That's exactly what I read too, and was ready to forward the story to all my female engineering colleagues.

Unfortunately, this is slashdot. Most of the readers don't care about such things and think women are scarce because they aren't as smart or as interested, and would be surprised if they actually met a woman in real life.

Right, there was nothing in that memo if it had been public that would have been able to be used to create a scheme from it. Maybe they had something like that internally at GCHQ but if it had then such documentation hasn't been released.

I would think that an honorary doctorate is harder to earn than a traditional one.

In the previous Newegg case versus Soverain(sp?) the jury was instructed to not consider patent validity. This was the basis for overturning the verdict AND the patents on appeal. That is one goofy court house.

I don't think a patent invalided in a court room that way would survive any appeals process, and it might not create a precedent that would be respected in other courts.

Only 8 jurors in this case. Getting a full 12 jurors would have depopulated the town.

I think they point the lawyer was trying to make was that Diffie gets credit for inventing it because the prior art was "secret"; so similarly Jones gets credit for the invention because Lotus Notes was "secret" because it wasn't released yet.

The claims weren't really about the encryption. They admitted they did not invent RC4. The claims were about the transactional model (SSL). I still feel it's bogus though, but reading the full articles and history can help.

The real issue may be the locale. Patent trolls love that court house. And no one in the court room was allowed to use the term "patent troll". The juries there seem to love standing up for the little guy who's being bullied by the big company. So the Newegg company and its lawyer, from the distant land of California, versus a locally based company and a lawyer from Dallas. Even the local Marshall Texas newspaper in the article saying that the trial had started took care to point out that the lawyer was from Dallas. Liberal big business California versus local home grown salt of the earth folks.

Except that Amazon is more evil overall and has an active aim to drive out brick and mortar stores when they can, actively running some divisions at a loss in order to dominate that segment.

Does the speed of compiling matter that much compared to the speed of the resulting code? I know that C++ compilers can be extremely slow to run but it shouldn't be a major concern unless it's so slow that an incremental build is wasting enough time that you're off getting another coffee or donut while waiting.

True. Most laptops are intended for people for doing basic computing. Horsepower is not needed there. People that actually need a souped up computer are assumed to be using desktops as workstations. The vast majority of people don't need the extra horsepower, and the vast majority of people who claim they need a higher end computer actually don't.

Practically speaking, the high end stuff is much hotter which makes it much more difficult to design a laptop that can deal with the heat. Those Macbooks can get HOT!

That was an interesting thing about the Macbooks, you could use a big power hungry graphics chip or disable that and use the smaller efficient one if you were just doing basic work.

The new ones are definitely slick and fast. However I rarely use them as laptops. I plug in the keyboard and monitor and use it like a normal desktop. I would be very happy with a Mac Mini style except the powers at work want to use a laptop instead. Then you could open it up and repair/upgrade/recycle if you need to. I wouldn't mind having the old Macbook Pro that you could open either, the smaller size is not a win really, and it's still portable so thatyou can take it to a conference room. Sleek stops being important once you're no longer a twenty something doing all their daily work while on a train or in a coffee shop and you're no longer trying to impress the strangers around you.

But those parts can be reused, even if you are not the one reusing them. I have taken out hard drives and RAM before and used them for other computers, maybe not state of the art ones. If you send it back to Apple chances are they may reuse parts, but if you send back the Mac Air then the likelihood is that it gets shipped to a third world country where a child will try to dismantle it and remove the toxic battery before tossing the rest onto a garbage heap. Maybe some of the aluminum gets saved, but in general there is no real recycling being done. These are not green products no matter how many hippies are using them.