Fox New said Mark Sanford was a D

Everybody refers to one mistake made long ago, a mistake Fox apologized for. Is that any worse than MSNBC identifying the notoriously racist Alabama governor George Wallace as a Republican? Nice history rewrite there.

OTOH, Fox apologized to the wrong people. The should have apologized to Sanford for the slander of putting (D) next to his name.

as they fought to the Supreme Court to assert their right to lie on the air

Sadly, that means MSNBC is a beneficiary of this precedent.

No, fraud involved and not a "protected computer"

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. If it's involved in interstate commerce, it is a "protected computer" under the CFAA. Facebook, and by extension any computer connecting to Facebook, is a protected computer under the act since it is in the business of interstate commerce.

Now about the fraud. Actual fraud isn't needed, CFAA makes it a crime for anyone who "(2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains ... (C) information from any protected computer"

They used duress (cop and admin there forcing her) to exceed their authorization to obtain information from Facebook (a protected computer). CFAA charges should be filed. And since more than one person was involved, a conspiracy charge should be added.

Did the school employees ever agree to the Facebook TOS? No evidence of that.

If they were using Facebook, then they agreed. Otherwise, they were accessing the sytem without agreement, which could be unauthorized access. Facebook TOS:

3. Safety
  5.You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
  6.You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/s...

On site? Can't we at least remove them from the school premises first?

I would have taken the $70K, but on the condition that the officials involved are fired and barred from future employment with the district.

I'll do an experiment. I'll pick a Republican state senatorwho was in trouble. Jason Priest of Montana is a good one. I'll Google for "Jason Priest arrested" and pick the first four mainstream news links.

• Billings Gazette: The headline, "Republican Senator Jason Priest arrested"
• Huffington Post: Article begins with "Montana state Sen. Jason Priest (R) was arrested "
• Missoulian: Second sentence begins with "The Yellowstone County Detention Facility's website listed the 45-year-old Republican lawmaker "
• Local KRTV station: Article begins with "Montana State Senator Jason Sheller Priest (R-Red Lodge) now faces four charges"

Let's do the same for "Leland Yee arrested"

• LA Times: Subtitle, "The prominent Bay Area Democrat and "
• Fox News: Doesn't show up until paragraph 12, "Yee is the third Democratic senator to face charges this year"
• CBS News does not mention his party
• SF Gate: Second paragraph, "Yee, a Democrat who represents half of San Francisco"

The Republican has one in the headline while the Democrat has a whole article not mentioning his party. Even Fox put his party way down. Verdict: Likely biased for Democrats, but a much larger dataset is needed for verification.

Must be one of Heinlein's recurring themes.

The book was Friday.

Yep, they were good at one point. That Model 100 was the last Microsoft product that Gates' own code went into. Maybe that's it, maybe Gates was a great coder, but a poor manager of coders where quality is concerned.

This short history summary shows that Microsoft's roots are in marketing, not programming

No, their roots were in programming. This was their foray into marketing. Anybody who used a Radio Shack Model 100 (or its brethren) knows that Microsoft was capable of developing an excellent product at one point.

There was no option to vote no on both. You vote for "Russia now" or "Russia later." The only other option was not to vote. Counting that as a valid option to choose the status quo is absurd.

For an abortion example, imagine the religious right-wing legislature in a US state got two options on the ballot, "Make abortion illegal" and "Allow the legislature to decide whether abortion is illegal." Any vote by the people is simply a rubber stamp of what the legislature has already decided -- making abortion illegal. There is no option to disagree with the legislature and keep abortion legal.

Fluke has these two live trademarks concerning the design and color of their devices: 85449701, 85449725.

As long as the color similarity could cause confusion in the market, it's close enough.

These days we're used to the Apple hype about design, but that's just consumer goods. In some cases, good design means lives saved. Bad design, or even decent design with unintended consequences, can be dangerous.

A former F-111 pilot told me that there were some controls to the right of the pilot's seat (radio IIRC). These worked just fine during flight and were well-designed in themselves, but eventually some unexplained crashes due to pilot error led investigators to these controls. Turns out if a pilot turned his head to use these controls at the same time he was performing a certain flight maneuver, it would screw up his inner ear, he would lose his sense of orientation, and possibly crash the plane.

It wasn't necessarily bad design, but it is a reminder that we can't anticipate all of the consequences of any one design when dealing with people. The important part is that when we identify an unintended consequence of a design, we change the design to compensate instead of blaming user stupidity.

choices seem pretty valid. the second one was "remain part of ukraine"

That is disengenuous and will only fool those who don't know what's going on. The two options were:

"Are you in favour of the reunification of Crimea with Russia as a part of the Russian Federation?"

"Are you in favour of restoring the 1992 Constitution and the status of Crimea as a part of Ukraine?"

The latter establishes an independent state technically within Crimea, but with autonomy to later join Russia if it wishes, and the parliament already said it does.

So, basically, the options were "Join Russia now, or join later." There was no option to remain as part of Ukraine under the status quo.

Groklaw had the best journalistic coverage in the world of the SCO v. IBM case, but it's "just" a blog. There's no fine line where a blog stops being "what I feel" and reports hard news. Take MSNBC, it's 85% commentary, yet still considered news, and their standards, such as using facts and verifying things, aren't that high.