I was intending to watch it but then I got a tweet from my bff and had to update my Facebook page and status on Foursquare.

Another vote here for Toughbooks. Where I work, we've given Toughbooks to all the field personnel and have no regrets. Our crews work outside in difficult environments and while I've seen HDs fail, broken keyboards and a couple of smashed screens (hit by something while open), for the most part they're almost indestructible.

Last fall we had a field engineer set a CF-30 on a backhoe and walk over to his truck to look for a drawing. When he came back, the backhoe had moved and his Toughbook was apparently somewhere in a trench that had been filled in.

I went out to the site that afternoon with another tech and an access point configured with a SSID that we knew the missing CF-30 would try to connect to. We slowly drove along the trench with a directional antenna pointed at it until the AP indicated that the missing laptop had tried to connect. We had the backhoe driver gently dig out several feet of trench before we found it. Disassembled, cleaned and reassembled it, it's still in service.

You made this comment just so you could use abici in a sentence, didn't you? ;-)

No, because that is only for (last I saw) the Fennec mobile-branch. It's explicitly removed from the normal Firefox branch because of the moral issues.

Which to me, amounts to Mozilla saying that they support flash and people should keep using it, as that's what people will do.

Offering the choice is not the same as shoving it down everyones throat.

Add in that the opposite choice would be true, the technology might allow one to be made gay.

"Would you like to be gay, bisexual or asexual, unlike everyone else?"

People can go to great lengths to modify themselves to not be like everyone else, to stand out.

Bisexuality would double your dating prospects, you can bet some would opt for it if there was a inexpensive treatement.

2016? 2016? By then there will be at least one - if not more - different video format that we'll be arguing about. Things are moving fast on the intertubes (except for the W3C) so I'm not worried about 2016. Technology will surpass itself given enough motive or profitability.

This is "business" in the sense of "profit is the objective, morals are not factored in".

The more consumers accept this kind of attitude, the more they will get it.

You know, as it turns out, even from the perspective of pure profit, adhering to standards still makes sense. (To the degree that consumers have some brains.) You can build customer loyalty by proving yourself to be in a symbiotic relationship with them. Conversely, Microsoft has made me an adversary. Would I be so strongly opposed to using Microsoft products if doing so weren't evidently a way to force yourself to pay for upgrades, limit your options, increase interoperability cost, and basically add "thermal loss" to humanity's computing at large? And I would have to suffer these because Microsoft is trying to finagle profit. I don't accept excessive selfishness in my interpersonal relationships and I don't accept it in my business relationships either.

Build a good product, compete based on its merits. Don't leverage your dominance to screw your competition unfairly while subjecting all users to the crossfire.

MPEG-LA never said they would go after END USERS. They CAN'T go after end users - there is no practical possibility in this. Really, wake up to reality. License fees connected to MPEG-4 technology, all of its levels, are always entirely free for END USERS who are just consuming video or audio built on said tech. Nothing else has ever been said, nothing else will ever be possible. Don't confuse end user's consuming commercial material of MPEG-4 format as being subject to licenses - the ones SELLING said material are the ones subject to the license.

Ubuntu is not for nerds only. It is for all people. And even when the few geeks o this globe are shocked by using kb = 1000 b, the other 6 Giga people do understand the new way better.

My anecdote deal with a private company, but I think it is still applicable to people working a government job.

I worked for a 1000+ person manufacturing facility. Everyone on the shop floor was hourly as well as a lot of the office workers. The "Higher Up" office workers were salaried. Salaried was really cool at that company. You didn't clock in and you could just take off when you needed to. Salaried workers would do a 12 hour day and then take off 3 hours early later in the week to take their kids to the doctor. Need a three day weekend? Get your work done earlier and take the day off. Decide you want the day after Christmas off? Ok. Having a salaried position was pretty awesome.

I am pretty sure you can imagine how this turned out. Most of the people were very happy to have this flexibility and worked really hard for the company and were reasonable with their off time. A few people were not. The worst offender was an Engineering manager who took off 77 days during the year. The company responded by saying "Hey, you guys obviously cannot be reasonable about this so salaried employees will now be punching the clock. They will also have vacation days just like hourly. You want 3 hours off? That will cost you a half day."

The moral of the story? Time and attendance isn't "Slavery". It is pretty much necessary. You can try the "Honor System" with employees and many will be pleased but you'll always get those that want to abuse the shit out of it and laugh about making money without working. The idea of every average Joe being a good honest person working for corrupt politicians and CEO's is pretty naive. Put Average Joe in a position where he can screw someone out of money and there is a decent chance he will.

The old way to define a kilobyte was introduced to make life easier for programmers, but nowadays the size of storage is going up in GB and TB and maybe to PB very soon. And most people using computers are not geeks, they are normal people which understand kilo,mega,giga etc. in the SI way. And why should computer technicians use the prefixes differently than any other science? Just because RAM is packed in base-2 units? That makes no sense. In 10 years nobody will care any longer about kibi.

Techman83 writes "...AVG and Avast have been quite good, but are starting to bloat out in size..."

Um, in case you haven't noticed, more viruses, exploits and malware are coming out all the time.
I'd be very surprised if ANY antivirus software got smaller.

In fact, I'd be highly suspicious.

Actually, Autostitch probably won't work for this application.

From the FAQ:

Q: Does AutoStitch support planar stitching, such as flatbed scans or aerial photographs?

A:The demo version of AutoStitch assumes that the camera is rotating about a point, so distortions will be visible when stitching multiple views of a planar surface. We hope to add planar stitching functionality in the future.

If your microwave popcorn starts to pop before you turn the microwave on, it's probably not safe.