Did I mention that I also had a kid in diapers to take care of?

Man, the freshmen get younger every year.

I slept occasionally in graduate school, but I think the best thing about graduating is that I no longer wake up with the thought in my head "Oh my god I have so much work to do."

I was just thinking the same thing - Google is in many ways an engine of innovation, and they bring a lot of cash to bear on a problem. But as you suggest, the same was true of Microsoft in the late 80s and early 90s. The only real difference is attitude, and attitudes change.

As someone who makes use of Google's services, I think this is great, but I can't help but wonder whether this is ultimately stifling advancement in the field. Google doesn't NEED to innovate in voice, it just WANTS to. In some ways, that results in a better product: they take risks a small software house dares not. But they're not as committed to innovating, and they drive a lot of people out of the market. Gmail is a great service, and Google continues to do new and interesting things. But I haven't seen a single new webmail service since Gmail went live, and that's a little worrisome.

As a software developer, I used to worry that Microsoft might find my particular niche potentially profitable. Now I worry that Google might think it's cool.

If he can still perform fine with that BAC, he probably wouldn't have been pulled over in the first place.

I don't think cops should be joking about police brutality or corruption, period, let alone in a public forum where they are apparently easily identified as cops. The police have a really lousy image right now, and anything that helps them to be seen as bullies or on a power trip is detrimental to everyone involved - they can't do their job unless we trust them, and it's just not enough anymore to ask that we trust them for our own good.

Set up a robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to index the site (or maybe only the front page), and then require a ZIP code to register. It's the find of information any local would know, and that relatively few outsiders would bother to look up - but could if they have a valid reason to want to use your site.

According to the linked article, that *is* the first step. The summary here conflicts in several places with the Campbell piece, and without the text of the legislation, it's hard to tell what the truth is.

Frequently it does seem that companies and the government are following the old plan: "Something must be done. This random thing is something. Therefore it must be done!" When the idea of due diligence comes into play, frequently that "something" seems to be just enough to keep the legal wolves (who often do not actually understand the businesses involved) at bay.

Some of the problem, it seems to me, stems from perception of international competition. How many times have we heard it said, "Sure, they can make thousands of cheap plastic widgets, but they're just copying, they don't have real creativity." That old slander can only be repeated so often before people decide that creativity is our *only* advantage, and must therefore be protected and sheltered and otherwise kept free from "harm", even if that means protecting it from being put to actual use.

Like I said, I don't think they should have gone down this path in the first place. PDFs were not a prime candidate for working DRM in the first place. But if they simply abandon it, then they open themselves up to lawsuits from the publishers who had been using the DRM and would be left high and dry. The harder a fight Adobe puts up now, the less they stand to lose in court. And since I strongly suspect that the people handling the cease-and-desist stuff are staff lawyers who get paid either way, I doubt it costs them anything extra to fight tools like this at this stage.

What do you expect them to do, wave a white flag and say "It's a fair cop, you got us"? They have a responsibility to their shareholders to do everything they can to protect a) their investment in creating the DRM in the first place, and b) the value of their licensed software and agreements with publishers.

While I personally believe that Adobe would have been better-advised to have not bothered with this in the first place, DRM being particularly silly for text, they did. And because they did, saying nothing right now is not an option, or their shareholders could rightly accuse them of not being duly diligent. If the DeCSS/Streisand effect kicks in, well that's just part of the dance they started way back when.

heheheh. I'm never going to see the RCA dog the same way again.

My understanding is that the supposed "terrorist-counterfeiters" are selling physical media. Forcing them to compete with a free product could indeed put them in the red - they would not be paying customers, but rather their suppliers of media.

... except the paid banner ads and internal content ads (which may or may not be positioned according to payment like some search engines' results). If we don't acknowledge that those are there (and missing from Boxee), some marketing jerk is likely to say "they're not obtrusive enough, make them flash and change size!"

OK, I did misunderstand -- as a programmer, that phrase suggests "register at start, then re-register X years later" where you meant, "register X years after start"?

Yes, in that case my objections are irrelevant.