I went to see all three prequels movies, expecting to see just why in IV-V-VI they spoke of Darth Vader like he had committed such atrocities, the Holocaust was a mere footnote(no, I didn't expect the killcount from Alderaan to have outnumbered his acts in even War of the Clones, let alone Revenge of the Sith). I wanted to understand why "his kids" thought he was such a monster, before they even know they're his kids.

I was most disappointed when he isn't even thrown out of the Jedi order before last half hour or so of ROTS, I wanted to understand all that rage.

The people saying the surface has to undercut the ipad are missing the point... Microsoft's strategy is to anchor a higher price for windows rt tablets...
So the oems can undercut the price without being over their own costs...(Which they would pressure microsoft about...)

touch input also includes trackpads... i wonder how well win8ui does on that... i suspect its subpar

Yeah except unless the OSes adopt common apis and abis, the most important part of that equation: "Developers, developers, developers!!" gets taken out.

And by common apis/abis, I mean a level of write once/read many greater than Microsoft's ever achieved between either the same version of its os running on different platforms, or different platforms, same on, except... "MAYBE" between the old versions of nt 4 that weren't x86(power pc and nec or alpha)...

It makes no sense to say "Microsoft just supplies a part", and have that part entirely determine the whole reason behind the purchase(people buy a computing device to run apps, not an OS, the os choice is just the biggest, simplest way to determine a "platform", at least, it was, I'm not convinced that the android fragmentation allows it to be properly called a platform.

Just because before android/ios there was no market for a personal computing device that wasn't either a desktop or a laptop doesn't mean a tablet is a pc.

Acer is confluing the two precisely because before touch interfaces, there was no "granny pc" to speak of. Now with a tablet, the "non-granny pc" is the one that's in trouble.

Putting the surface in the pc class is disturbing because it will not

1) run a lot desktop applications in an intuitive manner, because it's a user interface paradigm shift
2) will make any sense to classify tablets as anything but tablets once they overtake desktop pc sales

The two are seperate, and should be considered as such.

Microsoft HAS to make its own tablet, simply because the tablet makers don't make the OS, so what they are interested in is in making "addons" to an os, but the OS developer, when not making the hardware, basically has to pay the tablet makers to showcase the os features, which they are loathe to do, because it promotes the other tablet makers tablets... On the other hand, Apple makes the OS and the tablet, and doesn't sell the OS to others, so promoting the ipad is promoting iOS and promoting iOS for tablets is promoting the iPAD.

If only the handset makers and OS devs make money... The author could ask them to sponsor development.

The real triumph is that a US court actually recognized any patent from outside the US as binding US companies.
Anything else has already been done.

Only if it involved terrorism, and that's much more prevalent in the USA.
However, since the geolocation data identified the house, has the person tried walking up and asking for his property back?

Keeping in mind that if the person in whose house it is says no, he'd be in worse trouble, if they do get a warrant(and having the "testimony" of the gps data being denied by the house occupant would be more fuel for a warrant)

The fine summary lists a bunch of jobs with on-call requirements(health aides, nurses) then drops to computer programmers?
Wouldn't sysadmins and other operations personnel(network engineers, site reliability engineers, etc) be more likely to lose sleep?

The higher rate of chargebacks for porn is something I've yet to see a full explanation for, but. I always assumed it was due to married people being "caught" insisting on their money back and it being too hard to prove parjury in these cases.

On the other hand erotic material's been against paypal's tos the last time i checked. So maybe just look for another processor without the hangups? (Yes that likely means canadian or european or singapore...)

Yeah, except depending on facebook's "loose" vs "strict" interpretations of their own terms of service, you're violating their EULA by creating that second account.

Of course it's bullshit, just like it was bullshit for google+ to be tied to a real id, and that a social network was an identity service.
It got dropped from the media whcih means:
1) The law still isn't clear on it, and won't be for years
2) They never recanted it, so whenever a story gets loud enough to make the front line news, they can use it to either create a smokescreen or attack our privacy even further with it
3) Any pointy-haired politician that wants to win points with actors/actresses wanting to shut down an unofficial page that's more popular than the official one will be vulnerable to the right kind of pressure.

When it drops off the front page, without a formal, written apology, geeks lose.

Starting a real web platform's been tried before(netscape)
Its much harder than it looks, and ultimately, we're protected by those firms still using ie6 in this day and age. They slow down adoption enough for people to breathe and smell the roses.
At the end of the day the relationship between user, platform builder and 3 rd party dev has(so far) always been much more contentious than expected, and usually to the detriment of anyone but the app devs

They aren't interested in what you're interested in buying.

They're interested in what they can persuade you to buy.

The advertiser's job in this is the semi-underhanded part of this.

Whatever "value" they have to the system is how they can affect your purchasing habits. So even if you gave them a list of what you're interested in seeing, they'd try to cheat on that list, to show you stuff OFF your list. Because what's on your lit, you're presumably interested in buying, no matter what they do.

Whatever method works...
AND the results are secret FROM the candidates, AND the public, until the debate.

The third candidate should be a total unknown to both existing parties, and they should enter the lion's cage TOTALLY unharmed.

No you can't, and that's about one third of all that's wrong with the patent system of all the countries I know of.

Patents exist to REWARD them for sharing their patents, through licensing, and then land their inventions in the public domain.

That they don't even TRY to license them shows their contempt for the very reason they're allowed to have a patent in the first place.

It might be an idea to have an arbitrage type of system, where the patents expire unless the patent-holder signs up new licensees, until he's collecting licenses from everyone using his invention(might still be a small group of people), or else he's found culpable, and his patent gets cancelled.

The people are allowing that monopoly for a reason, 17 years is a very long time for most anything in tech now.

Patents should be shortened, or have to be actively maintained, like copyrights, or vest automatically.