He also told the US Attorney's office to look into the possibility of racketeering, and the IRS to look at them for tax evasion. Oh, and he's sending a copy of this to every judge who has a case with them anywhere in the country.

The next time these guys are in court, it's probably going to be as defendants.

Unless they've got the mirrors set up to automatically replicate your mistakes, in which case it's possible to accidentally delete every copy of it in existence everywhere... (This nearly happened to one OSS project recently.)

Mirrors are not backup. They are uptime reliability.

ZFS can implement some backup on top of it's reliability - in that the snapshots can allow you to recover recently-deleted files, but it's not really a true replacement for a real backup - something that you can pull the files off of if your entire server goes down.

My home server has ZFS (with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots that get cleaned up on a regular basis), but I also use tarsnap for regular backups. It stores encrypted (and deduped) incrementals of your data on an Amazon store.

My desktop mounts some of it's files (including a couple of whole users) from the home server, for the rest I use OS X's Time Machine - not quite as good as a remote backup scheme, but cheaper, and easy to set up.

You assume by 'succeed widely' I mean 'outsell SimCity': It just has to do enough better than expectations that EA (and others) take notice.

In this case, probably the best way is to back Civitas on Kickstarter: It appears to be SimCity the way EA should have done it. If they succeed widely while SimCity flops, then it's fairly clear that it was EA's approach to that was the killer, not the type of game.

It's 1970 because that's the first decade-year before Unix was created, so any programs or files on a unix machine will always be dealing with positive numbers. (Unless they are specifically doing date math, in which case they can be expected to handle it themselves.)

It sounds like it does, on the surface, but lesson plans are something teachers currently trade, sell, and use as a basic resource. The difference between a just-graduated teacher and a teacher with ten years of experience is that the teacher with experience has a stack of lesson plans, and can swap out which ones they use on any given day based on the progress, skill, and mood of their students. And, let's not forget, all of this is being created in the teacher's own time, outside of school hours.

Oh, and I doubt the school district will be making these available for free to their own teachers. (Unlike the teachers themselves, who might share with a co-worker.)

Any teacher who's spent any amount of time working on their own lesson plans would immediately start looking for a job outside the county. Any teacher who's any good wouldn't take a job in that county. You'll have beginner teachers who don't know any better, or teachers who've been there for ages and don't want to move, who'll just be hanging out until retirement. (And not updating any of their lesson plans.) Oh, and teachers who buy all of their lesson plans, because they can't be bothered to come up with them themselves. And the beginners will probably leave as quick as possible.

So you're trying for high-turnover, and chasing out any teacher who wants to invest their own time and effort into teaching the kids. Which means you'll get low-quality teaching, and low-quality schools.

The problem is that if you send them a letter it says that you exist and are taking them seriously. You don't actually want to do that; if they know that you are taking them seriously, then they know they can threaten you.

Let them actually threaten you first: Make them actually do something that costs them money, like file an actual lawsuit. Then you can immediately offer to settle, or whatever. (And just because you are ignoring them publicly doesn't mean you have to ignore them internally - start a chain of internal correspondence showing that you were checking for use of the patent and considering a reply, or something.)

Right now they haven't actually spent any significant amount of time or money on this. See if they want to, before you spend yours.

If the OP truly believes that this is a patent troll attacking them, the best thing may be to just ignore them. It's like spam: They are seeing who bites, and then they can reel you in for a settlement. If they send a couple of letters and don't get any response (especially from a small company that may have gone out of business without notifying anyone), they'll just move on to their next possible target.

Ars Technica had an article on this recently, though I can't find it quickly at the moment. It most cases, the best response was to just ignore the first couple of letters.

Opera Mini does it even for HTTPS. Opera Mobile has it as an option, like their desktop browsers. (And then I don't think it does HTTPS.) That's the difference, and the advertising all mentions it. (And why they have two browsers for the same market. Mini does have a slightly smaller CPU footprint on the consumer device, so it works on lower-end devices as well.)

I think the soda machines are probably one of the biggest problems in introducing a dollar coin: It's the only place I even use cash on a regular basis, and most won't get updated to take new coins. (But they can take new bills just fine...)

Give the vending machine operators $101 for every hundred dollars in dollar coins they accept. Watch as the whole country uses dollar coins overnight.

Same here. I use the fact that SpamAssassin gives more than a pass/fail score to filter spam into two folders: the 'I'm absolutely sure this is spam' folder, and the 'I've set the sensitivity fairly high, so this might be real email' folder. I scan the second one every day, just to check up on things. Usually months go by without it catching anything wrong, but occasionally bulk email I've requested - from a mailing list or similar (or my dad's emails, I'm not sure why) end up in there. I take it out and train SpamAssassin on it, and it'll be a while before I have trouble again.

While I agree with you completely, I think it's a sham that there was no attempt in the article to even try to show the watch in question.

His argument was satire. Don't blame him because people can't understand a joke.

The iPhone 4 (no 's') is also on sale over that time period. I wonder if that might also be part of the numbers - iPhone sales were split between several models, including upcoming models. (Though the fact that an Android phone was right up there is still news.)