The other funny thing about that video is that when trying to view it my browser told me I needed "silverlight" -- demonstrating that in fact silverlight was used for something other than Netflix Instant.

I had always thought it was hilarious that Microsoft spent all that money both developing and deploying Silverlight just to help the company of one of their board members. I guess one purpose of this video is to stave off shareholder lawsuits ("see! It wasn't only used by Netflix! Our archivist used it too!")

I think you meant to say, "`Cloud' is a technical term which has also been hijacked by marketing people who have no idea what it meant in a technical sense, so don't waste your time trying to use it any more."

Other examples include "broadband" (and even more perversely, "narrowband" when they mean "baseband"), "organic", "natural", "3G telephony", inter alia.

Not to comment on the rest of of your note (I don't use GMail so have no idea what its support is like, on either end) but on your other complaint I have a hard time agreeing:

I have seen this but the garble I've experienced has only been with users with Outlook. (There may be other clients with problems reading them -- I don't know.) I've looked at those Apple Mail.app-generated messages and they appear to me to be completely RFC compliant. Very strictly so.

Now Apple Mail may or may not suck, but in this case they appear to me to be blameless.

Despite my jokey post responding to this scandalous event: it will work just fine (for the feds, I mean).

They overreached and took something they shouldn't have. What will happen? Despite plenty of case law from drugs cases, I expect that this seizure would be found unlawful by any court. So they could prosecute, and lose, or simply drop any charges. In fact the whole warrant could be found unreasonable (a handguns warrant????) and the entire thing could be dropped. The files can be returned to the reporter.

From the feds' point: thats victory. There will be no penalty attached to a bogus warrant, and there's no arrest to try to prove false arrest. But they will have two gains:

• they will have the names of the whistleblowers, whom they can go after with a vengeance, or simply fire, and
• they will have a nice chilling example to stop future whistleblowers who now know their identity cannot be protected.

Mission accomplished!

I cannot believe that the Feds would do anything to hurt a whistleblower. After all, this text still appears (despite scurrilous reports to the contrary) on the Obama/Biden campaign website:

• Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

The politician said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Whoosh!

Cheers,
g

You sound like a blind Microsoft hater. If nobody used RT it wouldn't matter if 8.1 were buggy or not.

More likely two of the RT users had problems with 8.1 and MS decided to pull it before the third user got around to upgrading too.

Thank you, no. I am without sin and would prefer to remain that way by leaving the stones uncast.

But thanks for the offer!

If you had quoted more of my comment you would have included my point that yes, secret arrests occur, but they are fortunately extremely uncommon. A lot of the outrage (such as it is, which sadly isn't enough) over FISA is its secret nature, and what has resulted from it.

There are many many problems with the system at large, don't get me wrong. Plea bargains seem like fundamentally abusive, and are illegal in most countries. "Civil forfeiture" is a top to bottom abuse. One could easily go on, and go ahead: feel free to work on these issues.

My point is simply that the origin of public arrest is a good one, it does seem to mostly work properly, and that it's the abuses that should be addressed, not the public nature. If we had magical cops who only arrested guilty people it wouldn't be needed. Since they don't exist, this is the best check we have,

(By the way: answering an AC's response to my comment: yes there is a qualitative difference between wgetting the records in bulk than having to go into the basement and copy them down one by one. I don't think that is a bad thing though -- life was much worse when abuses could be hidden because finding out was hard, or because access to information was essentially restricted to a secret elite).

Actually, it's an important civil rights issue. Arrests are public as a way of preventing secret arrests, which were used in pre-revolutionary time and, sadly continue in many places. Its origins lie in the sixth sixth amendment to the United States' constitution, which tries to guarantee a swift and public trial as a check on the police, the public prosecutors and the judicial system.

Sure, it's not perfect. The system can and is being abused by jerks (but then again there are jerks in every country). The "perp walks" that cops do are also an exploitative use of a tool designed to rein them in. And I suspect the prohibition on secret arrests has been violated from time to time :-(. Not to mention a arrest is something most people would not like spread around (I wouldn't!).

But don't condemn the obsession with public mugshots without understanding their purpose.

Damn, no modpoints. Else I would have modded this "Insightful."

Too bad you had to post anonymously (I won't say C) because this is a really good suggestion!

I would bet this is exactly right. Steering MS appears to be like steering a supertanker -- there might even be a Surface 3 in the pipeline which will probably come out just so they have something to talk to the press about. Hell, killing the Kin took so long that the damned thing launched before it died.

The company will need a full top to bottom restructuring. It has the cash to do it, but does it have the sense of urgency? From outside it doesn't look like it. Apple had the same problem: fell in slow motion until, I believe, it had less than one quarter in cash on hand (in 1998, after the NeXT purchase -- but I couldn't find this figure online, so I could be wrong).

Yes, that makes more sense.

You need to have a civil liberties officer to keep an eagle eye out to make sure there aren't any civil liberties escaping into the wild.