Maybe your cost of living isn't actually relatively high after all.

Yeah, I should have changed the wording there to be slightly less flattering, considering that last time I needed to put music on an iPod ("I'm telling you, it's not mine! Those things aren't my bag, baby!"), I ended up using RhythmBox. Clementine's support for it was pretty broken.

In case you didn't follow the rest of the thread, I wanted to let you know that you should try Clementine. It's basically Amarok 1.4 ported to Qt, although they're still catching up on some less essential features.

I started reading this thread hoping for actual examples of prior art, but the examples people are mentioning aren't actually prior art (or infringing) unless they do everything in one of the independent claims, including stuff like "modifying the corresponding application user interface to include a switch application icon that is not displayed in the corresponding application user interface when there is no ongoing phone call". I'd still love to see examples of prior art, but it looks like it's fairly easy to work around this patent.

In the future, it may be useful to read the following or something equivalent:
Andrew Tridgell on Patent Defence for FOSS Developers

See Citizens United v. FEC for the First Amendment right the Supreme court recently ruled that corporations have.

Rob, is that you?

Actually, on Maemo devices before the N900 (I'm assuming that's what you're talking about), there was a hardware button by default, which is probably why someone felt the need to write software to replicate this on the N900.

I really liked Maemo, but as far as I can tell, it has a glaring weakness compared to other mobile OSes, in that it doesn't seem to have a sandboxing mechanism to run untrusted applications in. If it ever achieved the sort of mainstream success that Android has, it would have been hard to feel safe installing untrusted software onto it. Then again, it sounds like the sandboxing in Android doesn't have enough granularity in permission granting to prevent malicious software from secretly invading your privacy, so I wouldn't feel safe about that either.

No.

Haven't you heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Most of us are pretty wild by nature, so this is most definitely a nurture problem.

http://villagetelco.org/ have wireless mesh based phone networks called Village Telcos in Dili, East Timor, and several places in South Africa (and maybe elsewhere in Africa), using a custom device called the Mesh Potato, which has a wireless SoC, FXS port, and outdoor enclosure. It runs custom OpenWRT-derived firmware and Asterisk, and is set up so they're basically plug and play at deployment time. They don't have very up-to-date details on their website, but the mailing list is responsive, and you should check them out if this sort of thing interests you.

I found the following comparisons useful because they have sample recordings:
http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/second-comparison-2010
http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/organmusic

As weak as our net neutrality rules are, your statements are blatantly incorrect. Not even two paragraphs in, he links to the CRTC guidelines, which say stuff like:

ISP must also reference its online disclosures in relevant marketing materials, customer contracts, and terms of service.

and

Clear and prominent disclosure of technical ITMPs on the websites of primary ISPs must be made a minimum of 30 days in advance of a new technical ITMP being implemented or an existing one being modified.

I don't see how things like that can be construed as voluntary. It seems like an enforcement failure if you ask me. It's objective fact that there are very few neutral ISPs here (Teksavvy cable is the only one in my area that I know of, on the DSL version, Bittorrent gets throttled by Bell), and we're also falling behind the rest of the world in terms of the speed and price of access.

Obligatory xkcd

Thanks for making me laugh, but at a glance, it looks like the bug is actually in this package, not PHP.

*whoosh*