The only possible reason that you would care about your position on a serial list of choices is if you knew that the majority of people making said choice really don't care about what they're choosing, and their choice would end up being random (i.e., primacy effect, serial position effect, google it).

But the premise of this whole debacle is that people are not given a choice of browser when they install an OS, and that is the reason that IE has such a large market share (since it's installed by default).

So basically, these other browser makers are fighting over how to get their browser randomly selected the most among people who don't care what browser they use. So that they can claim that their browser is used more. How does that make any sense?

What do you find so reprehensible about SUVs? Is it the gas consumption? The size of the vehicle? SUVs are pretty much the same in size, shape, and gas consumption as minivans and pickup trucks. Some smaller SUVs get gas mileage that's comparable with sedans.

So what, exactly, are you upset about re: SUVs?

You hope that people die in order to increase the sales of battery-powered cars? Wow.

Mod parent "Asshole, plus I hope you die in a car wreck."

This is reason enough for me to quit. I hate the idea that I might stink.

Really? Huh. I will start washing my clothes more often. No joke, I was not aware of this...

I hear you can do that in Silverlight.

Good idea to go along with your idea: Remove the arbitrary limit on the number of total representatives in the House. Instead, tie it to population (e.g., 1 rep per 50,000 citizens, or something like that). Reps will actually represent their much smaller constituencies, and the ability of "money" to influence voting will be greatly diminished.

Completely agree. But unfortunately, the very people we elect to these positions are the only ones with the power to change their compensation.

Totally, because those companies are completely cutting into CSIRO's wireless networking hardware business. My CSIRO wireless router is awesome, and it works great with the CSIRO wireless car-

Oh, wait...

See, this one reason is why I don't pay much attention to the news. Let's play up the absurdity of the the seemingly inconsequential act that got someone in what appears to be an inappropriately severe amount of trouble, and be sure to leave out any useful context.

It's like running a story with the headline, "Man sentenced to eight years in prison for driving with a broken tail light!!" and leaving out the fact that, oh by the way, he was also wanted for armed robbery. (Not that reporters would write a story like that.) (Maybe.)

That's exactly the reason for the differences between FOSS and proprietary software - there's a non-trivial set of "other stuff" that's required to take a piece of software from a sort-of-useful but maybe buggy implementation to a polished application that provides a solid end-to-end user experience.

Things like market research into what your potential users actually want, high-level UI design, usability studies, deliberate architecting, and a significant test infrastructure are practically *required* in commercial software design, but I don't know if they get the same emphasis in FOSS.

Current seatbelt designs have been shown to contribute to shoulder and abdominal injuries.

Divisions in sport are totally arbitrary and the point of them is to match individuals or teams of nearly equal ability so that the outcomes of their contests are maximally uncertain and therefore, entertaining for both the observers and the participants. Nobody wants to watch a game where they already know who will win. Likewise, the athletes don't want to compete in a contest they're sure to lose.

Even if this "female" turns out to be an actual chick, it doesn't matter. If she's "too good" for her arbitrary division (which in this case happens to be by gender), then she will be excluded from it.

Actually, the patent does no such thing. The i4i patent describes an algorithm to separate the tags and plaintext of a markup-language document into two separate files, where the locations of the tags are defined by the character position at which they would have appeared in the original, embedded-tag document.

i4i claims to have patented the concept of storing a document's raw data and formatting data separately, rather than inline. Given that Microsoft Word's Custom XML stores its markup inline, I hardly see how i4i's patent applies here.

Also, on a *totally* unrelated topic, guess who, in 2000, won a multimillion dollar contract to provide XML authoring software to the US Patent office? i4i. http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/473021

So the patent works like this: Instead of storing markup within a document, you instead store the markup separately from the raw data and then map each markup element to a character position in the raw data, like this:

--Original document--
<foo>This is a foo</foo><foo><bar>This is a foo bar</bar></foo>

--i4i patented storage--
Raw document:
This is a foo This is a foo bar

Metadata Map:
1 <foo> 0
2 </foo> 13
3 <foo> 14
4 <bar> 14
5 </bar> 31
6 </foo> 31

The idea is that you should be able to edit the raw data, or the markup, independently of one another. The patent outlines three core scenarios: 1) Taking an existing document with inline markup and separating the text and the markup, 2) Generating a "separate data and markup" document from scratch, and 3) Combining the markup and raw data of a doc generated from scenario 1 or 2 back together to produce a document with the markup inline.

So why is this neat? The patent claims that you can edit both the content and the markup independently of one another. Except that you would require a specialized editor that manipulates both components to be able to do this and still maintain the "mapping" of markup to raw data. Hate to say it, but I can already do this on normal, inline-markup documents using notepad, or any WYSIWYG HTML editor.

The other claim is that you could apply any map to any raw data. Except that, unless the character positions of semantic elements in the raw data were exactly where the "Metadata Map" expected them to be, the result would be a huge mess. Practically speaking, the application of a metadata map to multiple documents (since the map is based on character position) would most likely require additional inline tags to align the separate metadata to the content, thus defeating the whole purpose of the patent. Or maybe you could establish a "standard sentence length" in order to allow one map to be applied to different documents - that would be great. :P

I'm having a hard time understanding how the technology described in this patent is actually useful at all, let alone how Microsoft has infringed on it. In fact, if they *did* actually use this technology, then they deserve to be punished for using a stupid idea.