It's painful to watch, but US Army just made Arial the required typeface for all official correspondence. Arial is now a weapon system.

So, what do you do when they *don't* call back, and no notes are kept about the call? "Oh, I'm sorry, I have no record of that." How many times have you started over from scratch to solve the same problem?

IAADM (I Am A Divorce Mediator).

I worked once with a couple who had a major point of contention over 10 years of family photos stored on the family computer. While he had physical possession of the computer, he claimed the hard drive failed so there was no way to recover the data. She claimed there *must* be a box of negatives somewhere. He responded they had shot only digital for the last several years. I asked if anyone had thought to keep backups for this irreplaceable community property. (of course not). I offered to refer them to a data recovery firm. (can't afford it, too many legal bills already).

Long and the short was, they spent many more $$$ paying their lawyers to litigate who gets to keep the dead hard drive.

Please, please, please, don't expect the law or the courts to solve this problem for you. Sit down together like adults and work it out!

After the next election cycle? Not interested.

First thing I learned in the Army (well, not the first thing, but a very important thing) is you don't wear contacts in the field. Too unsanitary, incompatible with corrective inserts in gas mask, and fracking painful when you get a faceful of diesel smoke after being awake 24 hours. Plus, think it might be kind of awkward if your targeting display falls out of your eye on the ground?

WARNING: Silverlight video

You must have kids.

AT&T will charge $9.95 a month if you want to receive toxic gas warnings.

Another way to look at this move is that open source projects have a significant dollar value, if for no other reason that the project may compete for market share with other products. One could certainly see the strategic benefit of supporting a "hard to kill" project to compete with a market leader. Now, we have an example of such a project becoming an acquisition target.

This is no different than a company which buys out their competitor for the purpose of "integrating" (e.g., shutting down) a competing product line. Luckily, unlike proprietary solutions, this project will fork back to the community and live on, albeit without Sun's corporate backing.

That seriously happened to me. Every time I look at that (unchanged after one year) website, I remember examples of undocumented hacks in there that made a nice proof of concept but were *never* intended for the production system. I feel a little bad at first, but then I remember why I left that job -- and chuckle.

What about everyone who installs msttcorefonts for compatibility? Not to mention all the other random fonts you have to accumulate to open documents?

I used to run an in-store tech department, back in the day when we wore black shirts and were "Techs" not "Geeks." I never had a moment's pause about selling my customer a $9.99 set-up service or $29.99 optimization. We gave a good service for the money, and spent quite a bit of time helping the customer learn a bit about their new computer. Which, for them, was a very big deal.

The customer was paying for 10 minutes of my time -- and the 15+ years of experience that let me do a job in 10 minutes that would have taken them four hours of reading directions and waiting on hold.

The biggest mistake is assuming a service isn't worth good money to the general public just because it's easy and fun for you.

Which is far better than huge, bloated printer drivers that constantly *need* updating (cough ... Canon!).