Formally, a flash bang is a "stun grenade" and falls in the "less than lethal" category of offensive weapons.
Note it is not harmless, most people report significant temporary (1 year or less not 5-10 minutes ) or permanent hearing loss. If close to the detonation point, 2nd & 3rd degree burns are common. Vision problems (retinal damage, corneal burns, etc) are another frequent side effect.
These weapons are designed for high risk breaches, not raiding a house in the middle of the night to serve a search warrant after you've already arrested the suspect.

You mean the patent to use the technology already baked into the web protocols - that was patented after the web protocols were written? that IP? "On a computer" is a magical phrase. If no one has patented it yet, it's fair game - everything on a computer is novel to the patent office. - I'll be very happy if the courts actually apply July's ruling on patent eligibility like they are supposed to, rather than just ignore it again.

Trade has existed long before mathematics were formally codified.

Not really. The whole 60 seconds to a minute & minutes to hours is because the Babalonians used a base 60 counting system for trade - that's pushing math in trade back 5K years to when they BUILT THE WHOLE NUMBER SYSTEM AROUND IT.

Individual barter goes back earlier, but pretty much as soon as you get into "Trade", you need math to handle it.

You are a little out of date, Odin was downgraded during the pantheonic reorganization. Unfortunately due to a clerical error the one true God is now a central park squirrel named Skippy.

Foamy - his name is Foamy the Squirel

3 times this year MS has bricked my system with updates. I run a stock install from HP - the only software on the PC is Firefox, LO, Steam, and ARC. All 3 times it's corrupted my system hive. The first time I ended up re-installing, the last 2 times I've just replaced the hive.

...the braindead HR manager...

Is there any other kind?

Actively malicious?

but unfortunately when you go to do complicated things, you frequently find the Microsoft product has a feature to handle it and the open solution either doesn't or it is rather messy.

Can you provide some examples? I generally find that the OS versions of software conform to the guidelines of GUI design as well as MS products do. I also find that the error messages provided in OS software are usually more informative than Microsoft's.

MS Office didn't read or write OOXML, and just after it was passed they said it never would. So if 2013 is working with it now - great. Just one thing - could they please explain the "asWord98" flags? As a full and complete standard, "do it like MS Word 98 would have" isn't exactly proper. In fact it's so incomplete that last time I used Word, it couldn't import documents from 2003 let alone 98.

Btw, how do you distinguish between defamation/slander and critics in the US?

If the statements are true or opinions:

1. The service was poor - I had to request silverware 3 times before I could eat my salad. Not libel/slander/defamation if true.
2. There was a cockroach in my salad. Not libel/slander/defamation if true.
3. The food was bland and flavorless. - opinion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... The US Government used their privilege to avoid embarrassment - claiming the crash report exposed damaging information about the classified equipment being tested on the flight - when the document was de-classified, the only comment was that it was testing classified equipment and the equipment was unrelated to the crash. From the start, the government has been lying about the need to classify information simply to avoid accountability, is it surprising that they are not trusted to do so?

Given that the Russian government is protecting him as much as they are, he handed some intelligence over to buy himself some time. That's the most likely manner in which they'd offer him protection.

Not really - it's cheap political theater. He's a highly public figure that the US desperately wants back on US soil - it costs Russia nothing to have him & they gain a lot of 'respectability' points for sheltering a US dissident from the wrath of "an out of control US government". The political points for having Snowden lecture the US on privacy issues & transparency from Moscow are huge - Russia couldn't buy a better venue to tweak Uncle Sam's nose.

Corporate whores and prostitutes are different. Prostitutes Fuck you for a fee. Corporate whores Fuck you over for a bribe.

You are supposed to help those on the path to enlightenment. Just because you can't lead them to enlightenment, doesn't mean you abandon them to their own devices.

"patents they've never disclosed" is kind of a contradiction in terms. Usually the claim is that they haven't disclosed which patents are being cross-licensed.

"Patents they've never disclosed" is acurate. They go to companies using Android and say - "Linux uses our patents, pay us or else.", but they never disclose which patents Linux infringes on - they just take the money for a no-sue promise.

22%? um 2.25% as an opening bid with the normal ending point of 1.2% or 0% depending on cross licensing agreements. At no point was there a 22% offer on the table.