Usually I would be on the side of "Damn police state, wtf" but I have a hard time getting worked up about this. Because, you know, whenever I buy 5000 rounds of waterproof ammunition, night vision goggles and a gas mask, it's always for something positive.

I'm reading Steve Jobs' biography right now and the man's legacy seems to be one of perfectionism and profound hypocrisy, especially in light of the article above. Steve Jobs was an orphan whose biological parents demanded that he be adopted by a college educated family. When the educated family backed out on him, he was picked up by a blue collar machinist with only a high school education; but he had a steady job and was involved in a working community where jobs received the stability he needed to work hard and make something of himself. The man was an orphan, used the social safety net of 1950s America to its full capacity, did his early work at Atari (not manufacturing overseas) with only a high school diploma, got Atari to pay part of his way to "find himself" in India, and now his multi-billion dollar company says it doesn't owe the United States employment? Disgraceful but what do you expect from a man who got into computers by playing around with hardware, only to create a computer company that forbids the user from customizing the hardware on their machine. Steve Jobs was remarkable in many good ways...but his legacy is very mixed.

Right on. A CRUSHING claim of semantics without citations. #*&^#$, who posted this?

Yea, and they've also released documents on them as well. Wikki leaks seems to be equal opportunity in its leaking.

The real world is about information. Secrets may have won World War II for the Allies but propaganda made Germany such a menace in the first place. Are you really implying that an abundance of whistle blowers would have helped Germany further their cause? Really??? Das wirklich passt nicht.

From what I'd heard on a recent documentary about wiki leaks that they approached the state department to say "Hey, if you have any tips on which ones to keep secret, we'd be more than willing to sit down with you" and the state department issued a blanket statement to them saying "none of them should be released because they're classified." It's a reason sure, but not a good one. Is this the one to which you're referring?

Dude, seriously. The "quirkiness" comes from whatever's cutting edge. Want quirkiness? Create something new! You can't just hang around debugging quirky software and expect it NOT to get better, unless you're a terrible programmer. I don't understand complaints like this. Linux is a solid operating system! What did they want for their work? If they want to work on something more edgy, they should build something more edgy.

It strikes me that the notion of promising a prize for a miracle invention ignores the process involved in research. Prizes are fun and all, but this is rather tawdry when one thinks of how much work and risk goes into developing an invention or solution to a problem of this magnitude. Researchers who pursue this goal take on substantial financial burdens in doing so, as the project requires both time and resources. This organization seems to keep itself a safe arms length away from the real blood sweat and tears of the undertaking by planting itself safely at the finish-line with a big check to congratulate a lucky few. It is unscientific to ignore the fact that invention requires highly competent people to fail who must be funded as well. Providing a prize for the winner has all the glamor of big-bucks but lacks the courage required for legitimate research.

My thoughts exactly! I'm not saying that it couldn't have future applications that are more useful but seriously MIT. We've got a record oil spill in the gulf, global warming, an energy and water crisis and you guys are figuring out how to build a trackpad without the trackpad? Fer goodness sake, we in the scientific world have really gotta get off this proverbial hard on for consumer electronics for a generation or so. There are better things to do.

Who at the company said that this would be a good idea!? I wonder how the conversation in that meeting went. "Well I'll agree to invest in this new technology but ONLY on the condition that we use encryptions for the sole purpose of making it HARDER for the customer to fix their $40,000 investment." The only thing that would make this better is if Chevy Ford or Chrysler helped to pioneer this piece cerebral excrement.

Look at the photo on this article, why would these folks ever want their faces attached to this job? Think of the following exchange that might happen at a party they attend. Man at Party: "What do you do for a living?" Tool that works for Facebook: "I enforce petty decency laws on people's personal Facebook pages" Man at Party "Thank God there are folks like you combating the posting of areolas and bringing this country back to Christ." Seriously, what do they think they're accomplishing? We're not living in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century.

While I applaud Mr Specter's apparent inclination toward good judgment, this seems to be the latest in what has become a disturbing trend. As the last of the sensible say "to Hell with the republican party," this leaves the most extreme to run half of our country's major political parties. While I've heard talk about a possible third party emerging out of this political turmoil, in 2012 we will most likely be faced with the decision between a republican or a democrat. The recent exodus of moderates from the republican party leaves only the profoundly stupid and the religious zealots (though these two categories are far from being mutually exclusive) to chose 50% of our realistic presidential candidates. This shouldn't sit well with anyone. I say that a push must be made to register reasonable people in the republican party in hopes of moderating what is currently a juggernaut of poor judgment.

"The court found the defendants guilty of helping users commit copyright violations 'by providing a website with ... sophisticated search functions, simple download and storage capabilities, and through the tracker linked to the website.'" Hmm, Google's search engine returned links to individual torrents on Pirate Bay by an even more sophisticated search capability. It too provides simple download and storage capabilities. I will concede that I know of any special Google tracker, however it does provide "sophisticated search functions" for a person to seek out this apparently illegal application and as we saw in the statement above, that sort of an association is good enough. The trumped up justification for this sentencing is so sloppy, it's an embarrassment to legal bullshit artists everywhere.

Certain levels of E coli in certain areas of the body are necessary for us to live, but it doesn't stop us from calling it a pollutant when we eat spinach that's loaded with bacteria. The reasoning behind your statement is accurate but trivial outside of a middle school science class. Of COURSE CO2 is necessary for life but I can't think of one harmful substance that doesn't have a positive application somewhere in the biosphere. Instead of getting all caught up in some moral conflict about whether a molecule is innately good or bad, look at the context of the discussion; it is entirely reasonable to call carbon a pollutant given discussion above.