What to do if the patent is asserted? Hunt down the parties responsible and butcher them like cattle. I don't know anything about hiring assassins, but surely compared to the hundreds of millions (billions?) paid out in bullshit patent lawsuit settlements, buying the death of the head of every known patent troll company (and their lawyers) would be a drop in the bucket, and probably a net benefit to society aside. Imagine if RIM were run by the mafia - they'd have taken care of this years ago, and anyone left would be too terrified to troll patents today!

Justice, glorious justice.

The inability of some people to put kneejerk emotional reactions aside and rationally consider whether it's reasonable to spend a considerable fraction of many people's total lifetime earnings for the sake of extending the life of a very sick person for a few months or years is disconcerting. It's fine and good to pretend money is no object when you aren't the one paying for it, nor the one suffering bedridden and perhaps barely conscious. When you consider your typical middle class American spends most of their life working to pay off a few hundred thousand dollar mortgage, burning through that much or more on a person with a terminal illness is in some sense like throwing the life's work of another person away. Unless you're willing to be that person, pipe down.

You're an idiot.

That's called resource pooling, and for small objects it's a workaround for a shitty GC. Why bother using a language with garbage collection if working around the GC makes life more difficult than manual memory management? In C or C++ you can treat small objects (points/vectors] as values and let the language copy them transparently, much like Java does with primitive types, and you'd have the best of both worlds. On PCs, a generational GC can be fast enough to not to noticeably impact real-time animation. On a slower device like a phone that's likely not automatically true, and you might have to specially tune the GC, or use an incremental GC (which sacrifices overall throughput to reduce/eliminate delays), but then I always thought running Java on resource-constrained devices was a bit brain-damaged anyway.

Okay then, how do you protect against a logic bug?

No, Black Belts turn into Masters. Thieves turn into Ninjas.

I'm surprised the current administration hasn't called the whole smart grid idea off. After all, won't it put tens of thousands of meter readers out of work? That probably hasn't occurred to them yet, but you just wait. Please, someone think of the meter readers!

Mozilla's UI team has a ten year history of cluelessly grandiose blunders - so if it seems like they're doing the wrong thing, they probably are.

I'm really fascinated by this stuff, as planning out how you're going to (ab)use the video hardware is key to getting the most out of these old machines - modern machines are so boring, with high resolution and unlimited colors, and no need for split screens and hblank trickery. I grew up on old Ataris but was too young (or too lame) to do anything but putter around in Basic at the time, and I love reading about the clever ways people have come up with to stretch the limits of the machine. I wish there were more graphic examples on the web demonstrating what you can do in these exotic modes.

Hardly surprising, considering Hildon really wasn't very good. Sluggish, clumsy, and tending to waste a lot of very precious screen real estate - not that I see how switching to Qt changes any of those things. Still, it sounds like they're basically throwing the whole UI and all the software written for it out, and that sucks. I've long been tempted to write a little music toy app to run on my N800, but I should probably just buy an iPhone or a Pre (given that I don't actually carry the N800 around anywhere anyway).

Comedy gold!

It appears you've taken a criticism of a collection of computer programs personally. Who said I was endorsing Windows? A general criticism of the state of Gnome or KDE does not constitute an endorsement of any alternative. Indeed, such a "you're either with us or against" mentality is antithetical to the spirit of choice. Whether I install Windows or Linux with Gnome, I end up with something very similar - a large, integrated collection of mediocre applications which I don't really want to use once the novelty has worn off. Ideally, I'd use neither. The specific choice between e.g. the faint aroma of evil lingering around Windows Media Player versus the bungling incompetence of "Totem" -- and again my answer is "neither" -- is left to your personal preference.