Instead they got in bed with MS and ended up with a fatal disease.

More like they got pregnant, had a severely disabled child, and their only sane option is the marry the father.

That's one way to look at it.

The other way to think about it is that the rest of Nokia just unloaded a boat anchor of a mobile phone business and a horrific CEO onto Microsoft, with the added bonus of him possibly becoming CEO of that combined corporation.

Or, if you prefer, "beware of Finns bearing gifts".

I'd say it's the lowest ever, too, but I've had a number of slashdot editors in my filters for years... Guess I'd better put timothy back on the list.

Stop right there at the "stress makes you eat" part. WTF man? No it doesn't.

I don't buy "stress makes you eat", but I'd be comfortable in saying that stress would contribute a lot to someone to not caring too much about what they eat, how much they eat, how healthy it is, or what it's doing to their body.

People under stress frequently take the path of least resistance, and if that means the cheapest, fastest, most convenient food and stretchy pants, then so be it.

I suppose I could have previewed that. Note to self: don't post on slashdot while buying a house.

Now I'm the terrorists to use teams of drones to herd geese into oncoming aircraft.

I don't think the popular sire effect can be drastically increased in magnitude, not above what artificial insemination provides.

I was thinking more about the popular sire effect and how it would work on the mare side of things. "Production" from mares is constrained by limited reproduction lifespans, gestation times, etc, so having a handful of clones of a popular mare could shakes things up a bit.

But is it an illegal monopoly? They're not preventing anyone else from racing horses, or registering horses.

From what I've read about it, there are other registries. However, if you want to race or do rodeo events, it sounds like they are effectively a monopoly, and the cost of starting up a competing ecosystem of events outside the registry is likely going to be quite high.

They likely aren't an "illegal" monopoly, but being a legal monopoly is more than enough to makes things like this happen.

Actually, they allow it- you just can't register the foal in the AQHA registry at that point.

That's not quite so bad, then, although for a foal of a clone of a registered horse it strikes me as silly if it wasn't allowed registration.

I do think you have to be a little careful though at how it is applied when money is involved and horse racing is certainly in that category.

Off the top of my head, it would drastically increase the magnitude of the popular sire effect. Right now, that's limited by the lifespan of a stallion (or, more accurately, how much semen you can extract, store and disseminate over its lifetime), and for a mare it's even more restricted. Cloning effectively eliminates those constraints, and it takes generations to get a true sense of the impact.

File a suit against those organizations, seeking to force them to recognize horses from other registries.

Yeah, that's always an option. But if you have to force those organizations to recognize other registries, you've pretty much nailed the argument that the one existing registry is a monopoly, haven't you?

And that's assuming those organizations even exist (I haven't looked to closely) and the entire quarter horse industry isn't basically operating under the thumb of the one registry. Which makes an even stronger argument for them being a monopoly.

Ergo, the correct solution would have been to dismiss the suit and tell the plaintiffs that they are free to form their own clone registry. The fact that the current registry is a monopoly would be immaterial because said monopoly excludes clones and thus wouldn't compete with a clone registry.

The problem usually comes not because of the registry, but because there may be other organizations which only "recognize" horses from that registry for their purposes. For example, if a race organization requires that a horse be "pure bred", and only accepts AQHA pedigree, then things start getting messy. And very likely, AQHA rules don't allow AQHA-registered horses to breed out-of-registry, which massively restricts the breeding pool for any competing registry.

In other words, sometimes these sorts of registries act as gatekeepers for a whole host of things, and it makes more sense to change the registry than the change the practices of everything "downstream". Particularly if the registry isn't keeping up with industry practices, or the rules start to introduce health issues with pedigree animals (i.e. reduces the breeding pool excessively).

TV and movies and other forms of media you consider to be passive entertainment frequently give life to interesting discussions and debates

No shit. Every human endeavor, from knitting to skydiving, frequently gives life to interesting discussions and debates.

The apparently subtle point I was making is that if passive entertainment is the basis your interactions with other people to the point that you think that giving up said passive entertainment would make you a social outcast, then you seriously need to get a life.

Sure, I could forgo films and television series completely, but there's that social aspect of being a part of conversations at work and at gatherings that I would miss out on. I already don't give a damn for sports, might as well drop out of society completely.

Not really. There's a fairly simple solution to this issue.

1. find a hobby where you actually do things yourself rather than having entertainment fed to you by someone else
2. do that hobby
3. find people into the same hobby
4. talk to those people

Speaking from experience, a shared interest pretty much eliminates any awkwardness due to lack of shared media culture. It's also extremely effective at shutting down undesirable conversation. Someone talking to you about the latest sporting media event at work? Start talking about your hobby (unless it's NSFW; we don't judge your predilections here on /., but the folks at the office might get a bit weirded out). If nothing else, it reminds people that while they sit on their asses in front of a television, you actually go out and do things. If your hobby keeps you fit, it's even more effective.

Shouldn't the RNG tap into the device's accelerometer?

The Linux kernel has has the ability to push device input into the random number entropy pool for a long time (/dev/random and /dev/urandom). If the device drivers aren't pumping accelerometer events into the pool, someone really missed an opportunity.

In this case, it sounds like something went wrong with the Java/Dalvik random number generator. It's not clear to me from glancing at the various write-ups whether it's a failure to RTFM on the part of the Bitcoin wallet writers (or maybe whoever wrote a common Bitcoin reference implementation) or if there's something broken in the Android implementation of the RNG class.