The only thing that will be effective is for the company to have a clear policy, as the law requires, and a clear enforcement mechanism. The only way to do that is with the assistance of a qualified labor attorney local to you. If you haven't done this already, whoever runs your company is insane, and your company is doomed. If you have, then keep with it.

The only enforcement mechanism that works is the same as any other kind of behavior that messes up the work place: counseling, warning, and termination. If you fire the first asshole who gets out of line, the rest will know there are consequences. If you lose the rest of the team, you're rid of people who value their childish behavior more than their jobs, or your job. If that hurts your company ,see above about insanity and doom.

You should, however, be familiar with various laws regarding such things where you are. In the US, laws vary a lot, but generally, the inside of a store isn't a public place, and if they have a policy against photography/filming, you could possibly face criminal charges if you're caught.

And in some states, audio recording (which your cell phone will likely do by default) without advance persmission from everyone is a felony.

You may not agree with the law, but you know as well as I do you're not ready to go to prison to protest is.

Attendance has been capped as what the fire marshalls will allow in the building (about 140,000, IIRC) for years. It's not about money, it's about the organizers getting meet the A-listers, without having to stand in line.

Missed the mark. Comic-Con, the Comic-Con, is non-profit, run by unpaid volunteers. Last I heard, the biggest convention in the world run by amateurs.

No, the reason they've sold out utterly and completely to Hollywood is that the people who make those decsions, the organizers, get "all access" badges. That means they can go anywhere and everywhere, inlcuding the green room, to rub elbows with Angelina Jolie (that was the year the sell-out really started) and Hugh Jackman. So far as I can tell, the organizers would perform human sacrifices under the Sails if it kept the A-list Hollywood types coming every year.

Becoming? It's been a Hollywood trade show for about a decade.

On a publicly visible web server is to set up set the directive for the default web site (the first one in the virtual host list) to default deny to everyone. Then put your web site on a different virtual host. 99.9% of the scans I see come in by IP address, which gets them the default site. Any legitimate traffice will come in by domain name. This set up not only denies the script kiddes access to any PHP forms you've got, it convinces their 'bots to give up very quickly, which means less of a toll on your bandwidth.

(As someone noted, the standard consumer highspeed account prohibits running servers. Many commercial accounts do, too, unless you told them you're running a server of some kind. You may also have to get them to unblock port 25 if you want to run your own mail server - be very careful if you do that, though. You don't want to be a spamfest rathole without knowing it.)

Actually, according to the FBI's NCVS data, if the victim has a gun, the odds of the victim being injured (in the case of robbery or assault) or the robbery being completed go down over any other response. Even if the criminal initiates the violence.

You've just made it profitable for big companies with on-staff lawyers to completely stop innovating. Instead, they can just see what other, smaller companies are doing, and copy it, patent or not. Because no small company will ever dare sue for patent infringement again.

California traffic judges are pretty well known for giving the defendent a break if they're put a lot of effort in to their presentation, even if their premise is obviously stupid. Half the time, they'll tell you that point blank. This is from the other half, of course.

They just figure if you put that much work in to it, you've learned your lesson, and hopefully know the line of BS won't work aqain, and will thus stop doing what you got caught doing.

According to industry indisders, the cost of putting paper on ink and getting in to the store is about 10% of the cover price. Yeah, that little. (And that's consistent with most other forms of manufacturing, too, where the average is more like 15%.) Charlie Stross estimated that as many man-hours are put in by the publisher as by the author, to turn a manuscript in to a book.

Every vote for 99 cent ebooks is a vote for less editing, no proofreading, amateurish layout, and generally even lower quality. And quality has suffered quite a lot in the last few decades as it is.

The future of computing is artificial consciousness, and it will be here within 20 years, and maybe much sooner than that,' says Sawyer.

Yeah, it'll be running on a Linux desktop in my fusion powered flying car in the Mars colony. Good thing they're all just 20 years away.

While it is, no doubt, true that those who do not file stuff can find what they want faster with search than those who do can with their folders, I suspect that those who do file find stuff faster in their folders than those who file stuff would with search.

To each his own. Not everybody benefits from the same methods.

Cost difference is minimal, since all the needed components will run just fine on Windows home. And, in fact, if you know Windows and don't know Linux, and you're not working for free, it's actually cheaper to use Windows because of the time to figure it all out.

Sure those are available, but a stable enough Windows OS to handle it is going to cost him at least a license fee. So, why bother?

I've had rather more trouble with instabality with server versions of Windows than with XP home, myself. Especially the newest version, though that has more to do with trying to do too much on a single box. Windows is only hard to keep running smoothly if you don't know what you're doing.

I know I'll get booed for this, but why use Linux at all? Apache, PHP and MySQL are all available for Windows, and run on any version. I use a Linux distro for my firewalls, but Windows for everything else, including two internal web servers, two mail servers and multiple file servers. Yeah, you can do the same thing with less hardware with Linux, and it's probably a bit more stable, plus less work to keep up to date, but if you know Windows, and don't know Linux, you're better off staying with Windows. You don't really need that much more hardare, mostly RAM, and that's not that expensive these days, and you'll be more secure and stable with an OS you know than something brand new. Plus, it's more likely to work.

(As a side note, I'd be very, very cautious about using XAMPP. It's not intended for a production environment, and it installs in a very insecure state. Plus, last I checked, they were pretty slow about adding new versions of stuff to their package, so things tended to be out of date. You can get all the components - Apache, MysQL, PHP, for free, direct, at the current version, from the people who make them. And while Mercury is a fine mail server, it tends to be updated slowly. Even if you go with XAMPP, use hmailserver for your email instead.)