This headline could have been so much better with just a tiny rearranging of words:

Microsoft Patents Silencing Your Phone By Whacking It

Try using a megaphone in a library and see how long you're allowed to stay there.

If "most people still run 32-bit hardware", then surely the "reality of the present" is that 32-bit builds are needed.

If Mozilla abandons 32-bit builds, then whoever eventually steps up to maintain these unofficial 32-bit builds will have the same problem. And all the 32-bit users who go to getfirefox.com will get turned away to some random 3rd party site? I'm sure that will help firefox's popularity.

As you say yourself, 32-bit Windows is far from obsolete. So it would be pretty retarded to just abandon the platform because of a build issue.

Solipsism is nothing to do with astronomy.

I'm sure the children in those pictures would be really fucking happy about that idea.

Mininova has been legal "content-distribution" only for a long time. How old is this research?

If only they'd managed to make the release date April 1. That'd have been awesome.

Are you also worried about people generating random credit card numbers? Do you know how much information can be encoded in a 2d barcode? The odds of someone successfully randomly generating one are pretty astronomical.

Why is that unlikely? Seems pretty sensible to me. Otherwise, why use a phone? Why not just print the damn thing on a card?

A camera phone is not going to take a readable picture of a 2d barcode from any appreciable distance.

In any case, I am sure they are one-time codes, or at least time limited.

Oh, ok. Then I don't know what the fuss is about.

Chrome lacks a status bar only when the status bar would be empty. As soon as there is something to put in it, it appears.

Mouse-over a link, and it shows you the target. Click a link, and it tells you what the progress is, until it's finished. Then the status bar disappears again.

If something has a physical cause, how can it also be caused by divine intervention? I mean, what you are saying is that God interfered in some way in order to cause a power outage. That means somewhere along the trail between power-station and your house, something happened which did not have a physical, natural cause. Something defied the laws of physics.

Your anecdote *can* be readily explained though - it was a coincidence. I assume your wife did not specifically ask God to switch off the power as a sign. So, it's not really valid to point to the unlikelihood of a power-outage, since whatever the next unusual event that occurred was, it could be taken as a "sign".

Coincidences do happen. Sometimes, unlikely things occur - that's why they are only unlikely and not impossible. Calling something a coincidence is not a very satisfying explanation, but it is a valid one.

I wouldn't buy a Kindle to check ePub files - the Kindle does not support ePub.

I didn't see the trollishness of it.

It doesn't explicitly say that a rewritten OS would be better than a non-rewritten one, which is an odd thing to think anyway IMO, so I didn't infer it..

But perhaps that is a widely held view that I haven't encountered.