...time I want to look smart.
Gosh, I have never answered an /. poll so honestly.
I find myself making personal plans all day, and then just standing there sitting on my butt.
=/

In Linux you can press SHIFT + NUMLOCK.
This toggles numpad-keys-as-virtual-mouse behaviour.

I really miss a "Well Played Sarcarm" mod option.

Here in Brazil we have been using alcohol as a fuel source for years. When you go to a gas station, it is guaranteed that you will find both a gasoline pump and an alcohol pump. Most cars developed here since 2003 accept both fuels, using an engine technology called FLEX. The only difference is that the alcohol we use is called "Anidro", and it is 99.3% pure, while Ethanol is 96% pure (the rest being mostly water).

Based on this, to subsidize the price of the gasoline here, the government sets an alcohol mandate of 22%. So even if you have a gasoline-only car, you are really using 3/4 gasoline and 1/4 alcohol when you fill the tank. Since the alcohol does attack all parts of the engine that are in contact with it, engines produced for the brazilian market have a special protection layer. And indeed, owners of imported cars here usually fill their tanks with a special "premium" gasoline, that is basically pure and high-octane, to avoid damage. (Guess I don't have to say that gas stations rip you off for that)

I dare say that this insistence on backward compatibility is going to kill this format.

If anyone still remembers, many years ago Thomson released the mp3PRO format.
It was a low bitrate MP3 with some added spectral band data that could recreate the original
music sound quality. So in theory, you could have the same quality for half the bitrate/size.

To my decaying ears, it sounded really good at the time... if played on the supported players.
But when you played these files in any unsupported player, which happened to be all of them
except for the Thomson's Player or the Thomson's Winamp Plugin, you ended up listening to
a HORRIBLE low bitrate sound quality, since the extra mp3PRO information was ignored.

And even worse: you had no way of telling if a file being downloaded was an original mp3 file
or a new mp3PRO file, since they both used the same file extension. Maybe if they had renamed
the extension to .mp3pro or something like that, the mp3PRO format might have had some chance...

Years pass... and now they are doing the same thing again.

Instead of focusing on a lossless mp3 codec for a specific kind of market/enthusiast, they are
insisting in keeping backward compatibility with players using the same method as mp3PRO did.
And once more the files are going to have the same extension as the original ones, instead
of .mp3hd or something similar.

I hope I am wrong, but this surely spells doom to me.

This is the first time I heard about Parrot, and it really got my attention as well.
I know it's common knowlegde, but you can get more information in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine

Enjoy!

Nice!
I am totally in!
Now we only have to manage the silly limitation that April only goes to 30!