So which parts of the article do you believe? None of them? All of them? Only the parts that fit your belief system?

Judging by the comments in this thread, people believe that:
1) The guy in question is obviously not suspicious at all.
2) The guy in question is telling us everything in a completely balanced and impartial way.
3) The police are obviously trying to track him just because they felt like it, and have no reason at all.

My point was that, first of all, they might, in fact, have reason to be suspicious of him. Or, they might NOT be suspicious of him: they might be trying to figure out where his cousin is, and decided this was the right way to do it. We don't know, because we don't have a comment from the police. Second, I don't really believe much of what anyone in the article said. I find it likely that he has a cousin who was believed to be a drug dealer. I find it likely that there was a tracking device on his car. I find it likely that the police showed up while he was being interviewed. Beyond that? We, the readers, don't really have anything convincing in any direction. We have no evidence that he's telling the truth, we have no evidence that the police didn't have a warrant or cause to put a tracker on his car, we don't even really have any evidence that the police DID put a tracker on his car.

So, yes. I believe the quote from him that his brother was probably involved in drug dealing just as much as I believe the rest of the article. Which is to say, I take it as a possibility, but in no way proven to be true.

I've never actually seen an episode of CSI. I don't watch much TV at all, really. But here's the thing. You're right: Americans can pretty much go to Mexico whenever they want. But if their stated reason is to go visit a relative who was likely a drug dealer, that might be suspicious.

You're also right that there's no proof of a crime. But there might be reason to be suspicious. So far we only have one person's take, and it was the person with the most reason to make tracking him look unreasonable. The police have a responsibility to investigate things that look suspicious. There's a fine line there somewhere between "investigating something suspicious" and "abusing police authority"; I'm not convinced this crossed it.

Now: I DO think that they should have a warrant. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but they're not answering questions. That DOES bother me. But I can see why they'd want to know more about this guy.

When I see a quote from the person being tracked saying that his cousin, who used to own the truck, left the country suddenly and was probably fleeing due to being a drug dealer, then yes. I find it no less credible than the rest of the story.

Because it's in the article? Well... the fact that the cousin left the country unexpectedly and was probably involved in the drug trade is in the article. I suppose it doesn't say he was charged with anything, so I overstated. I should have said "The guy's cousin left the country suddenly, and his relatives say he was probably fleeing because he was involved in the drug trade." But again... it was in the article.

Well, yes. My thought was more that if they'd gone for the warrant, they could have done a lot more useful things than just stick a tracker under his car, though. Like actually investigating to see if he was doing anything he shouldn't be.

So I agree that warrantless tracking is a bad thing. Let's get that out of the way right at the beginning.

What baffles me in this case is that they COULD HAVE GOTTEN A WARRANT!

Look. The guy's cousin is on the run for drug charges, possibly involving drug smuggling. Before taking off, he sells his car to this guy, who waits a month or two, then drives to Mexico, stays a few days, and then drives back. I'm not saying any of that is damning, but it would certainly raise questions in my mind if I were the local DEA or police representative. And assuming they had any evidence at all on the guy who fled the country, that ought to be enough to get a warrant to do some minimally invasive tracking. (Yes, it's invasive. But there isn't a person staring through his window all night, there's not an actual person following him around all the time, and so on.)

So why not go ask for a warrant? For that matter, why not ask for a warrant to do more checking on this guy and his cousin? THAT'S what bothers me about the whole thing. They had no particular reason to be underhanded about any of it, but they chose to anyway.

Buy a car from a possible drug dealer/smuggler, then drive it to Mexico and back shortly after the dealer/smuggler flees the country. At least, that's what this guy did.

Do not compare this to other software distributors. The 99$ tag that you HAVE to pay per year to have your app in the appstore make it extremely hard for anyone to be able to make a profit (especially when apple will take 30% of anything they sell).

And if you sell through a tradition channel, how much does it cost to package and ship your product?

And if you produce a physical product and try to sell it in stores, how much does that cost?

