In that case, use tape. Gaffer's tape is designed to come off without leaving marks.

Really, you specifically mentioned Apple but everyone else does this too. If your computer or router is turned on it should show a light. If it bothers you, tape it, turn it off, don't keep it in your room or put something between it and your head when you're in bed.

Apple and many other manufacturers use indicator lights that are a reasonable brightness for the job and have diffuser panels in front of them. There are certain other manufacturers who seem to pride themselves on picking the brightest, most concentrated LEDs they can find. Those are the ones to complain about.

The iPad the biggest offender because each unit is imbued with part of the radiant shine of his holiness, Steve Jobs.

I'd damn sure download a car if I could. Who would I be depriving? Who would be missing their car when the download completed? The same people who are missing their music or films? Please show me where my downloading music takes any real property or causes any real damage to a person. If I can listen to the song for free on the radio, tape it or otherwise copy it from the radio, then there is no harm. If I can not get the music without buying it, I will not buy it and there is no lost "profit" there either. So downloading a car or a song or a film does not cause anyone to lose real property or cause any real damages.

Yes, we need to STOP having education by the nanny state. The government should get it's nose entirely out of education/indoctrination.

You wouldn't go to the toilet in the policeman's helmet and then give it to the policeman's grieving widow.

Troll? Really? Hardly. He's just expressing his opinion. You don't have to like it, but that's no reason to censor him via subtracting points until his post disappears.

I agree with his sentiment. I was detained in Texas by an "internal security checkpoint" or whatever the hell it's called. I was within 50 miles of the international border, and had never crossed it, but they still wanted to search the trunk of my car. I refused to comply. They made me stand-around while they shined* lights through the window of my car, and then held their ear against the trunk, before finally letting me go an hour later.

Now anyone with common sense could have looked at my Maryland license plus how I was dressed (shorts/Tshirt), and realized I was a tourist not a smuggler. I don't know what they thought they'd find. There's not much room to hide anyone in a two-seater.

Anyway: Rights don't have meaning unless you use them. INSIST upon compliance; refuse to consent to warrantless searches and remain silent.

*
* Irregular verbs are illogical. They should be added to the list of obsolete words. IMHO.

Not really, the copyright holder still has that right. The only way to steal that right would be to effectively prevent the copyright holder from actually distributing the content under any circumstances. Which is pretty much impossible.

(Now, I wonder how many people will try to have a discussion, how many will foam at the mouth and rant, and how many will specifically target my admittedly-stupid spelling errors. Wanna place bets?)

Probably, but it might cause a conflict with wife 1.0...

What I've noticed is that nearly every one of these e-mail replies I've seen publicized has been from a report or rather prominent blogger. I would not be surprised if Jobs had a database of members of the media and prominent blogger, and has email from them highlighted, so he can respond.

Granted I'm not sure how he reliably responds to such e-mails when they come the personal addresses, but perhaps it uses a match by name system. Or perhaps he has all e-mail go to a receptionist of some kind, who can flag messages from media and or other messages that should get Job's attention. I would not be surprised if the addresses are then white-listed, so he can carry on back and forth exchanges if he so chooses, like happened here.

If there are a bunch of small time bloggers who have gotten responses from Steve, proving my theory at least partially incorrect, I'd be interested in links.

And it's been established in other parts of this thread that the a-Queda material is readily available at many other locations on the internet, including government sites.

First of all you have no idea whether it's the same material.

Secondly, Its a British law: if the same al queda material is being distributed elsewhere in Britain, including on internet sides hosted in Britain, then the responsible persons also face prosecution. The existence of stuff on the internet does not provide immunity from the law.

No, you can't wave 'al-Queda' around like a bloody shirt and automatically win an argument.

I wasn't arguing. I was explaining to those who hadn't managed to work it out for themselves, why this guy has been convicted of breaking the law.

Second, allow anyone to submit comments regarding any prior art relevant to the claims of any patent application. So if someone posts an application with claims X, Y and Z and it's a rehash of an old idea, someone can just post a comment "Yo examiner, this was done in FVWM in 1995. Reject this shit."

I don't know if this would actually be useful. Just reading the comments on Slashdot, for example, in just about any patent case makes you want to jam something sharp into all of the commenter's throats. Half of them don't even read beyond the abstract, which is the only damn part of a patent application that has no meaning whatsoever. Other think that anything that is vaguely similar even through 15 layers of abstraction ("well really all a computer does is manipulate bits and we've done that since computing existed!") is prior art, and have no problems whatsoever posting this opinion as gospel and then remaking on how stupid patent examiners are to have missed it.

If that sort of trend were to continue on the USPTO website--and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't--the examiners would quickly be overwhelmed with ultimately bogus leads that they had to track down. You'd occasionally get some that they actually did use to invalidate a patent, but it would be the vast minority of comments. More information can be good, but only as good as that information is.

All of that, by the way, ignores the possibility of information being simply bogus instead of accurate but not prior art. There will be all sorts of people with agendas -- competitors, the anti-patent crowd, etc.

I think every other student has a copy of the Anarchist cookbook. Big deal.

Two different things with the same name. The book, which dates back to the 1970s contains some primitive and naive instructions for explosive devices etc, which are about as likely to injure the "anarchist" himself as any victim. The CDs being sold by this guy included material from an al-Queda training manual. Real terrorist stuff.

I disagree I think the major problem we are suffering is that we aren't securing the machines from the get go. The environment is a kludge, but if you don't let everyone run as an administrator all the time, teach them not to click yes blindly to every pop-up box without reading it, teach them not to fall for every phishing attempt under the sun then you don't have to worry nearly so much. Not saying it would be impossible to crack a system, just that you don't have to worry nearly as much. I run a network and am both network and systems admin and I haven't had a virus or spyware incident (at least that i know of ;) hehe) in 4 years, the one I did have at that time was contained to only one machine and really wasn't much of an incident. But I run a tight ship security wise, though most of the users don't know it.

Actually, people don't really know what a millisecond is or how it involves their browsing experience. People that are stuck on IE are used to waiting multiple seconds to have pages load.

Show this ad on national television (not even the superbowl or so) and people will be downloading Chrome in bunches.

It's an awesome ad not just for geeks but for just about anybody. Being able to compare browsing speeds with 'natural' processes we would describe as instantaneous is just mindblowing.