Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them

Is Youtube a torrent site? The summary is pretty clear that it was the status of torrent sites that stopped them, so it neither relates to Youtube or does anything to suggest they wouldn't do something similar with 'legal' video sharing sites.

Google, being in a monopolist position may not be in a position where it can extort entire countries by just walking away (which it is doing in Spain). With current mood being like this across the EU, it just may trigger a pan-EU response.

You can't be a monopoly when you don't even offer a product in the country anymore! It isn't extorting Spain by no longer offering Google news there, anymore than it is extorting any other country it doesn't offer a dedicated service in. Existing, and alternative, operators can contest the market without competition from Google and unless it abuses its monopoly in search to stop them filling that niche they're doing nothing wrong.

That being said, are people too stupid/too lazy to just go to the newspapers' websites and browse the articles?

Well some people are stupid enough to think using news aggregators is stupid/lazy so anything is possible... Google's entire business model is collecting information together so you don't have to search through hundreds of seperate sources.

Any good programmer should be able to program on any level from assembler to C and C++ to Python and shell-scripts and up.

And every good butcher should be a great farmer, every good soldier an expert weapon maker, every good driver a world class mechanic ;)...

I learnt assembler, I think it was valuable to do so and I'd still suggest it to others, but it's nonsense to suggest that you need to know it to be a good programmer.

But a bird is made up of meat and feather...whereas the drone could potentially contain titanium or other such strong material. It could contain explosives too. So size shouldn't matter.

What on earth is the point you are making. He said drones shouldn't be near airports then made the valid point that a typical drone would almost certainly not cause a crash when hitting a large plane. Obviously if you strap a bomb to one the calculation changes, but then so would the calculation if you shoved a grenade up a ducks ass and managed to hit a plane with it! Neither point is counter to his post.

Your statement seems to imply that a felon is some sort of untouchable non-human.

Only as much as your statement implies you can't resist trying to mold other people's points into hyperbolic strawmen! He wasn't suggesting anything about felons other than that some people would consider drug charges a non-issue and yet would reject immediately other types of felon. You yourself used violent crime as a line in your example, should I assume you consider them untouchable non-humans?

Yes, it's pretty high precisely because of all the people like yourself with such an attitude.

Anyone with high school level reading skills would be able to understand that his post was about how things are, not how he thinks they should be. He even suggested that more 'enlightened' countries might be more forgiving. Unfortunately you, and the people who modded you +4, failed to understand his point before railing against it (at least that's /. SO I suppose).

A password doesn't need to be overly complex to avoid brute force cracking, just sufficiently long. Most people are incapable of remember past 7 to 10 random character sequences. And any password system with limited character lengths is insufficient against brute force attacks.

A secure password depends largely on what you're priorities are. Personally I wouldn't put brute force attacks too high on my concerns list. My workplace locks out accounts after 3 incorrect attempts. Personally I think one of the biggest priorities with passwords should be ensuring that, even if every password isn't incredibly secure, you don't use the same password in multiple locations.

I'm probably more likely to have my password taken by a hack on a server than by someone brute forcing it. If I care enough about it then I'd rather have 2 factor protection (google authenticator for example) than a strong password. Beyond that I priotise having passwords I can remember/workout for every website/application which is unique rather than having fewer stronger passwords.

Laws have existed for various odd things in the UK in the past, and certain examples like that and being allowed to kill Scots within York's walls at night were claimed to still be technically valid in widely spread urban legends. IIRC there isn't any law allowing the murder of someone in the UK that is still valid.

Your logic is slightly flawed. An egg laid by a not-quite-chicken is still NOT a chicken egg.

Yet somehow vastly stronger than yours. If a chicken comes out of an egg, people would not unreasonably view the egg it came out of as a 'chicken egg'. There's simply no reason to define an egg by what laid it over what is within it. If we found an egg and it hatched into an alligator, we wouldn't consider that the egg was an 'species unknown' egg because the fact an alligator came out of it tells us it's an alligator egg.

The power supplies were their bad. Not Apple's. Apple contracted for finished product, and didn't care about how it was made.

That's obviously nonsense, and the fact you'd post it just highlights you have no experience working with large multi-nationals. Firstly Apple will very much care about things like staff working conditions, following pollution rules etc which makes the general statement that they "didn't care how it is made" entirely incorrect. Secondly, it is very common for large companies to get extensively involved in the operations of suppliers. I've seen first hand examples of major retailers attending company strategy meetings and pushing for cuts in production costs which they will take a chunk of. It would not shock me at all if Apple had sent back GT's business plan with amendments like dropping reserve power suppliers and asking for a chunk of the savings to be deducted from their price.

It wasn't bait and switch though. Bait and switch is offering one thing, then only agreeing to provide something else. Apple & GT agreed a contract and as far as this article is concerned they used the terms agreed. I can see why GT agreed to a one-sided contract, but they have to bear a considerable amount of the blame for the decision.

What needs to interconnect with a "search" engine?

Nothing, but then why does the web 'need' search engines? It existed without them for years, they just make it easier to use. When I get emailed a flight confirmation it syncs to my calendar. It's hardly something I couldn't live without but it's a benefit of integrating services. Personally I wish the EU etc would push harder to force more integration data to be shared. If MS want to publish things from Outlook to google cal they should be able to use the same method as Gmail. If Gmail want to use my Gmail address book for improve my maps navigation then TomTom should.

Integrations between services only cause issues when they restrict functionality available to users who don't use the same company for all services.

That's an aweful lot of writing for a half-crazed fantasy.

Where else would all the dragons be!? ;)