Same here, but in context. If a friend of mine tells me that after some stupid prank, then I can be pretty sure it isn't a real threat. If some random guy I've never met tweets me the same thing, I have no idea. I can pose an alternate situation for you: an abusive husband tells his wife the same thing. Should he get away with it when he says it was just a joke? Not if there's evidence of abuse. It's all about context. And to me, random death threats from unknown sources is easily interpreted in a threatening context.

No, perfect solutions don't exist. But you're proposing that death threats be covered as a freedom with which we should be willing to accept casualties. I don't think that is a solution. Keep in mind that the law in question does require that obvious humor be excluded. I'll take casualties, even my own, for true freedom of speech, but this simply doesn't qualify.

Don't get me wrong - I have my gripes with TSA. But pursuing and even searching anyone making death threats in an airport (or in a random tweet, as in the post) is common sense. If I have to choose between someone getting inconvenienced because they think random death threats are funny or missing the one lunatic who wants to shoot up a theater (or a swim meet), I'll take the inconvenience in this case. And just because it doesn't eliminate every threat, it can still help make us safer. There are plenty of cases (including in recent news) where a nut job was calling out his own intentions in advance and everyone just ignored it.

I do get your point, but I have an entirely different solution. Prosecute the idiots who are wasting resources by sending death threats to people they've never even met.

Perhaps we simply have to agree to disagree. I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but I'm not budging on this one.

No way - that is entirely backwards. Yes, the chance of murder is always worth investigating. It's not like these 99% are innocent - they are making death threats, period.

That's a bit exaggerated. Humor has not entirely disappeared from the face of the planet because of the TSA. I'm sorry you have to miss out on all those hilarious airport bomb jokes that just can't wait until you've left the airport, but forgive me if I'm not entirely sympathetic. And my point was not that it was a major accomplishment; it was that we don't have to waste tremendous resources anymore chasing idiots who aren't serious about their death threats.

Because a threat is a threat. Even if 99% of them are empty (i.e., "very likely not going to do anything"), it only takes 1 psycho to follow through. Moreover, prosecuting a few of these losers will cut down the stream of death threats via twitter significantly. How many people joke about bombs in an airport anymore? At that point, public resources would go toward catching those issuing death threats knowing that there could be legal consequences, which would indicate to me someone more serious.

Actually, first, I have to disagree with the simple description of the kid as "classless." Telling someone that their dead father is disappointed in them and then sending an (albeit empty) death threat is much worse than classless. Secondly, I thought Daley's response, while grammatically incorrect, was relatively tame. If a fan simply expresses disappointment in him, fine, that's part of being a professional athlete. Responding to this stupid kid, however, is well within reason. Perhaps the most enlightened person would simply ignore it all, but how many of us always take the highest road when encountering idiot's? [couldn't resist! ;-)] Not everyone is the perfectly disciplined Slashdot reader who never feeds the troll.

I can't speak to the other fans responses and twitter. I didn't look that far into it. Maybe they were extremely classless; it wouldn't surprise me.

All your iris are belong to us

I know, right! These mean Americans/Israelis won't let those poor Iranian regime leaders build their nuclear bombs! I cry myself to sleep at night.

I think people are more skeptical of NVidia's IP reasoning than they have a right to be. Yes, I'd love more open drivers like Nouveau that actually performed well, and I'd like to not have to run NVidia's special installer every time I upgrade the kernel. Yet, I can easily conceive of situations where seeing driver source code might reveal something about the underlying hardware. It's probably a moot point in 6 months after a new card is released, when the cat is out of the bag on the hardware tweaks and everyone else has adopted it also or came up with an alternative solution. But this is a competitive industry, and I can understand how NVidia would be extra protective of their latest designs for the very short time that they are novel and superior. NVidia has some sharp people - I've known at least a couple of them. They know what open source is, what the advantages would be (free help, for one), and they consistently choose closed source.

Most people (at least in the hardware sales business) already know that there isn't a difference between their standard and platinum cards, except the support. The platinum cards are intended for server systems. NVidia is charging for the need to replace cards if they overheat from having batches of them installed in some rack. Sure, they don't say that outright, probably so some unknowing gamers will buy them anyway, but most people can find this out by doing some basic research online.

Don't just look at the press release - look at the actual list, which shows the power consumption along with the performance. The system is 60% faster than #2 yet uses about 63% of the power.

Agreed, not a major change. However, it might indeed affect competition. I'm glad AT&T has found a way to make money by helping large companies improve bandwidth rather than imposing a tiered system and effectively reducing service delivery for those who couldn't afford it. This attempt at a tiered internet sparked the net neutrality "movement" (if it qualifies as a movement, as such). The idea of private CDN's certainly is a more "positive" approach, but I do wonder if it introduces a precedent that allows companies to buy improved features to improve content delivery. I can imagine a tiered internet growing gradually and organically in such a way.

Absolutely - we all know that Python is much greater than R. ;-) Seriously though, I know where he's coming from, but it really should have had better explanations regarding his ratings for each language. For example, if one uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK, www.vtk.org), it has Python bindings. I think the author simply doesn't know about that.

until they make them like Laforge's visor.

For a judge who served on the court that "opened the floodgates for software patents," this guy knows remarkably little about software. He (self-admitting) doesn't even know anything about the software industry or its current disregard for patents. How can we take any of his comments seriously? The interviewers did ask some thoughtful questions, but I wish the interviewers would have mentioned that the current approach in the industry uses terms like Mutually Assured Destruction.

"Yeah, if countries didn't like the negative impacts of nuclear bombs, they shouldn't have produced so many during and after World War II." The problem is it only takes one Nazi Germany to scare a country into producing such a thing before the other, and one Stalinist Soviet Union to scare them into continuing to produce them. That's the problem with the software patents - everyone has to arm themselves against everyone else who isn't looking out for the good of the software industry. History may judge nuclear weapons as a great human mistake, and I suspect software patents also. Besides, software patents were NOT allowed to be patented before the Federal Circuit. It's not like that situation is without precedent.

I don't see how it's any different than Consumer Reports, JD Power, etc. that do reviews of products. Sure, there are companies that might object to the final results and rankings especially when they have crappy products, but the bottom line is that these product review are protected by their authors' First Amendment rights. The only time libel might be involved is if they produced reviews without any factual basis. Google does have a factual basis for their search results - their ranking algorithms, which attempt to figure out for what a person is truly searching. And it's in there best interest to keep it that way, else people move on to another search engine.