I have never owned an Apple device. After the moves made in German courts this week by Apple against Samsung and Motorola, I never will. I hope many others will join me in a boycott of any and all Apple products.

Rule 0: Spam is theft

Rule 1: Spammers lie.

Rule 2: When in doubt about spammers lying, see rule 1.

Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.

Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.

Time and again, these simple rules have proven themselves. Too many fallen spam kings, too many spam kings sitting in jail or just plain bankrupt.

I could swear I saw an episode where Cartman did this. Didn't I? Am I wrong? How?

GOD DAMN YOU SHEIK HAMAD!!!

One wonders, are they working at all with Steve Linford and Spamhaus? If not, why not? I know of no other well-researched collection of information, nor any other man well versed in who's sending spam.

Someone please tell me how a corporation based in Washington State and legally incorporated in Delaware suddenly becomes a tax collector for states in which it does not have a physical presence? I can see being held liable for Delaware and Washington State, but until someone amends the tax codes of the remaining 48 states and other U.S. territories, I think it should remain that we don't pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases. I don't live in Ohio and I don't expect to pay Ohio state sales tax on a purchase I made over the Internet, nor do I expect the state of Michigan to tax my purchase from a company outside of Michigan.

These things do not work on an American accent, only on one from a specific part of the country.

I'll call bullshit. I work daily with a voice recognition system integrated with Word and MS-SQL to process medical transcription. (Not by choice, mind you, but it's all there is in this field. Oh, and patents. Lots of patents.) It seems to do well with a good variety of accents, many of them ESL speakers with funny accents and mispronunciations. Trust me, it all still needs an editor to perfect the output, but it's far more capable of getting readable output on a page than you think. If it can do that, then it's good enough for natural language machine-human interaction.

But we are superior to other animals. We have prehensile thumbs, language, art, science, music, and other cultural gifts. Ever looked at squirrel culture? Houses built of sticks and leaves in trees. Hiding food anywhere they can to ensure good supplies. They're barely out of the stone age.

It's clear where the problem really lies -- in the idiots who insist that we should suddenly kowtow to the rights of dumb animals. If we weren't supposed to keep or eat tasty animals, they'd have a bad flavor and wouldn't be so cuddly.

You forgot one thing: You use executables from the original CD on a patched, updated system with all the security fixes and hot fixes and patches and service packs installed, and you can forget about the system being operable. That's because the older versions of the programs you just used to write over the infected, newer versions aren't compatible with the rest of the installed software on the disk. Microsoft could come up with a way to wipe and fix stuff, but that would cost them money and we know they're no longer the 500 lb gorilla they once were.

It's obvious that many posting here don't know the first thing about how Windows works or why it gets infected. The problem isn't in the boot loader. The MBR is just one place that an attacker can find space to store a bootstrap program that will launch his infecting executable from a file on disk, and then, since that area is read and executed each time the PC is started, it writes to so many critical OS files that removing them from the system or disinfecting them becomes impossible without rendering the system inoperable. As the researcher quoted in TFA says, a complete wipe and reinstall is the only way you're going to be certain you have a clean system. And this is one of the many reasons you can't get me to run Windows as my primary OS. Sure, I'll run it in a VM hosted on Linux, but no way would I rely on it for my every day computing needs on the bare metal. Fucking garbage without any kind of cogent security system is what Windows is.

Can anyone tell whether those 4 remaining claims were independent claims or dependent claims? The dependent claims aren't worth much if the independent claims on which they depend are rendered invalid.

But publishing a news story about the arrests isn't going to cause the members to destroy evidence and scatter? Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.... Fuck.

Really, man. TFA is full of unconfirmed speculation that only posits that the guy they got was involved with Lulzsec and nothing more. I'd call it irresponsible reporting myself.

As long as the prior art comprises a significant number of the patent claims and then makes the patented process a rather obvious extension of the original work, I think they've got it sewn up. I'm not saying the patent is an exact match, but here's prior art that embodies much of the patent's claims and could be useful in rendering it moot.

Yeah, all file transfer protocols developed in the '70s that do exactly what this patent claims. This is the reason why patents and software need a divorce.