I'm with Telenet in Belgium... I hope that isn't me they're talking about... I thought I had a life!

Tax in Europe varies, but 15% to 21% (Belgium, where I am!) is the ball park. The website does not explain this but I would guess VAT is included.

Delivery is higher too, about 25 euro perhaps?

Although GNOME will stay - any fork has to... fork! The fork will have to rename and head off in its own direction. It is somewhat opposite to the KDE example you mentioned. KDE became more free as QT became more free. Considering GNOME was founded to promote a free desktop environment these rumblings of a fork seem set to take it in a less free direction. Which I find surprising when you consider the roots of the project.

Pragmatically speaking it would be impossible to say how many developers would go with them or how much impetus it would take. Probably a slimmed down, Mono free Gnome would initially result - something that might go well will Distro makers seeking space savings!

Thanks! I can see what you mean!

You tell a great story! I want to hear about the other two now! Go on, spoil us!

The seventies soft-focus effect was achieved with Vaseline - he could try that.

Try squinting?

Well, didn't think of Giger, but Gaudi sprung to mind at once.The Brassica is also impressive in real life.

Scientific truth is a different sort of truth to Mathematical truth. Literary truth is again a different sort of truth. Stories can be true and represent truth in powerful ways. Your life story would be true if you told it? (Even if parts of it were not entirely accurate...)

I was intrigued to see the following tucked away in the "Other Features" section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Other_features:

A new font "Gabriola" is included.[63] There is also Office Open XML and ODF support in WordPad.

If ODF is built into Win 7 at this level then a lot of things change. Admittedly WordPad's new ribbon interface gets higher billing up on the page, but the ODF support is the real gem. And a surprise for me to see it included.

It's an interesting question. Here's a similar one that hits closer to home - how do you know this isn't happening to you every night when you go to sleep? It seems obvious that nobody should go through the trouble to replicate you and then kill off the original each night, but if it were to happen would we notice it? What if the original woke up too early one day and saw the copy sleeping before it died? What if that happens every day, but we don't notice because we're the copy?

The present moment is the only thing we have any concept of and even this idea of we or I seems very fuzzy. Assuming we don't fall back on the bullshit soul response all we are is a very complicated feedback loop. Interrupt or stop that loop and you kill the person. Looking at it from that perspective it seems irrelevent whether there are two identical feedback loops or just one. Each is an individual as far as it is concerned. Stopping either loop 'kills' it. Same goes with transfer or teleportation. You teleport - you die. Another feedback loop just like the recently deceased gets put together on the other side.

So in one sense I wouldn't let myself be killed or teleported or anything of that sort. In another sense it's really a moot point. The feedback loop that is me would exist in both bodies at once.

Telomeres.

A Russian theorist Alexei Olovnikov was the first to recognize (1971) the problem of how chromosomes could replicate right to the tip, as such was impossible with replication in a 3' to 5' direction. To solve this and to accommodate Leonard Hayflick's idea of limited somatic cell division, Olovnikov suggested that DNA sequences would be lost in every replicative phase until they reached a critical level, at which point cell division would stop.[1][2]

During cell division, the enzymes that duplicate the chromosome and its DNA cannot continue their duplication all the way to the end of the chromosome. If cells divided without telomeres, they would lose the end of their chromosomes, and the necessary information it contains. (In 1972, James Watson named this phenomenon the "end replication problem".) The telomeres are disposable buffers blocking the ends of the chromosomes and are consumed during cell division and replenished by an enzyme, the telomerase reverse transcriptase.

Elizabeth Blackburn compared telomeres to the tips on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from unravelling.[3]

Well, if Microsoft can't manage something this simple without it being a
total security disaster then perhaps it's time for more people to start
using Linux or MacOS. This is nothing to "sweep under the rug". This is
stuff that should be getting more rubust and more safe over time as more
people and companies get used to using features like this.

Oddly enough it's pretty easy to enable the ssh server in MacOS. It's there
but not turned on by default and very easy to switch on. You don't have to
make it a disaster to make it easy. Apple has been proving this for decades.

I imagine any CS dept (and maybe other technical departments) will support Linux.
Outside of that, its probably potluck between Windows and OS X.

Read the afterward (or is it the forward? Haven't read it in a while) to Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, where he explains why he gives his books away for free on his website in lots of different formats. He's a best seller, BTW, a VERY good writer.

If I've never heard of your game I'm not very likely to buy it, now am I? I used to be an avid gamer, and shareware was the way to go (I bought a copy of Duke Nukem when he was a squeaky little side scroller after trying it). Demos sucked; often the demo was the only good two minutes of a long bad game.

If I haven't played your game, I'm not buying it. If I play it and hate it, I'm not buying it. If I play it and like it, I'll buy it. You're shooting yourself in the foot with your greedy attitude. Sure, there are people who are going to get a free copy and play and not buy, but you're not going to get a sale from them at any rate.

Your attitude also makes me think that maybe your games aren't really all that good -- a really good artist wants everyone to be exposed to their art. You sound like you're just after the money, and I've never seen good art come from anyone who was just out for the money.