Civil disobedience is flagrantly ignoring a law because it is unjust. If they ignore you, the sense of the law erodes. If they arrest you, you become a martyr. Either way you win. MegaUpload, The Pirate Bay, and all the positive things I mentioned earlier are civil disobedience.

Thanks for mentioning this. I'd even go further and emphasize that, in practicing civil disobedience, one should welcome arrest, or at the very least not go out of one's way to evade it. In the words of Thoreau, "under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

In my view, the MegaUpload case isn't even arguably civil disobedience. First, the accused maintain they did not violate any laws, unjust or otherwise. Second, assuming they did, and assuming they believe the laws are unjust, it's quite hard to maintain the moral high ground while also using massive financial gains from violating "unjust laws" to fuel incredibly extravagant lifestyles.

In contrast, The Pirate Bay is a reasonable example. It's overt purpose is to wantonly violate what it believes are unjust copyright laws and to deny media companies the revenue they use to preempt discussion of copyright reform, and its maintainers have used whatever proceeds and attention they have gained from running the site to fuel further political action, not a fleet of expensive cars.

And beyond that, anything that doesn't promote additional works should be unconstitutional. Taking dead authors' works out of the public domain doesn't encourage creation.

I agree. Alas "Commenters on Slashdot shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" is not yet the law of the land.

Seriously, though, the Supreme Court recently held that "[t]he Copyright Clause . . . empowers Congress to define the scope of the substantive right" (Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 [2003]).

In other words, the precedent appears to be that a law that secures authors' rights to creative works for a limited time isn't unconstitutional merely because the Supreme Court disagrees with a Congressional conclusion that the law will, in fact, promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

And I know quite a few, myself included, who are "geeky" but are too interested in other things to have either the time or inclination to hack on their phones. And many use iPhones, because they work very well for phone calls, text messaging, music playing, VoIP, email, navigation, games, light Web browsing, and the occasional ssh session.

I have nothing against Android â" though I've honestly never really been a big fan of any of Google's non-search services, mostly because I've never been big on Web apps where better non-Web apps exist â" but, now that Apple finally sells unlocked non-contract phones, my time is simply more enjoyably spent on things other than investigating alternatives to my phone, like, uh, reading and contributing to Slashdot arguments about why Android does and does not suck...

In other words, it's not only "non-geeks" who choose an iPhone "by default."

What IP? "rectangular with rounded corners" is no IP

This claim concerned a design patent, specifically granted for the "ornamental nonfunctional design" of an object. The prototypical example is the Coke bottle: there's no functional reason it has to be shaped like that.

Alas, there are rather good functional reasons for a tablet to be flat and rectangular with an aluminum body, rounded corners, and a black bezel.

On the other hand, it seemed to many observers inside and outside the courtroom that the Galaxy Tab was not only flat, rectangular, ..., but in fact designed to look like an iPad.

In my eyes, it's just a silly game, really, and most likely intentional on Samsung's part, a calculated risk that, at worst, might lead to iPad-related publicity for the Galaxy Tab, not so much because they're "shameless cloners," but simply because they're trying to sell stuff and the press likes to talk about the iPad.

Apple may be similarly silly, but this hardly arises to the level of "evil," if only because, in the grand scheme of life and death, we're talking about somewhat trivial aspects of somewhat trivial products, and marketing stunts that are mildly entertaining rather than either "soul-sucking" or invasive. Evil is the assholes who want to enjoin medical diagnoses derived from "protected knowledge."

Sure if it could join a segrated vlan that can't reach any corporate assets it would be safe enough; but then you'd moan it can't reach the intranet, the file servers, the network printers etc, etc, etc. And if all it can do is reach the internet... what do you need it for anyway? facebook, skype, msn messenger, and pokerstars.net? Leave that at home.

Presumably the developer asking the question could reach both work-related Internet resources (documentation, code, discussion forums, etc.) and IT-approved remote access points to the corporate network.

Moreover, this configuration can be made to work as well for interns, contract developers, part-time, and telecommuting employees as it does for full-time on-site developers, and the flexibility this provides can make setting it up an easy sell to upper management.

Furthermore, it paves the way for safely allowing "unescorted visitors" Wi-Fi Internet access, which stands to benefit everyone who regularly meets with non-employees face-to-face — yet another "easy sell" to the powers that be.

Finally, it can also serve as the prototypical first step in a broader plan to implement firewalls for the very security and compliance purposes IT departments claim to be planning for with "no unapproved device" policies.

Given that most filtering and monitoring isn't done on client devices in the first place, employees doing non-work-related things on "company time" is an orthogonal, and essentially non-technical, personnel management issue.

Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic

thus the ICRC should play the role of International Karma Police?

as first person shooters become more realistic, do game developers have an obligation to include humanitarian elements?

No. By this reasoning, the only reason a Goomba doesn't have "human rights" is that it doesn't look like a soldier.

They probably will. The whole reason for the failure is lack of IT funding, and campus admin is currently studying whether to choose Google or Microsoft for their outsourcing. Of course, this is slightly tricky since federal law doesn't allow emails containing student information (eg grades) on third-party servers

Then why report grades via email in the first place? Presumably some of the money saved could go towards implementing a Web front-end to the registration system, or to improving your current system to cover whatever use cases led to grades being emailed to students.

