If this ever comes about, it would being about the hobbling of LiveJournal. Sure, its servers are in the States, but its management is in Moscow, and (if the Russian State does sever its connection to the Internet) unable to reach them.

Trusting in Oracle (or any other company of that kind) is your first mistake. When you realize that mistake, you sue Oracle. Well and good. Now you want to salvage the mess that Oracle made, and you need their help? That is even more foolish. Why should Oracle help you now? Just give it up already, swallow the cost (and the pride) you already paid, and go on the Federal site.

Why should one not be cynical? The human race has never given cause for one to be otherwise. Besides, cynicism is not necessarily related to hostility or anger, which makes the Cook-Medley test nonsensical.

Unless, of course, that the study calls 'cynicism' is not cynicism at all.

Facebook ... says creator Matt Kruze must remove them if he doesn't want to be banned from Facebook.

The threat appears to have been carried out. Kruze's Facebook page is made 'unavailable'.

Found the broken-square symbol and tried it. Now the beta looks much better.

There is way too much visual noise. The images (and I mean images, not icons) are unnecessary and distracting. I would suggest you remove them and find some way to do without them.

That is a misunderstanding.

Let me shift the bulletin down: The only reason ham radio is allowed to operate anywhere in the world is because the governments of the world (including ours) do not regard it as a threat to them. Encryption is a threat as far as governments are concerned; and legal limitations (or their lack) in this country don't matter, since ham radio is global. If you add encryption to ham radio, then ham radio becomes a threat to governments, too. Then ham radio will become largely banned or restricted, and its enjoyment elsewhere will drop to the point where it is no longer viable as a hobby.

This proposal, requested by a relatively narrow sector of society (hospitals) out of fear of litigation, if it every becomes allowed, will turn and bite hospitals in the collective butt when they face a shrinking pool of licensed radio operators. Any remaining ham radio operators will use ham radio at work, where the employer assumes the legal risk. Otherwise, why bother, when encryption makes ham radio too much trouble.

Let assume that the bill passes both houses of Illinois' legislature. The governor might see it for the nonsense it is, and veto it. Even if he signs the bill (or his veto is overridden), the law will be challenged in court almost immediately. It is likely it will be struck down on constitutional grounds, and will almost certainly not be enacted in the meantime.

Just to make things more interesting, the proposer of this bill is also proposing another bill to make gun ownership anonymous.

Okay, on reflection maybe I should not have used the adverb 'physically'. But I did have to remove the Kaspersky folder from the Program Files. Otherwise the install program would crash while reinstalling the software.

This is not Kaspersky's only problem with its anti-virus product. I have been asked to install a 'technical update'. When I did so, it crashed the anti-virus so badly that it no longer worked at all. I had to physically remove its folder from the Program Files area and reinstall the program from scratch. And this was with Windows 7. That was back in November. When I got the same message in January, I thought Kaspersky might have fixed the problem. Nope: Install -- crash -- scrape up mess -- reinstall from scratch. You kind of wonder what has Kaspersky been doing over the past six months.

I would like to preserve and safeguard my books, but we are talking wood pulp fiber that starts to rot the minute the book is printed. I have books from the turn of the last century, whose pages are so brown that it is hard to read the text. Yes, the shift from cotton rag to wood pulp may have made books cheaper and thus more available; but trying to preserve rotting books makes up for the cheap price. Oh, and electricity and optical/magnetic media are even more ephemeral.

Who's having a hard time filling mission-critical IT positions? Perhaps the kind of companies that will not hire anyone over thirty? Perhaps the kind of companies that think that IT workers ought to be treated like part assemblers, warehouse order fillers or hamburger flippers — cheap and expendable? This is coming from the same kind of arrogant managers and executives who have been whining about programmers, developers, and IT staff for decades. Why do we keep bringing this crap up over and over again? Why don't we just tell those losers to just shut up?