He was banned from their network, repeatedly, after abusing the system and causing load issues on JSTOR. After being kicked off the wireless enough times he couldn't get back on, he physically broke into a restricted equipment room on campus and attached a laptop to continue attacking the network and scraping the articles and took steps to conceal his presence and identity from security cameras which were erected specifically to look for him.

Surely you can acknowledge there's at least one criminal offense happening in that string of events.

I've derided tablets as being restrictive and generally poor imitations of actual computing devices and bemoaned their lack of input options. However, this previous Christmas season, I think I've come around on the process. My aging grandparents, now in their 80s, struggle regularly with a laptop or desktop computer but immediately figured out how to use Skype, e-mail, web browsing and a handful of other day-to-day activities far easier than they were ever able to on a full computer.

A friend's mother reports a similar experience: from being unable to manipulate a computer into doing pretty much anything other than going to Google, she set up and checked her own e-mail account she hadn't accessed in years, made Skype calls to other relatives, downloaded and then effectively used several Bible-related applications, and watched a movie.

Tablets are a great choice for someone who only wants to consume content, with little interaction with it. While I don't understand how these otherwise very intelligent, although non-technical people can have so much trouble in the first place clearly there's an unmet need for consumer-functional computing out there.

I suspect he has poor riding technique, or is riding a fixie where form wins over function and a frequent failure mode is getting your clothing sucked into the chain line with no possible way of stopping the bike quickly, resulting in fairly horrifying and dramatic crashes with high potential for injury as a lot of rotational force with nowhere to go suddenly is transferred into your body.

I ride and race mountain bikes, and while crashing in those settings certainly has a high potential for injury, I've never had any issues from drivetrain failures; nor has anyone I've ridden with. This includes things like the chain falling behind the cassette and seizing the real wheel needing complete dis-assembly, chains snapping under power or falling off front cogs, and even binding on a derailleur cog resulting in snapping the chain, the metal derailleur cage, and the derailleur hanger clean off the bike.

I'll have to ask about that next time we're arguing about ARM vs X86. Although I know these guys well enough to extract tiny bits of proprietary information on occasion (such as the conversations I cited originally), I suspect the details of the thread scheduler may be more severely verboten to outsiders such as myself.

Not being an SDE myself, I wasn't aware of that fact - I assumed the point of the CLR and the entire managed code paradigm of .NET precluded such native dependencies.

Microsoft is making a terrible mistake by not trying their absolute hardest to optimize the heck out of the Common Language Runtime for ARM. I don't think anyone would expect a tablet to be an acceptable desktop replacement machine - nobody thinks that of an iPad - but the fact they're not leveraging an existing architecture to bring application compatibility to the RT is going to cause major consumer headaches. No "native" apps would be a fine limitation, but they really should have the .NET CLR available for developers.

I occasionally chat with a few Microsoft SDEs who are directly involved in the development of native RT apps, and it usually goes something like this: "ARM is fucking terrible, it's weak and powerless!" "How come other platforms, including Linux, can run on ARM successfully?" "ARM isn't powerful enough to run Windows applications, that's what we mean. That's why we have to rewrite everything to be more highly optimized for these few Windows RT apps." "So, the reason Windows RT can't run Windows apps is because most Windows software is so bad, it wouldn't perform acceptably on something being run at its limits?" "Pretty much."

I'd recommend running an XMPP server to provide instant messaging and more on the local network. I recommend Openfire for the server, it's fairly easy to get up and running and is Apache licensed; the server runs on Linux or Windows. It supports LDAP for authentication against an Active Directory network for user accounts so it will integrate well with your existing Windows domain. Functionality depends a lot on the client you select, but I'd recommend Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) which is very similar in many respects with Microsoft Lync; it is LGPL and supports enterprise features like voice/video calling, SIP integration, automatic provisioning via URL, encrypted connections, and a lot of other interesting features. It runs on pretty much anything, If you add Asterisk to the mix, you can tie Jitsi into that as well and get phone system integration and dialing from your desktop.

This does not solve the problem of Sharepoint, however.

If Google is intending to stamp out online anonymity entirely, patenting the process by which people can be more easily be made anonymous seems like it would be a good way to force the market in that direction. All they have to do is refuse to license the patent, and litigate infringing companies and competing social networks, and suddenly the Google and the NSA are handed a great gift in that everyone's online identity will be tied to their real one.

Moxie, who I'd say has made massive contributions to personal security with his "positive" security tools (WhisperCore, RedPhone, TextSecure, etc.) has just released a tool which effectively eliminates common security measures people have previously been taking, rendering them open to attack. Not just enterprises or nation-states, but Joe Laptopper at the neighborhood Starbucks.

This isn't a new issue, certainly, but the likelihood of being attacked at the neighborhood coffee shop's WiFi was indistinguishable from zero. Now there's an off the shelf tool and cloud service made specifically to break through the security people have been using. This means that even someone who was doing security "correctly" (i.e. using a VPN on a public wifi network) is now at risk from having credentials stolen over the wire.

Other than giving Microsoft the finger, this doesn't seem like it's contributing much to the discourse. I'm disappointed in Moxie, he's placed a whole lot of people at risk just to say he could.

You badly need an attitude adjustment. IT is a team effort, and it sounds like you've managed to rub your colleagues the wrong way by being something of a smug know-it-all. Unfortunately, this attitude is all too common in young technology professionals across the board.

I thought that project went under after an author committed suicide under the crushing realization that their start-up had failed after collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars of crowd-funded money based on a knee-jerk anti-Facebook backlash.

You nailed it about the risk. I'd love to grow in some ways the small company I'm with now just can't offer, but discovered with even a bit of checking into what's out there I'm making either above or on the very top end of all the pay scales for comparable jobs at larger firms - and that's through networking, not random job postings. While I'm not even strictly opposed to taking a pay cut if there's a good promise of future growth, it's the fact that the more exciting (in terms of responsibility) offers are both lower pay and with even smaller companies, or are on terms or with divisions that are historically subject to extreme staffing volatility.

So I stay where I am, even though it's a bit like being a fish in slightly too small of a tank. The economy just isn't in that great of a place and I'm developing some freelance stuff as a backup and eventual goal but it's nowhere close to the point of being even sustainable yet let alone approaching my current income. It's kind of depressing.

Does the Charter also apply to private entities? The Constitution only applies to the Federal Government's actions, private entities are largely free to do whatever they want as long as there isn't a specific law against it around here.

Yours sounds a little better.

"Not Guilty" exists because people did exactly what you're saying no juror should do. Prior to that, the choices were "proven" or "not proven" - with no possibility at all for "what provably happened does not deserve punishment".

It's a corruption of the entire history of trial by jury to suggest jurors shouldn't consider the justness of the law along with the facts of the case they're trying, and also is a grievous insult to the personal capacity of jurors.

Hey, this isn't a violin! It's a banjo with some molding tacked on! FAKE!