The question is, does anyone really want or need a light for their Kindle?

Yes. My Kindle has been gathering dust since purchasing an iPad. I actually prefer a backlit screen; easier in low-light conditions. Shrug.

CSIRO develop technologies, patent them, then license them at fair terms. They then use that licensing revenue to develop new technologies, patent them, and license them at fair terms. And repeat.

It's not like CSIRO are patent trolls. The WLAN thing only got dragged out in course because greedy companies were not interested in fair licensing terms.

"Even 0.16 which I use at work and hasn't had much but bugfixes since about 2000 is very impressive. It had little thumbnail pictures of app windows for icons just like win7 only back before slashdot existed."

Slashdot has been around longer than E16. For instance, here's the Enlightenment 0.15 announcement.

It's amusing that nowadays E is considered lightweight, but back in that thread from 1999 people were complaining about its performance.

Shares and the like are not wages or income. If they could tax you when the value goes up, could you tax them when the value goes down?

Who the hell has a CD player these days? I haven't seen a music CD in at least 7-10 years.

Just a couple of points:
Virtually all DVD players are CD players. Eg I use the DVD player in my bedroom to play CDs sometimes (and I have a couple of dedicated CD players as well, although they don't get used much these days).

Amazon (in the UK anyhow) often sell music CDs for significantly less than the equivalent download (e.g. £5 vs £7), and ripping those CDs to flac gives you better quality** than the mp3 downloads, and an optical disc copy as well as your hard drive copy and backups. This is totally bizarre and stupid, but as long as this continues to be the case I'll carry on buying physical CDs.

** You get a losslessly compressed file which can then be converted to a lossy mp3 or aac or whatever at any quality you like, taking into account the capacity and sound quality of the target device. This is quite important to me. But even if you don't care, why pay *more* for lower quality?

As a side note to my OP (too bad you can't edit /.) the contract only requires connection to a live internet connection; I didn't see any requirement to power on the device or provide power to it.

I also don't get what he meant by "unique IP".

I am NOT interested in you telling me what you have to sell. If I want or need something, I am perfectly capable to search for it myself and assess which product is what I want.

Isn't Natal's resolution ~4cm? At that resolution, I doubt the system can pick up individual finger movements.

I do everything in my power to not run into things. That doesn't mean someone driving down the road the opposite direction isn't going to be drunk/falling asleep and run into me. I'd still like to be able to survive that.

And what happens when you hit someone else with the same vehicle? Or do you only aim for little cars?

At least in my world, our banks and trading partners like to make sure we have outside support, in case one (or all) of us gets hit by a bus. That's only being responsible. Our best-supported (and most important) systems are RHEL systems. Then again, we are probably what you would consider a medium-to-large US company.

Unless your scope is kept very shallow and/or very focused, you will never be doing anything more than tweaking applications or simple debugging. The codebase for most apps is too large and if it's not your primary job / hobby then you won't have time to learn it, let alone keep up with its development.

It's wise for each company to know where they stand when making any IT expenditures, whether the goal is to have a large Help Desk for instance or outsource everything beyond a certain scope. I don't run cabling anymore, and although I could if needed, we pay contractors for that stuff. Just like I implement systems using MySQL, but I don't tweak its source or try to perform bugfixes myself (beyond Googling for answers to questions) because I have other things to do. I support other databases and systems, and I have other apps to code. My time is most valuable to my employer for these tasks, and I'm a lot more expensive than spending a few thousand a year per server for support.

Need an example? OK. We successfully implemented a fiber card in 2 of our blades (RHEL 5.4 with kernels from 5.1) and this week brought up a third blade (same model, same base OS) only this time using RHEL 5.4 with KVM for virtualization. The kernel is 5.4 and the HP drivers won't install. The issue appears that one of the RPM's (lpfc IIRC) won't install because 5.3 and higher is not supported. The support grid at HP says that 5.4 is supported. Now I need to implement the entire tested solution by the end of next week.

Do I want to play around with this? No. I have one of our network admins contact HP and work it out, and when they're finished, give me a written set of instructions which I will add to my documentation. That's how larger businesses handle this stuff.

Would an EMP-pulse disable an airbag-release system?

I don't see where he said that you can buy a median home with fifty-four grand. He just said that you could buy a home in her neighborhood for that amount. This is a fact and no reason to pitch a conniption.

Are the android phones manufactured in China ?