What you really want is:

"This person agreed to pay you $1 to receive this message. Do you wish to:

1.) Make them pay, and report this message as spam.
2.) Make them pay, and ignore the message.
3.) Make them pay, and respond to the message.
4.) Not make them pay, but ignore the message.
5.) Not make them pay, and respond to the message."

Options 3 and 4 would probably be optional, but would still be useful. If the message is simply ignored, I'm not sure if #2 or #4 should be the default. I can see arguments for each.

The idea is that if the message is legitimate, the receiver will probably NOT make the sender pay. However, real spammers will be paying every time.

I saw this yesterday, and was shocked. This is effectively stealing all users' photos that have been uploaded thus far, and a pretty sleazy thing to do even for new users. If I was an instagram user, my first action after seeing this would be to delete my account. There is almost nothing instagram could offer me that would be worth giving them this kind of free control over all of my photos.

The privacy implications for photos containing people is even more staggering. I doubt most people on instagram have current model releases for their photographs, so using these commercially could get any number of people sued, but based on the instagram policy, it very well could be the user who took them initially, then "gave instagram permission to use them commercially."

I would expect this policy to change, but if it doesn't by January 5 or so, I would suggest all instagram users delete their accounts. Also, if it doesn't change by then, watch out for Facebook's terms to change to something similar.

I've thought about it, and I think Windows RT and the restrictions are all about Office, and really nothing else.

Microsoft sees OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice taking market share from the real linchpin of the Windows monopoly, Office. The reason is simply that it's cheaper. So, they find a way to preserve their Office monopoly by making a version of Windows that will only run Office. In order to compete with a regular PC with OpenOffice.org, they make the hardware cheaper, thus squeezing the hardware margins, but leaving their software margins largely intact. Now the consumer can get a machine that does everything they really want (Office and Internet) for cheap, and it supports Microsoft Office formats "perfectly." Because of API restrictions, users can't get OpenOffice.org to run on these new, cheap computers even if they wanted to. (Not that they would want to, as "real" Microsoft Office is included "for free.")

Windows RT is about monopoly maintenance for the Office monopoly, plain and simple.

What this smells like to me is a re-trying of Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale Corp., probably where justice Kagan will not recuse herself.

At issue in the earlier case was whether or not Costco had the right to IMPORT the watches, NOT whether or not he had the right to sell them. If a similar decision occurs here, the lack of first sale doctrine would prevent Kirtsaeng from importing the items in the first place, not so much from reselling them. It most certainly would NOT prevent FIRST SALE from applying to items that you purchased in the US, even if made elsewhere, as those items would presumably have been imported legally.

My guess is that if Kagan is the deciding vote on this one, it will go better for consumers, but only time will tell.

Believe me, I noticed that part about if a doctor prescribes it. I considered those weasel words to be further evidence that he was making this decision based purely on political grounds, and using doctors as political cover.

Your descriptions of UK politics make a lot of sense, and considering the reverence for NHS, I can totally see why a politician would take the stance he did even if not playing to those who have strong support of homeopathic medicine. He could also be playing to the "politicians should stay out of medical decisions" crowd.

Scumbags can be bought, for instance by the pharmaceutical companies who don't want "alternative medicine" to be competing with them. It's principled idiots who cannot be influenced.

The trick is aligning yourself with someone the politician will listen to, and letting them do the talking.

If you read Jeremy Hunt's response letter, what he actually says is that some PATIENTS want and/or believe in homeopathic medicine, so we should let them have it. Basically he's saying that the NHS should agree to pay for any treatment that the general populous wants, since it is a "patient-focused" organization. This argument is also significantly easier to defend if it's a treatment that they are already paying for, and it sounds like they are.

In short, Jeremy Hunt is a politician. He made a calculated determination that people who like homeopathic treatments are more likely to be supportive of him due to this decision than others are to be against him for deciding the other way. I can see why, since most scientists will think of him as a "typical stupid politician" (not much of an insult for an actual politician) while most homeopathic believers will see him as a "defender of their cause."

2 is absolutely first. The question was intentionally misleading.

As to 1 or 3, I think your description of 3 misrepresents the truth. If the person being asked didn't understand that the question was meant to make them look stupid, they might have thought: "Gee, one of the problems of cloud computing is that I don't control the actual datacenter, it's nowhere near my users, and I don't control the level of redundancy. This makes it more susceptible to certain weather-related problems than if my datacenter is in-house. Thus, I could honestly answer that weather-related problems can be one of the disadvantages to cloud computing."

My guess is that about 25% of people who know what cloud computing is would answer that it's affected by the weather, and about 25% who don't would guess that it doesn't have anything to do with the weather. Since about 50% know what cloud computing is, about 50% answered the weather question "yes."

This is dead on. Apple has so much of their money tied up in two product lines that if revenue for those ever tanks, they will take the company with them.

