Your staff members should be the ones crawling under the desk. You're the department head for God's sake. Act too busy or something. Rank hath its privileges. Personally, as a self-employed consultant, I wear a button-down with the collar open and black Dickies work pants (non-cargo) as ordinary dress pants rip too easily and get snagged on stuff while crawling under desks.

I'm marrying the sexy librarian I met on OkCupid next May. They're out there guys, just rarer than diamonds.

Read the question. I wasn't questioning who they were, I was questioning their expertise. In my book, people who do not have a solution for a problem can hardly be considered experts in the problem. Any idiot can say "abandon in place." It takes no special knowledge.

What makes them experts? How much space junk have they cleaned up? Which orbital paths have they cleared?

Apple makes its profits primarily on hardware sales. And it's mostly standard Intel hardware. Why would they care if you decided to put Debian on it? How could they stop you? Of course, that raises the question of why you are buying such expensive hardware just to run Debian since you don't like Apple's Software, but some people are willing to pay extra for industrial design.

Samba has switched to GPL v3. Past editions used GPL v2. Thus large chunks of the code are already multilicensed. You are correct that the GPLv2 does not require all publications to accept later licenses, only that that is an option if so chosen by the authors. The Samba authors have chosen to use at least one later version of the license. This is an interesting question actually,if the original authors have chosen to move up to a new version of the license and somebody makes modifications to an earlier revision under the earlier version of the license, are the modifications barred from being incorporated into a new version controlled by the original authors if the original license did not specify that later licenses may be used?

Hmm, how so? GPLv2 says that it can be used under that license or any later version. If the community wants Apple's patches and Apple cares to give them back, then they can. They will probably be advised by their lawyers not to though for fear of confusion. Look, it's in a GPLv2 and a GPLv3 project! Suddenly version control timestamps become very important.

Seems like an overreaction. Just fork the V2 version. Or maybe that's what they're doing.

I draw the lines at enslaving full human clones, lobotomizing them, or denying them human rights. Deliberately creating anencephalic clones for spare parts is fine. Creating chimaeras or hybrid clones is ok, I guess, but weird. In most cases there's no real point to that. Do we really want to create a race of mermen who can breathe through gills? Why? We have robots who don't need to breathe at all and don't demand rights or paychecks (yet). Other than that I'd be fine with cloning if only the techniques were more efficient. 4000 failures to one clone does not seem like a mature process to me. And we don't really need more people on this planet, so it's doubly inefficient.

Cox, the Computer Scientist, should sue Lacy for harming his reputation and making unfounded allegations.

They really ought to include a text expansion feature in all IM and SMS programs. Then when the kid types gr8, it will appear as great in the actual message and there will be visual reinforcement of the correct spelling. It will also serve to reduce annoyance to people who hate txt speak. If the 140 char limitation is important in the application, then the messages can be transmitted as-is in txt-speak and translated automatically on the other side. Think of it as a primitive form of message compression.

Pick different example. iPhone Mk 1 cost 600 dollars. iPhone 4 costs 200 dollars. Apple wasn't losing money even at the beginning. Now the Xbox, that's a good example.

I think they can be justifiably proud of this technological terror they've constructed.

Well, obviously they need to run some instances of Windows for research and testing purposes to protect the public, but you'd think the organization devoted to cybersecurity would run something with fewer targeted attacks designed especially for it.

The space tug was one of the first things that was cancelled in the space station program http://www.astronautix.com/craft/otv.htm We're doing this whole space station thing in such a half-assed manner because approximately half of the people in Congress would dearly like to see the entire thing cancelled (and this is not a vote along party lines). They try at every chance to kill the thing outright but it's always so far been saved at the last moment (with subtantial cuts) in a political compromise. And the thing about a compromise is that it's a solution that no one is happy with, ie, half-assed. That's the main reason. The other reason is that the station is in LEO, and thus is subject to significant atmospheric drag via the attenuated atmostphere. It's not a permanent orbit. Within a few years at most, without periodic reboosts (which cost fuel), the station would reenter the atmosphere and burn up. The primary reason that the station is in such a low orbit relates to the quality of the launchers we had to launch it. Without a Saturn V class, we had no real capability to project more mass than a telecom satellite to a significantly higher orbit. The Clarke orbit is filled with junk from dead comsats, so it's unsuitable for permanent habitation even if we could reach it with so much mass. And the area between LEO and GEO is mostly unreachable by the supply and personnel rockets we had with significant payload. So basically, the reason this station program is so half-assed can be laid at the feet of the people who killed the Saturn V. Skylab was launched in 1 launch. The ISS took dozens to be mostly complete.