It's classic "double-spending" - sure, I'll sell you my GPL-licensed DB! For millions of dollars? Absolutely! Sold!

I quit! Now let me fork the thing I just sold to you and keep developing it for free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom.

Sigh. Silly multi-billion dollar multi-national corporation! I'll be really impressed when Monty Widenius sells MariaDB to Oracle. And then quits.

I agree. Group behavior is much simpler than individual behavior. When people act in a group they become extensions of a system. When they act alone, they must justify (and rationalize) their action, and this process can become very complicated. For example, the health care Supreme Court decision. In-Trade got it completely wrong. Our modelling systems, which are well applied to aggregate decision-making, failed when trying to predict the actions of a single wildcard sitting on the Supreme Court, who acted unpredictably.

Right, and changing my theme is what I do whenever I set up a Ubuntu desktop. But I shouldn't have to change my theme to make my eyes stop bleeding.

Ok, so make the Chinese version of Ubuntu red. Most American desktop operating systems use blue because Americans tend to find blue soothing. Facebook is in blue for a reason. (OR rather, Facebook stayed blue for a reason.) I'm not advocating American centrism, just locality based color decisions.

  If I was culturally raised to find red warm, cheerful, and positive then I would find it that way. So I'm not saying this is innate. There's just what some of us do, versus others do. I personally find red abrasive to look at, which is why I tend to use themes that utilize blue/

Red is the color of alarm, of fear. It is abrasive to the eyes and to our visual processing system and is often used to signify errors for these reasons.

I know it seems unoriginal but Ubuntu needs to move over to a blue/green color palette. Mac OS X and Windows screens heavily utilize blue for this reason. It is psychologically soothing. It makes you feel like you're awash in the operating system as opposed to standing apart from it. I think if Ubuntu switches over to bluish colors we'll see a sharp increase in adoption.

Last minute bug fixes are one thing. Last minute features are another.

Last week I made a last-minute feature add that not only saved my job(the VP changed his mind about me), but got me promoted.

I don't mind saying: It was legendary.

Maybe give Joe Adler a call? (Yes, this is a perhaps copyright-infringing clip from Extract.)

Yes. If they really aren't concerned with international intervention or bottom-up revolution that is exactly what they would do to remain in power.

"This person was hired before we had sophisticated methods to verify international degrees," Aerospace spokeswoman Pamela Keeton said in a statement. "He failed to disclose his other employment as required."

Sophisticated methods...like calling them and asking.

And before you grew up(presumably), the 1918 flu pandemic killed literally tens of millions of people. Just because none of the flew strains that were carried in your youth were especially lethal doesn't mean that flu is some sort of inherently mild illness. It can be very dangerous.

You can always skip the handwriting recognition - just store them as hand-written notes using a paint program or some other solution. It won't help you with searching, but with cataloguing and retrieving it should be fine.

Others have probably mentioned this, but LiveScribe is also a really good example of a smartpen-only solution that will work to do this.