Why put your neck on the line? If you make a cable and anything goes wrong, even if it happens later on, you're blamed. If something happens with the Belkin cable, you can blame Belkin. Even if it isn't Belkin's fault. Especially after your boss has told you to do something. Whenever you go up against an authority figure, the best you can hope for is proving them wrong. It's better to say "What a great idea boss!" and buy the cable. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, don't rub it in. Besides, do you really want to crimp your own cables?

I somehow feel that terrorists would not want to pay for a license from Microsoft or Apple. And even a pirated version of Windows would make them very nervous everytime automatic updates ran, would you like your system connecting to an American company's servers when American Predator drones are flying overhead waiting for intelligence on your location. I guess you could run Windows unpatched, but that's just going to make suicide bombers press the detonator early. Linux has a more international flavor, which would appeal to the global jihadist.

Maybe I'm wrong and Osama has an iBook.

If this was completely intentional, it wouldn't be such a big deal. Non-political censorship is a minor matter. It would be terrible news if Amazon was de-ranking liberal or conservative books. But this is a minor issue. Worst case scenario, men will have to go back to jerking off to Sears catalogues. How difficult is it to find "adult content" on the Internet? My guess is that 90% of people trying to buy adult oriented books have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for. They probably have a name or saw something online. Otherwise you might buy something that includes she-male porn. Or does not include she-male porn (I didn't want to leave the Apple guys out).

Gay and lesbian books are a niche market. So are many other things. Dan Brown novels and Harry Potter books appeal to a general audience. Not saying that they're great, just that a wide scope of people buy them. Pregnancy books are an example of a niche market. People who want to find pregnancy books, search for pregnancy books. They are completely irrelevant to other people. The same for deck repair. Most non-gays are not interested in gay material. Joe Hetero-Average or Jane Hetero-Average do not benefit from getting gay book hits on their generic searches. If you want a gay cowboy story, search for "gay cowboy". If you want a book on kitchen repair, search for "sink disaster".

If this wasn't a glitch, it's because the vast majority of the world's population is repulsed by homosexual sex. The same way that the vast majority of the population do not want to see a man and a woman who have a BMI of 50 have sex. The media image of sexy lesbians is pretty much lesbian blackface, they are usually presented as two straight women who are having sex to arouse a man. This does not mean that people want homosexuals imprisoned or punished, the public just doesn't want to watch them "exercise" their freedom. Just as most people do not want to watch a burn victim have sex with someone with a colostomy bag.

As far as sales figures go, I've never understood why people are so likely to follow them. I don't have grey hair and I've known for a long time that sometimes half the people in the country buy drek. Popularity and Quality are independent of each other.

With scanners at $100, who do they think this will stop. People will scan their books or borrow them from a friend and scan them. These scans will end up on the Internet. Wizards of the Coast is going to stop as much piracy as the RIAA. All they've manage to accomplish is cutting off a source of revenue. People who pirate will continue to pirate, people who don't pirate won't be able to buy your books in digital format. Not to mention reducing revenue from people who want to look at a pirated PDF to see if the book is useful before spending $20 to $30 on a non-pirated book. Now they're just not going to buy.

The only way to stop piracy is to lock down every system in the world and then destroy all knowledge of computer technology. And that will only work until some guy in his basement re-discovers the knowledge.

Were the prosecutors Republicans or Democrats? It's one thing to have an impartial prosecution of a politican before an election, but a crooked deeply partisan is unacceptable. He does sound guilty though, but who knows what the prosecutors lied about.

It's not that the newspapers don't want Google linking to their website. They want the ad revenue of course. They just want Google to pay for the privilege of linking to their website as well. Think of ISPs who want you to pay for an Internet connection and then want websites to pay for a premium connection to your system.

This is probably why AP is going about it, rather than an individual newspaper. If an individual newspaper complains to Google, Google will simply remove them from being listed. The newspaper loses to their rivals and no one gets the double dip. If legislation required Google to link to the newspapers and pay a small fee every time someone clicked on a link, I think AP would be happy. If Google was not required to link to the newspapers, it probably would just link to the websites of a country which didn't have this legislation. It's pretty much asking Google to subsidize the newspaper industry. I'm not a supporter of this.

Most people want a default browser. They just want to surf the Internet and their last computer had IE. They don't want to learn another user interface. IE may have its issues, but it's not that bad and you can easily replace it for free with the world class browser of your choice. Even an inept user will be offered Google Chrome whenever they go to www.google.com. Firefox has an OK share of the market. And there are a lot of people who've downloaded Firefox and decided to keep using IE.

It's likely that PC vendors will be paid money to include a company's browser with the system. As part of the agreement, it may even lockout other browsers. So you could be stuck with a worthless browser because a few dollars were passed the vendor's way.

Imagine a scenario in which Opera wants to charge users for their browser. So the PC vendor offers you two options: $30 for an Opera browser (the only one they offer and it's locked in, so you can't change it) or a free ad supported version of the Opera browser (again you can't change it).

I know I'm supposed to hate Microsoft and I don't like a lot of the things they do. But when I get something for free (included in the price) and I can change it for free, it's hard to bitch. The only people who are hurt by the inclusion of IE are market losers trying to screw consumers out of money and anti-Microsoft ideologues.