>I really miss Byte :(

I totally agree. Having recycled my old Byte magazines I have gone to the University library and read through all issues of Byte. Twice. You get the entire computer history from the microcomputer onwards. And I swear there is magic in them there pages.

This reminds me of a long time ago when each issue of Byte had a card where you could fill in all the ads you were interested in and send in to Byte. They then forwarded this to all the companies and you actually got a boatload of brochures and stuff from them, often printed on really nice, thick, expensive luxuriant paper. They really wanted to do business with you. To bad for them I only was a twelve year old in Sweden who thought it would be fun with some brochures. No surprise they stopped doing that...

If chiropractice is bogus or not of course depends on what they say they cure. I haven't checked every chiropractor here in sweden but generally they are definitely serious and fix real problems when for example discs in your back are out of alignment and nerves become pinched. They are part of the medical establishment. And as someone from a family with serious back problems I say thank good for swedish chiropractors. It's either bed-ridden with maximum dosage of morphine or going to a chiropractor to fix it.

Always funny to read how americans complain about how fundraising wrecks your democracy. Don't know if you know this over there in the USA, but in the civilized world (in my case sweden) it is not called fundraising, it is called bribery and is illegal. You understand? No company, private person or organization is allowed to give money or things or services to any politician. Nada. Zip. Because they are elected by the people and allowing bribery naturally wrecks the whole concept of democracy. Don't know why you put up with your trainwreck of political system, but nevermind, I'm sure there's some good on the telly between the commercials.

You are all a bunch of limp wristed weaklings with your god damn new yuppie fonts. Use '-misc-fixed-medium-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-c-*-*-*' and view your code as emacs and X11 intended it with hard, cold gloriously pixelated simplicity.

>running a pretty stable system, so it may be days or weeks

Jesus, I hope you are running windos or something if you consider weekly reboots stable. For the record, my Linux system practically never goes down. It's the power outages that takes it down perhaps once a year. Desktop machine that is. And I use a window manager that only manages windows (ctwm) and not the entire system, which I suspect is the reason it never dies. The servers are on UPS and are usually up for a couple of years before we upgrade redhat on them or upgrade hardware.

I'll second that, from Sweden. We, friends and collegues in programming in true IT companies, don't recognize all the problems you seem to have in the US with both being continously fucked by the companies and you all seem to have incompetent middle management.

If you are a skilled programmer working here (at my work) you usually work 38-40 hours a week. Every second of voluntary overtime is paid (if you feel like working another hour on a current problem). Ordered overtime, where my boss ASKS me if I could work a little extra on something (happens perhaps once a year and I can usually just say no) pays double. And if our boss or project manager isn't good enough we'll make sure upper management knows about it and he'll be moved to something else. Everyone gets 25 to 35 days days paid vacation, straight out of school. Sickdays are paid by the government, though not in full, and my company goes in and pays a little extra to get to almost 100% paid sick leave. Note though that this is in the high-end IT field. We who do this do not grow on trees and the companies know this.

Perhaps it's time to pull your heads out of where ever you have put them in the US and do something about your situation?

>Reducing it to a penis-measuring contest is hardly edifying.

Unless you are the winner of said contest.

>Dude, necrophilia is wrong.

Tell that to the windows users.

>Why do entertainment providers think that huge budgets are going to impress us? Or is it, as I suppose, a matter of them looking to excuse their having to keep raising prices and using draconian copyright protection measures?

Sitting on your throne of 'good taste' most be lonely when the rest of the world is busy going to the huge budget films you don't seem to like.

US all time box office hits:

1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824
2. The Dark Knight (2008) $533,316,061
3. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665
4. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036
5. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459
6. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $431,065,444
7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) $423,032,628
8. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375
9. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Only big budget movies in the top 100 and absolutely no 'indie' films. You were saying?

As always when discussing patents most people get one small vital detail wrong. It is not the fluffy stuff in the patent abstract that is patented, it is the things enumerated in the claims that specify the patent. For example, in this case the claims say that the patent is for a system where you view two pictures of a person where they have changed one single thing and you then vote for the best picture. So any existing system which instead uses one picture is NOT prior art. Neither is any system with two pictures where two items of clothes changed prior art. A system with two pictures of a person with a single thing changed between the pictures but where you give a rating for the pictures is not prior art.

Please, please remember this so we will not have to endure any more stories about patents with prior art. Yes the patents are often trivial and should absolutely not be approved but they often don't have prior art since the claims normally are very specific.

>UNIX isn't exactly an elixir from the Gods

I absolutely beg to differ. Although the general unix design isn't bleeding edge in any form it is a very good design that has survived for forty years and is still going strong. That IS a mark of excellence. I say Unix, C, emacs and latex has the same qualities together with ethernet and tcp/ip which are the all time greats in computing. Any good programmer can design something that works now. It takes a really great programmer to design something that can work for FOUR DECADES.

We stand on the shoulders of giants and we owe it to them to preserve our common first footsteps in the sand.

This just in. Another pointless application for cellphones and a university professors clueless search for grant money.

Read my lips. Just because something is technologically possible doesn't mean anyone is interested in it.

Please. Stop.

Gosh yes I would like my pilot to be a handsome, square jawed silverback with war medals all over his broad manly chest but in the end it turns out that he/she is a normal human being with all these god damn bugs that is inherant in that design. Reminds me of the Aeroflot Flight 593 where the pilot thought it was a good idea to let a kid sit at the controls, and he managed to disable parts of the autopilot. All aboard died.

Then again people are also designing the software to control the planes... So damn if this once again is a problem that isn't just black and white and has an easy solution.

Cue the 'Oh the poor poor children will cry themselves to sleep if we actually expect something more than attendance in school.' estrogen-high soccer moms.

The Jobs presentation back in 2007 was of course utter PR bullshit, but that is as expected. The article pointed to here was sad oh-isn't-Steve-cute wanking. The Zrop submission was the most pitiful piece of steaming manure ever, I mean 'the iPhone will change the world'... And that Taco guy is apparently also buying into the hype with his 'super real world pointer' fawning.

I feel it's like kicking on a chromosome-impaired kid lying on the ground looking for his coke-bottle glasses to comment on slashdots inability to write a good article. Especially when the overpriced fruit is concerned. So I wont. Seriously.