I'd, uh, like to think I've got a valid basis for challenging that claim...

Reminds me of a humorous story many of you are probably familiar with:

Going to bed the other night, I noticed people in my shed stealing things.
I phoned the police but was told no one was in the area to help. They said they would send someone over as soon as possible.
I hung up. A minute later I rang again. 'Hello,' I said, 'I called you a minute ago because there were people in my shed. You don't have to hurry now, because I've shot them.'
Within minutes there were half a dozen police cars in the area, plus helicopters and an armed response unit. They caught the burglars red-handed.
One of the officers said: 'I thought you said you'd shot them.'
To which I replied: 'I thought you said there was no one available.'

Or maybe if you were the judge in this case, you'd side with the guy who according to Google has connections to the local mafia. Wouldn't want to wake up next to a proverbial horse's head.

You seem to be a little backwards on how warrants work. Warrants are tools for the police officers to obtain information that they might not otherwise be privy to, they are not a restriction on what information the police are able to have. Your statement, "The police didn't ask for the information yet got it anyway." seems to indicate you believe that the police aren't authorized to be in possession of any data they didn't have a warrant for; this is completely untrue. The police can ask for whatever data they wish at any time, and the company is free to decide whether or not they want to comply. It's when the company says "no" that the police can try to get a warrant from a judge. If the judge issues the warrant, now the company is forced into complying with the officer.

TL;DR: Warrants don't restrict the police, they restrict the ones the police deal with.

"Living standard" is kind of an oxymoron. The whole point of having a standard is so that authors have something to target, and developers know what is necessary to be standards compliant. A constantly evolving standard creates a moving target, which I believe is actually counter-productive.

Well sure, if we could actually observe the weather on this planet and confirm or refine our speculations, that would be great. Unfortunately, the technology to do so is well beyond our means at this point. By the time we actually are able to directly observe this planet, our weather models will probably be much more refined as well.

I'm reminded of the planet discovered over a year ago that was tidally locked to its star, which created a habitable zone circling the planet where the light from the star would hit it at an oblong angle, creating a zone of essentially perpetual twilight where life could form. We had quite a few ideas already for what the environment on this planet must be like, until further measurements of the star system revealed that the "planet" was really just minor errors in the calculations of the star's wobble, and there wasn't even a planet there to begin with.

This article isn't "just knowledge for knowledge's sake." Indeed, it seems to be purely speculation for speculation's sake. I'm actually very concerned by the line in the summary, "With patience and cunning, more than you might think," because that really implies we know a lot more about what we're talking about than we actually do. I'll just be happy when the weather forecaster on TV can accurately tell me the weather for the next week.

So, some users signed up for "Protected Registration" and are now pissed because GoDaddy is trying to... protect their registration? It doesn't sound like GoDaddy is refusing to transfer domains, just providing the service users have paid for. This is a complete non-story.

And KDE is just a Windows ripoff. So really, Razor-Qt is just another Windows look-alike. That was actually one of the things I liked about KDE, the interface was so familiar to what I already knew, it made transitioning easier.

I like how his advice is coming directly from how he personally feels a UI should look and feel, instead of the potential mess of bringing in a group of average people and asking them to compare UIs, and performing usability tests to tune the UI towards the common user. But no, clearly every UI should be tuned for Paul Miller, he knows what a good UI is supposed to feel like.

After fourteen years of graduate school, Professor Farnsworth settled into the glamorous life of a scientist. Fast cars, hot nightclubs, beautiful women... the professor designed them all, working out of his tiny, one-bedroom apartment.

So torrenting music and movies is OK, but as soon as it's something you support, it's suddenly theft? Nope, sorry, doesn't work both ways. That point has been covered many times here, you can't "steal" intellectual property like that. Coyne's comments and questions still belong to him, even if the video containing them isn't released. And he's still free to make his comments public however he pleases. I know Slashdot has quite a few militant atheists, but please try to sound objective in your summaries.

Assuming the audit system is actually random, there's no way you can guarantee that two audits won't come up back-to-back either. Are you really willing to take that chance?

Now you're assuming they haven't been trained to pull items from random depths in the cart, as much of a pain as that might sometimes be.

Self-checkout lanes where I live tend to be the cashiers that are more observant and reliable than the average cashier. I'd assume with a system like this, they'd tend to be even more so.

Yeah, I'm sure he's heard that one before too. The guys manning these stations aren't likely to be that naive.

People actually determined to shoplift are still more likely to just stuff the item in their jacket, where the auditor is unlikely to check anyway.

Ok... but that's not the question he was asking. He said would you pay $1000 for a DVD player that was guaranteed to last 20 years from NOW, not would you buy a 20 year OLD DVD player that still worked. And the answer any sane person would give is "no" simply because in 20 years, DVD isn't likely to be relevant anymore. By then, everyone will have moved on to Bluray++.

The point (I believe) he's trying to make is that there's a trade-off between durable technology and price. If people were willing to pay massive amounts of money for technology that lasted 20 years, companies would be making them. But since people count on technology being obsolete after relatively short periods of time, they'd rather pay $100 for a player that will last 5 years that can be tossed out when upgrades come along or cheaply replaced if they should break.

When you're building something designed to go as far into space as it can before breaking down, cheap, fragile technology just isn't an option. A lot of money was put into making sure Voyager would be as durable as possible, because when it breaks down, there's no going out there to replace it.