Yeah, I think you're spot-on in your assessment, and I really like the "middle age" term here. It really applies. Just like the middle-aged guy who shows up to work to collect a paycheck, they're not climbing the ladder anymore, but they've built enough of a stable niche that they don't have to worry about being out on the street next week unless they really screw something up.

I don't think he does, he says stupid things fairly often. His mouth is like a font, with stupidity gushing forth. Given the dismal track record of previous Microsoft products that attempted to go up against the iPod (Zune), iTunes (MSN Music Store), and iPhone (Kin), their new offering will have an extreme uphill battle, and probably be abandoned just like its predecessors.

That'll be one major factor contributing to the new Windows phone's failure, it's hard to trust that Microsoft will stick with something when the going gets a little tough, and most people actually do learn when they've been burned by a vendor who sells them a bum product and then drops all support for it within months. Clearly, as CEO, he hasn't learned any lessons from previous dismal failures, either.

So, it'll basically be an iPhone, only without the market traction that Apple has gained? I see another dismal phone failure in Microsoft's future.

The real problem is that while this would really help fight spam, there's collateral damage. Just like the judicial systems in civilized countries tend to operate on the principle that it's better to set 100 guilty people free rather than imprison 1 innocent person, most people who receive email would rather receive and delete 100 spam messages than miss one legit email inquiry from a potential customer or long-lost friend.

Sender Policy Framework seems even better than simple reverse DNS in theory, but it doesn't seem to get much traction because it causes more serious problems than spam in general causes. Until a critical mass of sysadmins basically tell the domain owners who are too stupid or lazy to add the appropriate DNS records to fuck off, lazy and stupid sysadmins will continue to not add those records. But until then, customers will cry and rebel if any of the good sysadmins who host them try to apply a passive spam filter that relies on such records. That's just how it goes, it's a Catch-22 which is preventing widespread adoption. The only potential solution would be to stage an SPF or rDNS record adoption day, get some big names on board, and hope for the best.

Indeed, I'm sure corruption and incompetence are the cause of ridiculous disposal regulations...but man, a little common sense with a little oversight would go a long way.

Can the government ever abandon something in that manner?

To say the lunar lander was "abandoned" probably isn't as accurate as saying it was "scuttled". Most government-owned stuff, such as shipwrecks, munitions on practice ranges, land & structures, and surplus property is never abandoned until it goes through a disposition process. I have a feeling that's even how the remains of soldiers (even on foreign soil) are regarded and why nations are entitled to recover the remains of their fallen soldiers.

I've also dealt with the disposition process firsthand, as a military and government surplus buyer of much stuff over the years. Pretty much everything that isn't low-grade trash (paper, disposable packaging, etc.) or food waste has to be disposed of through a process that seem to often last several months. Some of the things I've seen them trying to sell have negligible to anyone (and I'm very good at finding value in just about anything):

• Broken household electronics
• Broken particleboard furniture
• Bald tires
• Broken glass and plexiglass
• Rotten rubber sheeting
• Tattered rags
• Expired medical supplies

Some of those things might be able to be recycled (tires can be retreaded and all), but even that would likely be at a cost rather than for a profit. Only after they give the public a chance to buy this crap, can they just throw it in the huge roll-off dumpsters where it belongs. It's a massive waste of money and government employees' time to process all the forms and handle the rubbish so many times, but that seems to be the only way the government can actually surrender ownership of stuff that was purchased with taxpayer money.

It would set a very bad precedent if they allowed a US employee to violate the rules. I doubt the camera weighed all that much, but I'll go with the same argument that holds that it's unethical to take anything from a site, "What if everyone took a (rock, artifact, fossil, etc.)?", which my folks rightly used early and often. In this case, astronauts looting things isn't likely going to deprive science or other sightseers of knowledge or the experience, but NASA has very strict rules for very good reasons.

Astronauts are apparently allowed a small box for mementos to take into space and return with (I learned this on Pawn Stars when someone brought in a moon mission patch, photo, and autograph display). Nothing more without authorization. What if all the other members of the moon landing crew also decided to smuggle crap, and the module wound up being overweight? That could've endangered the lives of the crew. Why should Edgar's alleged bad behavior allow him to benefit in such a way that all the other moon astronauts didn't, because they behaved themselves?

I don't think jurisdiction of the crime matters. The Dred Scott case could apply here, which decided that ownership of property isn't conditional based on location or interruption of some conditions of ownership. In this case, US property was taken to the moon, where it was allegedly stolen and returned to Earth. I would think its condition of being on Earth and in the USA causes it to revert to being US property.

As stated in the article, astronauts had to receive explicit permission for what they were bringing back. That permission is apparently documented for all the other moonwalkers, who pulled-off pieces of their discarded suits as mementos, and also for small boxes of crap they were authorized to bring along (such as pennants and patches). Why should the rules that applied to all the others not apply to him, simply because he decided not to obey them?

