I'd say we draw the line between expressing an opinion and expressing facts.

I should be allowed to say whatever I want, as long as it's clearly my opinion: "I think...", "It is my opinion that..."
I should not be allowed to say whatever I want if I'm presenting it as fact.

"I think John Doe is a pedophile and a terrorist" - You go ahead and think that.
"John Doe is a pedophile and a terrorist" - You can't go around making false statements like that

Reasonable?

Even so, firing at the van stopping to assist the wounded is something I simply cannot wrap my head around.

Say for sake of argument that the crowd of people really were bad guys.
Someone comes driving along, and finds a large amount of dead bodies, with a wounded man writhing at the side of the road. The driver pulls over, and runs out to help the person - and this grants the coalition forces the right to engage? Someone finds a wounded person and tries to help, and for this they deserve to die?
Even if that was a Really Evil Terrorist I can't grasp how the ROE would permit engaging someone to stops to help a wounded person.

Anyone care to venture a guess when the RIAA will buy every single black van and large electromagnet within 100km of Washington for... "marketing" purposes?

You've misunderstood things: The law doesn't apply to the people writing it.

First of all, there's no need to insult me. I don't run Windows, thank you very much.

Second, I've yet to come across any malware with polymorphic defense mechanisms. Sure, I've read about it here and there, and I haven't encountered any infected machines in a while, but is this kind of behavior really par for the course already?

Malware gets exploited... Are we about to see makers start releasing patches for the malware to fix security holes?

Patching an exploit in your exploit? Is that good or bad?

...and since when has prior art actually mattered when BigCorp is obtaining a patent?

I don't know how much experience you have in EVE, but generally, if you're AFK you're dead meat. Suiciding miners even in hisec is quite fashionable these days.

Do you really think they'd keep it up if it wasn't successful to some extent? :)

Now, if I had that kind of exploit (along with the Windows source code) to play with, and the skills to individually target a specific Google machine, I'd sure as hell make sure to sneak my exploit into the soon-to-appear Microsoft patch site...

And honestly, so far the chinese have struck me as the competent types.

Perhaps we should stop bashing MS all the time, after all, where would the anti-virus industry be without them?

QA 9 years too late.

On a more serious note, you're right of course that they should test it and have it working before pushing it, but bashing Microsoft is trendy and all the cool kids are doing it, so I can't help but complain it's taking over a week to patch.

They'll be rewritten to actually work?

Tbh, I think it's already reached the point where any entity creating a new fancy website these days has to comply with standards, simply due to the percentage of users who aren't using IE anymore. All that remains is for the archaic IE-only websites to go extinct.

Wow, so that's... 4 days after full disclosure that they announce their response.

"Could be here as soon as this weekend", which is still more than a week from the exploit being published. That's swell.
Anyone else grateful MSFT doesn't run the fire department?

I believe the official explanation is that "it seemed like a good idea at the time."