Barnes and Noble's argument that the Borders customers whose data they bought will be protected by their own policy is specious. The very act of B&N purchasing the information is in and of itself a violation of the previous privacy agreement. That's like a bank robber saying, "Sure, I took the money, but don't worry, I won't share it with any other criminals."

I'm in the same boat. I actually attempted to replace the connector but the contacts are ridiculously tiny. That's the last Nokia phone I ever buy (for that reason and for their embrace of Microsoft).

Assange did what every newspaper does, publish leaked material. The NYTimes, Guardian, and others worked with him to do this. If you want to have Assange extra-judicially murdered you have to do the same to editors at these papers, for they did nothing more or less than he did.

Please do this as soon as you possibly can, the way things are going down here we don't have much time left.

About 2% of my cell phone usage is talking, the rest is web browsing and texting, neither of which make any noise. I don't think I'm that unusual of a cell phone user in that respect. Also, people who talk to other people on the train can be loud even when not on the phone. As a person who spends about 1 hour a day on subways and feel it would be nice if more of the major urban train systems in this supposedly first-world country had cell or even wi-fi access. I think we can survive the occasional loud caller.

Exactly. I would say most of the fundamental ideas have already been thought of in every field. I'm sure there's a lot more to know about life on earth but no one will ever come up with ideas as big as "natural selection with random mutation" or "DNA" ever again. Same in physics, the people working at CERN are going to find out new things but every other physics researcher is going to be tinkering around with what is already basically known.

Yeah, I'm sure there's more data than what is shown on that graph but the standard deviation from that linear fit looks huge to me.

Who even mentioned the 1st Amendment? Free speech as a principle is bigger than just the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Just because something isn't technically in violation of that particular clause doesn't mean it isn't undermining the freedom of speech. As a hypothetical example, if Comcast decided not to allow any discussion of FCC regulatory policies to flow through their network infrastructure it wouldn't technically be a violation of the 1st Amendment, but it would quite clearly be a blow to free speech.

I'm looking forward to the first installment of the new IL-2 series of flight simulator games, IL-2: Cliffs of Dover here in the U.S. but while gamers in the UK and Australia will be enjoying the game in 1 week (March 31st) we Americans have to wait until April 19th. Given the fact that it may be a digital-only game and there is no real language difference here, what is the point of this?

My biggest problem with newspaper paywalls is that in any different week I get linked to stories in probably 15-20 different news sites. If every site charged $30+ a month to access, how many could I possibly afford? I wouldn't mind paying a bit to support news agencies but if all of them put up paywalls, how can they expect us all to pay for every one of them? NYT might be able to get away with it but a model like that would dry up every small paper out there because no one would pay for them. If it were somehow possible for me to pay $10-15 a month and have it split between the various news sites I visit I would be fine with that, but that would be very difficult to implement.

I think Utah is doing this because they are a bunch of paranoid right-wingers who think children in the U.S. are being indoctrinated into the ways of socialism in their schools. And if you think I am being ridiculous go RTFA where a State Senator explains his motivation by saying exactly that. There is not some sudden blossoming of desire among Utah politicians to enhance the quality of civic education in their public schools.

That's easy, surgically implant the display and keys on the opposite side of the devices, then they will be protected from splashes.

timeOday's criticism of Omega Hacker's art criticism is a powerful journey through the pupil of a discerning eye and into the mind of one of the great art critic critics of our time. (I'm an art critic critic critic.)

I have a Nokia n900 in the U.S. and I can tether all I want through T-Mobile's service. T-Mobile has no way of knowing if the phone itself is using the connection or a device attached to the phone. I guess only locked phones with closed firmware can allow them to get away with such nonsense as charging for tethering.

I'm with you on this. Maybe it should just be a flying chair with an implied Ballmer just out of frame.