But if I don't have my fiat money, how do I run my Fiat car?

He wants to open America up to a Bold New $0.95 menu!

You, sir, are a very cheap date.

Oswald Avery (born in Halifax, NS) was the senior member of the Rockerfeller team that experimentally verified that genetic information was encoded in DNA rather than as previously thought in cell protein. The Avery-MacLeon-McCarty experiment set the stage for Crick and Watson's discovery the helical structure of DNA.

But I'm nowhere near the advertiser's eyes and ears!

Hard to imagine it but the combined market cap of Sony Corp. and Nintendo (about $60 billion depending on market and currency fluctuations) is only worth about 90% as much as Apple's reported cash-on-hand ($65.8 billion).

Weirder still, Apple increased it's cash-on-hand in the Q2 alone by 10% of the value of the combined market cap for both Sony and Nintendo.

Interestingly, the Four Yorkshiremen was actually recycled from "At Last the 1948 Show" (also starring Graham Chapman and John Cleese): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA

Maybe he should have switched to lion taming.

If you think of Xanadu as a highly available redundant P2P document system mixing in TBL's Semantic Web and adding more automation, you get a bit closer to what Ted Nelson was trying to do with Xanadu.

http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html

Section two of the FAQ covers what a Xanadu system was supposed to entail.

This article (originally on Wired) covers some of the controversies that have broiled up:

http://aether.com/archives/the_curse_of_xanadu.html

If you can find Nelson's 1982 Datamation article it is pretty interesting but I couldn't find it anymore after some quick Google searches (YMMV).

What? 3.5" drives???? What kind of spendthrift Buck Rogers crap is that?

I've got a bunch of perfectly good Shugart 8" hard drives, so make sure you don't skimp on the S-100 bus.

This is so off-topic it isn't funny, but powwow is by any standard a real English word.

You are right that it is derived from a Narragansett word (which was itself derived from an Algonquian term for a spiritual head of a tribe) but it has been used in English as a synonym for meeting or gathering since 1812. Even before that, the word was first used in English as a general term for native gatherings as far back at the 1600s.

Would you say that canoe or barbecue are not real English words? Both come originally from Arawakan.

flawwed isn't a word in English but there ARE English words that have the "ww" combo, that combination was fairly rare and you often tend to see them separated into word phrases but glowworm, powwow, and arrowwood are real words in English.

But there is one word which is quite common -- if you consider acronyms to be "real" words (and only Scrabble seems to think they aren't) -- then WWW is probably the most common.

Because Microsoft doesn't own most of the patents in the h.264 patent pool. The h.264 patent pool is made up of 1,135 patents from 26 different companies. Microsoft owns 65 of them.

Apple and Microsoft settle most lawsuits against them, big difference. And Google wants to own your eyeballs to sell to advertisers. So what? These are businesses, they will compete against each other for your attention but their genuine concern for the commonweal is pretty much limited to their own self-interest.

If there are actual monetary reasons why Microsoft wants h.264 to win besides the ones I've already shown don't really pay off handsomely, what are they? I'm genuinely interested in hearing it since I can't think of much which doesn't come down to lawsuit avoidance.

Now, why is Google doing this, how about this for an explanation:

Google was perfectly happy to be a h.264 licensee for Chrome until recently. So what changed recently? Microsoft decided to provide a h.264 plugin for Firefox.

What if Google wants Microsoft (and ultimately Apple) to pay for the privilege of having h.264 on their OSes. It saves Google $6.5 million in licensing costs (that the capped maximum for software licenses).

Google can then promote WebM free and clear while knowing that all costs for supporting h.264 are being paid by someone else.