Ummm... yes. Yes, I did. Glad you're keeping up.

No, it's really, really, really not. You can't revert a death.

Umm, that's not a Playstation controller, or at least not an official first-party one. Give how many PC controllers have used that style, it's more likely just some generic PC controller.

What a brilliant idea; I completely agree! But... how to make it happen? I mean, this is just two people on Slashdot, we can't do much.

Maybe, and bear with me here, maybe we could get other people to join in. We could all push together for these rights. Not just people we know or are in contact with though, that wouldn't be enough. We'd need a whole organisation, country (or even world) wide. People could join to have a say in our policies and how we apply pressure to get our aims! (For a small cost, of course... I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have the resources to run something like this for free.)

With enough people on board, all demanding the same thing, we could truly be heard! Some employers may not wish people to join, but we could offer our resources to protect people, ensure that they are free to be represented, protected from mistreatment, and that when we are able to get these laws changed, that the new systems we fought for are actually followed.

If only there was some kind of system for uniting people in this way... Alas, it's just a pipedream.

The two tasks aren't mutually exclusive. There is a logical fallacy in thinking that scientists can be taken as one entire group who should all focus research on a handful of "important things". The people with the expertise of how we could theoretically travel to other planets and make that habital environments in a millenium (30 generations?) are not, for the most part, the same people with the expertise of how best to steer society on a global scale to make best use of this planet over the next century (3 generations), and I daresay if each group focuses on their area of expertise, they'll both make advances that aid the other along the way.

But recording at "better than human hearing" isn't enough, because as those sounds are altered, processed, mixed, overlaid and resampled over and over and over again, you lose fidelity. You don't need your original recordings to be good enough for human ears, you need them to be good enough for mixing boards and DSPs and all kinds of hardware, after dozens (hundreds?) of changes. You need the end product to be good enough for ears.

(And to nip the obvious counter-argument in the bud; obviously the genre of music and recording method are important here, and if there're not many steps between what's being recorded and what's being sold then, sure, it's not such a big issue.)

She also has a youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/clairelom) with some videos of in in motion. One of these says it's blocked by a TV channel that own the copyright, hmm....

The Snowman was very clearly referring to ingredients which are generally considered inert enough for used in placebos, but in a small majority of cases can have a direct, unintended physical effect. In a world where a small number of people are allergic to water, I challenge you to find any substance you could introduce to absolutely any human that's guaranteed to be truly "inert".

I'm not sure whether you're talking about cars or computers now, but the answer's the same either way; it's depends on the driver.

"Each tablet costs only $80/unit"

Umm, does the summary really need to say "$80/unit" rather than just "$80", seeing as it already states at the start of the sentence that this is the cost of "each tablet"? Unless each single tablet can be a variable number of units...

Soooo, any idea what they mean by "50% more colours"? Do these allow the screen to display a wider set of the visible spectrum than LCD screens? Do they allow the same set but at a higher bitrate? Do they simply display the desired colour more precisely? Is this "extra" in the range that consumer GPUs and OSes can display?

I agree that your alteration makes his point clearer (although I'm unsure it was really necessary), but I'm not sure it's as much to the argument's detriment as you think. I'm probably going to come off as a Microsoft fanboy here, but so be it.

The reminder must be made that companies both create a legacy of existing files, and must use files by other companies. If you were to flick a magic switch, today, and have all your users understand a new suite of office applications and religiously save into an open format, you would in no way have solved your problems. Their blissful glee at being able to do what they were already doing but in a slightly different way would last until the moment they tried to open an existing file, or one from an external source, that "doesn't look right". And yes, I know I'm going over the same old points that get made, but I'd argue that 1) they're unfortunately still relevant, and 2) with respect, your own points aren't new either.

One additional aspect that usually gets skipped over is Microsoft Access. Yes yes, toy database, shouldn't be used in business etc etc, but we all know it does. I don't believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't checked in a year or two, that any of the open source suites can attempt to open .mdb files. There are now open source Access-like systems to create databases, but again, what do you do about the legacy information? With databases, it's even more likely that these may be currently used, critical files.

As you've said, the starting point is probably to begin using the open document formats in Microsoft products, until all the documents made with older formats are simply not relevant anymore; for my part, our company has only migrated a few users to a version of Office new enough to *have* those formats, so I'm stuck with .doc whether I like it or not. In the end though, it's rather amusing to consider that if, one day, we find ourselves in a situation where the majority of files are created in an open format and switching to an open office suite is easy, it's likely because Microsoft bridged the gap this way.

Hey now, this is Slashdot, surely you can't expect me to RTFA? ;)

See, that just raises further questions; so the tool exists, but rather than just run it on the whole project they're asking individuals to run it on their own code as they're going forward? Makes sense from this point on, but why spend the last 6 months... You know what, screw it, I'm sure it makes sense in context!

Wait; so they've had half their people working for half a year to remove code which isn't used anymore?

(Disclaimer here; I'm an occasional, hobbyist programmer at best. It's entirely possible that I'm missing something here, and if I am do please enlighten me.)

I wonder why this couldn't be automated. You make a program that runs through and makes a big list of every function in the source, deletes functions that aren't called anywhere, repeat a few times to deal with chains of unused functions, and you're done. It seems like exactly the kind of task a computer is designed to do. Have a few flags to tell it whether to treat commented-out functions calls as valid so you don't wind up removing the alternate version of routines while trying out experimental new versions, and whether to actively delete the functions or just feed them back to the programmers to examine themselves, and you're finished. If you really want to be clever, have it look for calls that technically exist, but due to the logic involved would never get invoked in any circumstances.

I'm not even sure it'd be fair to say it would take too long to develop such a tool. After all, once it's made for a particular language, then it's done; everyone can take advantage of it, and in a few years time when you decide you need to do another grand cleanup, no need to take up six months and half your team for the task.

Now don't get me wrong here; code optimisation is a different beast, and there's far more to maintaining a tidy code base than this. But we're explicitly talking about a project to just remove unused code here. Do we really need to get those many eyes all focused on this?