The idea that a company is being threatened with a single lawsuit is enough to cause a small panic in the stock price. Repeat this multiple times, and you'll have a company with an undervalued stock price. While you are correct that such actions happen all the time, it's appropriate for a CEO not to mention them, as a CEO is interested in increasing the stock price.

While shoving a mouse around and typing does not seem like significant exercise, I think there's a bigger energy expenditure in interactive thought. Zoning out at the television does not engage many areas of the brain, but chatting with friends or deciding where to browse next takes a bit more power. Brain activity burns calories. I've personally noticed that my head warms up more when I'm thinking, especially if the work or play is cerebral or there's a time pressure involved. It would be very cool to see a study on just how different these tasks are, with brain activity monitored objectively.

Agreed, but the life and death wasn't the point. Regulation was the point. Over-regulation sucks. The question is whether the fact of regulation is reasonable.

You've indicated that life and death obviously merit regulation. And you've said that distraction might be just cause.

Banning screens is regulation. Maybe it is over-regulation. So what would be reasonable?

Maybe you should do a bit of research before you try calling other people's comments bullshit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia

I don't know much about Sony or Wii, but with respect to XBox at least, you can develop for it using XNA - and it doesn't come with such a restrictive license agreement.

Then also, for gaming consoles, the model of restricted SDK and publishing has been a de facto standard for a while now, for better or worse. With smartphones, though, only Apple is trying to lock things down - everyone else on the market has been open, and remains so.

Super-hydrophobic would do. It takes more hydrophobicity to repel oil than to repel water, since oil has lower surface tension than water.

as I don't live there, I don't have to either.

I guess this will mean this islander nation is more of an islaneder by now. any UK person I'll meet, I can be sure they conceded in having their genitals exposed to some underpaid 'security' asshole

what a bunch of perverts...

If you are referring to ATI's proprietary driver, then I'll have to agree with you. I've never been fond of ATI's own proprietary drivers for Windows or *nix, though they have improved greatly over the years. I especially hate the fact that ATI feels it necessary to advertise their own products, inside their drivers. And I'm not talking about "advertising" for the hardware you already have. Add-on TV tuners, latest Radeon cards, etc., have all been advertised within their drivers. No thanks ATI.

Honestly, I still prefer NVIDIA's drivers for their stability and reliability. I have worked extensively with NVIDIA hardware over the past few years in a professional field, utilizing GP-GPU and CUDA. They may not currently have the fastest hardware at the moment, but it works well. And their drivers are solid. I'm not saying NVIDIA's drivers are perfect, they are not, but they generally work well and I have had few issues over the years. I still believe ATI's drivers are a weak point for their hardware, which is currently very good. The UI for the CCC is also poorly designed and looks amateur-ish, imho.

Today, I'd much rather have a solid, closed-source binary driver that "just works", than a much less functional OSS one for ideological reasons. Let's see what happens over the next few years.... it could be interesting.

Indeed - it's interesting that the 2005 bombing didn't AFAICR get used as an excuse for more draconian laws. But a failed attempt in another country has resulted in the UK bringing new measures in.

Why bother? Thanks to security theatre, they can now simply blow themselves up in the scanner queue, which will kill the hundred or so people packed in there, will probably shut down the entire airport, and will cause the government to rape us even harder than before.

That, and the fact that its largely compatible with all the IE only corporate SHIT out there (i'm looking in your direction, sharepoint) means it will be stuck on corporate networks for some time.

Given the choice between having to support 350 clients on IE8 with auto patching via WSUS, etc - or Firefox/Chrome by relying on 350 PCs to go off and get their own updates whenever the user feels like it - I choose IE8 as the corporate standard.

I quickly scanned TFA, but didn't see what the 'metal' actually was (steel? iron? titanium?). With a vastly larger amount of delicate structure potentially exposed to the environment, I think corrosion could be a significant problem.

The law covers indecent images of children. They must be engaged in, or appearing to suggest, a sexual act. Photos of naked kids are not illegal, otherwise every parent in the country would be on the sex offender's register. That photo of you in the tin bath when you were two will not get your mum in jail, nor the one when you ran around the garden in the buff because you didn't want to wear powder blue swim shorts.

The guy you reference was previously convicted of having images which were of children engaged in sexual acts. That is what he was originally convicted for. He was convicted the second time for having cartoons which were of the same type of indecent images of children he had previously been convicted for having. Clearly, this man has a sexual desire to (at least) see children engaged in sexual acts, and was therefore prosecuted.

Had the man not been convicted before of a similar offence, I'm fairly certain the outcome (and press coverage) would be considerably different.

This isn't a post decrying Microsoft. Surely it's just a post to remind all those people using the RC to download a cracked copy of the final?

Doesn't even Ubuntu try to mimic this in some respects with its downloader?

I'd rather say that Apple is "mimicking" what Linux distributions have been doing for a decade.

However, Apple doesn't have to restrict the ability to install software from other sources; that is a typical Apple-restriction.