None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to empty chairs at 4AM!

Fixed that for you.

A remake...of a 21-year-old game? Come on. Get some new ideas, for chrissake. The current crop of game-playing kids wasn't even born then, how could there be any demand for a remake?

You may not be aware of it, but video games are no longer solely the domain of unpopular 12-year-old boys. A lot of those boys have grown up, are in their 20s and 30s now, and still play. And they have a good amount of disposable income available for the hobby, which both Sony and Microsoft have used to their advantage. You would not have seen anybody foolish enough to offer a mainstream console with a $600 price tag in the late 1980s.

Some of those bys even have girlfriends, spouses and children now, who also enjoy gaming, which is one reason for Nintendo's continuing success.

What would really be great is if they would add this idea to desktop computers. Most of my DOS applications on my 80286 run just fine at the XT-compatible 4.77MHz CPU clock speed, but once in a while I think I'd really benefit if I could crank that up to 12 (or dare I dream, 16?) MHz...

But, take things like libel, which in the US used to have truth as an iron-clad defense.

Never.

Libel is a defamatory act, and defamation is characterized by intent to harm. In many jurisdictions, a written statement which is factually true may still be considered libelous if it is misleading and/or proven to have been published with malicious intent.

Arrived at the place to talk with the developers and see if we could incorporate their software at our location. The atrium to the place was nice, wide open area with plants and all nice. Going into the halls they had robots running mail and physical items between room, then we got to the programming room. It was a big white room with 3 columns, and around 5 rows, of picnic type tables and two programmers on each table, each with their own computer. At the front of the room was a raised platform where the managers desk was sitting. Making it even worse was the manager, she would require that they get permission to go to the bathroom, get lunch, etc.

On the plus side, they had free vending machines in the hallway kept stocked with all the Flavo-Fibes you could eat, and all the Reconst you could drink! Plus there was a well-known backdoor on the file server that allowed employees to scroll up cinemas while they worked.

If we now have a popular Java platform that only have a subset of the Core classes, it will cause a lot of headaches down the road, eventually fragmenting the "Java" platform.

Good.

No single platform should be or can be universal. The requirements for an application on an 8-core 64-bit server serving 10,000 users at once have nothing at all in common with a single-user application on a low-power pocket device; what's the advantage of using the same language to write both when fundamental design choices must be necessity be different?

I thought Sun had understood this concern when the J2ME/SE/EE standards were established. If their position is now that every JVM must implement Threads, even the ones running on the hardware equivalent of a Gameboy Advance, then they've lost sight of pragmatism.

The whole point of using flash for video is to 1) prevent viewers from skipping over ads, and 2) prevent viewers from saving the streaming video to disk.

3) provide a common cross-platform experience for all visitors
4) prevent users from having to deal with "codec hell"

There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.

I'm sure this is an idea that the record labels have never considered before. Never ever.

The reason they would dare ask $1.29 for a download of a 30-year-old song like 'Barricuda' is because they think enough people are willing to pay that much that they'll make a profit on it -- and they barely have to sell any copies at all for that to happen, since the recording costs were recouped decades ago, and its constant rotation on Classic Rock radio already makes it a cash cow for them.

Your people deserve what they get.

NOBODY deserves living under a corrupt or oppressive government.

"Open to the public" and "substantial number of persons outside of...family and friends" are the key things to understand here.

Indeed.

Playing a DVD at home when a few pals come over == not public performance
Playing a DVD in the common room of a college dormitory building, all students welcome = likely not public performance
Playing a DVD over the video projection system in a college lecture hall, all students welcome, non-students may attend by paying $5 = probably qualifies as a public performance

It does, however, highlight the unfairness of a law that makes do distinction between commercial and non-commercial breaches of copyright.

The damages (as they are) to the rightful copyright holder are identical whether the violator made a profit off the violation or not.

first, he gives the British PM a stack of DVDs (ultra lame). next, he gives the queen of england a friggin ipod

The DVDs and iPod are not the gifts, they are the packaging. The real value of these gifts is of the content that's on them -- examples of the artistic and cultural outputs of the United States, which have been exported to the world.

That most of this culture is available to anybody with $300 to spare is not an indictment of Obama's stinginess, nor of America's, but a celebration of our egalitarianism.

You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English.

So that covers what, SQL? And FORTRAN?

Hey, maybe people have a reason to use MySQL - a product that only supports that db,

Badly written software.

or developers who aren't particularly familiar with what relational databases are supposed to be like.

Badly written software waiting to happen.