Good points

So they have the nucleic DNA - what about DNS from other intra-cellular bodies such as mitochondria? What about the epi-genetic effects of bringing a mammoth fetus to term inside another species? (Presumably an elephant.)

I think what they will end up with is an approximation of a mammoth, not an true instance of the species that became extinct 10,000 years ago.

The other thing you can do is boycott all Apple products and encourage everyone you know to do the same. And do the same for any other company that tries to control the market - and where your dollar goes - using the same broken patent system.

Ultimately all large companies make their decision based on the balance sheet, and Apple's products are discretionary purchasing. If people can be made to care about the company's behaviour it will affect whether or not they buy their product or a competitors.

Fring [ http://www.fring.com/ ] looks interesting, although it only works on mobile platforms right now.

KDE seems to suffer terribly from re-writer's disease. They'll write a good piece of software, possibly lacking a few features and a bit buggy in places. Rather than polish it and fill in the gaps, they nearly always decider to write something Newer and Better.

Almost invariably the new application won't be the latter, because immature software tends to lack a few features and be a bit buggy in places.

I still prefer KDE to Gnome, and Kubuntu is my main desktop, but I really wish the developers would settle down and get a bit less skittish.

Parent poster doesn't have a girlfriend or he would know there is no such thing as free sex.

I recently bought a Dell Zino HD from Dell NZ. I did it over the phone, so I could ask for the Windows licence to be refunded - there is now way to do it on the website of course.

The first operator didn't really know how to handle my request and asked if they could call back. When I did get called back I was offered a discount to the value of the Windows licence. So presumably Dell ended up paying Microsoft for a licence on my purchase anyway.

I'm guessing that Microsoft have insured themselves in the agreements with the system builders and distributors in this way. I don't know how you would go about finding out what the content of those agreements really is though.

Anecdotal evidence is not proof of a rule. If you kick a dog it might run or it might turn and bite you.

If you can't convince your boss to spend the time and money to write tests for old working code, just start writing tests for any new code you write.

When you fix a bug, write a test for it.

When you add a feature write a test suite for it.

Your tests will also incidentally test old code near the new code, and your coverage will increase surprisingly quickly.

I had a team of 6 developers doing this over ~400,000 LOC over the course of about 18 months and got 60% code coverage over the product.