I'm tired of grammatically incompetent know-it-alls. You have two errors in your "correction." You need a comma before "dammit." Also, "damn it" is the correct way to damn somebody. Good lord the internets is full of tards.

Coasting is a big part of space travel (one of Newton's laws says an object in motion will stay in motion until another force acts upon it), but is it really possible to plan out a perfect space journey without need for fuel-assisted adjustments? Of course not. You can run out of gas in space.

This is an exaggeration; Windows Vista/7 will not run 16 bit applications.

I disagree. I think sex can be harmful in a number of situations: molestation/abuse creates psychological harm to the victim, unwanted pregnancy can derail long-term goals, and STD's are not "harmless", especially if they aren't treated.

I went to Giant Eagle the other day and their computers were "down" from a recent t-storm. I waited around 15 minutes or so as the store gradually filled up with irate customers (they were NOT making sales) until I finally left and just went down the road to a gas station for my gallon of milk.

*WHOOSH* That's the sound of the importance of users' MAC addresses being publicized flying over my head. Why should anybody be concerned if the RIAA, or Google, or anybody else knows your MAC address?

I fail to see how your NIC's MAC address can be used to extract sensitive or private information. I don't know of any way that it can be cross-referenced or traced. Whenever you are requesting information from a server, doesn't every hop along the way replace the "source MAC address" in the IP packet headers with its own MAC address? The only way, then, for your MAC address to become relevant to outside investigations would be if your default gateway were examined.

Every investigation I have heard of involves IP addresses, not MAC addresses. Hypothetical situation: let's say EvilBob logs into his neighbor's unprotected wireless access point and torrents a few albums. Unfortunately, the RIAA was hosting those songs as bait to catch evil-doers like EvilBob who steal music. The RIAA decides to take action against EvilBob. However, they don't know EvilBob's name. All they know is his neighbor's IP address. They pull a few strings and probably convince EvilBob's neighbor's ISP to release account information such as the name and address under which the Internet service is registered. So the RIAA sends a letter to that address and EvilBob's neighbors scratch their head for awhile, then hopefully end up enabling some security on their access point.

Let's say EvilBob is a part of something more nefarious, like trying to incite riots against government officials. In tihs case, it's not the RIAA who goes to the ISP but the government. The ISP gives relevant information to the feds and they bust down the doors of EvilBob's neighbor's house and confiscate all their computer equipment. Soon they discover that there is nothing illegal on these machines and concur a neighbor was using the unprotected wireless network to perpetrate his crimes. At this point, the AP can be examined and the MAC address of a certain NIC (if it has not been spoofed) can be identified as belonging to the machine that sent/received said illegal material. If they want to find EvilBob, I believe they are giong to have to search the whole city block in search of that MAC address and hope that a) the MAC address they got from the AP was not spoofed and b) EvilBob wasn't parked outside and is 1000 miles away in another country right now, installing botnets in public libraries in Florida.

Why is anybody worried about this issue? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here!

It IS their right... but you ARE allowed to disagree.

I'M not a manager, I'm just a general-purpose technician. If a local business manager calls me and says he wants to limit Facebook access, I'm not going to advise him on his managerial skills. I am going to blacklist *.facebook.com on the local DNS server or use a DynDNS account with blacklisting/filtering and point the offender's NIC to that address. If he insists that he has made the decision that he wants spyware installed, guess what - I'll install it for him (assuming it's legal).

I would absolutely hate to have a job where I have to maintain "satisfactory output" and have nothing to do, and out of boredom surf Facebook. I have a friend who feels this way, and spends literally hours a day sitting at his desk playing games on his Droid, making $40,000/yr. That actually pisses me off and I hope I don't ever degenerate into somebody who feels like I need a babysitter as a boss who spoonfeeds me work and checks in on me to make sure I'm busy.

The name of the software company ("CyberSpy") sure seems to imply that its marketing strategy is to appeal to the obsessive stalker who needs a convenient way to spy on another person and steal their passwords, read their email, etc. I personally knew a guy that was so obsessed with his ex that he tricked her into d/l a similar spy program with very similar functionality to CyberSpy and all he did was change the filename of the install package to something a little less obvious (unicorns_with_flowers.jpg.exe was a good example).

I agree that the most legitimate use of this software would be for employers to monitor their employees. An employer who owns the computers its employees are using has a right to install spyware without employee's knowledge... duh. They are handing out paychecks and if they don't want their employees farting around on Facebook all afternoon, it's their right to "spy" and verify that rules are not being broken.