the best algorithms are *already* kept secret.
Or as secret as they can be given that there's hordes of people with talents with debuggers.

a distressing number of software patents completely fail to contain any source code or even decent pseudocode.

I can imagine rare situations where a patent on software might be justified but as it stands there's no requirement that source code be provided.
Instead they patent the general idea and use vague flowcharts instead of explicit code.

It's possible to innovate your way around a novel break design.
It's impossible to innovate your way around a box in a spreadsheet reading "slows car down"

plus there's a load of other stuff about how patents work well for centralised industries dominated by large companies(the legal teams can keep up with all recent patents) but utterly terrible for a decentralised industry where trying to make useful things becomes like playing Russian roulette since no one person can keep up with all the recent patents and shouldn't try.

Word on that, I drove my entire family insane with the sound track to that game.

That said, was an awesome game, only Ultima V has any claim to being as much fun. That said, I do still remember IV more fondly than any other in the Ultima series

There was a Gauntlet-esque game I played furiously on the C64 called "Into The Eagle's Nest". It had no save points, and in the style of Gauntlet required you to remember where the health and ammo dumps were, and use them judiciously. After many long months learning this silly game on and off, I finally got to the end, to be told:

"THE CASTLE HAS BEEN DESTRAYED (sic)"

Worst. Ending. Ever.

No. But once you have 30 GB of music, you either keep all of it on your laptop or you need to decide which 2, 5, 10 GB of those 30 GB you do want. Which can be annoying. It's easier to just have it all available all the time. The same issue exists with portable media players. Note that I'm quite happy with my flash-based player, but I understand how people don't want to bother with managing a second "current" music archive. None of this is about need, incidently, the word is just meaningless in this context.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

You'd probably have little doubt that the site is genuine, if you simply examined it further. It really is rather pathetic -- they're looking for people to only purchase this slapped together crap for nostalgia's sake.

No news story here folks, just another company trying to peddle something no one will buy.

Only if the FSF owned some of the copyrights.

It's still imperialism. We just noticed that it's cheaper and more profitable to install a local government instead of sending our troops and our bureaucracy there, which costs money and manpower. That has been outsourced. We allow countries now to govern themselves, but by virtue of WTO and other organisations that ensure these countries cannot act against our interests we keep them at the leash.

Imperialism didn't end last century. It's still going on, we are just more subtle about it now. Instead of directly controlling the country, we control it by proxy. Instead of holding them as slaves, we keep them so deep in debt that they can't really make any decisions for themselves without first asking us if it's ok.

I kind of miss Master of Orion on the list. A truly great game that I even like to play in 2010 from time to time.

One of the reasons for that is because China is artificially holding down the value of its currency so that we will destroy our own manufacturing base in a mad rush to make a quick buck. For the other countries, often American companies are the ones building the facilities and training the workers over there just for the cheap wages. Our own technology is given away for their cheap labor.

It seems to be working very well in many countries around the world that are smart enough to protect their own industries and work to keep out ours. Why do you think China is creating such problems for Google, and that Baidu is doing so well over there? The point is that if you don't go to extremes, you do very well. The extreme that America has gone into (not protecting our own domestic industries in favor of temporary profits) has really hurt us.

You mean make America a 3rd world country? That strategy seems to be working.

Now if they can just admit their service sucks everywhere else too, then they can take some of all that iPhone money and actually improve the service.

What's really amazing about AT&T and the iPhone is that if you are in a large crowd of people (such as a festival), the service becomes overwhelmed and you can't even make or receive a call.

Even just going to LA can make the phone get pretty unresponsive as it waits for a signal from the overloaded tower, so you can't really use it for much.

So, basically what you're saying is, is that you're at the "ignoring" stage of the whole process?

About 10 years ago I came across a chain of drug stores in the northeast that was able to run 12 cash registers using a 286 as the central server, serving 12 cash registers.

You can imagine my amazement as I watched a 286 that had the power to send prices to 12 registers at once and receive sales back from all 12 registers, run reports and updates, all without blinking an eye! At the time, Windows 95 could barely keep one computer running, so seeing it run 12 registers simultaneously was quite amazing.

That was years ago, but apparently Flex-OS lives on as IBM's 4690 Operating system. It was originally started by Digital Research as "DOS 286" so it's come quite a long way, and hasn't died at all.