By the first stable release of R (2/2000) folks recognized the problems using the search engines to find C documentation. It would have been a wise time to pick a searchable name.

Use your brain. Back before streaming, back before Netflix, back when Blockbuster was king, what motivated the studios to to make cooperative agreements for DVD rentals? If you said "first stale doctrine" you win the prize. The studios figured out they would make more money by taking a cut of the revenues instead of only getting a single sale for a DVD rented many times. The rental places figured that lowering the capital outlay for new releases was a right good plan too. So they came to a gunpoint agreement -- the gun being the first sale doctrine.

The deals with Netflix are little different than the deals with any other DVD renter. On the other hand, Netflix tries to avoid buying DVDs because they're out $20 when it breaks in the mail, versus cooperative agreements which replace them cheaply. But it has a few competitors who buy and rent the DVDs Netflix won't -- and ship them more carefully.

Meanwhile the precedents for streaming absent permission are 100% in the copyright owners' favor. Even if Aereo wins its case, DVD renters are still prohibited from breaking the DVD copy protection. So the owners don't have to permit it if they don't want to. And some have secretaries who print their email.

It's the law stupid. The answer to your question begins and ends with the law.

I'm shocked to learn that a purpose-built programming language might be better at its specific purpose than a general purpose programming language. Shocked I say.

I'd be even more shocked if a bunch of mathematicians had the good sense to pick a Google searchable name for their language. One PIA thing with C is how hard it is to search Google for documentation when you don't remember the exact function name.

So... a purpose-built language is better at the purpose for which it was built than a general purpose language? If that wasn't the case it'd basically be crap, wouldn't it?

The general right to privacy is one of the many freedoms withdrawn as a result of criminal conviction. As it should be. As should any freedom which makes it harder for the guards to maintain their own safety or prevent other prisoners from harming you. You're only innocent until *proven* guilty.

The point of prison is to remove those who would harm others from the rest of society and put them somewhere they can't harm the innocent. Punishment doesn't work. Rehabilitation doesn't work. The recidivism rates basically don't change.

So you give the prisoners the opportunity to become someone who isn't trapped in a cycle of crime: some will take it and some won't. Other than that the focus is and should be keeping everybody alive at minimum cost until society is ready to give them another chance.

I agree with one thing you said: once you've served your time full rights should be restored. Until and unless you prove you still can't handle it, you should be treated as a citizen like any other.

What Microsoft *should* do, if they were a responsible company, is spin off a new company called "Windows XP." The new company gets a license to all technology in XP for the purpose of maintaining it. It continues on an update subscription basis winding down staff with the decreasing revenues.

To do otherwise is planned obsolescence. Americans let the U.S. automakers know what they thought of that in the '70s... by buying Japanese cars.

Vaccines are effective. Safe? I guess you can call crossing the street in a crosswalk safe. Some people do get run over and killed but most come out OK. Not as safe as simply not walking around lots of cars. But safer than jaywalking.

Sapphire is the linchpin component in one of the two known processes for making blue and white LEDs. The other is CREE's gallium nitride process. If you could make sapphire cheaply enough it would be the dominant process for LED lighting.

too bad the Osprey will crash on the way to delivering it.

So why hasn't Steyn demanded the data under ordinary discovery rules? FOIA is an odd way to go about getting data you're supposedly entitled to in order to defend yourself in court.

Why is capacitive touch so important?

Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.

That's how I'd handle it. If they want patch reports, that's reasonable. If they want you to patch the test environment a week ahead so that the devs can check for problems and alert you not proceed, that's reasonable too.

If they want to micromanage your tiny components of your job they can get bent and good luck finding a replacement. No preapproval for routine systems administration activity.

That's the thing The capacitive multitouch screen makes tablets practical. Before that they were just toys. Nokia made the right call for the time.

The idea then was that the country's military power should be retained individually by its citizens. They wanted legal barriers against a concentration of power under a central authority.

Things haven't exactly worked out that way. Lincoln was the beginning of the end: with intentions pure he demonlished the concept of state's rights. Roosevelt's New Deal put the final nail in the coffin. And really, which individuals would you pick to keep one of the nukes in the barn stall next to the chicken coop?

On the other hand, things like crazy Cliven Bundy's fight with the Federal Bureau of Land Management are probably a healthy part of Jefferson's "Eternal Vigilance." That couldn't happen without guns and a viable threat of violence against otherwise unsympathetic bureaucrats.