Indeed. The Chinese authorities should have shaved the pigeon's heads, like the Romans did (important messages were tattooed on a slave's head, and a week or so later it was overgrown enough to send him on his way).

Does that mean they will finally support the X protocol? Maybe even over SSH?

Does it reboot to Linux if you use your middle finger?

No need to pin. After some net searching, you can find how to add a launch bar to win7 as well. Many disabled features can be re-enabled on win7, but it takes a hell of a long time to find and do it.

No, but dollars don't say anything. Weight or volume or things like "enough to ensure world peace by getting each soldier world-wide high for 20 years" are more descriptive.

The price is only so high because these drugs are illegal. I can't see the page (slashdotted?), but chances are that these drugs would not even be worthwhile to sell if the price was not driven up by making them illegal.

There, fixed that for you. You don't have to be a subscriber to be stalked by Google. There's no consent. Google is the major company that made internet browsing without adblockers downright impossible.

See his blog post on the War on General Computing. (warning: video lasts more than five minutes, but it is worth seeing.)

Just another "build me a device that can do anything, except for (<insert feature here>)" action.

If you take your company to the vultures of Wall Street, you find that you have created an extra problem.

"Global warming" quickly got replaced with "Global weirding". Not all places on the world heat up, but the extremes get a lot more extreme, so some parts have now droughts for years, other places get flooded, permafrost areas thaw, etc.

IT would probably be easier, bot not exactly easy. Off course, terrorists could "cook up a weapon" as they need it, and if they can use suicidal people to do that for them, they have a severe advantage to military forces. Making such weapons is hard, but storing them is also quite hard. So if you use someone else to make it for you, these weapons are useless unless you use them immediately.

If figures. When I swear it usually shows my true feelings of that moment. And when I would find such a disrespect of human rights and the constitution, I would swear as hell.

Oh we already have enough random data in the pipe: facebook, twitter and youtube.

In pieces. The database or whatever storage is used could be a good starting point to abstract. See How to Ride a Dinosaur.

I would not replace it with something new, but migrate it to something maintainable.

you know the mantra:

• If it ain't broke, maintain it
• If it's broke, either repair it or discard it
• If it's beyond maintenance, it's definitely broke

The fact that it is a core business system does not provide an excuse, it makes it even worse.