"violate copyright law"

I love the absolute terms in which this is posed, as if there was a single, worldwide, copyright law, or even better, a single, worldwide law system. I would love to see common law jurisdictions trying to cite a case in New Zealand as precedent.

Yes, it would have effect, but nowhere as clear cut and definitive as TFA tries to present them.

And objectively speaking, beyond their core product, which Bar has been a success? Arguably the X-box.

Windows phone? Nope.

Zune? Nope.

Surface? Nope.

Azure? Please, be serious.

WebTv? Nope.

Mice? Maybe, a long time ago, but not today.

Kin Studio? Nope.

Courier? Do you even know what this is?

Keyboards? Some people like them for some unfathomable reason. They are not unlike a myriad other keyboards out there.

Headsets? Nope.

Microsoft knows how to fail. That's good. Microsoft has a real issue with acknowledging they have failed. That's bad.

Sounds like he spent some time reading about Roko's Basilisk, and since he's trying to prevent its creation, we all know what the next headline will be...

He converted it to dicarbon monoxide, which is going to react with the nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, eventually releasing nitrogen molecules into the atmosphere.

You are looking at it from a engineer's point of view. Look at it from a marketing department's point of view: to change a lightbulb you need no tools. Unscrew, screw, done. To change a fixture you need tools, and need to fiddle with wires and screws, and things that can go wrong.

A blink of an eye is in the order of 10^-3 seconds. The inflationary epoch lasted roughly in the order of 10^-33 seconds.

Don't worry, fiver, you aren't.

The study in the article comes from a government-funded agency which operates within a public university, which, in Costa Rica, effectively makes the researchers public employees.

Yes, Yahoo still has an email thing. I know exactly one person who still uses it. And pays for it.

When reading the summary, I was sure that this:

gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Microsoft Outlook

... was going to read "gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Gmail" and Yahoo was imploring their employees to switch to Yahoo! mail. As bad as Yahoo's mail system is, Outlook is worse. I figure 75% of Yahoo is sales people.

No, they are saying that you can always find a pair of primes separated by 600. Let's say you list all the primers between 2 and N. You enumerate all the pairs whose difference is 600. What they are saying is that if you look beyond N, you will always find another such pair. They are NOT saying how much further you have to look.

They are *not* saying that given any prime number p, then p+600 is also prime.

Their goal is to demonstrate that the same is true for 2 instead of 600.

You have the hubris to say that you are going to fix everything that is wrong with X11 / X.org AND also provide a compatibility layer on top of your new shiny solution to support running the programs that still use the thing you are claiming to fix ... and now you are surprised because getting said compatibility layer right turned out to be thornier than you had expected?

Several years ago I wrote a transport mechanism on top of VNC that allowed you to access high end graphics services (read OpenGL) from devices without any hardware acceleration to speak of (back then it was an ipaq). I did the initial implementation in one evening, which worked for 80% of the use cases. Together with another developer, it took us probably a month to get it to 90%. A third party worked for half a year to get it to 95%. Several years later it was up to 98%... maybe.

Whenever you try to pull this kind of stunt off, you are going to run into the same situation. Most of the stuff that you are interested in is easy. Then there's the stuff that makes "creative" uses of existing APIs. And then there's the stuff that works because of, not despite of, existing implementation bugs. And then you run into the really weird...

... on November 23rd. (and yes, it's for medical reasons, otherwise I might go insane from all the waiting)

The name of the main character in the series "Doctor Who" is neither "Who" nor "Doctor Who".  That character is referred to as "the Doctor".  Calling him "Doctor Who" is like saying that Darth Vader is a Jedi or that Picard was captain of NCC-1701-C.  The name of the Doctor is not known but to a few within that universe, and calling him "Doctor Who" simply reveals lack of research on the topic at hand.  Please see http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Doctor

So, their astronomers less than a 50 light years away ran their version of Kepler, looked at Sol, found Sol-5 and Sol-6, and with some luck Sol-3 and they noticed the liquid water fingerprint and selected it as a likely candidate for a life-hosting planet.  Then they made more and better observations and they found the CFC fingerprint and figured that Sol-3 must have a technological civilization living there.

What do they do next?  Build their version of SKA and point it at Sol-3 hoping to catch radio signals?  There won't be much to find yet.  They probably need to keep observing for another 20 years at least.  What if they looked 100 years too early?  They would have noticed the water, but not much more.  They might be able to figure out that Sol-3's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen.  Will they keep observing in the hopes that something interesting happens?  How soon will they be able to notice the subtle changes in the atmosphere's composition?