Any time you produce a product and market it, you're taking the risk that you won't break even. The Apple store isn't really any different. It perhaps shows a little faster whether your product will succeed or fail, and it's perhaps a little less obvious when you start out that there's that risk, but the risk is pretty much the same. You've got to develop the product and market it. Only then will you know whether it will actually succeed.

No argument there. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, though; a friend of mine was hired by a company to oversee a switch to an open source database system. What he found out was that not only was the old system closed and proprietary, the actual data files were encrypted, and there was no way to just read the data out of them without first breaking the encryption. It also turned out that the company they'd bought the system from originally didn't have any way to migrate the data to a newer version -- why not? Because they didn't have a stand-alone way to decrypt the database! It was only possible to do it through the interface, and they hadn't built the key for the old version into the new version.

Proprietary systems at their worst....

... and discovering that it won't work for them, for whatever reason.

They didn't say "We'll move to 50% OSS in the next year," they said "We'll look at it favorably." If they look at it and discover that, despite the costs involved in their existing software, they can't actually afford to move their data to an open source equivalent, it's not going to happen. And if it turns out there ISN'T an open source equivalent, it's really not going to happen.

While I'm not saying OSS is always more expensive -- it usually is a lot cheaper, in my experience -- there can be times when it's cheaper to stick with what you've got. Think about it. If all your data is in a proprietary system in a non-standard format, and you don't have anyone on staff who can update it, it's going to be expensive to make the switch. That one time cost may be a lot more than you have in your budget for the yearly licensing fees of that proprietary system. After all, that's WHY that proprietary system uses its own unique data format....

I've got three Lowepro bags, for different situations.

1) An old holster-type bag, with a shoulder strap. Similar to the Toploader Zoom 50, but much older. I use it for day trips to the fair, things like that -- it'll take my SLR (with or without grip) with an 18-125 lens, and I can fit a 50mm in the outside pocket with a few extra memory cards and a spare battery.

2) A slingshot 200. This is my tool for all-day walks. I spent a few weeks walking all over Italy with it, I take it for day hikes, and I carry it pretty much everywhere on a daily basis. It will hold the gripped SLR with any lens I own, up to the 70-300 VC attached, with my other two main lenses (the 50mm and the 18-125OS) and a flash also in the main compartment. The front pocket holds my remote shutter release, a couple of batteries, a notebook and pens. The top pocket holds a Nook perfectly, and still has space for either lunch or a few other travel necessities -- glasses, contact lens stuff, and an address book, for instance.

3) A Fastpack 250, I think. It may be the 350. With all of my lenses, the gripped SLR, a 15.6" laptop, spare batteries, remote trigger, memory cards, tripod, windbreaker, lunch, ebook, notebook, and all the chargers for everything I'm carrying in it it weighs a ton. But it IS a convenient (more or less) way to move everything at once, and make sure it all makes it through airport security. I usually stick one of the other two bags in my checked luggage if I'm going to bring this along, because it's just too big for daily use.

For there server folks, maybe. But a lot of desktop support people are pretty focused on one OS, in my experience. They'll be able to do anything you need with Windows, but not really know anything about Mac or Linux.

And someone who has spent the last 15 years learning to admin Windows servers isn't necessarily going to be able to just step in and make a linux server do what they want; there IS a learning curve, and while it's not all that steep, it means linux servers aren't going to be a "Yeah, I can have that for you tomorrow" kind of deal.

Absolutely.

When the economy collapses, the first thing everyone will do is run out to become a computer expert so they can install and run linux. Corporations will replace their entire IT staff with people who know linux, and the average person on the street will suddenly realize that what they really need to do to cope with a failed economy is LEARN A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!

Or, you know, people might just keep using what they're using while they hope things get better. Because that will leave them time to work enough jobs to buy food.

I've found some to be readable on the Nook, but it works better to convert them to epub with Calibre, and then upload them. I imagine the same would work for the Kindle, since I'm pretty sure Calibre can be set up to talk to one.

My experience has been that if I get a magazine in PDF format it's not very readable. Magazines are mostly published in columns, rather than full page articles. The columns don't translate very well.