"buh-kuh buh-kuh" has become standard words in my vocabulary.

"Where's the buh-kuh buh-kuh" (where's the Tivo Remote).
"Buh-kuh buh-kuh" ("This commercial is stupid, fast forward please", or "Where's the Tivo Remote? I want to fast forward through this commercial/lame part of the show right now" or "whoa, did I see that right? Please rewind a few seconds").
"You buh-kuh buh-kuh'ed" ("You fast forwarded through the commercials too far into the show, please rewind a bit").

Reading a bit more about the patent dispute between Curtiss and the Wright company, it becomes clear that the Wright brothers wound up not being a financial success not because of lack of patent collections, but on moneys spent on defending the patents.

If that's the case, then that spells the doom of TiVO.

Having been through the patent process, it became clear to me that filing a patent does one and only one thing - it means that you can use your patent. Defending your patent (by litigation) ultimately will bankrupt you, unless you have a law firm on retainer (which in and of it self can bankrupt you if you're a very very very small business of one or two).

Things probably would have wound up being a bit different for the Wright Brothers had they simply accepted Toulmin's initial offer of being on retainer...

Interesting - I had thought that the Tivo HD that I bought has that as a selling point - it provides multi-room DVR features (albeit with other Tivo's or any generic computer running Windows/MacOSX).

If only there was some sort of small, removable storage media that you could plug into portable devices like the iPhone. I wonder when they're going to invent something like that... Then I wouldn't need to worry about this application eating up 1/8 of the total storage on the iPhone.

WoW does that now. By exploring every spot on the map (actually, just removing all of the fog of war), you gain an achievement, and a new title "the Explorer" that you cahttp://games.slashdot.org/story/09/08/08/0345231/Finding-New-and-Unintended-Ways-of-Playing-Games?from=rss#n add to your name.

Ultima 3 was the last Ultima I did anythingn like that for. I killed a monster in EVERY square, populating the entire map with treasure chests. I suppose you could say that it eliminated all random encounters (since monsters were boxed in by the treasure chests) and helped me to focus on playing the rest of the game, but it took a really really really long time to actually get to that point.

I disagree. There's really only 3 - mechanics, story, and aesthetics. A new technology is strictly a method for delivering the other 3. I therefore don't think that it's one of the core aspects of the game. In other words, the technology doesn't manifest itself unless through at least 1 of the other things. I'd conjecture that you can get any of the others without requiring the others...

And soon, you'll realize that it's really 3 parts marketing, and we have yet another marketeer in the workforce. My day died just a little more today.

YOUR salary is secret. However, the company can very easily say that "we have 15 managers in this field that make between y and z per month" and still not divulge YOUR salary. Provided they don't specify what each person makes (ie connecting you with your salary), there's no problem.

Huh. The mute button is located right above the backspace key on my keyboard. Though I suppose my keyboard isn't wireless, so it's not really a remote?

False. There's no correlation between an animal's behavior and "being responsible" when searching for food. Hunting for animals is an optimization problem in risk assessment. They have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to support that claim. Hunting is risky (get an injury while chasing game, and you're probably not going to live), it takes a lot of energy to chase down game (animals don't have the benefit of rifles or other "tools" to hunt with), and the reward is only realized if they're successful.

People, on the other hand, have the luxury of not needing to go hunt wild game to eat. We can just go to the grocery store to get it. We have to think of being responsible, since hunting for food (in the same sense that an animal has to hunt) is not a necessary condition for our continued survival.

That one definitely broke protocol - straight to double dog dare.

That's not entirely a fair statement - you could also make the case that Apple doesn't sell a sub 1000 dollar notebook, too..

More or less all non-Apple notebooks that have a starting cost of 1000 have gigabit ethernet built in...