How about you fix you?

Rather than trying to avoid horrible legacy code, admit that the world is built out of horrible legacy code. Get hold of Martin Fowler, “Refactoring” and Michael C Feathers, “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” then develop your skills at working with legacy code to turn it into better code.

After all, that new beautiful code that you wrote for that last job is now someone else's horrible legacy code.

It is a matter of perception & expectation management.

Watch as your nation is demolished by people claiming that religion is more important than science, and that giving all children the same grade in reading tests is better for their education. If you want to know where your country is headed, watch "Idiocracy".

Just remember that it's easier to control a population if they are uneducated and fearful.

http://www.documentsnap.com/

Brooks Duncan will help you go paperless, tame your documents and provide useful hints. Well worth visiting.

Of course, Fujitsu ScanSnap is the most recommended scanner. I have one myself, and it's a joy to use. Just put the paper in the tray, press the blue button. A short while later the searchable (i.e.: OCRed) document is sitting in my electronic Inbox, and the paper can go to the shredder.

I use Leap to name and tag the documents, then Hazel conveniently files them away for me.

Leap: http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/

Hazel: http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php

Of course, I'm a Mac user. There will no doubt be similar products for Linux (using xattrs to tag files, perhaps?)

That's not the point. The point is that the Apple iBooks Author program is free to use, but if you make money from the output of the program you do it on Apple's terms.

If you didn't want to use Metroworks, you would just go and write your own toolchain. If you don't like bit keeper's conditions, you would just go write your own version control system. If you don't like Microsoft's Educational licence restrictions, you'd just go buy the full version or write your own word processor.

Licencing conditions on commercial use of tools are not a new thing. We still have the option of writing our own WYSIWIG GUI for editing ePub 3.0 format, with live reviewing on the iPad or other device sitting on the desk.

At least you can rest secure in the knowledge that Apple isn't going to give your book away for free in order to boost sales figures, like Amazon does.

And the fact that it's Motorola instead of Google makes it just fine for them to violate the F/RAND licensing six ways to Sunday?

There's also the possibility that Lamo was lying, or that the "Bradley Manning" he was chatting with was actually someone else trying to set Bradley up as a stool pigeon.

an "invisible glass" screen will achieve the same result as the "glossy screen" - no surface treatment interfering with the colour depth and resolution of the LCD panel.

Sure other stores might be cheaper in your hypothetical model, and fanboys are rabid looneys in your hypothetical model, but here's how it goes in real life:

If I want Sony music, I head over to Bandit.fm. Check out the prices for Gotye and Kimbra - the iTunes store is cheaper or the same price. If I want stuff that Sony doesn't have, I have to find the online store for that particular publisher. Or I could head to the iTunes store where the music I want is available at the same price.

The only thing I agree with you about is that iTunes is an unholy mess. I prefer the "good old days" when synchronising stuff between devices was done by iSync, and all iTunes was used for was to play music.

But as for your last example - does anyone still use CDs? Really?

An injunction simply means that the Judge has decided that there is enough substance in this case to warrant it actually proceeding. Thus until the case is resolved, Samsung is not allowed to ship a potentially infringing product.

If Samsung wins the case, Apple will be liable for damages.

So don't worry, Samsung iPad fans, you might end up being able to buy your iPad ripoff in Australia after all!

Pity it's off-base.

How about, "Apple bans game that portrays suicide & child slavery, and offers to collect donations outside the usual rules for the App Store."

But that doesn't have the same attention-pulling power, does it?

It's the go-to place because that's where everybody goes.

c.f.: the network effect

So you're okay taking someone's blood money, but you're not going to stop them committing more crimes?

I have a FireWire/USB disk enclosure, and regularly get double the throughput on FireWire 800 versus USB 2.0 (contemporaneous standards). It might be just my imagination, but the disk is quieter when running under FireWire.

So anyone who thinks the standard is "dead" is simply in denial.

I'd make an ad hominem attack about such people being happy gluing $20k worth of plastic onto a $10k car instead of buying the $25k car to start with, but I'm not normally that kind of person.

It does cost money to build the network in the first place, and funnily enough while the cost of cable is relatively small and the cost of digging it into the ground or hanging it off concrete trees doesn't change mich in relation to how many pairs are in use, it does cost a great big truckload of money to terminate the cable and send/receive data, and then route that data to someone else's network.

The costs you are indicating are similar to utilization fees. That is, if you utilize 100% of a cable's capacity, you pay 100% of the upkeep costs. Quotas are a simplistic form utilization charge, where you simply give the end user a proportion of the cable's capacity for a month at a set fee, then either charge penalty rates for over use (learn to budget, dumb end user) or shape to very low speed for the remainder of the billing cycle.

This is a model of billing that has been used in Australia successfully,with ISPs using the profits to expand their capacity. There will always be complainers, of course, but they will be the ones who assume that having a 20Mbps carrier means they should be able to download at 20Mbps all day, every day, for $20/month. Sorry mate, the world doesn't work like that.

You forgot Natalie Portman!