That's a really insightful comment. Thanks for posting.

If I remember correctly, Sun acquired MySQL prior to being acquired by Oracle, and Oracle's reasons for buying Sun had nothing to do with MySQL. Somebody correct me if I'm mistaken!

Not if the whole reason for recording your gender in a database has to do with other people identifying you. If you self-identify as female but I think you look like a guy in a dress, that may not qualify as a success.

The thief sells your phone to someone who will ship it to another country, wipe it to factory defaults, and sell it on the black market - possibly repackaged as new, if it's in good enough condition.

You said the thief doesn't get the charger, but I can buy an iPhone 4 USB cable for about $6 retail, which means the wholesale price is closer to $2, and I'm sure they can be obtained for less. The new iPhone 5 ones are probably a little more just because they're new. I expect many other phones use Micro USB, since that's the official standard in Europe, and obviously those are dirt cheap.

An international stolen device registry would prevent these stolen phones from operating, which means people will stop buying them, which means the market will dry up, which means people will stop stealing them because they no longer have value. It won't happen overnight, but if everyone's on board, it will help a lot.

Oh come on. We're far too apathetic to commit to an actual civil war. It's gonna take a lot longer than a year or two to get normal people upset enough to start killing people. At this point it's not even the lunatic fringe yet.

The Constitution describes what the government has the power to do, and what it does not have the power to do. It does not specify against whom that power may be wielded.

You lose some of the miracles, but not all of them. Sometimes a "miracle" is just a totally naturally occurring phenomenon, which God set in motion from the time of Creation just so that it would happen at a specific place and time so that it would have a special meaning in the context of what was going on.

If you use the Bible as the foundation upon which to build your hypothesis, then you can use real science to test it, and when you've disproven your hypothesis you go back to the Bible to seek out a better interpretation and form a new hypothesis you can test. That sounds crazy to some, but it's totally consistent with the scientific method.

You're also forgetting the part where W3C was sitting in their ivory tower doing nothing useful, so the browser vendors (sans Microsoft) got together and formed their own group, WHATWG, which created HTML5. W3C only decided to adopt HTML5 after it became clear that all the browser vendors (except Microsoft) were already committed to implementing it. (Microsoft didn't get on board until W3C's adoption.)

But you're right, the expectation is that JavaScript is a big part of how the web is supposed to work.

Some of them are in HTML5, but browsers haven't implemented them yet, and since everybody uses JavaScript anyway (and will continue to use JavaScript to support older browsers for the next decade) there's no pressure for browser devs to implement them.

Well done sir.

Thank you for having the courage to stand up to the nutjobs who would demean your service.

I believe his implication was that the Start menu has to return in order for people to want to buy it. Microsoft isn't required to do what customers want, and... customers are not required to remain customers.

The solution to this problem is more competition.

Agreed. I've had a consistently positive experience with Apple's repair services, although I suppose it's not ideal that I've needed it on the majority of Apple products that I've owned.

Rather than focusing on DRM itself, let's turn things back around and focus on why we have DRM in the first place.

There is a demand for rented content. A movie that I want to watch once, but have no desire to keep. A book I want to read once, but don't plan to read again. I song I want to hear when I'm in the mood to listen to music, but don't want to own. Not everyone wants these things - you might not want these things - but a lot of people do, including me. I also want to own things, but for now let's focus on the things I don't. I might be willing to pay $15 to buy my own copy of a movie, but I only want to pay a tenth of that to rent it.

It used to be that you could go to a video rental place and rent a movie on VHS. It was possible to copy them, but most people didn't own the necessary equipment (a second VCR), there was a loss of quality in the copying process, and the blank media cost about as much as the rental. Similar issues with copying a show of the TV or a song off the radio (minus the part about the second VCR).

In the digital era, data can be copied perfectly with no loss of quality and the media to store it on is cheap.

As a consumer, I want the option to rent a movie for $1.50 or buy it for $15. Content providers want to offer me this choice. How would you suggest that this should work?

Ahh, maybe that was it - not that it's difficult to do, just that it requires a $50 app to do it.