This is assuming communication between faculty and staff will remain either in-house or "seriously" outsourced (effective SLAs, NDAs that cover confidential information, etc., rather than best-effort "branded Gmail").

Oh, and electronic gradebooks are one thing, but please, please, PLEASE don't torture your students by implementing messaging embedded insome "courseware" system that amounts to a non-interoperable inbox for each course that uses the system on compliance grounds. Any email system that's inappropriate for day-to-day course communications is unsuitable for campus use in the first place, no?

Calling a government "stable" when they're creating an uncontrollably deadly super flu is a bit of a stretch. I don't think that any genuinely stable government would do this.

Because no stable government would want to respond rapidly and effectively against new flu viruses, saving lives? These researchers aren't hoping to obtain "superweapons." Could this research help those who are? Maybe so. But this is true of most any immunological research*. On the other hand, natural mutation of influenza viruses has in the past been a far more significant threat to human life than "weaponization," so the cost in lives lost due to overreaction to the risks of otherwise-useful research "falling into the wrong hands" could be quite significant. Hence the debate.

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."

* One need not stop there. Finite-element analysis could have been helpful in planning the 9/11 attacks. Should we similarly restrict research in applied mathematics, cluster computing, and 3D visualization?

Product ideas are like (name your favorite body part), everybody has one, or two.

True, but there's a huge difference between "1,000 songs in your pocket" and an iPod. Product ideas are not products. Unless, of course, you can sell the idea itself.

Most people who go into business focus on being able to execute the product/service better than the competition,

Citation needed.

FTA:

The other issue is the source code. In my opinion, since we taxpayers paid for the development of this piece of shit, we should at least be able to modify and redistrubute the code. Apparently though, the Government doesn't have to supply any information which it considers to be a "trade secret," and OSHA has determined that this crappy source code is somehow a privileged secret. This means that the company which wrote the application was allowed to object to the release of the source code, since the time limit on their objection time has since lapsed and OSHA hasn't sent the source code, I can only assume that they have filed such an objection, making this $200,000 worth of broken proprietary software which the public isn't even allowed to fix.

Or he could do a bit of fact-checking Fuck, the source is not only available on a OSHA's Web site, it's also available on site the article itself links to.

Looking at the iOS version, there is very little code, and essentially no graphic or custom UI design. According to the original iOS developer's blog, there were indeed a lot of change requests that "began to add up." In light of the public outcry, I'd feel bad for the guy even if he had made the full $56,000 for his work on the app, which he clearly didn't.

Finally, compared to the requirements churn I've personally experienced subcontracting on similarly "trivial" projects in the private sector, a "mere" $56K sounds like a good deal. Taking salaries into account, I've seen Fortune 500 companies easily drop $50,000 on what amounts to a two-page proposal for a project with similarly trivial scope.

So even if "government" is the problem, returning to the trees sounds like a more promising solution than "business."

Mayo on fries isn't bad, esp. with pepper â" but horseradish is even better. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Sriracha complements damn near anything. Also, there are few simple, nutrition-free pleasures better than potato chips with Frank's Red Hot.

Finally, it may sound a bit off, but Totino's Party Pizzas are outstanding for "experiments" â"Âtry, for instance, artichokes, Brie, a light sprinkling of sea salt, and just a hint of truffle oil. I'm not making this up â" actually, I did, but it's surprisingly good. As implied above, Sriracha is also quite good on pizza (though possibly not the one I just mentioned, but, hey, I haven't tried it, maybe?).

Can't stomach ketchup, though â"Ânever quite understood why, as I like pretty much anything else tomato-based, but even the smell of ketchup has always made me cringe.

As you say, to each his own.

Cheers,
Jason

I have one of the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros, so I can very easily get to the battery and hard drive. I loath the fact that they un-did this feature of the MBP in later models. Jerks!

The manual for my "early 2011" 17" MacBook Pro explains the (easy) procedure for replacing the RAM and hard drive (and theÂ"non-user-replaceable" battery is right next to the hard drive). Given that the "late 2011" MacBook Pros are just speed bumps, what you say no longer appears to be true (for the 17", at least).

If iOS applications were DRM-free, someone could fork GNUstep to make a binary-compatible operating environment in the tradition of Wine. The reason such an environment hasn't been built in the three years that the App Store has been running is because of the DRM.

"In the tradition of Wine," an appropriately "clean room" implementation would entail a massive amount of work, and "in the tradition of Wine," it'd most likely never be robust and current enough for anything but "useful special cases" in production.

Not to mention the fact that Apple's army of lawyers, unlike Microsoft's, aren't wearing antitrust shackles. Thus the project would almost certainly attract "undesirable attention" from Apple's lawyersÂonce it looked promising, demotivating the aforementioned "massive amount of work" required to reach that point.

Perhaps "DRM"Âwould become involved eventually, but, as it stands, app DRM really is designed to prevent casual piracy of App Store apps. Apple already lets you "format shift" apps onto every device you own that's capable of running the damn things, after all.

And if iOS apps were DRM-free, people wouldn't have to pay $600 plus $99 per year to run applications that a friend developed on a device that they bought.

Unless by "run" you mean "compile from source and run," I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from. Assuming the "friend" is a member of the paid developer program, there are several ways to do this for free.

Both good reasons why the answer to the headline question is "no".

In other words, "having already exchanged keys solves the key exchange problem." How Zen. As a follow-up, why not rid the world of all known diseases?