Perhaps they are one and the same thing. George R. R. Martin's descriptions of Valyrian steel in the books are very much like real-life Damascus steel, featuring the same distinctive rippled patterns that Damascus steel is famous for.

Similar techniques were used in the old Soviet Union and former eastern bloc countries, called samizdat, except that with today's technology it's even easier. A US$40 64 GB flash drive can hold a lot of data, more text than a person could read in their lifetime, and to copy data from one to another would take only minutes. With a program like Truecrypt it even becomes possible to hide such incriminating data on it without anyone being the wiser. The only way to restrict this practice would be to ban or regulate all computers and computer equipment the way printers were, and I doubt that this is in any way feasible for Cuba.

The difference between a republic and a democratic republic is like the difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.

That's only half of it. They don't even seem to be open for international customers. As much as I'd like to get ebooks from B&N, the Nook app isn't even available outside of the US, whereas the Kindle app is. I downloaded the Nook app while I was in the US when I bought an Android tablet, intending to try to use it when I got home. Well, it never worked properly then, and uninstalling it and then trying to reinstall showed that the Nook app vanished from Google Play. And so I installed the Kindle app and now Amazon gets my money instead. Nicely played.

I beg to differ. They're every bit the same assholes they were in the late nineties/early 2000's. But they certainly have changed. Remember that old adage about malice and incompetence? These days however, it looks more like Microsoft has become malice and incompetence rolled into one, which makes them much more the object of ridicule than terror the way they were in their heyday.

I'm probably one of the few people who actually doesn't find Unity so bad and don't get all the hate that it seems to have here on Slashdot. I use 12.04 on my primary machine and Unity works well enough for me: it's not revolutionary, but it's no better and no worse than the Gnome 2 user experience that came before it. However, these types of shenanigans is where I draw the line. While Ubuntu did a lot of good work in their time, I don't think I'll ever upgrade to Quantal or any of their future versions unless I hear they're actually doing something to address these concerns with privacy. My next major upgrade will be to either Debian Squeeze or Linux Mint Nadia, and that's happening soon.

It's also the wrong word to be using in the context, and is completely nonsensical if taken in its strict meaning. The correct word is 'heterogeneous'. 'Heterodox' refers to doctrines or opinions that strictly deviate from orthodox teachings in a religion or system of belief, but not sufficiently enough to be branded as heresy.

Catholics are definitely no Biblical literalists, and have chosen to interpret Scripture allegorically where it appears to contradict science. Most Catholics believe that the kind of truth that the Bible is supposed to have is of a different type than that sought by science. For instance, they generally interpret the story of Genesis about God breathing life into the dust of the earth and creating humans that way as not an explanation of how human beings came to be (as Biblical literalists like the Texas School Board that are the subject of the article would), but rather an explanation of what human beings are supposed to be in relation to God.

Oh, I dunno. I kind of like having the choice of whether to stay in the walled garden or go outside every now and then at my discretion because I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing most of the time. Let's rephrase that a little: If someone decides to go outside the walled garden, well then, their security becomes their responsibility right? Perfectly reasonable thing if you asked me. Trouble is Apple doesn't like giving anyone this kind of choice, and that kinda makes you feel they're still trying to exercise ownership over your device even though you've paid them their ridiculous profit margins for it.

Well, the odd thing was that Lord Kelvin was wrong about future science being in the fifth decimal place, and it wasn't lurking in the shadows, but would stare at them right in the face, as his peer in the House of Lords, Lord Rayleigh found out. An equation Rayleigh formulated (the Rayleigh-Jeans formula) showed, using classical physics known at the time, that an ideal blackbody at thermal equilibrium should emit radiation with infinite power (the so-called ultraviolet catastrophe). Attempts to fix this obviously wrong result by Max Planck and others led to what is today called quantum mechanics. There are many places where modern physics shows similar divergences, and perhaps there is a similar scientific revolution waiting in the wings there as well.

I've been using Osmand to do that on my Android phone for years. You just need to download maps for the area around you beforehand.

I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, and one of the chapters is entitled "No User Serviceable Parts Inside." That's something that you see a lot in today's electronics (and even software), and it is extremely frustrating for a would-be tinkerer who wants to learn how things work, the way I was when I was a kid. About thirty years ago an aunt of mine got me a C-64, and it was on such a platform that I first learned how to program, first in BASIC, and then later 6502 machine language (by peeks and pokes off a photocopied reference manual and manual relative branch offset calculations, lots of fun!). Until the Raspberry Pi, there existed no cheap system where hacking even close to like what I used to do as a kid was possible. That's what the vision of the Pi is supposed to be about as I understand it. It is intended not to hold the user's hand so much, but to teach them how things work. This is something for those kids that, were they kids 30 years ago, would have taught themselves 6502 machine language from photocopied references and soldered together some TTL circuitry and plugged that into a printer port.

Interfaces. Flexibility. You can plug it into a 1080p TV and get video output that way. If you need more storage, a multi-terabyte USB hard drive is easy to plug in. Software is also your responsibility, and that means you can make it run just about anything with more or less effort depending on that. You'd be lucky if the $40 Android tablet even has an HDMI port, much less a USB port, and good luck getting it to run anything but the version of Android it came with. I managed to build a working HTPC with a Raspberry Pi within a few hours of it getting to me in the mail, and the only reason why I haven't yet turned it into a file server/torrent box as well is that I'm reorganising the several external drives I have, so I can repurpose one of them.

Reminds me of my own sig quote at the moment, which, more fully in English goes: "God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena." --Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Discours de métaphysique (1686).

CC-BY-NC-SA is not open source, not by the traditional definition of open source. The NC part of the license is the problem. Open Source licenses should permit commercial redistribution, and this is in fact part of the first criterion given in the definition of an open source license:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

(emphasis added) The NC portion restricts selling the manual. It isn't a free cultural work either for the same reason.