I always think a PGP style web-of-trust would be useful in the sphere of trading opinions, whether that be reviews on academic papers or posts on a forum.

One such form of trust would be that, yes, you are Alexander Hamilton, and these 2,000 people have signed your public key to acknowledge this.

If you want to be democratic about it, have a platform where you can lend weight to peoples opinion ; in the context of Slashdot, your post is already weighted according to your karma when you initially post it, and later on, by people reviewing it.

Being well-spoken is essential to having a democratic debate. If you cannot express your opinion in a way which the other party can understand, you have no chance of having any discussion about it at all.

If you are well spoken, then those of us who are not well-spoken should be able to recognise someone who shares their opinion, but manages to express it more clearly, and lend their support to your ability to have it heard.

Prion diseases were well known before ; kuru in humans and scrapie in sheep.

Scrapie has been known about since the 18th century. It's the reason they don't feed ground up sheep to sheep. Kuru and conditions like it are probably one of the reasons there are taboos against cannibalism in most cultures.

Yup, I wish the UK measured how late it's trains were in seconds, like Japan. Instead of which, they don't even concede that they are late until their lateness exceeds 5 minutes.

Not all of them are glorified kettle boilers.

This one : Focus Fusion has a reactor design that has a combination of magnetically decelerating helium ions and gamma-photovoltaic collection as the primary energy collection modes.

And a design reactor size that is more on the order of magnitude of "shipping container" than "aircraft carrier".

It's perhaps more ambitious (in terms of the physics) than ITER - but I think it's probably less ambitious in terms of general engineering problems, like how to breed enough tritium, etc.

Not true here in the UK. Steam is often priced 10-15% higher than retail, both via mail-order (the kind that houses it's warehouse in a tax haven and ships small-value packages to avoid paying it in the target country) and, for the big titles, the big-box supermarkets (like Asda) often have a competitive price as well.

Indeed.

Swipe to unlock for doors == a bolt.

Swipe to unlock for GUI == ?

Patenting GUI analogs of physical devices is an oxymoron - you're copying a user interface that already exists. The very reason you made that analog in a piece of software is because it ISN'T a new and innovative idea. It's familiar and obvious to people or there would be no point.

If you want to patent UI metaphors, you should first demonstrate that no-one understands how to use it without first reading the manual.

The very first test should be - ask a bunch of software guys - "If you had to do X in software, how would you do it?"

If ANY of them gets even close the patent should be thrown out.

That said, there shouldn't be any software patents. Asking how to improve the process of patenting software is like asking how to improve the process of circumcision. Just because you do it now, and lots of tribal elders say it's a great idea, doesn't mean it's true.

On that partition, nothing. I'm just referring to the tools required to manage it. The cloud folder is on my home folder, which as I said, is on another partition.

There's no way to punish Domino for it, because he held no patent on his packaging method. He relied on it being a trade secret... then gave it away.

More fool him. Packaging is big business. If you have a genuine patented innovation in the field and manage it right, you're on the gravy train until someone supercedes it. It might be small potatoes, but it's a LOT of small potatoes.

It's legal either way, whether it's a giant corporate bastard or a small independent bastard.

If there's no license for your software, though, you hold the copyright automatically. There is no legal recourse for any company that rips off your code and sells it, even if you paid for it to be marqueed across a billboard in Time Square.

Do you think media companies would accept the proposition that because they put their content on public broadcast networks, that anyone can copy it from there and sell it on as they desire?

You can store a crapload of anything in 23GB, apart from music, pretty pictures and video. Alas, these are the number one reason for having a tablet in the first place.

There's no reason to hibernate a tablet computer though - the things are designed to be in perpetual standby.

Let's see... on my current Linux install my root drive (no user documents or settings) is 9.5GB.

I have..

* A full office suite
* An email / calendar program
* A bitmap graphics program
* A vector graphics program
* A general diagram tool
* A diagram tool for making GUI mockups
* A UML modelling tool
* A mind mapping tool
* A project management tool
* A selection of different media players, each tailored for a purpose (music, video)
* A CD ripper
* A CD creator
* A DVD / video transcoding application
* A webcam app
* A photo management app
* Two different web browsers
* More than three different text editors, all with features that blow Notepad.exe out of the water
* A backup system
* Database management tools
* The tools for three different version control systems
* Development kits for C, C++, Ruby, Python, Perl, XML, Java, C# (probably missed some out)
* Two Java development environments
* File differencing tools
* A hex editor
* The thoroughly awesome GNU tool set which by itself makes you more productive with a large folder of text files than anything else
* Encryption software
* Archive tools for every common archive format and most of the uncommon ones

* Several sets of remote desktop / system management tools
* VPN software
* A Windows-compatible file server

* A sticky notes program
* A BitTorrent client

* A unified instant messenger client
* A specialized IRC client
* Skype
* A unified social network client

* A cloud folder with 5GB of complimentary storage

* A calculator
* A few desk toys
* A typing tutor

* The usual system management widgets

* A means of pretending to be Windows when the need arises

And

* A package management system that keeps ALL of it up to date (not just the operating system)
* and doesn't need a reboot every time it does it ... No, I don't think 40GB of Windows provides all of that.

(no, not all of this came out of the box, but all of it was available for free, and all of it fits in that 9.5GB ; there's some "payware" on there too but I didn't include it above)

They based a lot of the characterization of Tony Stark in the recent movies on Elon Musk.

Pulseaudio solves the problem that only one process can use the sound card at once, by being that process and pretending to be the sound card for everything else ; even programs compiled against ALSA. This means you can hear your email ping, even when you listen to music.

It's a similar design to the sound system you get on Windows ; each application gets it's own volume, etc. The main problem I've had with it is that it's not 100% robust (it would go into a loop sometimes when receiving bad sound input), which seems to have improved greatly in the release included with 12.10.

Possibly the other problem with it is too much YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it). It includes a bunch of features like being able to tunnel sound across networks. I would rather they had focussed on it just being a bulletproof sound multiplexer for one machine before they started on clever stuff.