Sure, Mac has been making strides, and I have a friend who swears by 'Pages' and 'Keynote,' but it's the iPhone, iPod, and iPad that have made Apple the behemoth it is today. Microsoft would love to make money in these markets as well, but they already ARE raking in tons of cash from MS office, and Exchange servers and other software for businesses. That is where Google (and not Apple) can really hurt them, and with the shift toward cloud services, MS is right to fear Google, and they have some decent points to be made about consistency and long-term reliability that you can reasonably expect from Microsoft.

Clue was actually pretty good. It was very loosely based on the game, and turned out to be very funny. Battleship, however. Let's just say I won't be standing in line for that one.

If you have the ability to take something back it might not be so bad. Also, it seems like it would be pretty easy to tell who you are sharing with and avoid sending the wrong people (like your gay black boss) your inflammatory homophobic racist rants.

and a much more practical one at that. Much of other scientific disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, etc...) is based primarily on observation. What can we observe and record about things that already exist. Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.

Figuring out how to manipulate electricity in such a way that a 12-year old boy in a village in India can search the entire corpus of Shakespeare from his phone in milliseconds is pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A lot of Nobel-worthy breakthroughs occurred to get us to where we are now.

Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing. If they want to keep their traditions and not add any new prizes, that's their right. It's just unfortunate that to the general public, the Nobel prize is the prize to get if you've done anything useful in science.

If the event is newsworthy (and if they're allowing press in there already) I don't see how a location can be trademarked. Which part of the trading floor? All parts? Every floorboard? Or are they just generally saying that a crowded group of yuppies in suits wearing bluetooth headsets falls under their IP?

I just realized this will never take off. Look at their logo.
Look familiar?

Certain renegade elements of the consumer sector are considering switching to alternate methods of payment in retaliation against Google's proprietary monetary transaction system. "Basically the plan is to exchange small rectangular pieces of green paper in exchange for all debts, public and private," said one proponent of this new monetary system. When asked how his purchasing history would be tracked, indexed, and made available to advertisers in order to better serve him, he responded, "That's kind of the point."

More on this story, and new developments that indicate water may be wetter than once thought, at 11.

I think we're pretty much on the same page here. I agree that DNS blocking will be very inefficient. As a matter of fact, it will probably just increase people's awareness of what DNS is, and how to take advantage of it.

However, as I said before, I'm afraid that this is just a foot in the door. To borrow a phrase from paranoid philosophers of years past, this is a slippery slope. It's not hard to imagine regulators blocking swaths of IP address space or even filtering out specific pages on websites. If China can get away with it (with most people content to be censored and kept in the dark) who's to say it couldn't happen here?