Now they use "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko". It seems they have become too embarrassed to include the name of their own browser.

It was never a good idea for website code to examine the User-Agent string, and this just further confirms it.

Exactly, isn't there supposed to be a Cowboy Neil option?

I'm not exactly sure what sort of Wiki manipulation they are talking about. If you check out an old version of the Priceline.com article it has a bit of corporate nonsense for Booking.com etc. However it looks like something that could have been done in less than an hour, and was easily deleted, so hardly justifies the fear of some kind uber-manipulating PR firm.

According to the article, it's a bit more than that:

So a "mechanism by which people can get them reviewed and if appropriate removed" isn't enough, they have to proactively read every comment and remove anything defamatory. However, they may have been able to pass the liability on to the people making the comments, if they hadn't allowed anonymous posting.

So a website in Estonia should either check every comment, I suppose ideally before publishing it, or ensure that they have the true name of every commenter. Perhaps the latter wouldn't be an issue in the US, since true names would be available from the NSA in most cases anway.

Running an insurance company is like running a casino. It's gambling, but you only want to take bets where the odds are in your favour.

Installing apps from the software centre and running Steam has got nothing to do with Unity. Replace Unity, for example by installing Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu, and all that stuff still works.

Futures and foreign exchange markets aren't closed for long each day. I'm not sure how much of a window there is between the outcome of the Fed meeting becoming obvious and the public release of the outcome, but it may still be long enough for somebody with inside information to take a position while the market was still open.

Closing the financial markets throughout the world every time a news release is expected isn't very realistic, since there are many such releases during a typical day. The could hold the Fed meeting on a weekend, perhaps, but this wouldn't necessarily be an option for every news event.

The other IT-wifekiller Hans Reiser at least accepted his fate.

As a last resort, once he had exhausted every other option.

I'd assume that his decendants are trying to profit from the speech, not trying to suppress it. However it's true that copyright is a restriction on free speech, in that you no longer have the freedom to say something that has already been said by somebody else. Unfortunately, the US constitution explicitly allows this restriction of free speech.

Perhaps, in this case, but what about the Long-tailed Cuckoo? How do the newly born birds manage to migrate from New Zealand to Pacific islands thousands of kilometres away, without ever seeing their parents?

Still, it's amusing to image bureaucrats trying to come up with a way to distinguish a "mock" religion from any of the equally ridiculous "established" religious.

Good point.

As argued by Hegesias of Cyrene thousands of years ago. He wrote in a book that life was so miserable that people would be better off killing themselves, and it was supposedly so convincing that many people followed the advice. The local king wasn't impressed.

Yeah .. at very least he could have driven right up to the front door and handed the car keys to somebody else to deal with the parking problem.

I'm not sure that I'd want to hold out for maximum life span myself, regardless of what terrible physical or mental conditions I found myself in. At some point, suicide would be preferable. Probably a good idea to start thinking about having a method prepared in advance (pills, I suppose).

Waste heat is fine if it's cold and you want to heat the building. It wouldn't be so great if it was already too hot. Sounds like a technology I'd only use for part of the year.