One wonders if they would feel less "threatened" if we made fun of female anatomy?

That's the first thing that occurred to me. Look at all the games that focus on female anatomy. Now you get an entirely different group of people complaining. The game devs can't make even 1/2 the people happy at any given time. So why bother trying? Novelty sells. Cash in on it.

there is some additional asshattery that allows them to tie the name up for a short period without actually having to pay money for it

This was called "domain tasting", and the guise it was made under was to "allow a customer to put up a web site under a new domain name to test it out and sample it to see if they wanted to purchase it". This is of course a silly concept, you don't need to have the domain name in its final form to decide whether or not your web page works. What it DOES do is encourage this squatter behavior.

When they first started allowing that, there were suddenly millions of domains in a continuous "sampling churn" by the squatters. ("In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, about 2 million were permanent or actually purchased." ie 94% of active domains were being "tasted") Getting a domain during that period without paying a squatter hundreds or thousands for it was very difficult. They had five days to decide whether to purchase or not, but then could just immediately (within seconds?) re-request a tasting, essentially keeping the domain locked under their control until you paid them off.

In 2009 ICANN made changes to mostly eliminate the free tasting when done in bulk. This helped a lot but there was still a lot of squatting going on. They made one more tweak, and after that the tasting was down to under ONE PERCENT of what it had been a year before. They called it good at that point.

  But someone above mentioned such a squatter being actually owned by the registrar, which really "tastes like" fraud to me.

The standard procedure, as far as I know (not being an expert), is upon noticing the fire, the pilots would have shut down all the circuits on the plane in order to find out if one was responsible for the fire.

Being an expert on the subject of electronics, I can assure you that turning off the electricity that started an electrical fire will not extinguish said fire or provide any useful feedback unless someone is actually watching the "sparking and arcing" and notes when it stops.

(also, "shut down all the circuits on the plane" sounds pretty crazy for a variety of reasons)

If only Harrison Ford had been piloting the plane...

they'd have done SO much better with Launchpad McQuack... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Their angle was "in stock and in HAND today". They lost sight of that, their most valuable resource. instant availability. I dropped $300 on dx.com last month in a single order. That gets you a crapton of small electronics. But you have to wait for it. I'm still waiting on one of the packages to get here. Ignoring the fact that 80% of that stuff RS doesn't carry, if they did, it would have cost well over a grand.

I remember them putting out an open invitation for surveys last year, and I tried to explain that to them. But they were asking questions like "do you want more DIY stuff and kits". Those were radio shack's bread and butter earlier that they got rid of over time recently, but those actually needed to go away. I can get arduino clone boards for $16 that cost $65 at the shack. No one in their right mind plans to buy that locally. It costs way too much, and you don't need it today.

The classic view of modern Radio Shack being a battery store is actually quite keen. Batteries are the perfect example of something you need now. If they were to survive, they were going to need to identify and focus on items like that. Small items that they can sell at a modest markup that people need TODAY. Anyone that can wait for something will order it from China. But instead they listened to the people that were reminiscing about how they used to shop at Radio Shack, and though that returning to a 20 yr old business model that they'd left behind was a good idea.

It was not.

The problem wasn't that they weren't following the laws. The problem was what they were doing wasn't illegal in the first place.

It can be difficult to get the cops to follow the law. But it's often impossible to get them to "do the right thing".

So this is definitely a good step in the right direction. Don't complain just because we've gone from "impossible" to merely "difficult". Sometimes these things take awhile to straighten out. Be thankful we made some significant progress today.

Microsoft says there's no evidence these flaws have been successfully exploited.

"...so we're going to wait until the bot herders have sucked in a few million more machines before bothering to patch it."

WHAT is WRONG with you, ms?? If I'm reading that right, google is doing precisely what is necessary to light a fire under MS's ass to get the bugs fixed. It isn't really even that. They're basically telling us they don't consider it to be a big deal until it starts getting exploited. By making that comment, they completely justify (and encourage) Google's actions.