As of 2:53pm Central time, this post has approximately 750 comments. I think you have your answer right there.

I have no sympathy for Julian Assange, should he somehow face prosecution for these leaks. For the longest time, I knew of WikiLeaks, but had never heard of Assange. Until more recent times, WikiLeaks' message was clear: We are simply to conduit for others to leak documents. I saw them much like a P2P network - people may use the service, but ultimate responsibility lies with the user.

I now feel different. With the Iraq and Afganistan leaks, as well as this one, it is clear to me Assange has fallen in love with his own legend. At least in spirit, WikiLeaks appears to have gotten into the promotion business and crafting a "public image" (and I believe have decided to push an agenda, but I understand that's a contentious point). Had Assange not decided to at the very least not become a celebrity (if not pushing an agenda), I firmly believe the media and government official would be more focused on the source of the link as opposed to being focused on WikiLeaks and Assange.

Assange himself has contributed to painting the target on his own back.

I imagine that companies are not buying this data for information on their own stores (Wal-Mart, for example, can see every transaction at every store in real time), but rather on their competitors' stores. Any large retailer can process their own sales information a million different was in very short order. But getting intel on your competitors can be very valuable. For example, Wal-Mart can use these images to say "at 5am, the average store had 1 car in the parking lot for every 10 square feet of retail space. Target had 1 car for every 14 feet of retail space (also determined by the images)". This could give Wal-Mart a rough sense of their performance versus competitors well in advance of the Q4 earnings release, for instance.

"See the BEAR of fearsome size, all the world's within his eyes..."

Right. This sounds like blackmail. At least, by calling it a "fine" some folks may unwittingly think it's somehow "official" and it's what they legally owe.

Because I know /. has significant international readership, I'd like to point out that we don't say "New Meh-DRID", like the city in Spain; but "New MAH-drid" (rhymes with "Eldred").

Also, I live in St. Louis and was 9 years old when Irving Browning predicted, to the day, when the fault go off. In the paranoia, some students practiced earthquake safety (crouching under your desk).

As American who has spent a few months in the UK outside of London... there are few-to-none serious obese folks in the UK. I can walk around the Wal-Mart 5 minutes from my house, and it's like an Obese Safari. However, I also noticed fewer particularly lean folks over there. My gut (no pun intended) tells me the distribution of weight for Americans has much fatter tails (again, no pun intended). While I didn't see obesity in the UK, I did believe I saw more folks who just a bit "not in shape" as I do here.

I know I enjoyed Nate's blog immensely during the 2008 election. Very good analysis. What I liked most about it, however, was it's *independence*. It placed the science of polling ahead of an agenda. I felt like, here's one place in our society where we can take a detached look at elections, and view it as the "sport" it really is (Nate's experience first came in sabermetrics).

Since the 08 election (and the healthcare debate in particular), Nate's abandoned much of his independence. I stopped reading a while ago because of it. While this doesn't mean his conclusions in the Times article are wrong, but I now view them with a certain skepticism that wasn't there before. I guess taking an independent and impartial view towards politics is just not interesting (or profitable?) for most folks.

Researcher #1: What's that in sector 2E?

Researcher #2: I don't know... it couldn't be...

Researcher #1: Isolate it. Now zoom in.

Researcher #2: It looks like a human, but I can't tell

Researcher #1: Clean it up. Now, you can clearly see the person in this photo is wearing a Rolex. Just like our suspect.

"I am shocked - SHOCKED - to find out private information is being used by developers" - Mark Zuckerberg

I think curse words are valuable, when used properly. Since they are curse words, they can carry a tremendous amount of weight. I curse very infrequently (maybe a few times a year) on purpose: if you hear me swearing, you know I am trying to convey an *intense* emotion. The people who know me know that if I use a curse word, something serious is going on. When you have everyone cursing every three seconds, yeah, it's meaningless.

Just one step closer to creating Blaine the Mono.

Jack must've forgotten to enter the code...

Right. Just elaborating further.... People generally kinda like other people. Assuming most of the employees are not asshats, friendships just form naturally. I was laid off from my firm of 5+ years last spring, and I still hang out a few times a week with friends from there. This works well across departments, too (I was in finance, my aforementioned friends are programmers and customer service reps). I think the best you can do is create an environment friendly to "banter" (i.e. not having a strict 30 min. rule for lunch, allowing some chit-chat in the cubes). This will go 100x further than a company-sponsored activity (which has a good chance of coming off as "corporate" anyway).

One thing that will alienate employees... management no longer "hanging out" with the peons. My former firm grew in almost the exact same way as yours. When we had 40 people, the partners would invite me and others to baseball games, would stop by my office to say hi, etc. At some point (probably 80-90 employees), they just said "screw it" and stayed in their offices all day and kept to each other. THAT pissed off people more than anything.