No it doesn't. This is just saying that most planets don't have solar systems, which in no way indicates that most solar systems don't have planets. The numbers given here put the ratio of planets to stars in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 1, so even if 0.1% of planets have homes within a solar system, that means an average solar system has about 10 planets.

Yes, there's some variety, with binary or trinary star systems and huge variance in the masses of the central star being common ones, but from a planetary point of view, our Solar System is a rarity.

Just because most planets belong to a solar system doesn't mean that most solar systems don't have planets. That it is atypical for a planet to orbit a star in no way indicates that it is atypical for a star to have orbiting planets.

If they don't attempt to sue, then their legal department must have found, the law does not apply, contrary to what (some of) Slashdot thinks.

Or, it's not worthwhile for them to bring a lawsuit. Discretion can be exercised for reasons other than not having the law on your side. That's a lot of how the patent troll racket works. Even if you could fight the troll and win, it is often not in your direct financial best interest to do so.

I'm pretty damn sure that this violates the CFAA in about a dozen different ways, and everything involving electronic communications is wire fraud. Given the standards set for Gary McKinnon, this would also probably constitute some form of property damage.

It's virtually impossible to not break the law in your everyday life, and this was an act of deception that distributed malware.

A sane risk/reward analysis would say that this risk is acceptable because there's no real chance of this happening.

Everything beyond a mild chuckle was an overreaction.

If it was reported, and did nothing, then it gets out that authorities didn't investigate a possible threat and are inept.

Unless they stuck to their guns and pointed out, like most of the posters here likely will, that it's incredibly stupid to ground a plane over a joke SSID.

How about they fine the idiot that reported a Wifi network as a terrorist threat instead?

I think the biggest problem is that we want bad foods and good foods, when biology doesn't work that way (with a few exceptions for outright toxic food). What is best for you is dependent upon the rest of your diet. So, if you eat ten pounds of rice to satisfy the hunger you get from not having three strips of bacon for breakfast, you end up worse than you would if you had just ate the bacon in the first place. We are seeing a bit of a flip side to this now with the anti-carbs fad diets, and people just load themselves up with fatty foods.

Where are we getting killing all insects from, and why was that concern not brought up when we just use pesticides? I think we are actually a great deal closer to having resistant pests than no insects.

fair enough points. but it all boils down to choice.

Except for the fact that MS effectively killed all reasonable choice. I would argue that Apple was a bit of a co-conspirator in this matter, as they priced themselves out of being a legitimate mainstream competitor while taking the public's eye as the most visible choice that wasn't MS and actually contributed to the IE lock-in. You are not realizing the impracticality of other choices because of MS's actions.

If anything one could argue the exact opposite, due to M$ policy, it caused others to get outraged and make competing products better.

Except that healthy competition does a way better job of that than fighting a powerful. The iron grip of IE was a small dark age in regards to browser advancements. The rapid growth we've seen as of late is the result of having a number of competing browsers trying to outdo one another.

I mean they could just not exist at all, and we wouldnt have a lot of what we do have today. you can make the same complains against any big company, ma bell, the railroads, electricity. while it may not be perfect, its STILL orders of magnitude better than the previous generation

You are assuming that if they hadn't exist, nobody else would have fulfilled the same niche. That is only true on accidental inventions. Had Alexander Graham Bell been struck by lightning on the way to patent office, we would've had Elisha Gray to take his spot the same day, and probably at least a half dozen others within a year or two.

I didn't say it affected you directly, which is why it's easy to hide the costs. Here's an example. Because MS controlled the browser market, HTML standard adoption languished, and web developers had to support IE6 much longer than we would in an actual competitive market. The amount of extra time spent for that is enormous (and in many cases, supporting IE would take about as much time as supporting all other browsers combined). They've also added on costs with bullshit patent lawsuits that have added more than the cost of the Windows Phone OS to most Android manufacturers. In addition to being low quality patents, a lot of them are only needed because MS doesn't support filesystems they didn't create. So, if you want a phone to conveniently work as a flash drive on any machine you plug it into, you have to use Fat32 or NTFS. There are plenty of perfectly good filesystems that would be fine if MS would support anything that they didn't create. NIH syndrome is one of the biggest issues of MS asserting their dominance.

If Ballmer is morally opposed to that stuff, he has more effective tools than avoiding paying taxes through the legal avenues available to him.

What is this 'middle class' you are talking about? I think I might have heard legends of a middle class existing, but at this point, they are pretty much a fantasy.

I wasn't even discussing the specifics of this case here, just dispelling the 'hate the player, not the game' meme because it's utterly idiotic, and you can put blame on both the government and individuals.

I think he means Mickey in Fantasia, particularly "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."