I am the perfect target of Windows 8. I use a touchscreen laptop (Lenovo x220t) and I love it--I work with the pen as much as possible, even when typing would be more efficient, simply because I like it.

I and users like me have been complaining since Windows 8 released that it's simply not a good touch/pen interface. Windows 7 had an excellent pen input system. Microsoft scrapped it and replaced it with a much less useful and less practical input interface in Windows 8. It was a bafflingly stupid decision--they dumped the best interface in the industry for something that's barely functional.

Reviewers haven't paid much attention to this problem because, I think, relatively few people are using the pen as a significant input device. But Microsoft is trying to change that. If they want Windows 8 to succeed, or PCs to move towards a touch/pen interface generally, they need to ask some hard questions of whoever is currently in charge of those design decisions. (I'd recommend, "Can you name any single way in which the Windows 8 pen interface is superior to the Windows 7 interface?", "Then why did you change it?", and "Have you been drinking on the job?")

I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory. They've taken the approach that it only matters whether the employer thought it was a religious theory. In other words, if the employer fired him because of what they thought were his religious beliefs, it committed unlawful discrimination whether or not those beliefs are actually religious. This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.

Caveat emptor, I'm basing this on second-hand reports and haven't read the pleadings myself. My thoughts are worth exactly what you paid for them.

you wouldn't just give the cc's away and publish what you did if your main point was to acquire cc numbers for fraud.

Yes I would. I would do it for two reasons:

First, it would let me claim that I committed the crime for altruistic reasons, which would feed my ego and let me pretend to be a hero instead of a crook. Anonymous's fans don't seem to need or want a serious moral or ethical justification for the crime; they're happy with a paper-thin pretext. It helps if you keep referring to the company you hit as "the shadow CIA!!!!!!!", and don't say anything at all about the thousands of individual customers you victimized.

Second, by releasing the numbers publicly, it would result in a widely distributed bloom of fraudulent transactions that would make my own thieving harder to trace. I would have assumed, at least, that a global rush of hits on the stolen CC numbers would give the original hackers a lot of cover for their own fraudulent use of Stratfor's customers' cards.

why is fbi releasing this data now? to make hacktivism seem like stealing...

It's not "like" stealing, it is stealing. They stole CC numbers from innocent strangers, and used them to victimize charities and for-profit businesses. Releasing a mountain of innocuous emails doesn't make it "hacktivism."

in any case.. stratfor is actually responsible for the fraud committed, they kept a data cache they didn't have authority to keep...

No. The people who broke into the Stratfor system, stole that data, and used it to make fraudulent transactions are "responsible for the fraud committed." Because they committed the fraud. If Stratfor was violating the processors' TOS, then it's responsible for violating the TOS. It is not responsible for malicious thefts committed by anonymous strangers.

I love my Kindle, and often find that critics of the device who claim that it has no benefit beyond a laptop or a paperback are simply not familiar enough with the device. Having said that, I'm not sure what the benefits of this thing (excuse me: tHIs THinG) are, over and above a separate netbook and e-reader. I can see some minor synergies, such as TFA's reference to sending search results to the e-ink half of the device, but is that really worth the extra weight and complexity? Of course, I don't think I can explain why the Courier needs two screens, either, but hot damn I want one anyway.

tHIs THinG may be perfect for a niche of readers, but I don't see this device going anywhere. That's too bad, because I want a much more diverse field of e-readers out there, in order to encourage publishers to settle on a uniform format. (Or, failing that, just to encourage Amazon to make the Kindle software platform hardware-independent.)

Actually, it's quite common - and quite Constitutional - for courts to maintain lists of vexatious litigants, and to restrict their filing in various ways.

It allowed you to see all the upcoming conflicts on one page, and to see multiple conflicts for each timeslot. You could see, for example, that six shows were competing for the 7-8 pm timeframe, and choose which one to record. (And whether it would be a one-time priority, or to bump it up on an ongoing basis.) You could also do this with a mouse, which I would love to do with the TiVo - their refusal to give us an online interface is baffling and irritating.

TiVo's system is smart enough to resolve most conflicts--smart enough that I don't normally need to resolve conflicts. But it would be nice to be able to see, once a week, what the upcoming conflicts are, and choose my own priorities for each one. Not a big deal, but it's the sort of thing TiVo should have implemented at some point in the last five or six years.

I'm a long-term TiVo user, but this story reminds me of my simmering frustration with TiVo. Years ago I used a Hauppauge card, and their interface had innovations that TiVo still hasn't picked up on, like a vastly superior conflicts-resolution system. Is there a decent alternative to TiVo, with a better interface? Cable-company solutions are generally poor, as I understand it, and I frankly don't have time to roll my own Myth system. (I would consider an out-of-the-box Myth product, though.) I'd appreciate informed recommendations.