First they came for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I didn't like Julian Assange or approve of Wikileaks' methods, so I didn't speak up.

Then they came for MegaUpload. I'm not a computer pirate, so I didn't speak up.

Then they came after JotForm. I hadn't even heard of JotForm, so I didn't speak up.

Then they came after me and my blog. There was no one left to speak up....

This is FUD pure and simple. And in a perverse way, it's actually a good sign for webOS and HP. HP has gone through four CEOs since it bought Palm and not one of them had ever bothered to spread fear, uncertainty, or doubt about Palm's mobile competitors until now. Is it possible that Meg Whitman actually cares about beating the competition?

I'm referring to the upgrade version. Even so, the joke was that MS should steal Apple's business model of offering tiny upgrades for $30 when Microsoft has been making tons of money off that model for years and your example is even better.

Where do you think Apple go the idea? What is Windows 7 if not two years of Vista updates bundled together with a new name and sold for $90?

As far as classic or even modern day "robber barons" go, Bill Gates isn't so bad. Certainly Rockefeller's old Standard Oil monopoly ruled the oil industry with a far more iron grip and crushed its competitors more ruthlessly than Bill Gates' Microsoft ever did. And I think I could even argue that Steve Jobs' legacy is probably tarnished more by Foxconn's business practices more than Gates' legacy will be by his own. But I think we can all agree that animated .gifs of Steve Ballmer dancing at developer conferences are hilarious. Let's get that as our Microsoft icon.

Forgot to ask - what license will Open WebOS be released under?

Apache

The man died in 1910. How could his autobiography not be public domain?

Because he had it published posthumously, 100 years after his death.

I curious, isn't the term 'dark matter' just a modern way to say 'aether'? I mean, a long time ago people thought that space was composed of aether because they didn't know what space was comprised of and needed a label with which to call the unknown unseen 'stuff'. Now they're saying space is full of 'dark matter' because it is thought there has to be something and they need a label to call this unknown unseen 'stuff'. So why not just call it aether? I just think it is kind of funny because it looks astrophysicists (or are you called cosmologists?) have come full circle back to aether.

The idea of the aether came about because it was believed that light behaved the way that waves of water or sound do - that is that light needed to travel through a medium. Just like waves must propagate through water and sound must propagate through air, so too light had to propagate through aether. And it was a perfectly reasonable theory until it was proven to be wrong.

So you are right in the sense that dark matter is a label which is being applied to something we don't completely understand in much the same way that aether was. But what invalidated the theory of aether was the Michelson-Morley experiment which tested an important prediction of the aether theory. Since Earth moves around the Sun and the Sun moves around the center of the Galaxy, it should have been possible for Michelson and Morley to detect an "aether wind" with their experiment as Earth moved through the aether. Instead, Michelson and Morley found nothing or at least not enough to justify the existence of an aether. And thus the aether theory faded into history as a failed theory.

The modern equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment for dark matter would be if there were some way to measure the strength of gravity (and thus the amount of mass) in a galaxy or cluster of galaxies. And in fact we do have a way to do that through gravitational lensing in which the light of background galaxies is distorted by nearby galaxies. So if we could find a region of space with a large cluster of galaxies distorting the light from other background galaxies and if there was a great deal of gravitational lensing coming from a region of the cluster are which has no visible galaxies, it would be considered fairly compelling evidence that dark matter exists. And that's why people keep bringing up the Bullet Cluster. Because the Bullet Cluster is just such a galaxy cluster where most of the gravity and thus most of the mass can be detected outside of the visible galaxies of the cluster. And while this isn't conclusive proof of dark matter's existence, it is a fairly compelling piece of data and since the Bullet Cluster was discovered there have been other similar observations which make the existence of dark matter seem more likely. So unlike the aether which failed its experimental test, dark matter has for now passed its test and continues as a viable theory.

Any alternative to dark matter would have to explain phenomena like the Bullet Cluster at least as well as dark matter does in much the same way that Einstein's Theory of Relativity simplifies into Newtonian physics when we deal with speeds significantly slower than that of light.

we get an incredible bang for the buck from NASA

Hang on, I thought NASA's job was to not go bang?

Exactly. That's why NASA gets so much less money than the military whose job it is to go bang, bang, bang all day and all night....

Don't you think that it's a cruel God that has created so much human suffering? Obviously he can't/won't prevent the harm caused by other humans like wars, genocides and famine. But how can he morally justify the famine, plagues, parasites and all the other natural abominations he has created? If I believed that the Christian God existed I would surely foresake him for all the evil he has created. The Abrahamic God behaves like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass. Jesus seems cool though.
 

Well the common to the question of "why do bad things happen to good people" is that God gives us free will and humans often exercise that free will by hurting their fellow man. Similarly, one could argue that God has imbued the universe which he created with something similar to free will which we variously call evolution, droughts, floods, and poison monkeys.