Well, when I get mine, I'm going to get a powered wall mount in my kitchen. I'll use it as an all-in-one e-calendar, music player, photo display, tube map, ordinary map, etc etc. I'd like to have that handy. It would be really nice if I could also get all my applicances' manuals on there as well, so that when the boiler or washing machine plays up, I don't have to hunt around for it. Of course, being detachable, it'll be great to read Alice in Wonderland and similar stories with my 1-year old daughter and enjoy this amazing new combination of words, graphics and interactivity that she can enjoy in a way that's completely inconceivable with a mouse or trackpad-driven device. Oh, and it'll be nice to have a recipe book that plays videos / shows multiple angles to show me the really tricky bits, compiles instant shopping lists and allows one-click purchasing from Waitrose, etc etc.

When it was going through inflation, it hadn't collapsed into the set of physics why now have.

IN fact, it may have gone through sever types before collapsing into what we know observe.

". And Scientists are like most people, they don't like big changes."
That is completely false. They LOVE big changes. Nobel prizes, cash grants, a chair, books are easier to achieve by discovering big changes.
Big changes make your career, especially if it changes away from something the data had previously pointed from.

however you need to be able to show substantial evidence you can just toss out a different idea. You need to back it with data that others can confirm.

The newest DS, the XL has a standard SD card slot, for playing music from. Why you would want to do that I am not sure, as there are cheaper and superior players around but it can be done.

This Jerkface Playhouse guy is just windows noob upset that the world he knows a tiny bit of is collapsing around him. People like that react with fear and hostility to anything new.

I have no idea if ChromeOS will be anything more then a thought experiment, but stranger things have happened. Right now Android is outselling the iPhone. Who would have thought eh? granted there are more android phones and they are cheaper but still. And who would have thought that with all this MS is behind EVERYONE on mobile phones. So much for 3rd time is the charm with a MS product. What release is Windows Mobile 7 by now (and no, it ain't 7)

I think Google is just seeing what sticks. It wants to break open the entire IT market and it is succeeding so far. MS ain't its enemy, MS lock-in is its enemy. Same as telecom lock-in and email provider lock-in. MS is breaking this up. more and more small companies and bigger ones use gmail. Gmail. Not exchange. BANG. Gone MS lock-in. For that matter lock-in with anyone. Granted now you got a bit of gmail lock-in although since there is far less tie in going on, you can far more easily migrate away from gmail then exchange.

If the internet becomes open then Google can sells its services to anyone. The more cheap devices are out there connecting, the more people will want to use online services (I barely ever write documents, and then often on different machines, I don't need office. I don't want office. I do use google docs. Anywhere, anytime.) and google makes money from that.

ChromeOS is just another attempt to break the lock-in. Maybe someone will make a cheap netbook with it purely for web access in the house. A cheap iPad for in the kitchen. Or maybe it will be in eternal beta. But Google is constantly trying and a lot of its succeeding.

When news broke about Android outselling the iPhone, where were all the doubters? To busy eating crow to admit they were wrong?

I am personally very intrested to see where Google is going. They are one of the freshest daring companies out there.

A software patent covers an allegedly novel method of information processing; how is such a method not a "new and useful process"?

In Gottschalk v. Benson, SCOTUS ruled that a "process" does not include mathematical algorithms. Methods of information processing are mathematical algorithms.

Why can't that employee use the GPL to demand the source code to that supposedly "internal only" executable? Then, why can't that employee say "The GPL prohibits adding more-restrictive terms to the executable than the terms of the GPLed libraries." and then say "Prohibiting me from distributing this now-GPLed executabile and its source code worldwide is itself an additional restriction that neither the author nor the university can impose on me." And then convey/propagate/distribute the executable and its source code worldwide. The bits & information want to be free.

Great! I'll start with you first and then pick three other people.

For simulation training in real-life, the military uses airsoft guns (soft BBs) so they soldiers actually shoot weapons at people instead of pretend shoot. It increases their reaction time in real life. They train in cityscapes to get used to not shooting civilians, too.

"Fake" training on 'gaming' simulators is probably just as good, a lot better than using real guns you can point but not fire.

They WOULD because if you change some letters in Roswell and add one, you get Scroogle! Isn't it obvious???! It should be to the aliens who run Google. Clearly the government has you in their clutches - only an upgrade to TinFoilHat 2.3 will save you.

So you usually support views and laws that benefit someone else to your detriment?

Not unless you use a new theme, but it does work better. Though I had a lot of problems in the upgrade from MythBuntu 9.10 to MythBuntu 10.04. Don't know if that was Ubuntu or Myth.

ois@zig:~$ EMACS
-bash: EMACS: command not found
ois@zig:~$ echo $?
127
ois@zig:~$

Google's methods are to fob off the information commissioners with reassurances that aren't backed by fact. For example in the UK, you can remove your house from StreetView - but only if you send Google, at your own expense, a copy of photographic identification, which they can reject for reasons unknown. The IC doesn't allow any other data holder to place arbitrary, irrelevant restrictions on remove requests like this.

Well, I released the rewrite under the BSD license. I did the rewrite on the weekends, on my time. I cleared that with my boss before hand. He seemed ok with it as long as it wasn't our production code.

The project wasn't licensed as BSD or GPL before hand, but 12,000 lines of it came with me to the job. He seemed to feel that since our product was now based on it, that he should have control over whether it would be open sourced.

They didn't want the responsibility of maintaining an open source project. Given the complexity of the code involved (real-time multimedia processing etc...) they felt that there was a much higher likelihood that instead of receiving the benefits of the open source community, they would instead bare the burdens of it. In hindsight, the point was valid. They had nothing to gain from open sourcing, so they'd prefer that it weren't a distraction.

As a result, I spent my weekends rewriting instead of improving what we had, but it also gave me a great sandbox to experiment in. This way I was making major architectural modifications to the open source project... (which I just check isn't even online anymore :() so this way I was able to prove the code before implementing the changes in the company's product.

I'm doing something similar now, actually writing a C++ alternative to GStreamer, having a blast doing it and although I maintain two copies (one for the office, one for my open source project) it's great since the open source to-be implementation is really very versatile while the one we use at work is more specialized as it is optimized to work on DSPs (which require entirely different optimizations from x86). I'm looking forward to releasing it soon as well. So far, it's a pretty reliable platform for IPTV (transport stream, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc...) and it's REALLY easy to code for. It'll be modified BSD something like "if you use it, please put my name in the license somewhere" kind of thing.

their attitude is literally
"You shouldn't complain about it.
Just pay us over and over and over and over.
We're sure you can afford it."

I'm very bad at math, but could the OP value their own work at say... 2, and other peoples work at 0.25? Wouldn't that cause the equation to untrue as well?