If by "first", you mean, several decades after the highly influential The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951, but based on stories written starting in 1941), then yes. Though that's a funny definition of "first" you've got there. :)

If someone really wants to, yes, but how likely is that? The problem with the glasses is now it's going to be a trendy thing to randomly film people without them realizing, and all kinds of people are going to find all sorts of embarassing things posted on the internet for the world to see and laugh at.

Chance that someone has gone out and bought a expensive clandestine camera just to follow me around and see if I scratch my balls or try to hit on someone who's out of my league at the local bar: 0.

Chance that some annoying hipster with more money than sense will randomly film me scratching my balls or trying to hit on someone who's out of my league at the local bar. >0 and climbing.

If the Borg is what pops into your head, then I'm guessing you haven't read Snow Crash. Anyone who's read that is going to think "troglodyte"--the annoying, creepy old farts who have wearables so they can make sure that the kids stay off their lawns, and can report any suspicious activity to the proper authorities, along with a full video record.

Basically, the high-tech equivalent of the Curtain Twitcher.

Wolfram Alpha? Seriously, you need an online resource for that?

$ units "45 cm/hour" "furlongs/fortnight"
    * 0.75161059
    / 1.3304762
$

How is it misdelivered? For years I've used different names for various subscriptions, so I can track who is selling my name, and to whom. If the PO refused to deliver mail just because they didn't recognize the name, I wouldn't have been able to do that. As far as I'm concerned, if it's got my address, it should end up in my mailbox. If it's not one of the names I use, I can always write "not at this address" on it, and send it back, but it was certainly not misdelivered. It went exactly where it was supposed to go.

There are all kinds of reasons why someone might write "return to sender" on something. I've found it far more effective to write "not at this address" on mail that's come to the right address but the wrong person.

If it's got the correct address, then it's not exactly misdelivered, now, is it?

"Return to sender" isn't an informative thing to write on stuff that made it to the right address. What you want to write is "Not at this address". I've found that to be very effective.

Actually, IBM, like most big companies, will pick-and-choose its fights. But yes, they're clearly willing to spend far more than it costs to settle in order to discourage trolls and frivolous suits. If they didn't, they'd be nibbled to death. But it's far more cost-effective for them to do so only to a certain percentage of litigants.

Of course, SCO made several missteps right off the bat that made them an easy candidate to choose for fighting back. IBM had already invested at least a billion in Linux by the time SCO came a long. So there was a whole lot more at stake than just the cost of settling. Furthermore, they knew that both Caldera and oldSCO were regular contributors to Linux--under the GPL. And they knew what their UNIX license from AT&T said, and they knew they hadn't violated that license.

Actually, it started just before the SCO fiasco, and was originally unrelated. However, it quickly refocused on SCO once that whole mess started, and from then on, things went pretty much as you said. However, I think it's interesting that it wasn't originally about SCO.

The oldest article in the site archives is about Grokster. The second article is about SCO. So, yeah, it didn't take long to shift focus.... :)

(The articles are also numbers 3 and 6 respectively. I'm not sure if that indicates that at least four articles simply haven't been archived, or if GL simply uses non-sequential numbering, but either way....)

You're probably not the only one, but that doesn't mean that the set of people who think it's a terrible idea are any less misguided or wrong. This is normal and standard and most tools for tracking versions assume version numbers work this way. Including the tools that do dynamic linking at run-time for you. In fact, for libraries, it's mandatory to do this if you have more than ten backwards-compatible releases in a series. A change in the second number of a library's version indicates that it's backwards-compatible but not forwards-compatible. (Forwards-compatible changes get a change in the third digit; incompatible changes get a change in the first.)

The only people likely to be confused to the degree that you suggest are non-technical idiots in the commercial press, and they'll make illiterate mistakes about all sorts of things no matter what we do. Hundreds of thousands of software projects do this sort of thing regularly (as AC pointed out, linux v. 1.1.10 was released in 1994). It's "three dot ten", not "three point one zero". Version numbers aren't decimals.

Of course, a lot of projects make sure to always list all three numbers (e.g. 3.10.0). Which I admit I prefer. But it's still the start of the 3.10 series.

Actually, patenting biological processes, as long as they're actually inventions and not just discoveries, makes a whole lot more sense.

Or maybe he's a 3+-armed alien, you insensitive clod. :)

(It is clear that he's not familiar with the common geek saying, "on the gripping hand", though.)

Nah, the best is subnatural.

Superb is much better than regular b.

So you prefer other people to do your work for you? If you had typed the same number of characters (not counting all the characters you had to type to try to defend your action) into Google, you could have pasted the results here, informed people yourself, and looked smart.

Although I suppose with a nick like yours, looking smart isn't your primary objective, and I'm cool with that. :)