...to be allowed to be patented.

Just imagine: Every couple would have to pay a licensing fee..

Oops I replied to grandparent instead of parent. ! I meant gp is wrong and parent is correct.

Absolutely, as an Indian I can say that the parent is correct. People send their children to engineering only because they don't want a "general" degree for their children, which would have no guarantee in the job market. Hell, nearly everyone here is in one of the following branches: CS/IT, Mechanical engg, Electrical, Civil. In no sense are these "general" degrees. People are much more desperate to have a job here as compared to people in the comfy first world. I hate to say this but the mods who modded parent down are only letting racist bias come out.

And so will Opera. Their developers have publicly said this in the forums. Given that Opera currently scores consistently with 60 fps(though with reduced quality) I can't wait to see what GPU acceleration will bring.

Opera has reported an increase in downloads. http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2010/03/18/the-choice-screen-effect

Apple was not founded by the Borg King, thus it cannot be Evil. And by no measure is Apple as large as Microsoft (including the size of the founders' charity foundation).

This was not treatment of a disease. It was fundamental research into the causes of a disease. A much different kind of thing that what you're talking about.

Your religion is Materialism. And really, it's only about 200 years old. Not a very old religion at all.

That you seem to think you've 'arrived' at some point of enlightenment that nobody could have possibly ever reached, say, 500 years ago, is just sad.

But continue on. Maybe someday you'll get a clue. The Humanities are not just some obsolete hoax.

Green card holders aren't different from citizens in any aspect other than the right to vote. They don't just bring supply of labor to the table - they also bring demand of goods and services, which leads to more demand of labor.

I mean, do you also count higher birth rates as "glutting the market"?

The reason why H1-Bs are different is because their relationship with their employer is much more one-sided - if they get fired, or even leave the job by their own will, they have to leave the country. This is much more of a hassle compared to what a local worker has to go through if he wants to change jobs. As a result, H1-Bs are more likely to accept lower wages, worse work conditions, bad management etc; and this, in turn, leads to lowering of those standards for the entire labor market.

That suggests the iPad has strengths.

How come addons are a defense for Firefox eating a lot of memory? Does anyone run Firefox with no addons? Everyone always uses addons as the reason why they love Firefox so much, so why shouldn't addons be included in benchmarks? Every benchmark of Firefox should include the 3 most popular addons installed and running. Currently, that looks like Adblock Plus, Video DownloadHelper, and Personas Plus.

Real-world usage of Firefox includes addons, so should benchmarks. A benchmark of Firefox with no addons is useless data for anyone who actually does use them.

my.opera.com is a blog hosting site and many user created blogs do contain "intimate apparel/swimsuits" . Check out the photos section at my.opera.com

Too bad standard education doesn't teach kids squat. High school graduates these days have spent most of their young lives wasting away behind a desk. There is nothing wrong with some people doing a menial, physical labor, low-paying job. Not everyone has to be educated in a society. Right now we have to import other workers from mexico, china, and the rest of the world to do the jobs that americans are too educated (or rather too low paying) to take. For some reason, our labor force has it in their head that even with just a basic education, they should make $50,000 or more each year to do something that people in other countries will willing do for a few thousand. THAT is why we cannot compete with other countries.

Plus maybe if we got rid of some things (like welfare) maybe there wouldn't be so much government encouragement to stay poor, and people would willingly pay for an education to get better jobs.

Quit your trolling. You can patent general easy-to-think-of ideas which would then cover any real innovations. This is constantly being done today.

The only people who benefit from DRM are content providers.

Well, then, maybe all of the people who want content, and who are always complaining about the quality of content, should look for a way to get what they want without there being any content creators/providers who do what they do with any prospect of earning a living. If we can just dispense with this whole notion of creative professionals, and just settle for entertainment created by junior high school vampire romance fangurlz, Bon Jovi tribute bar bands, street mimes, and hippes who want everyone to have their vegan curry recipes (for free!) then everything would just settle down nicely. There's absolutely no need for people who work for years on recording or film projects. It's pointless to expect people to work off and on for a decade on a novel. Those people should never be able to sell their works, they should instead focus on t-shirt sales and readings in coffee houses, where they are compensated with a share of the barista's tip jar. After all, it's absurd for anyone to make a single penny the week after they've spent a year doing the actual work of creating something. All entertainment should be paid for in advance by fans. Selling your work, on your own terms, after you invest the time to create it: that's, like, totally fascism.

Here's an idea: just don't do business with DRM-centric content creators or the distribution networks/agents with whom they've chosen to do business. Give your business to people who want to give away their work for free. If that really is the way to earn a living as a creative person, then truth of that notion will be plain for all to see. Put your money (or the lack of spending it) where your mouth is. If having a say in how your creative work is reproduced strikes you as eeeevil, then you surely wouldn't want to enjoy entertainment or information produced by someone who embraces the idea anyway, right? Right? Because, you know, that would be intellectually dishonest.