The company I work for physically breaks the lenses of all devices that have cameras in them. I'm not sure what they do but you don't see anything with that camera after they are finished. If it's a plastic lense you could simply destroy it with a hot needle.

Those are valid points but I'm not sure how applicable they are in this situation. You have layers in a system to abstract functionality and hide problems or "difficult stuff" in a lower layer so that the engineers developing upper layer stuff don't have to think about it - they just use it and it works. In my opinion this is an example where the opposite happens. As an application developer I wouldn't want to think about the crazy internals of the underlying file system - I would simply use it and expect it to work.

So is this a new trend to design systems? Make them reliable from top to bottom? Designing an upper-layer part of the system to work around the flaws of a lower layer system component is often necessary but is not the right thing to do it. Telling application developers to change their applications because a new version of the file system breaks their stuff is madness. No matter what POSIX standards say: it worked before, it is broken now: go fix it.

No, I believe there it no difference between you being weightless inside the plane and your blood being weightless inside of you.

It depends on how you look at it really. If you look at the planet, the plane falling into it and the person inside the plane falling with it there is certainly gravity. However if you only look at the plane and the person inside it there is no gravity affecting the person. The forces affecting the person relative to the plane are almost zero.
Or similarly take a truck that carries cars on it. The truck is driving a certain velocity and so are the cars parked on the truck. However if you take the truck as your reference system the cars parked on the truck have no velocity relative to the truck. They are parked.
This is actually an important principle of physics. It also explains why you can drive a car onto a truck going 40mph (like Knight Rider does it) without crashing into the truck.

The title is a quote from Clifford Stoll, astronomer, computer expert and high school teacher who argues that you don't learn with computers but with books and great teachers. I tend to agree with him. Computers are mere tools, great tools that are fun to tinker with. But outfitting entire classrooms with computers will not enable the student to learn more or better. Thinking that computers are an integral way of how we learn in the future is as wrong as believing television changes the way we learn.
Stoll even suggests that in most cases computers are only entertainment devices and if you think about it is true more often than you might realize or want to admit. Students should definitely learn to use computers but they can not replace good teachers so in my opinion computers should be treated as tools like a hand calculator or an oscilloscope you bring in for physics experiments. So laptop carts seem to make the most sense. A very interesting talk by Clifford Stoll where he explains this opinion can be found here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-666540182028461233

This is the same Jolt that owns the legendary Planetarion (http://www.planetarion.com/) browser game. They don't seem to invest a whole lot of money into Planetarion but apparently are creating an entirely new game. This is sad for me because I prefer science fiction and strategy over role playing and loved Planetarion back in the days. Jolt recently got bought by Omac Industries (http://omacindustries.com/). They also own Nation States, a popular nation simulation browser game.

I can imagine that this is part of the deal with the music industry. They might have said: ok, you may drop the DRM but if we find one of those DRM free files on a file sharing network we want to know who did it. Or maybe Steve offered this as compromise to the industry. Maybe he even exploited the industries apparent lack of understanding new technologies and told them it's a watermark. Well, probably not. But imagining the background stories that might have lead to things like "personal info in DRM-ree files" is fun!

To get their blog entries back people might be able to use Google Reader. If journalspace provided RSS feeds and if the entire blog posts were part of the RSS feed and if somebody subscribed to the RSS feed in Google Reader one should be able to obtain all blog posts from when the first user followed the blog with Google Reader. Here are some details: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2005/12/google-reader-api.html