"It strains reason to conclude that Defendant was attempting to criticize Plaintiff's reputation or competency as an astronomer. One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'butt-head'."

Maybe you don't have an active enough imagination...

My mom's Skype account was recently hacked. Apparently the hackers were able to abuse the Skype Manager system to gain control of her account without her authorization, transfer her account balance, and reset her password. Skype's customer service has acknowledged the problem but has not been able to restore access to the account yet.

(I don't know any more details than that, as I haven't been involved.)

They decided that all future versions will be backwards-compatible and the spec calls for new unsupported features to degrade gracefully, so even if there are new versions of the spec, you're not supposed to worry about it. All browsers will just support everything to the best of their ability anyway, regardless of what version numbers you'd like to define.

But I don't think it was a terribly good idea either.

The goal is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", and patents are one mechanism of doing that (there are others). Patents work by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor and allowing them to control all sales of the invention for a limited time IN EXCHANGE FOR the public getting documentation that shows us how the invention works. For patents like Slide-to-Unlock or One-Click, there is absolutely no value to the public in having that documentation because anyone "skilled in the art" already knows how to implement the idea without seeing the patent. There could be some value in getting access to the source code (maybe), but the patents aren't that detailed.

It definitely sounds like we are pretty much in agreement. :-)

This is stupid. The WHOLE POINT of a patent is that you get to control the use of your invention, for a limited time. That means you can charge a license fee to let others use your invention, you can let others use it for free, or you can just say NO and not allow anyone else to use your invention. The promise of this control is what incentivizes people to invent cool stuff and then show the world how it was done. If your idea becomes wildly popular, you stand to make buckets of money, and that's a GOOD THING for all of us.

The notion that you should lose patent protection if your idea becomes too popular completely ignores the purpose of having patents.

In order to submit your patented idea to a standards body, you have to agree to FRAND licensing as a condition for consideration. That's a good idea. Without it, we couldn't establish standards that people could actually use, and then nobody wins. Participating companies agree to do this because they WANT other companies to use their technology, for a fee. It's voluntary. Don't want competitors using your ideas, don't submit them to a standards body.

The real problem here is NOT that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea has become so popular that they should be forced to allow other companies to license the patent. The real problem here is that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea should not have been patentable in the first place. Apple was the first to implement the idea, so they got a head start in the market, and that should have been enough. Granting Apple exclusive rights to this idea does not benefit society in any way, because Apple still would have come up with the idea even if they knew everybody else could copy it. Patents are supposed to benefit society by documenting how a technology works, to make it easier for people to copy after the patent expires, and the slide-to-unlock patent does not do that: how the technology works is perfectly obvious to anyone skilled in the art, so the patent itself is useless to us. This patent benefits no one but Apple, and that's not fair.

You never touch the other elves like that.

I recommend to all Americans traveling abroad that they try going to McDonald's in whatever country they happen to be traveling to. It's a very different experience - almost always a positive one, but I have heard a couple of horror stories.

Does Ctrl-Esc work, in lieu of a Windows key?

Make a shortcut to "shutdown -l", and change the icon (there's a red X that works pretty well, although I believe it's intended to mean delete). Pin the shortcut to your taskbar.

Redundant articles are still OK, though, right? ;-)

Yes, except that if I post it on the WWW, the people I intend to share it with will never see it (unless maybe I spam them all with email they probably don't want, telling them to go to my web site). I post it to Facebook, and I don't even have to keep track of who I wanted to share it with; all the right people will just see it.

I only meant to show a possible interpretation that is both consistent with the text and mathematically sound. I am not saying that this interpretation is correct; another, as you say, is simply that they took inaccurate measurements and rounded a lot (although the wording of the passage makes me think they were trying to be as accurate as they could). The original assertion was that the Bible says pi=3 and therefore the Bible must be wrong. That conclusion is flawed, because both of these plausible explanations exist. You're welcome to find other things that you believe disprove the Bible, but this should not be one of them.

Sure, the documentation says you're supposed to pass it a number. It doesn't say what will happen when you pass something that is not a number. The behavior that I would expect is one of two things:
1) the script should crash because I tried to pass the wrong type of data, or
2) whatever crazy thing I tried to pass should be automatically converted into a number

And indeed, the previous behavior was #2. The new behavior is neither of these, and does not appear to be documented.

Of course - we know this about x-rays. But these new terahertz imaging things are "completely safe", which means there's no reason to take such precautions with them, right?