It different because if you don't like Walmart's policy you can go to Target or any other store.

And if you don't like the iBooks store, you can -- with the same Apple device even -- buy your books from Amazon's Kindle store, the Stanza stores, or a few others.

And if you don't like any of those choices, you can buy a different computing device altogether.

Contrary to what the Apple fanboys would have you believe, Apple is NOT the sole provider of useful things.

Well, maybe judges need to be sequestered away from society like juries if they're so easily influenced.

Juries are not always sequestered, and when they are, it's not because they are "easily influenced", it's generally to keep them from being exposed to coverage of the case that may supply information that's inadmissible -- it's hard to forget something once you know it.

Whether or not a jury is sequestered, it is still illegal to attempt to influence them, except through your evidence and arguments as presented in court. Just like trying to bribe a police officer is illegal, whether or not the officer takes the bribe.

Likewise, if you take action to try to improperly influence a judge, the judge has the authority to punish you.

It's not that a judge is easily influenced, it's that he cannot prove to the other party that he was not influenced.

+1 Clueful. Well done.

Right, but he obviously failed at the "untraceable" part in some way, and the post says that he was able to withdraw cash untraceably. Obviously, that part is not true.

Also, stop ruining my fun being pedantic. :)

I'm not a lawyer, blah, blah.

All the folks on here saying "wha? But he just asked people to e-mail support, that's not spam!" are entirely missing the point.

You are not allowed to approach the Judge, or ask anyone else to approach the Judge, outside of court and certain other specially-sanctioned venues. It's called ex parte , and is only appropriate in very specific circumstances, because - duh - that's likely to be unfair. That's the basis for the contempt charge.

Now, if it had been a friend or two that e-mailed the judge, he might have just warned them off with a "that's not appropriate." But when enough people e-mail to fill his Inbox, it's quite clearly an attempt to influence the judge, and that's not OK .

withdrew cash untraceably

Um, apparently not.

should a soldier disobey orders that in his opinion are inhuman? a military officer would probably say no.

You clearly don't know any military officers. None of the military folks I know feel an obligation to obey an order that's unlawful, much less dehumanizing. What they will explain is that sometimes you obey an order without thinking (that's how you're trained) -- and that it can be hard to blow the whistle after the fact.

And, of course, the military is a microcosm of humanity, and so it has its own share of bastards.

I don't believe for a second that they've had a sudden change of heart in the direction of equality and fairness. More likely, legal and PR informed the decision makers that they were about to be on the losing end of some pretty hefty legal action and bad press.

And you base this on what? Microsoft's historical poor treatment of the GLBT community? Oh, right, they're on the Human Rights Campaign's Best Places to Work list.

Just because Microsoft does some legally, socially, and ethically questionable things doesn't mean that everything they do is questionable. Given that MS has been a leader in supporting GLBT rights within their own workplace, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they just screwed this one up, and want to make it right.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

We can give "due consideration to the value of intellectual creations" without discriminating against open source. Maybe buy the developer a beer or send them a thank you note, or better yet, a bug report or patch?

More to the point, open-source licenses give higher value to intellectual creations, for two reasons:

1. Practically, because they rely on strong copyright to give them force - and violators of those copyrights and related license terms are aggressively pursued
2. Ideologically, because they demonstrate that the creators value the creative process so highly that they explicitly encourage others to create additional intellectual work, without forcing those others to do ridiculous amounts of re-work.

I've really been pleased with my media center setup; and my doddering mother-in-law has no difficulties with it either.

I use:

1. Elgato's EyeTV software, with an Elgato USB tuner card (supports ATSC, ClearQAM, so tunes HD cable channels and FTA HDTV). This gives me my DVR, which dumps ATSC video at full quality without even re-encoding (std. MPEG-2 stream)
2. FrontRow, which comes with the Mac, to watch DVDs and my media library, including music. Supports anything you can get a QuickTime plugin for (which is almost anything now, even Theora), and can browse media as files *or* in iTunes
3. Handbrake 0.94 (64bit) for ripping DVDs to media collection. Dealing with encrypted DVDs is made possible through VLC and Fairmount (more or less transparently - again, my mother-in-law does this).

