Exactly, do you even think for a second that this guy would be sitting in a federal prison if he had guessed your neighbor's Yahoo account security question?

This is very much a case of a commoner being dealt a disproportionally harsh punishment because the victim is part of the ruling class.

And Sarah Palin didn't even get a slap on the wrist for using her private email to shield government business from public scrutiny.

I remember September 2008, wasn't this the time wall street bankers nearly crashed the world economy? Anybody charged, convicted or sitting in a federal prison yet?

The system works.

So reality TV, Sarah Palin, American Idol and Fox News are all perfectly fine... but a guy playing Donkey Kong is the end of civilization?

Sure, video games are pointless time wasters, the opium of the people... as oppose to commenting on slashdot, which as we all know, is the last bastion of resistance preventing the downfall of the western world.

"Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted." -John Lennon

You don't understand, there are two kinds of copyright infringement.

The commercial one, in which benevolent publicly-traded corporations profit form the work of unpaid artists and the evil non-commercial kind, performed by individuals, which doesn't generate any profit at all.

The non commercial one is of course far more immoral and dangerous to society, and it should be punished to the full extent of the law (in this case $1,920,000 in statutory damages for sharing 24 songs).

Remember kids, when you download MP3s, you're downloading communism!

U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed... If you've got the money!

The megaphone part is exactly what is wrong with free speech in America right now. Go ahead and exercise your first amendment right in the woods (aka a “Free speech zone”), but good luck if you want to exercise that same right on any kind of mass media. Want to say anything on a national level that might upset a corporation? Not possible unless you’ve got the resource to outspend them.
In essence, freedom of expression now has a financial barrier of entry and this prevents significant critical discourse from ever reaching the broad public. This is how you manufacture consent, by keeping dissident voices out of the loop.

Money dictates the public and political discourse in America. The government isn't telling Americans what they can and can't say, corporations are. And the TV-Tropes case is a perfect example of that.

https everywhere is indeed a great extension, and everybody should be using it.

But some of the services that Firesheep target don't offer an https option *at all*. This is no rebuttal, it only proves Firesheep developer's point : these services have an unappropriate level of security.

The worst offender is probably Yahoo! Mail. They don't even offer https to their paying customers! For one of the leading webmail service this is utterly unacceptable. https for login is a fig leaf, the only thing this does is give users a false sense of security.

Go back and have sex with my grandmother when she was in her 20s so I can be my own grandfather!

I'd rather crash the stock market and start a revolution.

You know. Stir things up a bit.

Totally agree with you about keeping religion out of government and public life in general.

That being said, can we please not make this story about Islam?

This has nothing do to with Islam or cultural relativism and everything to do with Lybia being a totalitarian regime. Gaddafi is the local thug and dictator, but he is not an islamist by far. He's an arab nationalist, an ideology that is largely secular (very much like Saddam Hussein was), yet he has supported and backed terrorism several times in the past (Lockerbie Bombing). Please try to have a wider perspective, most of the dictators in power in Muslim countries don't give a shit about Islam, they are only looking out for themselves. They might use religion to try to legitimize their regimes or as a populist tool to fight their democratic opponents.

This is what happen we you do business with autocratic regimes that have no respect for the law or for basic human rights and liberties. The only real rule is the whim of the local leader/prince.

Switzerland learned the hard way, when Lybia kept two Swiss nationals hostage during several months as retaliation. This because the Swiss police arrested Gaddafi's son for beating his servants and treating them as slaves.

Bottom line: If you do chose to do business in authoritarian non-democratic countries, be prepared to pay the cost and lose it all at any point in time.

CookieCuller for Firefox does exactly that. You can white-list cookies for sites you trust and the rest of them are flushed every time you close your browser.

I stand corrected.

Je vous salue monsieur.

Less polls about cars

They just aren't allowed to say it out loud.

Don't fool yourself. Boards don't give a damn about CEOs and top managers sexually harassing employees (even if it wasn't the case here) and they couldn't care less about expense account abuses (record companies executives anyone? hookers and blow etc.) or about rampant corruption. They only care when any of it goes public, then heads have to roll (damage control and PR bullshit). This is what happened here.