Apple makes great stuff, but their business model of being the premium brand breaks down when they have 60% or more of the market, because the general consumer is fickle. A significant portion of their customers will eventually drop those product lines for good-enough lower priced competitors.

Android is a viable long-term business strategy for Google because they are making money on the ecosystem and actively encouraging competition between the mobile phone makers. Apple's business strategy would be solid if they had 10% of the phone market, but with 60% and so little diversity I don't know how they can cope with changes in consumer preference.

Based on a reading of the design parts of the Apple complaint, here is my take:

1.) A significant part of this most definitely IS about rounded corners, but it isn't only about rounded corners.
2.) I am unconvinced by most of the hardware arguments.
3.) The various software arguments are far more damning.
4.) The "Springboard" is by far the most interesting software item, but I wonder about prior art. I've seen similar behavior in, for instance, CDE virtual desktops.
5.) Some of the icons do look a bit slavishly copied, especially in the colors. Others, I think Apple is fishing. If I were Samsung, I think I would have been more careful in my choices.
6.) I also find the packaging arguments to be damning, though I would not award a significant amount of damages based on it. I think there is real "design innovation" (blech!) there.

Might you be hinting at the fact that the three-body problem is generally not integrable, and thus calculus does not provide a complete answer?

"I hate fire ants, and you should too."

There, both expressed and advocated hatred in a sentence that most would find perfectly acceptable, unless hatred is defined to mean something more specific in the definitions part of the document.

Also, while I find bigotry distasteful, I believe that it should not be restricted from social networks, except when used to do something more than express an opinion, such as to incite violence. In general, I support your right to look like a fool in front of as many people as you choose to. I guess the reason for that rule is that now they don't have to argue about whether or not your bigotry incites violence, just whether or not your support for Manchester United does. :-)

Well, you could calculate the encryption with pen and paper, and only enter the encrypted values. That would be safe on an untrusted terminal, but would not be immune to a hidden camera.

It also would not be immune to the user selecting "large" primes like 3 and 5, but that's their own fault. :)

Agreed. I LOVE my Galaxy SII. When I bought it, it was down to this or the Atrix 2. Both were about 4.3 inch screens.

I actually bought it after the Skyrocket came out, but bought the original Galaxy SII because I felt the larger (4.5 inch) screen was just too big. Even the SII is a little big in some of my pockets. The only thing I miss on this phone is that I wish it had a higher resolution screen.

This year's phones like the Galaxy S3 are just huge. I had a friend who had a Galaxy Note and that was ridiculous (I have other friends who loved it.) The point is, some of us don't want the uber-huge screens. We often buy them because there is no other alternative if we want a high-end phone.

I'm up for contract renewal in a few months and I'm not sure what to get. I may get a second Galaxy SII for my wife, as the current phones are just so darn huge that I may be willing to stay on my older phone and see if a mid-range line of medium sized phones comes out. If I do get something bigger I will consider the larger screen size to be a minus, not a plus. The main feature that I'm after is a qHD or preferably 720p screen, I just want it in a more reasonable size.

Beyond that, there are nations that would effectively use terrorist groups to act as proxies in a nuclear quasi-war.

If Iran had nuclear weapons, we know they can't use them directly, that would result in outright destruction. However, if they "carelessly" get a nuclear weapon stolen, a terrorist group could bomb a target in Israel or the US without giving the victim an excuse to invade. This has been the strategy of many nations for a while with conventional weapons, and it only becomes more effective with nuclear weapons.

Both the US and the USSR understood that if one of their nukes got used on the other, there was going to be war, and it was going to be devastating. Many of the terrorist-supporting states won't have that fear because it hasn't worked that way for them in the past.

Right now, most of the nations of the world with nuclear weapons (this includes North Korea and Israel) are nations that carry out their military operations overtly. If they decide to attack with nuclear weapons, the whole world will know they were the ones responsible. These nations know that openly attacking a nuclear power will simply result in their annihilation, so they won't do it.

That isn't true for many of the nations in the middle east. They have a strategy of letting terrorist groups do their dirty work precisely because they don't get the direct repercussions of it. There's no reason to believe that the strategy would be any different with nuclear weapons. So, how does the US respond when some terrorist group operating out of Iran "steals" a nuclear weapon and uses it to blow up DC? Do you nuke Iran? They'll simply tell the world "we didn't do it, the terrorists did." Do you kill a few individual terrorists after the fact? That won't appease the american people, who will be out for blood, I assure you. I can see Iran expecting (particularly against the US) that the world community would prevent the victim from directly attacking Iran with nuclear weapons, and thus expecting controlled use of nuclear weapons through terrorist groups to move political negotiations in their favor.

The only ways I see to avoid this are either to make terrorist-supporting countries responsible for the terrorism now, so that they won't attempt nuclear terrorism, or to prevent those kinds of countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Since the former will just make the US look like a bully in the short term and result in significant instability, I understand why the current plan is to try and prevent nuclear weapons from spreading.