No one is going to switch search tools because some particular newspaper is in Bing's index and not Google's. If Bing wants to get the traffic, all they have to do is return better results. Buying exclusive access to index the WSJ isn't going to help, because anyone who actually cares about what the WSJ has to say specifically will just go to the WSJ site, not to Bing.

This would be a waste of MS money, and would hurt the WSJ by having them be found less often (Bing isn't yet as popular as Google, as I understand things), thus getting them less hits and less notice. Unless Murdoch doesn't care about the WSJ's future, this is overall likely a bad move for him.

If Bing wants the traffic, they have to return better results. Eventually, that will translate into users, but it's not a quick thing.

This would be a stupid move on Microsoft's part, and probably a bad plan on Murdoch's part. That doesn't mean they won't go forward, but it's a dumb idea all around.

I can't conceive of why working in the gambling industry would be a mark against you. It wouldn't make sense. You're either good at writing software or you aren't, it really doesn't matter what industry. The only possible downside is that it's not a large industry, so you probably can't make a lifetime out of working in the same industry. But so what? So far, in the last 17 years, I've worked in the medical equipment field (EEG monitors, blood pressure monitors), industrial non-medical ultrasound (one project in the fish farming industry, one in the lumber industry), the petroleum retail industry (credit card interfaces for gas stations), the cable TV industry (software for video on demand systems), the video test equipment industry (windows device drivers for custom cards) and then back to petroleum retail.

No one who wants to hire good software people is going to care. No one.

All we have to do is get the CAs to pay attention to the certs they issue, correct?

Uh-oh. We're screwed.

If jailbroken iPhones can hurt cell towers, then it's already too late, because there are already jailbroken iPhones. So how does making jailbreaks illegal help this problem? It doesn't.

I'm supposed to believe that Microsoft couldn't replace a couple of drivers with code of their own, and thus ended up open-sourcing a large codebase to comply with the GPL? Sorry, no.

Everything Microsoft does is about making money. They open sourced this code because they believe they can use that in some way to make a buck. End of story.

Use an encrypted query to match against the encrypted text. The problem is, if the text is REALLY encrypted, then there shouldn't be enough information to do this - the encrypting of the original text should make it impossible to even match against it.

If it didn't, then an attacker who got hold of the encrypted text and some of your encrypted queries might well be able to mount an attack based on commonalities between the two.

I can't say I'm that surprised. I actually canceled a free subscription to EGM (they had a promotion a year or two back) because it just wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Being a print publication (and the attendant information lags) was bad enough, but their staff wrote like a bunch of high-schoolers. If I'm going to bother to kill a tree, I at least want some decent writing.