Other than paying $600 for the Mac Mini itself, the only cost to this was the EyeTV tuner (which came with the DVR software). Very pleased with this, much better IMHO than my Media Center and MythTV experiences. I've also played with Boxee on OS X, which does everything pretty well, including netflix/hulu streaming. Very nice, though definitely still beta. At least they seem to be making better progress fixing bugs than the Myth folks.

"Are we alone?" is shorthand for "Is our species the sole intelligent life in the universe?"

We just need to stop being dicks to each other.

I entirely agree. We could start by not assuming that what some people are passionate about is wasteful just because we don't care. I personally think that the SETI money could be better spent elsewhere, but I don't think that the search is silly, or even that they're going about it in the wrong way. I don't even disagree that the question is important.

I'm just a "clean your own house first" kind of guy - I'd rather see us (humanity) work to solve the problems we have where we still kill each other in huge numbers, allow some to starve while others have a great deal of surplus, and generally mismanage the natural resources available to us.

Otherwise, what would we tell an intelligent species: "hi, we're humans; we can't even take care of ourselves"?

Family helps Family for free. It's called being related, not being retarded. I'm pretty sure your parents spent more raising your arrogant little behind than you could ever repay by doing the occasional reformat.

There's "helping", and then there's enabling. For example, I need to deal with a reformat/re-install about once a year for my mother. No biggy: she does pretty well, but just can't keep up with new threats, and simply isn't perfect. That's what family is for.

On the other hand, I refuse to help one of my cousins anymore, because he refused to follow my basic advice on being safe - he insists on using IE and Outlook Express, he disables his AV to "make installs go faster", he declines AV updates, he refuses to run without admin rights, etc.. If I keep bailing him out for free, I'm not helping anymore.

See, you can't eat your cake and still have it. If you really value me as family, you'll respect my skills and my advice, and you'll show it by trying to make it as unnecessary as possible for me to have to help you. If you refuse to do anything to make my life easier, you show that you don't respect my skills, so why should I waste them on you?

Analogies to the no-fly list are flawed: the no-fly list is a policy maintained by people. What's at issue here is an automated "behavioral detection" system. When "foolproof" systems make a lot of noise on prominent people, those systems are "put under review", which basically results in crippling them to the point of uselessness to the tune of millions of dollars (or GBP, in this case).

However, even if I accept your analogy, the Kennedy fiasco did start down the path of neutering the no-fly list to the point that it's nearly useless. It doesn't happen suddenly and publicly, it happens because no one involved wants to be the guy that put the next prominent person on the list.

Taxpayers end up footing the bill for dozens of pointless systems -- things that were of dubious efficacy when they were conceived, and which have since been neutered to the point of absurdity.

At some point, some government official will either be exposed to be pervert or some such, or will be wrongfully and horribly flagged as some sort of terrorist.

In fact, I'm willing to bet the European hacker community will take steps to ensure that such a thing happens. As soon as it does, there will be all sorts of running about to cripple the system to the point that it's inert, but oddly still very expensive.

"people can't be bothered targeting us" isn't the best security policy.

Not by itself, of course not. Note how I mention several other security advantages immediately after that. But you do realize that lowering desirability of target is a key component of risk management, right?

Look, risk is "likelihood times impact". You can't really affect impact in most cases, but you can nearly always impact likelihood. Strong passwords make it less likely that someone will breach your system. Separation of duties makes it less likely that a single legitimate user will be the source of a compromise. Choosing something that requires unusual skills to attack (like a mainframe) reduces the likelihood people will even try.

And, choosing to use something that isn't worthwhile to attack reduces the likelihood that an attacker will go after you instead of someone else.

The only caveat is that, like any security decision, it can't stand on its own. You still need to practice defense in depth, you still need other security controls in place.