On Thursday, in response to questions from The New York Times, the I.R.S. announced that it would curtail the practice...

In totally unrelated news, the thief responsible for a string of high-profile burglaries in New York State was acquitted after promising he wouldn't do it anymore. Questions from the victims regarding their lost property went unanswered.

I call BS on this story. Imagine: someone worked for "an agency", and whatever he saw and did there would of course be classified; posting about it here would put him in Leavenworth. Oh, but that's ok: he posted anonymously! One little problem with that: he gave so many details, he could certainly be identified. If this story were real, that is.

What party, ultimately, has the most control over how many infected machines there are on the internet? Could it possibly be the software company whose chief product runs on most of the machines out there?

What parties, ultimately, bear the costs of all the infected machines out there? Their owners, sometimes. Everyone who has to deal with the billions of spam emails that clog the internet. Not so much, the aforementioned large software company.

So an executive from that software company suggests that the burden of infection should be placed squarely upon the user. Funny, that.

After the test has come and gone, will they still be interested in programming? Only if they've had fun doing it. For that you want something they can learn quickly and do significant projects with. In short, Python.

Memo to Senator Stevens: the posters above are joking. You do not need to introduce legislation to prevent these disasters. Kthxbai.

I realize you aren't being serious here, but come on, the CIA didn't even exist in the Prohibition Era.

Well, if you get a lot of earthquakes, you don't end up with many buildings that can't survive them, do you. One way or another.

Or, put more briefly, they have a 40 year history of being run like a typical American business.

I think we very likely could do it in Arizona now, if there was an economic reason to do so. In Arizona, there isn't. In space, there is.

Perhaps a good method would be to blast the dust off the panels with pressurized gas. This assumes it's available, of course; an oxygen factory would be a good thing to build, as a prelude to colonization.

Ah, pity. This really should be done. Granted the lag would be a problem, but see my post above for several reasons why this is better than sending humans and all their life support.

Well, yes; but sending up telepresence robots would let us build necessary infrastructure on the moon to make colonization much easier. One way, you have to keep launching oxygen, water, and food out of a deep gravity well to supply the astronauts until they can make all that for themselves. The other way, you just use robots to build the needed infrastructure first. The robots can also be made more resistant to solar radiation and temperature extremes, and if there's a big snafu, at least no one dies of it.

Hur hur hur! Thag have silly idea to make cave from wood! Where Thag going to get wood? How Thag going to cut wood? Thag wasting time. No pay attention to Thag.

But where will the next Microsoft come from?

If you mean the next big abusive computer monopoly: Mountain View, California.

If you mean the next big game changer and innovator: somewhere outside the Benighted States of America, obviously.

Hidden beneath all the shouting, the core issue is that computers and related technologies are all about copying. They make it very very easy to copy things; and the internet makes it very very easy to distribute them. Locking things up so they can't be copied or distributed is relatively complex and difficult. The traditional content creators and distributors can kick and scream and try to push the genie back into the bottle all they want, but their old business model is doomed by these simple facts.