That's ok, they have plenty of money to appeal where it will probably get overturned by some moron.

This is impossible. Reversing a trial court decision is not in the legal power of any single moron.

Someone doesn't understand the meaning of the word "decimated".

What you say is true, though I expect you weren't intending to refer to the people who confuse the etymology of the word with its current meaning when you said "someone".

Indeed, this is just so. And you can't copyright "functionality"; that's akin to copyrighting a concept, which is not what copyright is about. Copyright is about protecting implementations of concepts, and those are still protected. But a programming language requires a rigid codification of the concept itself.

Oracle's response made me chuckle a little...

That's really immaterial to the reasoning for why an APIs aren't protected under the Copyright Act in the first place. It would be relevant if "interoperability" were a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not, since the item in question wasn't protected in the first place.

Just because my implementation of fopen() breaks programs that depended on your implementation of fopen() that doesn't suddenly mean that your declaration of a function called fopen() is protected and my identical declaration is infringing. This would imply that copyright infringement claims based on APIs would suddenly be dependent on some kind of compatibility test.

And on that note, it was that last line that made me chuckle. Brings to mind something about ships and sailing, or barn doors and horses.

Of course, you have to rely on audio hardware vendors actually supporting the nifty new Windows 7 sound layer. If that vendor happens to be Creative, you're screwed, particularly if the product is discontinued. Case in point: the E-MU 0404 USB, which has a beta Windows 7 driver that hasn't ever been updated.

It works beautifully on an XP desktop system, and recent Linux kernels seem to support it at least for playback. On Linux, the Clementine audio player works well, but I like Foobar2000 better. Unfortunately, Foobar2000 doesn't work in Linux except under Wine, and Wine doesn't work all that well with the 0404 USB.

I tried running XP under VirtualBox with the 0404 USB passed through, but that just doesn't work - virtualization and timing-critical hardware are a bad mix. I hate the idea that I'd have to dedicate a box to running XP just for audio purposes and nothing else, but that might be what happens unless I can find an audio player that manages my music collection as well as Foobar2000. As it is, I do anything important (email, online banking, etc.) from Linux.

At any rate, I have no compelling reason to go to Windows 7 let alone Windows 8. On my last go-around with Windows 8 CP, I hated it - they're making the same mistake, albeit in a different direction, that the Unity and GNOME 3 developers are making. A tablet UI is great for a tablet, not for a desktop.

As for Creative, I learned my lesson the hard way - don't buy their gear.

Increased odds doesn't mean something *will* happen, just that it's more likely to happen. Wearing a seatbelt increases your odds of surviving an accident. That doesn't mean people who wear seatbelts will always live, nor that people who don't will always die. The seatbelt wearers are simply more likely to survive.

Seven events where outcomes are random (or at least chaotic) are not sufficient to extrapolate whether predictions were correct or not. One hundred years may not be enough. In traffic, there are tens of thousands of events from which to gather data in a given year. Not so much for hurricanes. Just because storm intensity and/or count hasn't increased in the years we've seen doesn't mean it won't. Nor does it mean that it will. But the prudent course is to err on the side of caution.

Well, I'm a bad person to debate the merits of wireless connectivity with. ~12 years ago, I had a Handspring Visor tethered to my bland Samsung cell phone with a $90 30" semi-custom cable that probably 3 other people in America owned. Every minute of 'online' time counted as a minute of airtime (well, not counting ~11pm-6am and weekends), it was a brisk 9600kbps (circuit-switched CDMA), and the browser was a cruel joke on a 160x160 1-bit monochrome display, but I still carried both the Visor and the serial cable with me everywhere I went, and ran my battery into the ground at least once or twice daily on weekends when I wasn't being metered.

On the other hand, if DirecTV took away my service tomorrow, I probably wouldn't notice for a few weeks. And if AT&T shut off my landline, I wouldn't notice until we either had a hurricane that blew down Sprint's tower (or their backup battery ran out, or their generator ran out of gas) or someone came to visit and the guardhouse didn't bother to call the second number in their "list of numbers to call when someone comes to visit" (my cell phone). But when Comcast has a cable internet outage while I'm at home, I usually know within a matter of seconds. ;-)

So we push some glaciers into the ocean to cool it off. Problem solved!

It's a 10-fold margin of error.

No, its not. Its 1.1m +/- 0.9m. The margin of error is 0.9m. Its not a percentage, because you aren't measuring Y/N polling results or something else where the measurement is a percentage ("margin of error" isn't a percentage of the measurement -- and certainly not a percentage of the minimum measurement as you present it -- its the radius of the confidence interval, or, IOW, half the size of the range between the minimum and maximum value.)

It is true that 2.0 is 1000% of 0.2, but that has nothing to do with "margin of error".

Even if you do factor out the .2, you's at best be 900%

Even if you rewrite this into something that looks like English, you've confused "factor" with "subtract", and still don't know what a margin of error is, because just like its not the ratio of the maximum value to the minimum value, its also not the ratio of the size of the range to the minimum value.

If you wanted to measure something related to the margin of error as a ratio of anything (which might in some contexts be useful as a way to make it scale-independent), the only thing that would make sense would be measuring the ratio between the actual absolute margin of error (in this case, 0.9m) to the center of the distribution (1.1m), which would be ~82% in this case. (But note when an actual margin of error is reported as a percent, this isn't what it means, it means that the actual values being measured are percents, and the list percentage is still the absolute size of the range, not a ratio.)

"More human than human." It just means the Tyrell Corporation was working on it.