Success is not measured in terms of money.

Just to let you know you're not the only one, I absolutely agree with you and anyone I've ever spoken to about this also agrees (parents, partner, friends, colleagues). The accumulation of wealth ought to be limited, nobody with a discrete income of over a million dollars a year can honestly say he needs more money. The ironic thing is that classic economic theory supports this view as well by presuming the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility - which in case of money has been confirmed well empirically.

However, just forget about making such heretical remarks on /. You'll be modded flamebait or troll and can expect an extreme amount of irrational hate. (I don't know why, perhaps the majority of people on /. are super-rich? Then there are also some US Americans who think that every political position they don't know and don't agree with must be socialism or communism without having the slightest clue what they talk about.)

Nope. You can only copyright your own creations, not those of nature.

I finally got interested in Bitcoins (like always, too late) and wanted to buy one yesterday. :-)

Anyway, I wonder why this falls under the authority of the Orwellian "Department of Homeland Security". Doesn't such a matter belong to the FBI or the Secret Service?

What do you mean by that? I thought that the very idea of bitcoins is that at some time no more can be produced, thereby causing deflation.

You could try... but I don't have a TV.

Okay, I was exaggerating. Armed robbery is certainly a serious crime. I agree with that and was a bit too fast with my post.

However, I've come up with an easy solution: Just rig the cellphones with explosives that can be detonated by sending the right message to it. That way, if somebody walks away with your iPhone, just blow him up.

Sorry, cell phone theft is not serious crime. Serious crime is genocide, murder, rape, molesting children, kidnapping, torture, etc.

Exactly. People do not want dumb terminals, they want cheap netbooks with a good battery life.

A display that is readable in broad sunlight and costs less than $500 would also be useful.

Why don't they just let 3 different people push 3 different buttons but only one of them is working?

I hear something similar was done with executions and apparently this magically removed all the moral quirks some executioners might have had. (It wouldn't work for me, but then again I'm not planning to work as an executioner in the first place.)

You can bet your ass that I'd keep the money.

Why is it not a declaration of war. Hm, let me guess... because signals intelligence is not a declaration of war?

Not really. Products can only last on the market if they satisfy their users and their maker to mutual benefit. Products that only satisfy their maker either disappear quickly (which is not to say the maker cannot make lots of $$$ with them) or stay alife because the maker has a quasi-monopoly.

To add another great wisdom, the above does not mean that long-lasting products automatically mirror what customers really want or need. When offered a choice between shit alone versus shit with strawberries, many people will gladly spend their discrete income on shit with strawberries and be quite satisfied; only few will choose nothing instead.

I'm not against animal experiments in general, they may certainly be acceptable if they help us defeat cancer, Alzheimer or malaria. But this time I pass. This does not seem like the kind of research for which expensive rats for laboratories ought to be used.

Hm, this is not a new idea. I've tried a super-cheap Android laptop years ago (can't remember the brand though) and had to return it, because it was completely unable to handle different keyboard layouts with dead keys / accents. Apparently there was no way to patch the software without rooting the device and patching it yourself. Quite an epic fail and the device disappeared from the stores in our country shortly thereafter.

Now that was a long time ago, so I wonder: Has this been fixed? Do international keyboards and keyboard layouts work flawlessly with recent versions of Android?