A friend of mine who is a composer and musician told me he once had someone ask him to autograph a CD full of pirated copies of my friend's works. Now THAT takes chutzpah!

They sit in their 1990s era thinking because despite everything which is changed, and everything which is conspiring against them from the modern age piracy front they are making money.

Not to mention that they have a direct line to the Congress and the Executive Branch.

Like you, I kept wondering why this surprised anyone. It's not like ward bosses and precinct captains didn't know everything about everyone in their neighborhoods. I suspect their information on each voter was a lot more detailed than you could get from the Facebook or Google profiles, too. I'm also sure they didn't spend much time in 1890 trying to get people to the polls who weren't likely to vote, or to vote their way, either.

Let's take the author's three points in order. First, he worries about data breaches, a reasonable concern, of course, but no different than our concerns about credit-rating agencies or any of the numerous other large organizations that maintain profiles on nearly every American. I'm all in favor of strict regulations, and more importantly substantial penalties, to enforce more care in the protection of our personal information. Let's make rules that apply to Experian and political organizations alike.

Second, he argues that privacy encourages anonymous freedom of speech, a claim that probably most of us would agree with. But what institution has provided a better outlet for anonymous speech than the Internet itself? What better examples for the power of speech, both self-identified and anonymous, can we point to besides this week's Komen fiasco and the revolt against SOPA/PIPA? I don't think peoples' reactions to these events would have been diluted had the commentators been more aware of privacy issues.

Third, he talks about "informational asymmetries" that give additional power to wealthier candidates and groups. He points in particular to the Iowa Democratic Party requiring candidates to pay $100K for access to its database in 2008. I wonder how much it would have cost each campaign to assemble the same information on its own. I'm going to guess that the cost could easily have been more than $100K.

So, when all was said and done, the author proposed no specific policies or legislation to address these supposed threats to the integrity of our political system. I'm sure it looks good on his resume that he has an article in the Stanford Law Review, but honestly, this article says nothing we don't already know, and proposes no solutions to address the issues he raises.

Actually most characters like Mario are covered by trade marks, which have an entirely different body of law applied to them than copyright law. For instance, trademarks don't expire like copyrights do. (Yes, yes, Sonny Bono, etc.) Also the standards for proving infringement are different. Here's a quick summary: http://brandgeek.net/trademark-copyright/

I'm curious whether you have an Exchange server, and whether you were a Blackberry shop before?

I ask this because I've thought Microsoft's biggest opportunity would be to drive RIM out of the market by selling Windows Phone to existing Blackberry customers who have Exchange in place. The BB outage some weeks back should have hastened this transition. So I was puzzled by Randel's article where he seems to ignore the corporate market entirely to focus on the appeal, or lack thereof, to consumers.

For those of you working in corporate settings with Blackberry systems, do you see WinPhone 7 as a logical replacement?

I've read the first few pages of the report and intend to read the details about the three areas where the authors think Firefox is lacking -- sandboxing, plug-in security, and JIT hardening.

However I will point out the comparison applies only to versions of these browsers running on Windows 7. For Linux users, the comparisons might not be so important, though I'd obviously prefer a browser that employs technologies like sandboxing and enforces security on plug-ins.

If I switched to Chrome, how much privacy would I sacrifice to gain these security enhancements? I already use Google dozens of times a day, sometimes with a Google account. I use Ghostery to block most tracking cookies except for Google Analytics. I have some clients' sites subscribed to Analytics so I figure I should support the service myself. Would switching to Chrome provide Google additional information about me that it doesn't get now?

What about the state of plug-ins for Chrome? Along with Ghostery I use AdBlock Plus, ForecastFox and some download helpers. I won't switch browsers if it means abandoning the functionality available in Ghostery and AdBlock.

I could just use Konqueror or rekonq, but I've never preferred either of KDE's browsers to Firefox.

First, there can never be "too many" choices.

That assumes that search costs are zero. More choices increase the cost of acquiring sufficient information about each option to make a rational selection. These costs increase exponentially as the number of choices expands.

Colloquially I call this the "Chinese menu problem." It's quite common in supermarkets as well.

IMHO KDE is too bloated and clunky

How long has it been since you used KDE? I've been running KDE desktops for over a decade; the current 4.x generation is really neither bloated nor clunky.

Most of the people who voice the "bloated and clunky" criticism of KDE often have little experience with contemporary releases.

I like the fact that I've avoided the entire GNOME3/Unity debacle and just keep getting the tasks I need accomplished on Kubuntu.

How does your IT staff deal with the constant security threat these commuting notebooks pose? Maybe they don't use Windows? Most clients I've spoken with report at least one, and usually multiple, malware infestations that resulted from an infected notebook being connected to the office LAN.

You'd think the rise of Cable TV would have changed this somewhat, as there could be more channels aimed at special interests, and not so much desire to achieve giant ratings (with only 3 networks, if you're not getting at least 33% of the audience, it looks bad, but with 100+ networks, expecting 50% of the audience at one time is obviously silly). But that hasn't worked out so well either:

One problem is that all the channels are bundled together. If we had a pay-per-channel system, even with advertising, it would provide better incentives for smaller market programming. If programmers charged a monthly subscription fee for some channels, it would allow the normal signalling process of the market to take place. As it stands now, I pay a monthly cable fee and can't indicate my preference for some types of programming over another.