+1 for you sir, for I laughed out loud.

You should check out my collection of Pogs.

I'm just waiting to hear that all these posts have secretly been part of a long-running ARG that is just going over everyone's head. I imagine some marketing monkey somewhere, desperately - furiously pasting these posts and hoping and praying that someone gets it soon.

At least it's more entertaining, anyway.

Yea, the article is very vague other than to say it seems it's going through one company to another, etc. It is claimed that the first party to his publishing indicated that they were not pleased with it either. Undoubtedly someone assumed that "standard contract rules apply" and for one of those companies the standard rules are "DRM protects our rights as an ebook publisher." I'll be interested in seeing how they respond, but the contents of a contract will be of the greatest influence.

If you've read any of the posts at those blogs you'll note that this particular law firm operates without determining who actually pirated something. For example, when a court asked how they determined that the defendant was the perpetrator, they claimed that their research indicated he lived alone and thus was the sole user of the IP address. Of course a brief consultation with his lawyer ensued who quickly spoke up and indicated that the defendant has been married and living with his wife of many years now.

So the problem isn't necessarily that those who pirate will pay; but that those who are accused of pirating will pay irregardless of their innocence or guilt.

To be fair both blogs have been linked in numerous previous /. articles and likely already have already registered many of those same IP addresses from those occasions. Well, at least the members of /. that break the rules and read linked articles :)

Read again, not Unreal Engine - Unigine Engine.

The Gumby episode with the out-of-control robots was surprisingly perceptive given it's intended audience.

You know someone is going to take your suggestion literally as a tutorial on how to implement a progress bar - later they'll come back with some mystical crash always happening at 0%.

That's basically it, isn't it? A campaign of FUD intended to scare users away from Gmail, hopefully to sign up with their service instead. Microsoft isn't above monetizing their users either - maybe they just hope it's not as obvious?

Yes, well the point is to ban magazines with capacities "higher than we want you to have" (aka, anything greater than zero) and not "higher than would normally be used with a weapon of this type".

Separately, and not in relation to the parent post, but since I'm posting right now... the AC are out in force today!

My concern is how difficult is it to accurately re-dock with the mounting/access ring when the stupid thing is behind you?

In response to the "what for?" in the "Uncle hacked hypothesis" a reasonable scenario exists where this would be of benefit to the malware authors. Specifically, having malware alone on a computer doesn't necessarily generate revenue for them, for that they need to use it to obtain something with a more liquid monetary value - such as user/pass credentials for the users bank, etc. In fact, the ideal scenario from a malware author's point of view is that he wants to 1. Infect a computer, 2. Use the infection for gain, and 3. Spread the infection so that #2 can be repeated elsewhere.

I have to agree with Frosty here. The page that is linked in the summary clearly identifies the problem in the section entitled Rationale; "The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement in the year 2011." Unfortunately they come to the wrong conclusion as to how to address the issue with the very next sentence; "Removing the avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface is a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors."
Quite frankly, it's obvious that the "technical impediments" of the editing interface are not to blame or else there would not currently be 4,099,684 pages of content (which excludes an additional 24,635,011 "other" pages - source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics ) as I type this. No, as Frosty P. states the problem is with the drama that comes with attempting to edit or create articles on Wikipedia. Rampant deletionism (which wasn't a thing before Wikipedia, hah!) abounds and new users are driven away in frustration. In short, they need to work on getting their current volunteers to operate in a more welcoming manner.
No doubt a majority of the problem is caused by a minority of the editors, but like everything else the vocal minority will out-influence a silent majority. This is the problem.

There's been a lot of back and forth revision of the definition over the years. I remember it was originally something like "Any object used outside of its natural scope to achieve a goal." Then people realized this meant otters used stones as tools to open clams so it became "Any object that has been modified to increase efficiency for a purpose outside of its natural scope." Then we had video of apes stripping leaves from branches to stick them in anthills... and the revision continues on ad infinitum because heaven forbid that humans have to share the title of "Tool-maker/user" with lesser beings.