Your mom likely has no excuse not to upgrade. What essential software is she running that only runs on XP? The only legit reason to not upgrade is if an organization is running old crappy software that only runs on XP and would be too expensive to replace, which unfortunately is pretty damn common, especially software written for large organizations (like medical institutions) whose development was focused on checking off requirements rather than quality. I blame those software vendors, but there's not a lot the organizations can do about it. Many of them make their software crap so that they can make a ton of money off of implementation (to make it do what it should do out of the box anyway), which is why it's often too expensive to upgrade (and that's in situations where the vendor still exists). While it would be easy to blame the bureaucrats who chose that software, in many situations there's just no better alternative, they or their predecessor had to choose between a turd sandwich and a giant douche.

I'm trying to come up a car analogy for this. Is it like typical manufacturers defects, where it can be fixed under warranty for a limited number of years, or is it like a safety recall, where there is no expiration?

The US has the "surveillance" symbol and the "imprisonment" symbol. Shouldn't that equate to censorship? "We're gonna watch everything you do, and we're gonna imprison you if we don't like what you're doing by calling it 'terrorism' or a 'national security threat,' but no, we're not censoring you, you can say whatever you want!"

And did Eich say something like, "In the past I believed gay marriage should be illegal, but my views have evolved and I now support the legal right of any two consenting adults to marry?" Unless he did and I missed it, then your analogy is completely broken.

So then a heterosexual marriage that doesn't produce children, either because the couple is medically unable to or doesn't want to, should be treated equally to gay marriage, right? And therefore, if a non-child-producing heterosexual marriage is legal, then a gay marriage should be legal too, right?

So what? You're saying that our culture should be just like historical cultures? We should have slavery? There should be no equal rights for women? It should be perfectly legal and acceptable to beat our children or wives bloody for misbehaving? We should be imprisoned for speaking out against the government? Also, there are plenty of things that apply to historical cultures that don't apply today. The most important in this case being population numbers. Back then, more people died from things like disease and war, so the members of that population had as many kids as they could in order to keep up their population numbers to grow their culture and prevent their culture from being wiped out (this can be seen in modern times by the growth of Mormonism). This doesn't apply to today, when our problem is overpopulation, not underpopulation.

So what if there's other people involved? Perhaps something like asking for volunteers to work on the project rather than threatening to fire somebody who doesn't want to work on the project would solve that issue. I'm sure there would be plenty of people already working at NASA who would love to work on the project and who wouldn't have a problem with an astronaut volunteering for a one way trip.

And, why can the military kill people who didn't even volunteer to die? Why can the military use aggressive and deceptive recruiting tactics and then put its own people in situations where other people are trying really, really hard to kill them, but NASA can't send volunteers who know what they're getting into on a one-way trip? In the military, once you sign the 4-year contract you can't opt-out of specific missions. In this case, people would be volunteering for a specific mission, and could even opt-out at any time before launch without going to federal prison.

Well, then it's a good thing that's not at all what the patent referenced in the article is. Not only that, but the claims don't even mention a phone. Okay, I get not reading the patent. Even not reading the article and making uninformed comments is pretty much standard protocol, but if you had even read past the 1st sentence in the summary it might have given you a clue that it's a little more than just "$PriorArt on a phone." Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of patents like that out there, this just isn't one of them so stop crying wolf.

Why is it that so many people think that the title is the patent (in this case the title of the news article, not even the patent title)? They're not patenting the idea of using any interchangeable camera lens on a phone. They are patenting a specific mechanism for an interchangeable camera lens. I'm not trying to say anything about the merits of the patent, just that it is certainly not trying to patent the idea of any and all interchangeable camera lenses on a phone.

I know, I know, actually reading the patent before passing judgement is very unslashdotish, but gimme a break. There are enough horribly broad patents out there that you don't need to be crying wolf over every single patent just because you don't understand that a patent title is not the patent, the title is merely telling you the subject of the patent.

Never? That is absolutely false. First, it was denying climate change was actually happening. Then, when that didn't work due to overwhelming evidence, it was okay, climate change is happening, but it couldn't possibly be caused by humans. Then, when that didn't work due to overwhelming evidence, it's now become okay, climate change is clearly happening and clearly caused by humans, but the effects don't matter. The next step we'll probably be, yep, climate change is happening, it's caused by human, the effects will soon be serious, but if we invest resources into making it better then the owners of this news conglomerate won't be quite as filthy rich, so why not just let the next generation worry about it?

Only if it's actually based on science. If it's from the "common sense" of a celebrity like Jenny McCarthy, then it must be true.

Right, because the winner of the case should have absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the case, and should be based solely on the names of the companies involved.

Except that's just not how large companies behave. Rather than having the mindset of, "we got hurt by game, the game sucks, let's get rid of the game or change it," it's more like, "we got hurt by the game, we need to play harder!" We it time and time again.

That's true. And in your analogy, the bank couldn't just open up your safety deposit box. In that case, law enforcement would have to obtain a warrant in order to open your safe deposit box. The question is not wether the leaker made a bad call by sending it to the blogger's hotmail account, it wether Microsoft had the right to search the blogger's (it wasn't even the employee's account) emails.

Preventing this situation is exactly why private entities aren't allowed to get court order for searches...because that's law enforcement's job! If they truly had probably cause, then the legal course of action would have been to present that probably cause to law enforcement, which law enforcement could then use to obtain a court order. Since the guy got arrested, this obviously went beyond a civil matter. I hope to hell that this evidence is thrown out of court as being inadmissible, because it needs to be made clear that this type of behavior is not legal. Then again, MS probably figures if the federal government doesn't have to follow the law to search private emails, then why should they?

Wow, one whole case. How many people are extremely successful that are college educated vs not college educated? One out success out of millions of non-college-educated is utterly meaningless, and to bring it up without additional context is intentionally misleading and deceptive. How about citing the percentage of people making 7 figures or more that are college educated vs. not?

In short, yes, it's been a problem in general for a while, enough so that camera phones are have been required for about 5 years by federal law (the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act) to make a noise when they take a picture to make it harder to sneak an up skirt photo on the subway.

Assuming you mean somebody accidentally captured an up skirt photo in the frame, then no. Not only would there be no criminal intent in that case, but according to TFA "The legislation says anyone who tries to photograph another person's sexual or intimate parts without that person's consent..." so there was no trying involved in that case (of course, the article could just be worded poorly, but there would still be no criminal intent).