Possibly as interestingly, is initial spin constant across all stars? All types of stars?

Still potentially interesting research.

Forget finger printing and DNA sampling, how about when they freeze your assets so that you can't make bail long enough to toss you into prison where you are strip searched.

I don't know about you, but I'm a lot more perturbed by that than a fingerprinting.

And that's on a good day, on a bad day some reporter's story runs out so instead they run your name in a headline.

I don't game at all, but I make use of extra mouse buttons heavily. #1 extra that I love? Minimize. I work in full screen RDP and VM sessions regularly, being able to make the whole damn thing go away at the touch of a button is a dream. Getting out of full screen RDP or VM windows via keyboard is a multi-key process, and worse, it's different whether I'm in an RDP or VM window (so I have to consciously remember what I'm using, rather than letting muscle memory take over)

Lately (since I picked up a new mouse a few days ago) I've been using the scroll-up scroll-down buttons to flip between tabs, this is starting to be really handy especially when I have a dozen chat windows open that I'm skimming frequently but otherwise ignoring.

So I'd argue that they have use outside of modifiers and gaming entirely.

That's the one I just bought, the lack of the thumbwheel was actually a big part of my purchasing decision. Debating another for the $DAYJOB computer.

My only objection is that I don't like the lower thumb button, the hit point isn't quite right.

Exactly! And it seems like the best way they've figured out to accomplish that end is to copy the best.

Were Google to suddenly take a nosedive it wouldn't take long for someone else to step up to the plate.

The Bing team would be dancing in the streets

Sure, until they figured out they couldn't use "signals" from Google anymore, and instead they'd have to work up their own algorithms.

Oh well, if it's prohibited then I'm sure /no one/ will lie about their call sign while trying to evade a gov't ban on communication.

Perhaps but Apple didn't have a "rollerball" commercial did they?

You're aware of the Apple ad campaigns over the years?

1984 adapted to the modern era where instead of the gov't being in control, corporations control the gov't and us.

Me too, but iTunes is a requirement to use an iPhone (call me whatever names you want, but I have WM6, iOS, BlackBerry and Android here. My iPhone is the only one I actually carry and use)

QuickTime isn't nearly as obnoxious as it used to be. It does still steal a few file associations upon installation but once you tell VLC to take back what it supports, QuickTime is mostly a "install it and forget it exists".

Gone are the days where QuickTime would run in the tray and take up CPU and memory despite the fact that you'd never actually used it.

Still, I'd happily give up iTunes' lackluster media playback capabilities entirely if I could lose QuickTime in the exchange.

It occurs to me that DNS could be used as a primary load distribution solution with HTTP redirects being used as a fallback.

This would require CDNs to work with large public DNS providers to ensure that the DNS providers return CDN IPs that have a redirect.

For website hosting redirects probably aren't worth it especially since with many sites you'd end up redirecting every static resource. I'm not sure that the latency of hitting the "wrong" CDN pool is that big a deal anyway for web pages and their resources.

For anything over 1MB or so, the additional few hundred ms to redirect upfront will quickly be overshadowed by the significantly faster KB/s download speeds.

However, at this point redirects might not be simple to drop-in, does iTunes follow redirects? Phasing it in wouldn't be that difficult, clients could add a &allowredirect=true to tell the CDN that it's free to redirect users when appropriate.

Either way, DNS is a bit of a clumsy way to do it.

Even so, anycasting IP traffic isn't impossible but it does require some clever programming to allow sites to "transfer" a client back and forth. A CARP-like solution would be possible.

Technically this is true, but I'm more annoyed by QuickTime's stream of vulnerabilities and the potential instability of having unneeded kernel modem drivers.

Constantly uninstalling something every time iTunes has an update isn't worth the hassle, nor is pulling apart the iTunes installer and beating it into installing just iTunes without Bonjour every time.

Bonjour is the one component that doesn't really annoy me, if only because it occasionally gets used (or at least some iPhone apps can use it to find a PC, and it's sometimes easier/lazier than entering IPs)

Fair enough.

Right... Without DRM, but with a watermark (in other words, if you download a Miley Cyrus song and share it, anyone else who gets access to it can track it back to you)

That being said, I have a lot of trouble getting upset over the fact that purchased content is watermarked. As long as I'm not distributing the content, who cares?