The reason why now is pretty obvious: the phone scandal was the crack in the dam. The reporter working the story made damned sure to cover all bases, or Murdoch and the entire pool of NewsCorp sharks would have chewed him up and spat him out. When he testified before parliament, he was supposed to be ripped to shreds by bought and paid for ministers, but they couldn't find any chinks in his armour. And then the skewer he was wielding suddenly seemed even more potent.

So now all of a sudden the meanest, biggest predator is wounded, and all those he intimidated now see the chance to get rid of the one they feared most. All of his riches no longer will help him, since tearing him down all of a sudden seems the more profitable route (profit in terms of power and influence, not mere money).

Agreed, there really is no "cloud" in the original sense of the word (a virtual machine that is actually hosted on a bunch of servers that can ramp up capacity as needed - thus cloud to mean amourphous). Well, maybe there is, but here "the cloud" is reinterpreted to mean "on a big server somewhere on the internet and not connected to your device".

I guess Buzz and Google's other efforts really did scare them.

One factor that people keep forgetting is that there are a small amount of buyers who for some dumb reason forget to redeem the purchased coupon. So perhaps 10 of the 300, possibly more if the voucher was purchased as a present for someone else.

It is a relatively recent addition to the web interface, so you both are (probably) right.

If you are using a Mac, then I recommend dropping Dreamweaver and using Coda from Panic Software instead. It lets you ditch the crappy WYSIWYG for a fast and clean editor, and the part I like best is the seamless Subversion integration and calling FileMerge when conflicts do occur. Only thing missing now is git...

That's basically what I was thinking. Most of the projects I work on nowadays have been normed to use Eclipse, though I still prefer Coda. As far as testing goes, I use a VirtualBox VM with a shared directory for that, and then present it to the client on an Amazon AWS instance.

Hey, even UX devs need to work with the app code that generates the HTML. Though admittedly 99% of the dev work is in PHP, not Python, the rule holds: even front end developers need to know how to dovetail with the back end modules, otherwise that enterprise app going to look like crap.

Now get rid of that attitude, kid, and go get your project manager some more coffee before I tell her you were posting on Slashdot without engaging your brain. :)

Actually, the main reason why the password is https but the session ID is not so important is because people recycle their passwords, and session ID's are merely temporary. So it is sensible to keep a user's actual password encrypted, but not worry about the session if there is little to do other than browse the catalog or post a comment. Whenever any action requiring HTTPS such as final checkout is called up again, then often a good site will ask for the password again and not trust the session ID from HTTP.

Actually, in legal discussions I rarely see the term "intellectual property" used, but instead "copyrights", "patents", "creator rights", and so on. Most legal systems do not treat IP as property, but as a different form of rights than the right to ownership of a physical object, or the ownership of physical property. There are good reasons why the right to control who is allowed to make copies of a complex work of art are different from the rights to control access and usage of pieces of land.

I think you misunderstand. There are the official reasons which are entered into record, but that does not mean that only those reasons on record are valid. Even if the Google Tracks report from the defendant's Android phone was not actually admitted as evidence, I think it did plant enough doubt in the judge's mind to be more skeptical about the police testimony. This particular judge just wasn't ready to set this big a precedent, though, and to me that is a sign of competence. He recognised his own lack of expertise, and punted.

The balance here is that if a copyright holder finds it more valuable to pay the Copyright Tax than let it expire into the public domain, then at least the money is going to the government. We need to pay for government services somehow, yet everyone is loath to pay taxes. Why not make a tax like this, where the owner really must decide if it is worth it to maintain ownership, to pay the public for the right to keep it from the public?

Note that copyright does not extend to branding. In those rare cases like Disney where ancient works still have value, the brand Mickey Mouse would still belong to Disney even if the first works and the characters therein have entered the public domain.

Physical objects are not equivalent to abstract rights. The home from your example is unique, a physical object that can only belong to one party at a time. Mentioning the connections to public services is only disingenuous, really, since those are services that the landowner buys, not services that the landowner receives income from—the municipality reserves the right to cut off service if the tenant does not pay.

For your analogy to be even close, the house would have to be an apartment complex that the city owns, and as thanks to the father's work he received an apartment rent-free according to contract, and contracts of that sort can be terminated according to the terms, and follows certain laws. It still does not map well to a right to declare who is allowed to make a copies, or are you going to state that I cannot build a house that uses the same design as the house your father built?

Mind you, TFA isn't even about the rights to make copies, but the right to use the author as a fictional character in a historical novel. This could possibly fall under the right to privacy, but since the late Professor Tolkein qualifies as a publicly known person even that right is restricted. In my opinion this is a doomed effort, as it cannot ignore the fact that deciding in favour of the family would ignore the huge precedence caused by unauthorised biographies and the common usage of public personalities in novels ever since stories have been told.

It is easier to parse if you treat "inute" as a mis-spelled "minute"

The simplest answer is because projectiles fall back down to earth. That means there will be impact with some poor schmuck's home over in Georgetown.

The other answer is that the White House is already pretty much a bunker with the president's offices well protected, and there are a classified number of guns, radar and so on on already up there.