I'm also curious to know if such a request would've been honored. How many moonwalkers were permitted to keep more than just pieces of their suits, were others allowed to scavenge instrumentation or maybe the lunar rover's gearshift knob? Or were they pretty much limited to salvaging tiny mementos from their own personal equipment?

Frankly, if he smuggled the camera back without permission, it's not his and he needs to give it back and ask for forgiveness. It was unprofessional and unethical and unfair to the others who risked their lives and didn't come back with extra souvenirs they could try to sell tens of thousands of dollars because they played by the rules.

The statute of limitations doesn't apply. They're not prosecuting him for a crime.

They're attempting to recover stolen property. Just because you stole something a really long time ago doesn't make it yours, free and clear. That's why the government can repossess moon rocks, no matter whose hands they passed through over the years. The odds of most stolen property after years and passing through many hands is remote, most people don't care enough to pursue their stuff that long...but if someone shows up one day, claiming to possess something he stole and using the people he stole it from as being the provenance that gives it all its value (the camera would be worth what, $100 tops as an obsolete scientific curiosity had it not gone to the moon?), I think the US Government is well within its rights to demand return of its property.

Yeah, this is just about right.

Rotary engines are really interesting, but engineers generally have to have an avenue to pursue in order to increase efficiency. Just like chronically-filthy 2-stroke diesel engines (think older buses & trucks and locomotives), or chronically-filthy air-cooled gasoline engines, there's only so much you can do with some technologies, due to limitations of the design or exorbitant costs involved with constructing them in ways that would overcome the limitations.

Usually, if a design has good potential and novelty, someone will try to run with it. Mazda has been working on Wankels for 50 years. A number of other major manufacturers tried to do things with them as well, and none of them pulled-off a coup. Rotaries were what set Mazda apart for so long, and they have a cult following. So did the Porsches with air-cooled engines. Emissions and efficiency standards rendered those obsolete, too, because lighter weight and "awesomeness" just don't balance out the flaws.

They treat the Foxconn workers like prisoners, including installing wire mesh over all of the windows of the barracks so the workers can't jump out. That level of control probably works wonders at preventing suicides.

I'm certain they deserved every bit of the bad press and deserve no slack whatsoever.

Foxconn workers who assemble stuff for Dell and a variety of others apparently don't get tortured for days over the loss/theft of pre-release hardware. THAT is the root of the problem, Apple is so caught-up in the silly product release spectacles that they send their iGestapo after people who find prototype phones their drunken employees have carelessly left in public places, and there also seems to be an even more locked-down and insane culture at the Foxconn plants that make Apple products.

I'm sorry, I don't care how special iCrap is, and how much fanboys are caught up in the iHysteria over the imminent release announcement, I have trouble regarding torture as appropriate even when lives are at stake. To torture someone over losing a pre-release device, or even over a blatantly stolen pre-release device is way off the scale of wrongness, and a corporation (and CEO of said corporation) that fosters that sort of culture in its overseas manufacturing facilities is despicable. Did Steve Jobs ever publicly denounce that culture? Did Steve Jobs ever announce measures to change the way situations like that are handled? Did Steve Jobs ever do anything other than tacitly approve the way the Chinese factory overseers handled the missing iPhone crisis?

No, Steve Jobs didn't. He defended the indefensible and did his best to minimize & brush-off the problem. Instead, Apple and Foxconn just blamed the workers for the problems and made them sign anti-suicide pacts. That puts him, and his entire corporation, right alongside the robber barons of the late 1800s as far as I'm concerned.

Actually, many, if not most, campus cops are really a step up from regular city cops. They have the same POST training as any other law enforcement officers in their state, they have the same authority as well, and they are held to a higher standard of professionalism and conduct. They're basically dealing with a mini-city filled with hordes of unwashed, drunk, and privileged young adults. You just can't have power-tripping bullies in a position like that. Around here, most of the problems arise when the city police lose their cool while handling off-campus problems in the neighborhood where all of the frat houses and homes that are rented by students are located.

Point granted-- though I have a lot of trouble envisioning how the pure form of anarcho-syndicalism would function in a practical sense, with all anarchist systems relying so heavily on individual virtue and self-restraint...free communism would be so incredible to have, but human envy and greed always seem to derail such systems on any sorts of large scale, since their trusting altruism is too easily taken advantage of.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's supposed to be the pinnacle of socialism, whereas Marxism-Leninism socialism is supposedly more of a training-wheels sort of arrangement that establishes the order and trains the populace, and then can transcend to the higher form after the class warfare is extinguished and the classes all learn to cooperate and work for mutual benefit, regardless of what their roles are. It's just my observation that, while Lenin is an idealist who I rather admire, the system unfortunately just never progresses to what would amount to that utopia, since it's still rather impossible to train humans not to be selfish dicks.

On a related note, I like the Linux form of socialism. It does generally work beautifully and is a shining example of what free communism can accomplish. I suppose it only works because it's nearly impossible to assign value, so it's free. Since there's no value assigned, people work on it for free. That all adds up to something that I find to be quite priceless, owned by the people, produced by the people, and used by the people.