There's nothing you can earn with doing the "hard stuff" when it is already done correctly, unless you think real programmers are those who can constantly reinvent the wheel... Reusing wheels is not THE problem. I think the real problem is that there is another extreme. There are too many wheels and some times, programmers don't bother to stop and think whether it would sometimes be more convenient to invent a wheel when the only available wheels just do not fit with the rest of your car or are all square.

It was way easier to skip it, just do it at the word "balanced". Reporters think balance is to give the same attention to both sides of the discussion. But scientific issues work differently, science requires you to be biased towards the theory that is actually supported by evidence. Using journalism's balance in science is the Arkansas school board approach...

Hehe, you know a game that requires you to be connected 100% of the time to be played? WoW. You know what game has been in the the many piracy streets of my beloved La Paz Bolivia for years including expansions? WoW. I have stopped doing piracy when I grew up and just moved to open source, but I am fairy sure there are a lot of wow players in here that are not paying blizzard for the game. Then again, I have no idea how it works, most likely they are just using a pirate server...

It is naive to think the method described can work as well as the article claims, they assume it is actually hard to get rid of this form of DRM, but really.... Does the game use public key encryption? hack the game so that it does not use it!, simple! Or you thought they were gonna try to bruteforce the key? lol... my bet is that the pirates will get to play the game it even before the release date. (it is gonna be leaked, gratz!) Mean while, true costumers won't be able to play when internet goes down. Good work.

Considering this:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_tel_mob_cel_percap-telephones-mobile-cellular-per-capita
The global average number of functioning cell phones per person is 0.6~... I am surprised 50% of all of us have not gotten cancer yet. In fact, countries like the US take the number to the extreme, with 1000 cell phones per person! With these numbers I can safely claim that there is not even a correlation between cell phone use and cancer :/

Also consider that just as there are companies with economical interests in cell phone signals being healthy there are also companies with interests in them being hazardous. The more reasons you have to sell those "protection" systems that you are supposed to use with your cell phone to protect you from the harmful signals, the better.

At least the ubuntu 9.10 version of OOO runs just fine on my aspire one D250, and it also ran fine on my old 701 4G ASUS eee.

That's an excessively lame excuse. Ubuntu is continously losing functionality and replacing it with proprietary solutions just for disk space sake. You claim that it is no problem to have to install fundamental applications everybody uses manually, but you are missing something:
* What about the live cd/usb? In case of emergencies I would be able to use my flash disk/CD to boot into a version of ubuntu that has the tools I needed for my work (ie: you are using someone else's computer, your hd broke and no time to fix, etc). But without openoffice or the gimp I am now screwed.
* Besides of taking precious time from me and making it feel as cheap as windows, there is the little problem that it is not obvious to new users that these useful apps ever exist. New users would just assume UNR forcefully needs web connection to use that limited office service that google docs is...

UNR actually targets even heavier "netbooks". An Atom processor is on the requirements list and also the 1024x600 resolution. In those machines there is definitely no issues with ooo in my experience. In fact I didn't really have much issues on my old 701 either.

Honestly, I think it is just that the current ubuntu heads would just keep using disk space as an excuse to replace perfectly working apps with proprietary ones. I think we need a new flag distro...

Darn I was not aware of that statement Bradley made and now that I read it it is so true and it makes me so sad. Just every new ubuntu version comes with a new idiotic change that had no reason to happen, like ooo to google docs. GIMP to f-spot. Etc, etc ,etc. I think it is because the current heads of the project (Mark is just the owner, not the ones controlling them) have complete disregard of the ubuntu manifesto. It was that manifesto what lead me to choose it, but now it is clear that it is not important at all for them. We need a new flag distro.

So, according to these -biased sources - DRM or the lack thereof does not change piracy rates. It is strange that the conclussion from such find is to continue doing it. If DRM does no effect whatsoever there is no point in adding it...

So, assuming the stats are all right, the conclussion is... well bullshit?. So, in fact google news users click HALF of the links they find... That's a lot of traffic. Since google news tends to show the same news multiple times. And since some news sites are not worth clicking. And since many users probably did not find the news they were looking for... 50% is actually a huge number.

In this specific case I don't think monospace font makes a difference? this is the same word in all the four lines anyway... this->posx=0;
this->posy=0;
tis->ttl=40;
this->source="";

I am not quickly dismissing your point, but just saying that you need a better example.

Though seriously. Normals books don't come with an UI for that either. What I see here is that with normal books. The blind person will have to buy a braile version of the book. And with a kindle, the blind person would have to buy a specialized ebook reader. It is the more logical move. An ebook reader with speech support but with a mainstream focus is likely not going to be too good in its speech feature or will cost a lot more to develop and thus cost more for its mainstream audience... Does this sound bad? Well, when you purchase a book, the braile version is not included for it... at least in the case of ebooks, the blind person only has to purchase a different reader and will be able to use the same ebooks as the maisntream audience after so. The solution to this is not to stop promoting the technology but to also promote a technology for blind people to use.

straight binary storage would improve memory usage but it does not improve CPU usage incredibly much. However, using a power of 10 as base is helpful when converting the input/output decimals to bignum, since it is trivial instead of requiring successive divisions. Let's call it a case of pick your poison. However, that's not what the patent is about, it is about choosing a base according to the word size... The base may be a power of 10 or 2 if you like but the patent (According to the summary) merely says that you should choose a bigger base when the word size is bigger... This is perhaps a very obvious realization to even the slower CS student, but hey, it is patented!

blah, this is the sort of troll that makes us c++ lovers look so bad :(