Sayonara

I wouldn't bother.

Filled with hydrogen you say? Not a good thing to have around naked flames, those dragons.

He's referring not to the formulation of opinion itself, but to the complete lack of value of fence-sitting in a debate. As you well know. You really need to stop this personal crusade.

Patents don't protect "things" as such, they protect methods or inventions. Say for instance I patented a process involving the naturally occuring "Bacterium A" in the production of some consumer product or drug - it doesn't stop anyone else using Bacterium A for other commercial means or research, it just protects my rights to use it in that particular process. This is because the process is the invention. If I had created Bacterium A and it did not occur in nature, a patent would protect my rights to anything involving it, because it would be considered an invention in itself.

Descriptive thread title = higher probability of getting help.

Speed is a scalar quantity - it has only magnitude. Velocity is a vector quantity - it has both magnitude and direction. So the negative velocity represents motion in the opposite direction to the positive velocity.

That sounds like some amount of work to me

Not in the least (so far as anyone knows).

Although the first post looks like test questions, the title of the thread suggests to me that it might actually be the approach to structuring the answers that's being asked about. It's not very clear.

How very unsurprising.

What exactly is it you want us to do? I mean, presumably you don't know how to go about answering the questions, but you haven't stated which parts are giving you problems.

A PDA is a computer, and an X-Box definitely is (irrespective of the o/s). I don't really know what you mean by "internet appliance". You mean like those stupid 'wired' refrigerators?

Summary of the article for non-NY Times members?

Actually, he appears to have been very specific and exclusionary when identifying what he sees as being moronic. It is dishonest to claim that he calls "anything that does not conform to [his] gibberish moronic".

Are you sure? Because the line straight after it about IBM is a bit weird too. In what way do IBM have any control over the countless companies manufacturing and shipping IBM compatibles and clone components? Incidentally' date=' in reference the last line of that post (about people going to the system they know and love rather than learning Linux), I find this is a common argument against using any non-Windows system. However here I have to say "what complete bollocks", because nobody is born with an innate ability to use Windows. With a competant mentor and starting from scratch, Linux is no more difficult to learn than XP, and neither is Mac OS. More difficult to [i']master[/i], perhaps, but then mastering Linux means you have covered more ground than someone who has mastered Windows, and let's face it - it's a shitload more useful. But then most people won't need to master the system, no matter which one it is.

I'm not sure that was the question. The o/p appears to ask if other nations should be prepared to adopt that responsibility, not whether they are considered to shoulder it automatically.

The one with the name that sounds like that Chinese village where they eat babies.

Stop having hissy fits or you'll all be sent to China.

I find myself thinking that he is a fellow of a peculiar sort.

While this is true in itself, Microsoft's strategy does sacrifice some quality, some functionality, and virtually all interoperability in order to get their products to as many customers as possible in the widest slice of the market.

In reply to Pangloss, Microsoft can - fortunately for everyone else - afford to be sloppy occasionally (for instance, buying up software that they claim to be integrating into their existing suites, when it is in fact not integrated at all - like Visio). It's when they say they support standards like XML and rebuild their apps to use these new technologies, then refuse to share their specifications with all the other vendors that the trouble starts. Hello antitrust case number 3905. It's called Project Looking Glass, and it comes from Sun Systems. [edit] It's just that the killing hasn't started yet - give it a year or two.

Actually I haven't. I returned it to the original meaning, after noticing that the title I gave it on thread split (i.e. "Global representation of windows") didn't really relate to the topic under discussion. This title does.

Why is that ridiculous? It's not a nice thing to say, but then we are presented with the fact that - as you say - these things have been going on for our entire lives.

Having just caught up with this thread, I think that you seem to be the one making the most aggressive, personal and condescending replies. For extra fun, swap "China" with the names of other countries.

This is just a minor point - Katz seems to include any interference in his artefact category, so even if we make a community ecologically "better" (increasing diversity, stopping an unwelcome instability, preventing decline, blah blah) he still considers it to be devalued. It seems that anthropocentric concerns are what he is condemning, not what he is offering.