The "big news" is that they are making it mandatory for first time offenders. In Michigan we have them as well, but they aren't always used for first timers. A friend of mine had to have one installed after his second DUI though.

Not really. I just counted 22 junk icons on my Blackberry 9700. The BIS servers (carrier controlled I believe) that run the consumer devices are capable of pushing down a service book with new bloatware at any moment. On BES there is an IT policy to prevent the bloatware service books from being pushed down.

I'm not sure what Blackberry OS your referring to, but since at least OS 4.5 the bloatware is actually service books that are pushed down to the device every single time it boots up. They are simple pre-configured browser shortcuts with home screen icons. If you remove the revelant service books from your device when, the next time it boots they are right back on your desktop. My solution is to make one folder called "Garbage" and put all 22 icons in it and then hide the folder. Let's be honest, whether we are talking about Android, Blackberry, or whatever this is simple greed on the part of the wireless carriers. Simply paying your bill isn't enough to make them happy, they have to partner up with everyone who is willing to give them $1 to put an icon on your phone.

Songbird was far from perfect, but overall it was my favorite media player. Guess I'll just be sticking to VLC and loose the media library functionality.

I think everyone that has a SSH server must have the exact same issues. I have a CentOS server behind my firewall that I use for a little web development (personal projects, nothing major or really interesting) and just testing out different things but for some reason the chinese army seems hell bent on breaking in. I just set iptables to block every /8 IP range that I could find that was even loosely related to china. Personally, I don't understand why anyone would allow their network/machine to communicate with chinese IP ranges, there just seems to be no real need. Honestly, this cut invalid login attempts from thousands to a handful. As said before make use of your authorized_keys file and I'd also recomend that you double check that login by root is disabled.

Come on, throw Ubuntu on and put Mac4Lin on it and tell them its a Mac. Ubuntu is definitely easy enough to use. Its what I use and I've switched several family members over to Ubuntu because they were worried about keylogger spyware and internet banking. Songbird is a wonderful Firefox based music player that is very close to iTunes (minus the store) that syncs with many portable devices including iPods. If you already converted them to Firefox and/or OpenOffice on Windows then the experience isn't much different on Ubuntu and makes the transition much easier.

How about the FTC just convinces the rest of the Government that we really need to change the third party doctrine to keep up with the growing use of the cloud? Oh wait, that would mean that law enforcement investigators would once again have to do real investigating instead of having their work handed to them on a silver platter without even needing a warrant.

The first thing that I though of was how EA effectively ruined the fantastic Sega NFL2k franchise by licensing the exclusive rights to player and team names from the NFL. Does this ruling effectively invalidate these exclusivity arrangements?

GM has had their best and brightest working on this car for some time now and since this is a sort of "halo" car for them I'm sure that they are doing their best to mitigate any potential problems. They also have more experience than any automaker with plug-ins, and they have decided to back it with a 10 year/150,000 mile warranty. What more could you ask for? Before everyone gets down on GM just remember that they produce some of the finest cars on the planet (Yea, I said it! ;-) ). Their C6.R race cars have dominated GT1 racing for the past 5 years at least, enough to drive the likes of Ferrari and Porsche out of the game. The Corvette ZR-1 is faster than cars 3x its price and the current record holder at the Nurburgring. Their focus for the last 10 years has just been on the trucks, and before you and everyone else faults them for that just remember that it was the most profitable segment since early to mid 90s. Shame on them for chasing profits! Its proven that Americans don't want small cars until gas gets around $3.50 - $4 so unless you outlaw trucks (what obama did) or artificially increase gas prices, there is no way to sell the smaller cars. Now we can argue the merits of tinkering with free market and required CAFE numbers, but that's for another discussion.

Its already been proven that the Government won't let anything happen to GM. Plus, GM has the best balance sheet in the industry because of it's bankruptcy. Have you seen any other automaker's debt-ratio lately?

This isn't the first plug-in the General has produced, remember the EV-1? I'm sure there's lots of lessons they learned from that endeavor that have been applied to the Volt. As far as plug-ins go, GM is the first and only only large automaker I know of that has produced one in the past (large = excludes tesla's 1,000 or so cars they want to produce per year).

And if I had some moderator points you'd be getting marked as -1 Troll for saying

Actually, you don't have to factor in battery replacements because GM is supplying the Volt with a 10 year 150,000 mile warranty on the Li batteries.