This seems rather like the position musicians are in. For every dollar you spend on a large music download site, the people who run the computers trowser around 82 cents while the creators of the content get around 18. That's a terrible division of the money. The cost of delivery of that content is a few cents; the rest is profit.

We see something similar with TicketMonster; charges are often around a quarter to a third of the total cost of tickets even though the preferred method of delivery is electronic; they even tack on a bit extra for the privelege of printing them on your printer, and they tack on a bunch of advertising while they do it, costing you excess ink.

Content can be delivered electronically cheaply, but its delivery is currently expensive because a handful of companies have cornered the delivery.

This is definitely a model that content providers need to break up, so Murdoch clearly does have some understanding of the way the net works and why it is bad. Unfortunately he does not seem to have worked out how to combat it. His answer that "we don't make hardware" is exactly the wrong answer - he should be leading the effort to either open up Kindle or come up with an open replacement.

My laptop has shock detection on the harddrive and I am almost certain I have had it since before April 2008. Seems like this is prior art.

In any case, devices with cases that cannot be opened undetectably have been with us a long time as have those devices that you stick on the inside of a box to detect rough handling.

Because its free, so no contract is formed between the user and the supplier.

In any case, for a lot of open source software, the bug database is also open, so making sure any bug you find is reported in a timely manner should be a good defense. Putting it in the database discloses it while making sure it is timely means you cannot be accused of keeping it secret.

It does create an incentive for projects to keep open bug databases.

Not from where I am sitting, unless they can also see through walls.

Anyway, you can pry my progressives from my cold dead fingers. No way would I switch to having to spend the day thumbing my nose. Can you imagine trying to walk down a staircase in these things?

No they're not. Although perhaps implementations differ. Qwest redirects you to their own web page and changes the URL so you have to go back and retype the whole thing. Its very annoying.

I was on the bus the other day and an old crone pulled the bell cord but the bus sailed past her stop.

She rubbed her hands together and yelled "Out out, Damn, Stop"

Is telling bad bus jokes also a felony?

What enquiring minds want to know is when they made talking on transit frequencies a felony, did they give a list of the frequencies we were to avoid?

Have they tried Ronnie Bigg's old digs in South America?

Or perhaps he's hiking the Appalachian Trail with Lord Lucan.

If we're lucky he'll leave his clothes on a beach comewhere so we'll know he's still alive.

This is just one data point I know, but my scrawl was illegible long before I ever used a computer. You should see what used to come back from the keypunch operators even when I was trying to write clearly in capital block letters.

This is one of those works that everybody should have read at least by the time they leave high school. So how many high schoolers are using Kindles? - I expect its very few - while everyone else should have this on their bookshelves already, together with a bunch of other of Eric's works.

Now if it had been Misner, Wheeler and Thorne, you could understand why people would need an additional copy that was easier to read in bed.

Its well known that the x is base 16. So far I don't know of any standards that required base > 16.

The language that eventually became Fortran 90 was known as Fortran 8x during its development period.

Given that its now the latter half of 2009, the chances of C++ 0x actually having x==9 have been vanishingly small for quite a long time already.

The toilet is broken and the engineers who are trying to work out what broke have nothing to go on.

They should put in a night soil closet where they remove the can once a week and deorbit it over some random totalitarian regime.

Or by standing in the street playing the violin.

You don't need to be able to play the violin to make money playing one on the streets. In fact its a positive advantage not to - shopkeepers come out and pay you to move away.

pi may never be 3 but it can be 30!

The problem with this line of argument is that it takes a result as a premise. Why should not some mathematics be patentable? I don't really see much difference between inventing a working sewing machine and finding a way to factor large numbers in logarithmic time (say).

The answer of course is that publishing mathematics benefits the art more than patenting it would. So allowing it to be patented in the US would be unconstitutional.

On the other hand, software patents as currently being issued only require to disclose what is done, not the total details of how it is done. If to get a software patent you had to forgo copyright and disclose all your code, there might actually be a public good to awarding such patents. If I patent a sewing machine I am patenting the machine not sewing. The problem with software patents is they are patenting sewing not the machine.

Its not their file system - its from CP/M80. The only bit they added was the long file name support, and its hard to see exactly where the originality is in that claim. Didn't Burroughs B system use variable numbers of fixed length slots for variable length file names? The idea of having multpile names for one file has, of course, been part of Unux for as long as I have used it (1984-ish). Actually I think you could do that on DOS360.

Isn't that a good thing? Surely his system can make good use of large numbers of assholes.