I don't see how it devalues the media. If everyone on Earth has free use of a particular song, that song is likely worth more given that it's so well known. It would be useful in movies as a background song in the same way that Turn Turn Turn is used because everyone knows it and knows what they're supposed to feel when it is played. It can be played by bar bands. It can be used in mix tapes. The original singers could perform the song and sell more concert tickets. The economy would likely improve due to increased usage of the song.

If everyone on earth has an extra dollar, each of those dollars has less purchasing power than before. The economy would get worse as a result.

In short, a copyright term of 2 years for songs would probably result in a much larger positive economic impact, while allowing the copying of money after any period of time would always cause a negative economic impact.

Apple looks at markets that have crappy products and makes good ones. Anyone who comes in after Apple will have to show that their product is not just a me too product. Google was able to do this with Android by filling various niches with a high quality product which the iPhone wasn't addressing. Then they moved into direct competition by releasing high end phones that compete directly. It didn't hurt that Google still has a respected name.

Microsoft didn't do that. They released a high end product which competed directly with the iPod but which didn't really look as good (to most people) and came with the baggage of the Microsoft name (the name is either neutral or negative. I don't know anyone who considers it a positive.). That was the first impression and they never did anything with the Zune that was big enough to warrant second looks from most people.

There will always be people who defend any product, but the fact is that Microsoft is just no good at designing flashy products. Heck, they're not even good at making good me too products. It took years before Windows had a GUI that was as good as the Mac. Steve Jobs was angry at Google because Google has people who can look at a good product and do it just as well or better. He wasn't angry at Microsoft at that point because the people there are good but not great. He always said they put no soul in their products.

If someone has impulses that they want to repress, that person will assume that everyone else has the same impulses. Normal people aren't worried about those things because they don't have the impulses and assume (probably rightly) that most people don't have those impulses.

Anyone who strongly wants to control other people is someone whose personal behavior should be watched very very carefully.

Never allow your children to be near anyone who walks around proclaiming that the world is full of child rapists.

Bullshit. I need to pay for health insurance to prevent life destroying medical costs in the event of an accident. It's insane that the same should be needed for phone bills. Is it really rational that I should need to buy Excessive Phone Bill Insurance to prevent a crippling bill for accidental overages on the phone? The phone company could quite easily just cut you off if your bill goes over some limit that you can select yourself. Instead they play it dumb and then try to collect insane fees and then get to act all generous if they decide not to sue you for an eleventy billion $ call.

Then why did they fire you?

How was it screwed up before the TSA? I wasn't a fan of airport security at the time, but once they instituted the TSA approved cancer porno groping system I now have to have a give and take discussion with my family every 6 months to find out which of us is going to be forced to go through that stuff in order to visit. My dad actually pays me money so that I do the flying instead of him. If I could avoid flying entirely I would do it in a heartbeat, but the various members of my family are spread hither and yon.

I wish someone would set up a separate flying system where plane tickets were 50% higher, but none of the TSA sexual cancer stuff goes on. I'd take that path anytime.

Tim Cook is 50 years old. He's only 6 years younger than Steve Jobs. I don't think age is the thing here.

It's my understanding that the energy required to put something into orbit is much higher than the energy required to just reach a certain location in space. Rather than orbiting anything why not just slowly pulse it over to the moon and land it there? Launch several rockets full of fuel and attach them to the station's boosters and run them very slowly over the course of 10 years (or whatever) and get the thing onto the moon.

It's so expensive to get things out of the atmosphere that it seems crazy to deorbit anything once we get it there. Toss it over to the moon so that once we get there one day we can make use of it.

Define "frequently". It's my understanding that adoption is incredibly expensive and actually adopting a newborn baby is very difficult to do. People who don't have $30k to burn may well turn to this avenue with nothing but good intentions. I would be astounded if more than a tiny percentage of baby buyers were intending anything other than raising a child that they couldn't have themselves.

If that was their goal they could have done their thing in a harmless way just to prove it could be done. Stealing info and publishing it to the world (without a white hat political goal like exposing corruption to back it up) is just throwing gas on the flames for fun.

In any case, what were the DDoS attacks supposed to prove? You can have perfect security on a site, but that doesn't help prevent DDoS attacks against it. They didn't do it for white hat reasons. They did it because they are jerks.

Any positive effects of their attacks are secondary to their primary goal of being dicks.

Simple code reviews can find SQL injections quite easily. Just search for the method names for executing queries then make sure that there are NEVER string concatenations which include user input.

It's all really quite simple. Use parameters for every query and you'll never have a problem with SQL injection unless the DB library itself has a hole (much less likely than the possibility that your home grown validation code has a hole in it).

Where I work I do this regularly. Every now and then I find crap like "foo="+ someParam in the code. When I do I call them on it loudly and publicly (in a reasonably nice way). I make sure all the developers in my group hear my criticisms. It's the only way to staunch this sort of dangerous behavior.

I don't care if you think you've validated it. I'm not going to waste time triple checking every place that parameter is used. It's very simple to just use parameters and be almost 100% safe from SQL injection.

I know that the IRS has strange rules these days for stock options, but is there really a rule that you have to pay for UN-exercised stock options that you have been granted? I know that exercising your options and then holding them is incredibly dangerous, but it sounds like you didn't even have the option of exercising them.

If you never exercised them is it possible for you to get your money back from the IRS now that you've sold them for much less than the taxes you paid?

If they were going to sell Oracle again they'd need to make it public domain (or something similar) to prevent the next buyer from taking control of it again. I suppose an alternative would be to buy Oracle, sell Java to Google for $1, then sell Oracle.

You had me until you talked about the broken window fallacy as if it is somehow wrong. In your example you are 1 coin poorer and all you got was the status quo before the window was broken. The glassier is now one beer richer, but the time they spent on that window could have been spent making a new window for a new house. If you had simply paid for a beer the economy would be 3 coins plus whatever the glassier got for making someone else's window. The final result is better than your original example because you got to have a beer and everyone else got the same thing.

The broken window fallacy shows that the system is not really improved even if some numbers are higher than they otherwise would have been.

When I read something like "confirms Einstein's theory" AGAIN I just get annoyed. In my opinion, the mission would only be a success if it found a flaw in Einstein's theories. Those theories are many decades old and I'm hungry for some totally new physics.

I get so disappointed when I hear that the Pioneer mystery (or whichever one was curving unexpectedly) is solved using perfectly well known physics. Where are the new unknown rules that we can use to create new breakthrough technologies?