Most of the problems you raise are pretty trivially solved by remembering that it's the government talking about this. AT&T tries to keep your identity to impersonate you? The government can lock AT&T out of the system, or fine the crap out of them, or whatever sanction they want. This actually reminds me somewhat of the records provisions of HIPAA, which are actually pretty good about making sure records are used properly and are given to the people who are supposed to have them (too bad they're all a bunch of incoherent sheafs of paper).

Of course, these burdens have other names, like "costs of doing business properly" and "helping to contain liability."

'Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent.'

If only someone would create an online service which allowed you to buy music! What kind of twisted mockery of a universe do we live in that has kept this from happening?

Why must the universe mock us so?! WHY?!

(For reference, it is raining behind me, and I am wet. The two are not related.)

Yesterday I needed to boot into windows (the D&DI Character Generator doesn't work in wine, as far as I can tell), and I was greeted after boot with a lovely screen telling me that the system was broken and in need of repair. So my two options were restore from backup or repair. I had no backup, so I went to repair, and under "select drive," there was no system install. Windows had apparently uninstalled itself.

I'm still trying to sort out what happened.

First, he absolutely hijacked it. It doesn't matter that he was the only admin and nobody else "needed" (even allowing this rather hefty value judgment) access. It was their system. He built it for them. They got rid of him, and he decided that he wasn't going to let them have a thing that was theirs by right. If this was a corporation, he'd be sued six ways to sunday. Since it's the government, they're talking about jail.

Your point about exiting angrily and recommendations is completely irrelevant. Exiting gracefully -- handing over access -- would have 100% avoided the situation he is now in. How anyone thinks he is the good guy in this situation is beyond me, but I guess it's just nerd bias.

"They will return Tuesday to start their deliberations. Childs faces five years in prison if he is convicted for disrupting service to the city's computer system by withholding administrative passwords — a verdict that, if rendered, puts all IT admins in danger."

This is true, this puts all IT admins who exit their job angrily, hijack the system and lock everyone else out in danger.

I mean, who hasn't been there, right? I mean, one could just leave the job gracefully but something something something freedom.

"ruling from the New Jersey Supreme Court ... is likely to set precedent for other workplace privacy cases around the country."

No, it's likely (100% likely, in fact!) to set precedent for other workplace privacy cases in New Jersey. For the rest of the country, it sets nothing, even if it might be useful for other courts dealing with similar problems.

Unless, of course, poster is just being ridiculous optimistic and think that the logic of this ruling is so impressive that all other judges will simply bow in awe and follow it. To which the only response is: d'awwwwww.

Why should devs adopt DX11? Because the last iteration of DX lasted about a year and a half before being ditched and extended/redone? Because the majority of the market doesn't have DX11 cards? Because there's no clear advantage in developing to DX11 rather than DX9c?

Why should developers shift from something they know to something that they don't know as well unless there was significant profit motive to do so? There simply isn't in this case.

"InfoWorld's Galen Gruman sifts through the 'doubleplus ungood' of this year's CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out 'Big Brother' mobile carriers' true designs for IT and smartphone users."

This sentence does a good job of informing the reader that article in question is an insightful and objective look at new mobile telecom strategies.

I wish I had mod points for this post. Too many on slashdot rage against the system without actually knowing the first thing about it, just vaguely that there are patents and they describe things in some fashion and they are bad.