I was in a small, regional Tesco (UK market chain) just the other day, and there were plenty of flavours of Oreos there. Perhaps not quite so many as I might find in the US, but certainly more than just plain vanilla.

On the other hand, I don't much like the other flavours, so plain is just fine with me.

I mentally read it 'plus plus variable', but I'm thinking 'increment variable'. This is similar to how I will mentally sound out the letters 'ICBM', but I'll be thinking 'weapon' or 'missile'. It's also somewhat similar to when I see the words 'Federal Communications Commission' written out, I mentally reformat that to 'FCC', then mentally associate that with a larger gestalt knowledge of what they do.

The nomenclature of how one sounds out what one reads doesn't necessarily equate to how the next layer down in the thought process is representing the concepts.

I learned it as Salt, Sugar, Caffeine, and Alcohol...making Irish Coffee Margaritas the perfect food.

Sounds like going back to the days of infrared communications on phones. I'm not sure how this is better or worse than QR codes, except perhaps that you can cram more data into the stream.

I think it's even worse when they're disallowing physical media. I specifically purchased a game for my son (Portal) so that when he was finished playing it, I could uninstall it from his computer and install it on mine so I could play. But, even though it was purchased at a store (Wal-Mart, Target, something like that), and it came on a physical disc, uninstalling it from his computer is not enough. It's already been registered and locked to his Steam account, and after several communications with Valve, they refuse to disassociate it from his account.

If it was just a download, then I could sort of, kind of see the restriction. But purchasing a physical object, like a book or a DVD or a CD-ROM, should allow one to disassociate the application from one account and sell it on to the next person to associate with their account.

How about $6,000,000? "Steve Austin, a man barely alive..."

Locked into a time machine travelling forward at a decent enough clip that I'd get to watch the universe evolve sufficiently before starving to death. Assume an adequate air supply. Travelling backward to watch the Big Bang would also suffice.

As a matter of fact, I did first see the word "patents". It's a shame, too, as I was just getting ready to be all indignant and such.

Not that I'd put it past something like the RIAA to try and claim 28 patents on the recording disk attached to the Pioneer spacecraft and sue NASA for their p2p (that's planet-to-planet) file sharing.

Me