Actually, it's called Microsoft Word. If you don't turn it off, it converts every minus sign you press into a Unicode character. It's a nightmare when you're writing documentation and people try to copy and paste commands from your document and they all fail.

They can probably get around the criminal part by just creating a fictional person. It's only criminal if they steal a real persons identity. I doubt the cops care anything about civil law.

I think the judge's ruling simply makes it legal for the police to use the evidence created from the account during the prosecution. It has no binding over you to keep the account on your system if it violates your terms of service. If they want to request your help to keep the account active, they can ask you, but they shouldn't have any power to compel you to help.

I don't think anyone in North Korea owns DVD players to watch them. Probably not allowed to have them, or could be lack of any movies to rent due to censorship.

I always thought this might be a good solution for Google. The news clips they publish on the search page are technically adverts for the full article. Google should charge the news sites for that advertising which would include the cost that Google pays to the news site for copyright, plus a nice 5-10% or so to pay for the extra administrators Google would need to employ to manage it. A useless waste of time and money transfer, but that's the way their law demands it now.

If you go by your examples, it is Sony that should have systems in place to prevent their movies from being stolen, not the ISP. As the parent message said, the ISP is just like the roads the criminal may travel over to and from the bank. The city may be able to put up a few stop signs or traffic stops as needed, but ultimately, someone always finds another route around.

I think the simplest answer is that making clones is very costly, whereas it would be very cheap to just recruit regular people from the trillions of people across the empire. Training costs can be reduced as well if you simply have higher numbers of troopers to throw at problems. Hopefully 5 less-trained troopers can shoot as well as one expensively, well trained clone.

I got an idea from someone else's comment on a past news article. Netflix just needs to setup a Canadian Pet category and have all of us Canadian subscribers send in pet videos. They'd get thousands very quickly and throw that percentage far over the line. I don't think the law says it has to be professionally produced content. The biggest plus with this idea is that there would finally be something interesting to watch on Canadian Netflix! Our new releases page is still full of stuff from 2012 and earlier.

I can't speak for Apple, but Microsoft and IBM do have great documentation. The MSDN is extremely extensive in documenting every API they've released in C/C++/C#/VB/F#/OS/WMI/etc, and every release of those can still be looked up so you can see if an API has changed over time. They even provide code examples for most of the API calls so you can see how they are used. All of this is out there for everyone to use, for free. Microsoft understands that by giving out that information freely, it will help more developers write more applications for their platforms, and that is what helps them in the long run. Staffing a call center with knowledgeable support people does not make them money. There is a reason those calls cost so much.

I do remember the documentation for OS/2 that IBM had. It was also super useful, especially in a world before we had good internet sites and search engines. Every API again had descriptions, parameter explanations, code samples, references to related API's, etc.

There are some OSS projects that still try to be this good like GCC, Perl, Python, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache, but so many other projects just don't make the effort any more. You mention there is no profit in documentation, but like the free application itself, the profit should not expected to be in money. The profit to everyone is in actually building a user base around your application and If you are not willing to teach people how to use it, then why would you release it in the first place.

In general, if I cannot read about your application or library and how it works then I'm not going to waste my time with it, even if it is the best app in the world. As a user, I don't need to see docs on your code, but I should at least be provided with an installation and user's guide. As a developer, I would expect to see docs in the code so that I can see how things work so I can use existing functions properly and I can make new code fit in properly with the original design.

The patch to the man page should have been included with the patch to the code. If the developer is adding or changing a parameter for their application, the documentation update should be a requirement before the commit is accepted. If you're not going to tell the user how to use your new options, why bother creating them in the first place?

This is how I feel about all project documentation. If you aren't going to bother teaching the user how to use your app, then don't release the app at all. You're just wasting everyone's time. If you're lucky enough to have volunteers to write your docs for you, then give them the information they need up front to write them.

Instead of replacing the windows with screens, leave the windows and replace almost everything below them. All or a lot those controls on a plane could be put onto visual displays and have the cameras project the ground and surrounding area onto the areas between controls. This would be like a flight simulator on our PC's.

As long as you have some physical controls still available for wing level, altitude, speed, etc up above the windows, it should still be safe if the monitors go down.

I've watched all those Mayday episodes with airline crash analysis and one thing I've learned is that all power on a plane is usually provided by one engine. Lose that engine and your power goes out. They need to fix that and add a lot more redundancy before I'd ever trust them to replace a window.

Besides, anyone who has watched the end of ST2 TWOK can tell you why a big view screen is no match for a nice window. No nebula would have messed up a window's view!

no one is forcing Mozilla/Firefox to make this choice, except their own unscrupulous non-tech business people

I see this as Mozilla giving US the choice instead of making it for us. If they choose not to support DRM, then I have NO choice in watching DRM material with Firefox and I have to use another browser I dislike. By supporting a DRM plugin, "I" now get to choose whether to use it or not and if I choose not, then it doesn't affect my browsing experience at all.

Apple - two months ago with the misplaced goto statement. We certainly heard about it and it was fixed pretty quickly.