I think everyone in this thread has gone out on a tangent from what this story was all about.

I don't know if these guys are potential terrorists on a recon mission, or if they're a bunch of guys who were hanging out one night and randomly decided they should check the facility out because of professional curiosity. I don't really care. They were trespassing, which is an already illegal activity, which gives the police all the authority they need to arrest them and question them on what they were doing there. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

What this article is about is having people call the police's "tip" hotline when they decide they see others do "suspicious" things that are perfectly legal. I have a problem with that.

Which is why competition is fantastic. I love that the two behemoths are fighting.

Yes, Google is doing what Microsoft has been doing to everyone else for the past 20 years. The difference is that Microsoft used to be the only game in town, so nobody could fight them. Microsoft is now trying to fight them, and as a result, we are the ones who win.

The computer is a general purpose machine that will run whatever program you write for it. That program is copyrightable, and thus already protected. It doens't need any more protection than that.

The machine you build for processing bauxite has one function. And instructions to build the processing plant are not copyrightable (in the same way recipes are not copyrightable). Therefore, the process is patentable.

I'd go with s/mime, because most e-mail clients will support it without having to install anything else.

Actually, pretty much, yeah. I might expect to get flipped off as he continues on his merry way, but that's equally protected speech.

What do you expect? That he tries to hit me? Because battery doesn't get constitutional protection.

I have further expectations from police officers and uniformed military personnel. Not only do they have to ignore my calling them fucking assholes, they don't get to flip me off in return. Because it would be unprofessional behavior. That might not be what actually happens, but they should be punished when they react in any other way.

There are consequences to speech. His friends may shun him, the media may react to the lyrics and condemn him. The government cannot take any action for pure speech. Other than possible investigation of a threat, but I wouldn't consider lyrics to a song to be a threat anymore than I consider the vast number of times the white house was attacked in a movie to be a case of the writer and director of said movie threatening the white house.

Pretty much, yes.

I'm not saying racism and sexism doesn't exist. But if it's possible for people of all races and genders to live their lives without discrimination, then we, as a society, don't have a racism problem. Not having a racism problem doesn't mean that you're never going to encounter discrimination every once in a while. It means those cases of discrimination are due to individual fuckwads. In the same way that there will always be morons who think killing people watching a marathon is a good idea, or shooting up an elementary school fool of kids is a good idea. Individual fuckwads will always exist, but as long as their actions isn't met with acceptance and encouragement from our society, it's not a problem with our society.

When you're a kid, they're often one and the same.

I long for the days when chemistry sets contained chemicals that you could actually make explosives from, and kids would compete to see who could make the most powerful explosions. Those who didn't lose a limb are now successful in their science careers, because that's how they were motivated to go that route. We've decided to take all the fun out of science in order to try to make everyone safer, and then we're surprised that kids don't have any interest in going into the science fields.

Science experiments are supposed to be fun. If she's doing this on her own time, she's one of the good ones with enough interest in science to have a successful career in it. Somebody give her a college scholarship and limit her punishment to a suspension and some community service. If she's allowed to, she'll contribute far more than enough to our economy in the future to justify the cost of the minor damage she caused while being a stupid teenager.

Oh, please. I have brown skin living in South Carolina, and have never encountered any racism. I had to take a trip to New Jersey to have that experience for the first time (although I will say even in New Jersey it's atypical, I go there often and never have any problems). The United States really doesn't have much a problem with racism when you compare it to someplace like Europe, where you can attend a soccer game and start hearing racist chants against non-white players from the crowd. Have you ever been to a sports game and seen this happen in the US?

This is more a case of the stupidity that takes over a population every time we see a terrorist attack. When 9/11 happened, airport security started freaking out over engineering students carrying circuit boards (because exposed wires must mean it's a bomb or something). Now we had the Boston bombing and a minor explosion as a result of an accident of curiosity which doesn't actually hurt anyone is going to cause an overreaction. Right now, in so short a time after Boston, a white student would have gotten the same treatment.

I was going to point out how this doesn't make any sense, when I was suddenly reminded almost every alien in TOS looked exactly like a human. Including Klingons, which looked like bearded humans. It's been too long, I think it's time for me to rewatch those episodes.

Like I said, it's been a while, but I could have sworn Spock said the DY-100 class of ships was meant for traveling within the Solar System, and that the cryogenic chambers were meant to keep humans alive for months, not centuries. I always figured Kahn used his superior intellect to modify the ship for his purposes when escaping Earth.

You are right, sir. I stand corrected. My memory is far more accurate for TNG episodes.

He was always born on Earth, regardless of time-line. When TOS referred to him as "Zefram Cochrane from Alpha Centauri" they were referring to the location where he eventually settled. As the inventor of Warp Drive, there's no way any humans could have gotten to Alpha Centauri before Cochrane was born.

Let's focus our First Contact continuity complaints on the Borg Queen. What a horrible idea that was...

It can also mean they're fairly robust and can survive in a large range of environments. I think that's more likely considering the other fish sharing the same environment has evolved faster.

That said, it's not like the ocean is dominated by coelecanth, so it doesn't mean they've reached optimality or anything. Just that they're good enough to continue reproducing and surviving.

A dollar is also legal tender. Whether people have faith in it or not, they're required by law to take it as repayment of my debts.

Read it again. He's saying his time is worth money, which Microsoft is stealing from him. He's not saying the money he used to buy Windows is the stolen one.

Also, welcome back to slashdot after your 2 year vacation. One of the things you missed is that since Unity was released, Ubuntu is no longer a slashdot favorite. In fact, every Ubuntu article seems to come with massive amounts of people saying, "switch to Mint or Debian"

I'd never work for someone who would hand me a hammer when I need a screwdriver and tell me to adapt.

You're supposed to use the right tools for the job, not learn to use crappy tools.

I agree 100%. That said, I have a problem with DRM in the html5 spec. I think Netflix has found a perfect reason to continue using Silverlight, and I have no problems with that.