Apple is mainly a hardware company and Google is a software one.

Arguably, Google is an advertising company, not a software company.

Cant take credit for this one, but:

mkdir android ; cd android ; sleep 15552000; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make

By railroading this guy, what the Muskegon County Prosecutor is actually doing is weakening the severity of real child abuse in the public's mind by diluting it with dumb but ultimately harmless comedy.

Gee, I wonder why he would possibly want to do that....

Without knowing the particulars of this particular case, I still feel free to speculate that it's because the Muskegon County Prosecutor, a man named Tony Tague, is a self-promoting sleaze who loves nothing better than to get his name in the papers.

I grew up in Muskegon County. Tague became prosecutor about the time I left to go to college, 20 years ago or so, and during that time he has repeatedly shown a penchant for pushing the envelope and excersising his considerable prosecutorial discretion to criminalize behavior in any case where he can whip up public outrage -- the first one I can remember was when he elected to prosecute a pregnant drug addict for delivery of cocaine to a minor -- her unborn child.

His "family values" and "tough on crime" posturing resonate with a certain portion of the local electorate but I wouldn't describe the area as particularly prudish or inordinately socially conservative. It's less that the community is really up in arms about such things and more that Tague loves the publicity such cases bring and has been successful throughout his career in exploiting such cases to mobilize a certain segment of the electorate. Besides the sleaziness of such tactics, it's also pretty hard on the individuals who are singled out to advance his political career.

new technological advances, enabling systems and cost considerations WILL change the entertainment industry as we know it within 5 years.

Well, OK, if some guy with a Wordpress blog says so, I'm convinced!

Being less snide -- I wish these pioneers godspeed; I'd be happy to see big changes. I'm just not sure it'll happen as easily or as quickly as the write-up asserts.

AIX's SMIT did this, or rather it wrote the commands that it executed to achieve what you asked it to do. This meant that you could learn: look at what it did and find out about which CLI commands to run.

It's been years since I administered an AIX machine but my recollection is that the CLI command strings it came up with were generally amusingly-specific unique-to-AIX commands with very long names like resizepartitionandinstallbootblock or something like that. They were generally specialty scripts built to parallel SMIT menu choices and you'd never wind up guessing the command without SMIT telling you what to use, but having the command-line version was nice because you could do something by menus in SMIT on one machine and then use the command-line equivalents to automate the same operations on dozens of other hosts.

I am however somewhat surprised by/skeptical about this story. How did the poster's name and info get associated w/ this?

Perhaps the malfeasor(s) "borrowed" his name from the contact information in his company's bona fide domain registration?

thus something invented by us is more likely to cause serious trouble for our metabolism than something that bees or trees invented millions of years ago.

I've got some foxglove growing out in my yard if you want to test that theory.. And if you survive that, there's a local amanita variant I can probably find without too much trouble if I go looking for it.

While I think the statutory damages here sound excessive, if it really gets to be a problem the legislative branch can easily pass an amended statute correcting that. Meanwhile it does seem to be desirable to have some disincentive in place to prevent manufacturers from claiming the protection of expired patents. A better system might require a company be served with notice to stop claiming the patents, giving them a reasonable amount of time thereafter (30 days?) to correct their manufacturing; any devices produced after the grace period would be subject to penalties if patent protection continued to be falsely claimed.

It probably wouldn't be such a problem if we hadn't gone absolutely patent crazy in the past fifty years. I made a ludicrous discovery the other day while replenishing my toilet paper supply. The brand of TP I had purchased claims no fewer than 36 patents on the packaging, and I believe that's not even counting the additional design patents (or at least I presume that's what the series designated D########## represented.) C'mon, really -- 36 patentable innovations? It's toilet paper.

Some of the responses so far seem to be based on the assumption that this is an information technology class for students who intend to specialize in the field. I'm assuming, rather, that this is intended to be a basic primer class offered to everyone and intended to give a general grounding in the subject.

My suggestion is that you start by talking to adults to find out what they do and don't understand about the technology they use. In my experience (20-some years' worth of dealing with end users in various capacities) many, probably most, adults have an extremely limited idea how the technology they are using really works in the physical world and deal only with it as an abstract unit. And some of the assumptions they make based on the mental model they have built up lead to really bad decisions because they don't understand very basic concepts that the rest of us take for granted.

To give an example: perhaps the single most misunderstood concept I encounter is the notion of storage. A great number of people seem to have no idea what actually happens on a computer when they save something. Generally they don't understand the difference between various types of memory (i.e. the difference between temporary short-term storage in RAM and long-term storage on a file system on some sort of disc or flash device. They have a very limited understanding, if any, of the filesystem and the concept of hierarchical organization. They are generally unable to distinguish between the various components of their system (e.g. display, CPU, input devices, file storage.) These are things that seem idiotically simple to most of us because we have completely internalized the knowledge, but deal with people who don't have the same underlying framework and you will soon see how it affects their reasoning about their computer.

People with this sort of limited understanding of the computer as one abstracted whole, a magic box that they interact with, generally get along adequately as long as everything is working the way they expect but as soon as they run into any sort of exceptional circumstance they have virtually no recourse because they have no real understanding from which to base hypotheses about a possible cause for the problem or method for proceeding. Their ability to use their systems is therefore fragile and subject to disruption from virtually any sort of unusual situation.

If you've worked in the field you've seen this over and over and over again and you can probably call to mind some of the unfortunate results of this kind of shallow understanding and "magical box" mindset.

I think the best thing you can do for kids just getting started (though I think 9th grade is pretty late to be getting started) is to help them understand that computers are not magical and that their behavior is not arbitrary, that with the proper basic understanding of what's happening most of what follows can be predicted by fairly straightforward logic.