If MS hadn't contested them and they had been found to be infringing at a later date, MS would lose the patents.

Wrong. You're thinking of trademarks. Patents don't have a "defend it or lose it" clause. That's the very essence of submarine patents - file a patent, keep quiet, wait until a bunch of people are using it, then BAM!! Surface and file a bunch of lawsuits.

Programmers work with what they're given. You often don't have a choice on what the rate is. For example, the "standard" tick rate of a PC in DOS and Windows is 18.2 ticks per second. Where in the world did this weird rate come from? It came from the fact that the original DOS set the timer to 0xFFFF, and the timer was clocked by one third the color burst subcarrier frequency. This gives the exact tick rate of 3579545 / 3 / 65536 = 18.206507365 ticks per second.

Don't laugh - it's the truth! Schools have NEVER been a place of learning. They're nothing more than over-paid babysitters and have been for decades. I learned more on my own in the library and bookstores than I EVER got in school. These days, I don't even have to go to a library or bookstore as I can find even better material online. I only WISH we had had the net when I was in school.

Would I be a bad person if I were to suggest that this would be a perfect time to upsell Time Capsules to worried Snow Leopard customers?

"have to respectfully disagree with you there. It's not that feminists are trying to get more rights than men, it's that they're trying to get them more rights than they currently have. Totally different."
"The goal of feminism is to get women more rights"

Sounds like we are in agreement...I think that the goal of a feminism promoting women is sexist. If you cared about equality your fight wouldn't be for women it would be for equality generally. A good example is in Canada when women were granted the right to voted the feminist movement celebrated as would I. But Nellie McClung pushed that men should have the right to vote. Which is fully in line with feminism but clearly opposed to Equalism.

A lot of the issues you listed are cultural and suck and we will keep working towards fixing these issues, I think/hope they will get better with time. BTW women win the nobel prize all the time and its nothing special at all, maybe you are thinking of 20years ago.

I don't think all feminists are bad but I think it lends itself to abuse whereas stating that you are an equalist does not.

Oh my word!

But most OSS projects don't work through face to face conversations.

I believe that many, if not most, OSS projects do have conferences and other get-togthers, at least for the project leaders.

Google hits for: Linux conference = 36,700,000

Google hits for: Apache conference = 5,970,000

Google hits for: PHP conference = 65,100,000

And of course many people are drawn into the F/OSS world by exposure via classes or LUGs or other meatspace interactions.

So why would you explicitly start a movement emphasizing one of those things, as if it said something about the quality of your code?

Why would you think that belonging to such a group was intended as a statement about the quality of one's code?

No, in fact I didn't. What I said was that the GP's argument would have worked just as well as a defense of slavery. Of course I agree that slavery is much worse than the situation of women today. There's no comparison.

As for the evidence of discrimination, I'll leave you to look at some of the other posts for that but, there are quite a few. But you're exactly right that there isn't much we can accomplish by trading anecdotes, so all I'll say is this: it's important to remember that it doesn't take repeated, egregious cases of sexism to make a community hostile to women. A vocal fringe is all it takes.

Of course I agree that most men in these communities are not sexist (at least not noticeably so). The problem, as I see it, is that there is a vocal, immature minority of FOSS men who are always making sexist jokes, talking about porn, and asking women out on dates on message boards when they try to make serious contributions. This is a problem, and its a shame so many here on /. want to respond by asking women to grow a backbone instead of asking that men not beheve like middle schoolers.

This might, possibly, make a decent Home Theater PC/media center type thing. It's got a relatively small form factor (although, of course, there *are* smaller PCs). It's got HDMI out (I didn't really check what kind of video chip this has installed, but if it's got HDMI out, one would hope that it has a video chip that can handle decoding 1080p video). The little screen means, that, potentially, a media center software vendor can have a User Interface which runs on the small screen, so that your TV just continues to show full-screen video while you do things like checking a program guide, or otherwise are doing 'control' tasks.

Still, I think you'd be better off with a very small HTPC with no built-in keyboard, and use a wireless (IR or BlueTooth, perhaps) keyboard externally. Just keep the wireless keyboard in a box or bin beside, behind, or underneath the couch/chair - grab it out to interact, and while your watching a movie or show, stow the keyboard back in the bin/box.

I'm running 7 on an Eee 1000HA with 2 GB RAM. It runs just as well as XP did - maybe better. Of course, I don't have an SSD, so space is not a concern.

The best li-ion batteries can release 5 kilowatts per kg (the titanates). Six orders of magnitude would mean 5 gigawatts per kilogram. Sorry, but not going to happen. A kilogram of copper wire couldn't carry a small fraction that much current without vaporizing.

Six orders of magnitude more power than current batteries wouldn't be a battery; it'd be a bomb.

Plus, it's (eventually) coming to Wiiware, with quadruple the graphics resolution.

(enhanced graphics/music is toggleable)

stop whining like a spoilt bra

Especially since the "Mac version" is just a Zip archive containing an HTML file with the Flash game embedded. What's the difference to the PC version, then?

...

Lappy!

*runs*