May not look serious? What the Hell does that mean? Why would this NOT sound serious? :-)

Personally, I think sales injunctions under *most* situations are merely a "dick" move to shut down competition. What company wouldn't jump at the chance to disable any portion of sales by their competitor?

I think a more sophisticated way to deal with this is levy royalties, retroactive if need be, and enjoy your opponent's success.

Copy and pasting images DOES live on the web. A surprising example is AOL email. You can copy and paste a picture from one email to another.. Yes, I said AOL email.

Absolutely right. I'd like to add that reasonably free-willed capitalism can't sustain itself without 'moral ethics'.

Unfortunately, we've entered a period where our society has disregarded ethics in favor of profit. Of course, profit is almost always the primary motivator in the free-market, but profit needs to be accompanied by ethics or I'd wager the system will ultimately fail. This kind of stuff is often the result of those lack of moral ethics.

For all of you dirty business men/women out there who think you make a quick buck at the expense of public health, safety, product quality etc.. ALWAYS remember this: Where ever morality is found to be absent from capitalism, legislation will be substituted in its place. I, for one, don't personally like 'morality' being legislated.

If you're really a free-market person, then surely you can appreciate doing the *right* thing -- because if you don't -- government intervention in the market becomes YOUR fault.

It's in the user's manual.

I'll have to change it from "Everything" to "95% of everything". :-(

. Wait, is oxi-clean.. plasma?

I think this is one of those ideas that *sound* better than it actually is. In short, adding graphics and video to electronic book readers are the first couple of steps into losing what a 'book reader' should be.

Many argue that eReaders "just aren't the same" as a real, 3 dimensional book. I agree... both literally and figuratively, I suppose. However, educational text books are perfect for eReaders. They are often enormous, have to be frequently carried around in conjunction with others book and I'm pretty sure most people don't care about how a text book 'feels'. So moving eReaders to book = good idea.

However, with an LCD screen, this changes things a bit. First, I feel this is losing the focus of what an 'eReader' is. It hasn't lost it yet -- but it is getting there. It blurs the line between an eReader and a Tablet... which could be a little blurry with a laptop already.

Another drawback over eReaders as we know them is we're going to see a pretty intensive increase in power usage. This is now going to be a device that needs to be charged hourly, depending on the battery size and how much multimedia they plan on packing into this thing. Books don't have videos and while it is neat, again, it is losing focus of being an electronic book and falling into the realm of tablet.

Take it a couple of more steps with web browsing, a keyboard etc... It's not longer an eReader. Personally, I'd rather have a 'dual screen' laptop that I could types notes on and read at the same time, since I'm going to spend a lot of my time looking in the general direction of an LCD already.

Everyone knows firing short, repeated bursts of tachyons between a 3 dimensional grid made up of Federation star ships is the most effective way to detect invisible, cloaked objects.

There's still room for error there though, and that is simply unacceptable based upon how we use our computers today.

This means that quantum-based processor will either become useful for a certain niche (something that doesn't require precise results) or we'll find a way to make them useful for everyday stuff... like outfitting classical processor technology with quantum capabilities to solve specific types of problems more efficiently.

I know it is disastrous trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from the details of this Examiner article -- but the wording of the article leads me to believe he's being arrested for selling the software.

Since .NET was installed in an 'official' way, I can only assume it is Firefox that provided Microsoft the ability to remove the "Disable" button from their first iteration of the Firefox WPF plugin. Is that behavior actually by design?

If it is, I certainly hope that gets changed in 3.6 too. Every plugin and extension ought to have 'Disable' and 'Remove' buttons, no matter what.

Why are you so hard on W|A? Wolfram Alpha answers LOTS of extremely important questions!

Query: What is the speed of an unladen swallow?
Answer: "there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)"

Query: What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
Answer: 42

Query: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Answer: Not sure, but wherever she is, it isn't here.

Query: When is judgement day?
Answer: "2:14 am EDT | Friday, August 29, 1997"

Query: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound??
Answer: "No. Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound."

Query: Can entropy be reversed?
Answer: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

Query: who would win in a fight: pirates or ninjas?
Answer: "The answer remains an ongoing debate which Wolfram|Alpha is not in a position to arbitrate."

Certainly, but it isn't as straight forward as you're implying. You're living in the 90s if you think a virus can't be hidden from a virus scanner.

Yes, but can that loader or the mechanism for installing that loader not change its own instructions by randomly transposing code? Can it not insert NOOPs here and there? Can it not reassign registers and so on? Is it always going to have the same hash/checksum/bytes?

No, no *good* virus will.

Heuristics are the secret sauce of good AV scanners, but that is certainly far from perfect. Otherwise, virus scanners rely on some form of 'virus signature', which is often based on a database of known viruses and checksums. Nearly any changes at all means you're AV is left guessing... And no algorithm is going to be right all of the time, even *if* the changes to the loader or virus are minimal.

The offline approach worked fantastically in the year 2000, but now... the playing field has changed.

We have root kits that embed themselves into alternate data streams, utilize virtualization, employ self-encryption and password protection and randomize what would otherwise be easy-to-detect signatures etc.. Some root kits can *only* be reliably detected if they are actually *running* because they conceal themselves using these techniques. *Even then*, it requires a competent utility with things like stealth detection which look specifically for that behavior of concealing/unconcealing itself. As a result, some of these viruses don't show up in Safe Mode either...

Scanning offline is a good first step if the system is hosed. From my experiences though -- if the system can boot and mostly works -- do whatever scanning you can first while it is online. Use your best judgment as to whether you have mitigated the threat and THEN take it offline for the final clean up.

It might be a good idea to take the pancreas too...