Software patents are stupid, but I'm happy to give MS a monopoly on fontlings, if only so that I can spend the next 17 years never being subjected to a fontling. (I hope.)

My friend once told me that Apple fanbois were petulant, childish, small-minded, rude, and unable to engage in civil discussion.

My friend is apparently an apologist for fanbois.

I only got into one small edit war once and it was enough to discourage me from ever contributing to wikipedia again. The concept of deleting knowledge (not correcting or challenging it; DELETING it) just strikes me as wrong on a visceral level.

The worst part is that it probably wasn't deleted by a malicious HD Radio hater. It was probably deleted by somebody who was too lazy to be careful with his edits.

It's your own fault. You were supposed to monitor the page every hour, and get friends in different time zones to watch the page while you slept. That way as soon as somebody so much as corrected a spelling mistake you could revert it nearly instantly and discourage other hooligans from messing with your article.

Hasn't wikipedia taught you anything?

And not one of the people on this list has a US Navy warship named after him.

Amazing Grace

...unless you're willing to use it.

I'm not really familiar with this project, but couldn't they just call Princess Rosella like "Princess Rosetta" and so on? It's not like Activision can lay claim to the entire swords and sorcery genre.

The alternative is an Internet controlled by the ISPs, which can simply be paid by the RIAA and their friends to shape traffic as they see fit. The only way to prevent people with deep pockets from controlling your network access is to own the network yourself. Hell, if I remember correctly your "naive people" were demanding government interference BECAUSE the ISP sysadmins were blocking paying customers from using P2P protocols -- with no government involvement at all. When you're paying to use somebody else's network you're at somebody else's mercy, period, full stop.

P.S. Don't interpret this post as a defense of government involvement.

So can VLC, infact it's kinda the same: ctrl, shift and alt + the arrows do the same You can even set up how far it seeks with those keys from the preferences...

The four political poles are liberal, conservative, libertarian, and populist. Sometimes they go by different names but a liberal is by definition one who supports controls on industry but also in personal freedom, while conservatives favor controls on personal freedom but a free market. In the USA, those who call themselves liberals and those who call themselves republicans are both overwhelmingly populist. The democrats and republicans both favor big pork; the dems want to tell you what kind of media it is okay to consume and the republicans want to tell you what you can do in your bedroom. Between the two of them we should be delivered directly into massive fascism in no time. How different are things on the other side of the pond, really?

Would be Google dropping all Chinese and China-related websites from their search results (including AdSense if they really want to talk the talk). They could easily justify such actions by pointing to the attacks they suffered from China and declare it a lawless no-commerce zone where no one can be trusted.

This tweet was intended to be read by the guy's friends.

So? I don't suppose Osama Bin Laden's emails are exactly cc'd to the CIA.

Yes, except I'm still trying to come to grips with an OS that includes nothing but a browser but still weighs in at almost a GB. Why so much? Heck, I can get Slitaz (an OpenBox-based Linux distro), which includes Firefox, in a 25MB .iso.

My point is that expensive certification could still prove to be substantially cheaper than a purpose-built medical device.

No toy company wants to deal with the shit that medical device regulating agencies (not the plural) can and will send their way. Not for any amount of money.

(Medical device engineer here, with a crapload of shit from $THREE_LETTER_AGENCY coming his way.)

The last time I looked, all of the discount internet brokers (Etrade, TDAmeritrade, etc.) provided real time quotes for basic accounts.

There are only so many hours in a day, and there are only so many movies and television shows that people can consume. If the costs of reproduction and distribution fall precipitously, people aren't going to see ten movies a week or watch TV for an additional four hours a day. They'll just spend less money to consume about the same amount of content. That would be true even in a world with no piracy. And with more bandwidth to fill, that smaller pool of money needs to fund the creation of even more content. Risky, expensive productions were going to wither away even if BitTorrent had never been created. Or put another way, don't blame piracy for The Jay Leno Show or Saw VI. In fact (although the huge biases make it hard to trust any study of the topic), I wouldn't be surprised if most pirates haven't greatly reduced their spending on media as distribution costs fell; but rather started accumulating more bits for the same amount of money.

Once content producers figure out how to make money in a world without physical media (which requires them to figure out how to offer their customers what they want at a prices they'll pay -- you'd think it wouldn't be so hard), the content will flow again. There may be less money available to create it, and they may need to change the ways they fund it, but people with a story to tell will find a way to tell their story. The radio and the phonograph didn't kill live music, movies didn't kill live theater, television didn't kill movies, and the VCR didn't kill anything. In all of these cases there were big winners and big losers, and the scope and/or quality of the content may have morphed over the decades, but there is more stuff (both good and bad) than ever before.