If somebody were willing to come up with a billion dollars in cash, they could buy the top 100 people in the PostgreSQL project, and that would cramp it severely for a couple of years.

That said, Monty took VC money, which is basically legalized loan sharking. Taking VC money results, in the overwhelming majority of cases, in the complete screwing of the borrower. Monty was one of the lucky few who managed to get a fortune out of that situation, which makes his whining utterly unseemly.

"Octopodes" would be the correct plural if octopus were an ancient Greek word, but since it's not, octopuses is it. "Octopi" just makes you look both pretentious and ignorant at once, a feat which may cause people to think you're a libertarian. Avoid this fate.

Quoth Archangel Michael :

Holy crap. I'd think a being like yourself would have better things to do than post on Slashdot.

Okay, hadn't seen those but the radios still have an antenna that if currently embedded in the glass could be restored to an external location with ease.

My point was that the complaint about standard and Sat radios was a non-issue.

Sitting back and waiting does not lead to much technological advancement. Taking on an ambitious project tends to inspire many advances.

The idea is not to catch asteroids along the way. Rather, the craft would catch one large asteroid of sufficient mass to provide all the raw material needed for the journey. Using an asteroid saves the huge cost of lifting this massive raw material into space.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the LDS Church, but I do know LDS (Mormon) theology somewhat. Suicide isn't considered an "unforgivable sin". The official policy is to assume that a suicide victim's soul isn't damned to hell or any of that nonsense. Quite a few years back we had a suicide in our immediate family, and although sad and shocking, the person was buried in their temple clothes. What that means is that it was assumed that they were (for a lack of a better phrase) sick in the head and made a bad judgment, and therefore either forgiven or simply not at fault. I firmly believe that person is enjoying all the benefits that heaven has to offer!

Exactly what problems do people have with Pulse anyway? The ONLY problems I ever have with sound on Linux are related to ALSA drivers not being updated yet (and that's Ubuntu's fault for its insane "Older is always stabler" policy).

Or to California. Really. Expecting something to come out of the California government to make sense?

That's true for a plain Pre. Out of the box, it has the options: Sprint only network and roam when Sprint isn't available. However, the people at webos-internals.org have created a 'roam only' patch that gives the user a 3rd option: roam on non-Sprint networks even if the Sprint network is available. There are lots of other patches that they've created for the device too. Many of which just enable features that Palm has commented out for some reason, others are additions to the javascript files to enable new functionality. IMHO, anyone that's on Slashdot who owns a Pre should check it out.

False. All you need to know to know that this is bullshit is to consider what happens if you have two point sources radiating the same signal. At some points the signal is doubled. At some point the signal is cancelled. Those frequencies you can't hear overlap with other frequencies you can't hear and with frequencies that you can hear and the sound is changed. That's why analog will always sound better than digital... for one generation, anyway. Obviously there are drawbacks to analog which have pushed us to digital. It doesn't mean you can just forget about the analog world, where we live.

Cheap, clean energy with no dependence on hateful towel-heads - what's not to like?

I'm all for cheap energy, but the second law of thermodynamics means that any energy you've got is spilling heat pollution, and the advocates re not claiming that heat is the only thing to deal with.

As for those "towel-heads," a word which should get you about the same reaction as "nigger" or "faggot:" a punch in the face, you might want to look into just exactly what actions we've taken and policies we've got in place that we could reasonably expect have made them, "hateful." One of the most repressive regimes on earth, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is an entirely Western creation. It's there because they're more convenient to get petroleum from with an unaccountable autocracy doing the deals.

We are not innocent victims in this mess.

That screenshot looks like a cluttered version of Chrome's UI. Clutter is not good. It's for looking at web pages... it doesn't need all those buttons!

"I will kill my neighbor" is illegal. "I wish all jews were dead" is not illegal. A flag could hardly be taken as a specific act against someone.

it's also usually a statement that, with or without a government that supports them, they'd encourage and possibly participate in terrorist attacks on ethnic minorities.

So? Should we throw Sarah McLachlan in jail because she does commercials on preventing cruelty to animals, and those people often join PETA and attack research facilities? A flag is an association, not a statement of actions. As such, it can't ever be taken as a specific threat.

I do think that very obvious shows of support for Nazism should be illegal (not just in Germany), simply because they cause people to fear for their lives.

And Christians bomb clinics, so I want Christianity outlawed. Muslims blow up planes. Jews shoot Muslims. Chinese shoot Tibetans. Ban them all because someone somewhere may think that the flag/cross represents hatred and violence. The choice is that or nothing. And I choose nothing. Of course, you could take the current situation where some things are banned and others not with no regard to actual effect in today's world. But that arbitrary and capricious scheme is abhorrent.

I'm not quite sure its the idea they were doing something when they were working but they were abusing their search and seizure warrant to do so. See as how S&S is handled by the Bill of Rights and all, it's a bit bigger than browsing /. at work.

Depends on your definition of Value. OSS people saw Surface, and said "but wait, we can do that too, watch this...", and so a group of developers set off in that direction.

A group of developers will see this (IMHO incrementally cool) product mockup and say "exactly, we should try and bring Linux to this". This specific device doesn't seem to be so much a radically different device as much as it is bringing together a bunch of pieces that currently exist and integrating them into one small tablet.

Other people can and should do this. If the only thing to come of it is inspiration to get people moving on a project, and that is value enough.