"no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for"

Kindle.

I mean, we could always trust the Russians to work in our best interests. Also, they were never sneaky about anything. Always truthful and honest, them Russians.

And Iran only threatened to wipe The West off the map, starting with Israel, with any means at their disposal. And that they could make a nuclear bomb if they wanted to, because it was a right granted to them from Allah.

Not to mention that they're playing the North Korean game of "let's talk" / "we're not talking to you anymore" / "let's talk" / "we're not talking to you anymore" with the UN. Remember what North Korea has now after a few years of that? Ah, yes, The Bomb.

And all this in the hands of a fanatic regime, intent on spreading Islam through force, feared and hated even by most other Islamic nations, all the while being one of the most horrible human-rights violators of our time.

But there's nothing to fear. They're not after the bomb. They say they are, but there's nothing to worry about. It's just a nuclear power plant.

REMAIN CALM!

[fanboy of company] was one of a surprisingly large number of people writing in this morning to report that [company's website] is having serious troubles taking pre-orders of the [yearly product refresh]. People are seeing the error page or just waiting an insanely great long time to get pages back. Just imagine [pseudo-snarky comment trying to downplay moderator's asskissing]!

Would this story appear for Microsoft's Windows? Adobe Photoshop? Color me skeptic.

True, but we don't need more databases like these, we need less.

It is the mathematical function that identifies your facial features as your own to a very high degree of probability.

Your fingerprints are not in one big database that can be hacked (as others have been hacked before) along with the rest of your entire country. If you've given your fingerprints 10 times, I hope you're sure you gave them to people who can keep them a secret. You can't really change them later.

Think of someone using this database, along with live CCTV footage from a railway station (say, a public online webcam), singling out the Israelis in the crowd. When they see a large group of Israelis coming by, a suicide bomber comes along and explodes next to them. You don't have to be a privacy freak to shudder at that thought.

You don't need a central database to have biometric passports/id cards. All you need is to store their hashes on the card and that would be compared to the person in question.
This is the only thing required of a biometric card.

There's been a long struggle against this biometric database and we may have lost the battle, but we will win the war. There are still ways to bury this database and all will be pursued, whether they're appealing to the Israeli High Court of Justice (Bagatz), convincing the Ministry of Treasury to keep it outside the budget (It is estimated at over US$100,000,000 to implement), etc.

The law was introduced by MK Shirtrit who I personally suspect has ulterior motives for his overzealous support of the bill and the way he rallied both the coalition and opposition to the cause. The finger has already been pointed at lobbyists from Hewlett Packard. The government bowed to pressure and shady deals were made - we knew it was going to be passed even before they started deliberating.

There's only one finger that I'll be showing MK Shitrit and his biometric database.

How about every American comedy since the 1990's?

I've been using Windows 7 for a couple of months now, since it was RTW, after using Vista for a couple of years.
There is absolutely no comparison to Vista in terms of speed and stability, as it it far better. I also love some of the new features they added. Windows 7 is to Windows Vista what Windows XP was to Windows ME.

By the way, Apple's ads have been going downhill since they started. They started out nice and truthful, highlighting Microsoft's failures and Apple's successes nicely, but now they've turned into mostly FUD and cheap-shots.

The first is my friend who went with me to watch it last night. He said during the intermission that he feels like he's walked into a sequel and was missing lots of information, to which I replied that the novel went just like this. After the movie he said he enjoyed it very much.

My other friend went with his wife and they both said that it was a movie you had to stay really focused and concentrated on to understand, but that they think it's one of the best comic-book-based movies they've seen in years.

I've read the novel and loved it, so my view doesn't count ;)