A police chief who wants to use the law to shut up those who criticize him. If this doesn't ring "police-state" alarm bells then I don't know what will. This chief should go.

Build-in a kill switch for when your spyware hits the wrong machines.

Following through after 'outing' seems a non-solution; you could still start cases you know you have a small (if any) chance of winning to 'out' someone.

My initial reaction actually was people cannot and should not expect anonymity on the internet, unless extreme measures are taken which often still do not guarantee anonymity 100%. Furthermore, it is not something people should want; if crimes are committed via internet or with assistance of it, then through proper procedures law-enforcement should be able to track culprits.

This however was not the case here, and so far I can see the only 'solution' would be to keep the identity of the accused anonymous during the trial and make it known only after a guilty verdict. This won't work, however, since often the daily life of the accused is relevant to the court proceedings; the accusing party has a right to be able to research what more the accused has been up to.
Perhaps an anonymous trial is only feasible for a small subset of charges. Don't see it happening though, this is probably just a necessary evil.

On a sidenote, if the charges are too ridiculous, any court would just dismiss the charges entirely without anyone being drawn out.

That was my first thought too. In that light, can (couldn't) they still appeal, perhaps at an international court?

Best standard to date, no?

Two dual GPUs in SLI/Crossfire? Maybe?

Not only MapReduce; the global description of the patent (input, partition, repartition, output) seems just to be a prehistoric version of partitioners like MeTiS, parkway, Mondriaan, Zoltan, etc. Prior art in abondance.

Agree, but perhaps keeping track of user-accepted plugins in a (weakly) encoded file, would make bypassing an illegal act?

Is Microsoft 'correct' in downplaying, in the sense that the particular vulnerable configuration mentioned is not used by many?

The alternative of answering those questions truthfully and thus keeping this facility useless, would render password-protected access useless; pick your poison.

I'm really going through some trouble trying *not* to quote FPS Doug here...

They aren't afraid. That's why if they encounter some new observation, they update theories to allow for those observations. If this is not reasonably possible, the theory goes down the toilet. In other words: theories, including string theory, are indeed based off of our observations, and not the other way around.

That was Larry, not Lenny!