One swallow does not make a summer, nor does the occasional lucid court decision give me faith in the legal system as a whole. It's nice when it happens (Kitzmiller especially), but the courts make plenty of bad calls too. That reactionary fugghead Scalia is still in SCOTUS; British libel law is still horribly broken; and then there's this story.

Really? Didn't work out that way in England.

I use Comcast and I've noticed DNS has been damned slow the last few days. Maybe this is why?

I can, and IANAB, just a science geek. Bacteria are prokaryotic: their DNA is distributed throughout a relatively small cell. Fungi are eukaryotic; their DNA is in a cell nucleus. This is Chapter-1-of-the-textbook stuff.

No, that was Bill Gates. He should have taken the left turn.

Well, he makes some good points. Code review is indeed difficult, requires good skills, and is not done by many people in the free software community (the OpenBSD development team being a notable exception). Good software engineering methodology is crucial, certainly.

He concludes that Microsoft ends up shipping fewer vulnerabilities than anyone else. Is this true? Well, with the obvious exception of OpenBSD, it might be; but that's not the whole story. What developers do when a vulnerability is found is pretty important, too. Probably even more important.

Not long ago, a serious vulnerability was discovered in several versions of IE. Turns out Microsoft had known about it for several months. So, naturally, they had a patch all ready and tested before it became a problem - right? Well, no. Instead, they urged users to upgrade to IE8. The bug didn't get patched until almost a week after exploits were seen.

For all their professionalism and expertise, Microsoft developers labor under a severe handicap: they have to work on what Microsoft managers tell them to work on. They may think that a given bug is urgent and should be patched right away; but at the end of the day, the priorities are set by people who are focused on the bottom line, and those people know that nothing much is going to happen to Microsoft if a vulnerability is left open for a week or two. Every year, people in the Linux community confidently assert that this is the year of the Linux desktop; and every year, they're proven wrong. Too many people are locked into Microsoft's proprietary formats, and have too much time invested in learning to use Windows, to switch easily. And that's not going to change anytime soon.

Bad move? Really? What are people going to do about it if Google chooses to be evil? Stop using Google? Seriously? Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least? Can even the technically-adept people here get along easily without it? How about the other 95% of web users?

Google is at least as immune from criticism as Microsoft, at this point, and they know it.

While I agree that Justice Gordon is sensible, I'm pretty sure the Honorable Michelle Marjorie Gordon (photo) is not a man.

Obviously it is not the end of the world - a similar decision was rendered in the U.S. in 1991, and the U.S. phone directory business has not gone down in flames.

Why did Wikileaks choose Iceland, of all the places they might have gone, to try to persuade? Do they have an exceptionally good press freedom record or something?

Yes, very good, we certainly don't want people overthrowing governments by force. Except in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile, the Confederate States of America, or His Majesty's American colonies. That's different.

See my comment above - protesting without crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's can be illegal.

Well, the law does say it has to be "by force or violence or other unlawful means". However, I see a problem here. Suppose a group wants some kind of change in government, and holds a peaceful protest, and it turns out they've broken some law against protesting without a permit or such? Bingo. They're advocating controlling the government, and they're doing it by unlawful means. And here come the guys with the riot sticks.

Obviously such an abuse would not hold up in a court for a moment, but it could sure as hell be used to intimidate people until it's struck down.

No mention, of course, of the new jobs it will make possible. How many web designers were there in 1990? How many airline pilots in 1940?

Well, yes, but we've learned more about the problem domain since then. It's still guesswork, but at least it's more-informed guesswork.