My father currently has Alzheimer and moved to a service home a month ago in Sweden. He is having a good time at the home, and keeps saying that he doesn't understand what he is doing there, as he doesn't feel sick. It is the family that is suffering from the change in him, not my father. Quite the opposite, if you sit with him showing him pictures he is very excited. He likes taking walks, drinking coffee, talking, playing the piano. And it is not totally ungratifying being around him, as you can tell the same joke twice and he will not remember it the second time. :-)

Thus, Alzheimer is in my opinion not a candidate for assisted suicide, as the patient does not suffer from the disease. True, it is not the same personality as he had in his "sane" days, and he needs constant assistance. But saying that a life is less worth because you are only satisfying basic instincts, is egoistic on the side of the family, who wants dear loved one stay the same as they remember him.

Terry Prachett who is today saying that he doesn't want to become the demented Terry Prachett does not represent the wishes of the demented Terry Prachett.

You are absolutely right. I made the mistake of mixing up metric centric cultural conventions and SI. Obviously they are not the same thing. ms^-1 would make more sense everywhere.

I thought we just had a discussion a couple of days ago describing the insanity of using anything but SI units!

Or python, perl, lua, tcl, with Qt, Gtk or Tk on the N900. I'm always amazed how companies like Microsoft and Apple manages to first push the paradigm that "less is more" (no scripting, no inventive GUI concepts, no access to phone applications, but "magic") and then they throw you breadcrumbs of what they took away and people get all excited and the news even makes it into slashdot...

Check out the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Make a search for "Ghost Hunting" and you'll find a couple of episodes from the past where they are talking about this. I'm sure you'll get some ideas from those guys.

I can second this. In addition you can easily:

• Run scripts on the phone in a standard linux environment (bash, sed, awk, perl, python, tcl, grep, etc).
• You can ssh into the phone.
• You have vnc support so if your server has some gui program you can access it via ssh+vnc port forwarding.
• You can run git on the phone so you can easily sync your utility scripts.
• You can install input methods for accessing any keyboard keys.

So, I absolutely agree, this is a sysops portable dream.

Use sshfs to mount your remote machine's disk and then run meld locally. No remote access protocol will be faster than that.

Based on the video this is the same idea as QuickWriting that I played around with on my PalmPilot a number of years ago. See: http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/quikwriting/ The Quikwriting site says it has a patent on the method. So are we in for another litigation in the handheld area? Or is this the same technology under a different name?

They seem to have set a trend here. Zune is very similar how the f-word is pronounced in Hebrew. So now we can start guessing what they will be calling their next product...

A shame, I liked the brownish look. It reminded me of the savanna of Africa, the origin of Ubuntu. I thought they should have gone even further with the African theme by making sound events by tom-tom drums, other African music, or perhaps even jungle sounds.

If you look at the Artifex license page (http://www.artifex.com/indexlicense.htm) you will actually see that they have a very strange interpretation of the GPL. They basically claim that you can't bundle Ghostscript together with non-GPL programs, or install it with the same installer. If they used the same legal advice for writing their licensing terms as they have used for filing the lawsuit, then it might turn up in the end that the whole case has no merit...

This claim is like the difference between Windows and Linux (and GNU and other animals). There are those that prefer a large set of suboptimal washed out solutions, one-size-fits all. Others prefer the freedom of being able to choose the components that fit them. By tying a library to a set of libraries you are in for the first choice. Personally I'm happy that I can choose a more optimal (and evolving) solution. The bundling also has the disadvantage that a new version (e.g. a bugfix) in a library is a new version of the whole system. No thanks.

My preferred password solution is still KeyRing (http://gnukeyring.sourceforge.net/ ). It satisfies the requirement that it is a non-connected device and that the data is stored in strong encryption. A similar application for a mobile phone would be a next best. At least until someone writes a keylogging virus for the mobile phones and then steals your data. But that is much more likely to happen on Windows.

If nobody would use non-changing software, then TeX would have been long forgotten.

Why not mount a camera above the paper and write a program that interprets the scribblings on the paper as computer input commands?