Designating a point-person in advance, even for something extremely improbable, doesn't sound like a bad idea. Sort of like designating the presidential line of succession out to 20-odd places: it's very unlikely that all of the first 19 are going to die at the same time, but if they did, it would be at a time of unimaginable national catastrophe, and precisely the wrong moment to have any doubt about who was in charge. Likewise, in the unlikely event ET does show up tomorrow, it would be a terribly chaotic period as governments, scientists, armies, and religious leaders struggle to come to terms with its implications. Ticking this off the list of stuff to worry about is probably worthwhile.

ASSUMING the cost is negligible. If the position comes with a separate salary, that seems like a blatant misuse of UN funds. After all, we don't pay the US Secretary of Veterans Affairs extra money for being president-in-waiting.

Fair point; but even a multi-national conglomerate by definition has its assets in multiple nations. In order for US plaintiffs to reach those assets, foreign courts will have to recognize the US judgments. The US probably doesn't want those foreign courts deciding that a system based on scumbag lawyers putting up "Have you been injured by the Gulf Oil Spill?! CALL NOW!" ads on cable TV and collecting their 33% is an "abusive legal system" whose judgments can be ignored. On the other hand, it might not be such a bad thing for the rest of the world if they did make such a decision.

While I of course applaud the aims of this particular legislation, I think Senator Sessions may not like the consequences of starting an international game of "we won't recognize your court judgments because of your 'abusive legal system.'" The US legal systems for IP and class action recovery are the poster-children for 'abusive', and at a time when so much of the US economy depends on IP lawsuits (to say nothing of some no-doubt imminent class action suits against a certain British oil company), being the first to start ignoring foreign court judgments on principle might prove ill-advised.

Exactly; she's not pleading the 5th to questions from the police, she's refusing to answer questions from a plaintiff's attorney--the kind of lawyer even other lawyers think are scum. I'd have a hard time faulting Hitler for trying to avoid those kind of questions. I have a lot of sympathy for the kid and his family, but their lawyer gets a hard-on whenever he gets in front of a camera, and he's been more than happy to mouth off about this administrator even she didn't say anything (e.g., she "may be a voyeur.") I think the administrator is guessing--probably correctly--that the lawyer doesn't give a shit about the truth: he wants to get her to say something unseemly so he can blast it in the papers, scare the school district into a higher settlement, and collect his 33%.

Don't get me wrong, it seems like what the school district did here was absolutely reprehensible; I'm just withholding judgment until I see some sort of investigation by a party (FBI, US Attorney's Office, DA) that doesn't have a financial stake in the outcome.

Why not just do what we do? Full body cavity searches for flash drives before you're allowed into the building for work each morning.

You might love to see him "prove" that until you remember that in his line of work, "prove" doesn't mean "demonstrate conclusively by scientific evidence," it means "convince 12 citizens of Juneau County Wisconsin."

I think what he's trying to say is that Woz's philosophy has been literally bricked.

How do you get users to read error messages? Simple. Put pictures of naked ladies on them. How do you think Michelangelo got the common folk to be interested in looking at "art"? Added bonus: Easy to describe the errors. Like your "puppy error," but more fun. "Hello, tech support? Yeah, I've got the blond chick in the shower... Oh, okay, just check to make sure the network cable's plugged in, got it."

I've been following this story for a the past week, and by far the scariest story I've read so far is from the Philadelphia Daily News: Students seem largely unfazed by spying case. Among the students quoted:

"A lot of people think this is being blown out of proportion," said senior David Freedman, 18. "I believe the school when they say they only used it to find lost or stolen laptops. People realize this is not a real threat."

"It an invasion of privacy, but I'm sure we signed stuff in waivers [when we got the computers]," said Senior Bonnie McFarland, 17.

How the hell much have we failed our children when they can't even be outraged about this? Are they seriously so used to living their lives in public on myspace and facebook that they don't even realize the value of the privacy that the school district stole from them here?

TFA posits that the proliferation of forked implementations and proprietary extensions will create a vast jungle of mutually incompatible Android phones. The problem with this argument is that, as Apple's "There's an app for that" campaign shows, it is increasingly not the features of the hardware that are selling mobile phones as much as it is the app ecosystem surrounding the platform. I'm inclined to think that handset manufacturers are going to be constrained in the amount of forking and proprietary extending they're going to be able to do without risking breaking compatibility with the mainstream app development. If it gets to a point where, for example, a large number of apps in the market have notes from the developer that say "won't work with HTC's super-Dream because of its proprietary SenseUI system," HTC will have effectively cut itself off from the major factor driving adoption of its product. Standardization is the handset manufacturer's problem, not the users' or the developers'. Developers will naturally build their apps for the most popular implementations, and other manufacturers will have to make sure their implementations compatible with those if they expect to compete.

Seems to me we've already developed a fusion reactor capable of solving the problems you mention with Saudia Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia...

Beneficial to many consumers? Healthy competition? Maybe in the short run, but what about the pending Book Search settlement? If that gets approved in its current form, Google gets exclusive access to scan and digitize millions of orphan works. Even if the settlement eventually gets cut back somewhat, Google has an enormous head start in its catalog from the books it's scanned already. Is there any doubt that the eBook format it chooses to market this huge selection of digital books will easily crush all other competitors? TFA seems to suggest that Google is planning on selling these eBooks only in cooperation with publishers and not from its settlement spoils at the moment, but given the potential to leverage the settlement monopoly to monopolize the market for eBooks and eReaders, I would be pretty surprised if this announcement doesn't pique the interest of the Justice Department.

Because there are different speed limits on different roads? They want to eliminate all speeding. Going 45 mph in a 25 mph residential zone where children are playing is probably more dangerous than going 85 on a 65 highway, yet it wouldn't be prevented if you simply set the speedometer to max out at 65. You need the GPS to figure out what road you're on and what the speed limit there is, so that the maximum can be changed accordingly.