Most of the comments here are annoying riffs on the theme, "I can read the word 'manipulation' in a pedantically absurd way and pretend there is no distinction". In fact, law and courts can use common sense, definitions, and human reasoning. They are not constrained to crudely written algorithms (even sophisticated algorithms could do better than most posts here allow, but that's a digression too).

As TFA says, photojournalism already has a fairly well defined standard about what "modifications" are merely technical versus which alter the meaning of the material presented. Part of this is a question of particular transformations that may or may not be applied, but much of it is a matter of judgment about meaning. Clearly, at the edges, you can try to subvert some overly narrow and hyper-technical construal. For example, Man Ray (and other photographers of the early 20th C) created some strikingly abstract and recontextualizing images using only techniques that would no per-se bump against the technical "modification" techniques... his purpose was obviously much different than fashion magazines, but if a modern photographer applies the same devices, the law and courts would reasonably call that "manipulation" within the spirit of the proposed law (whether labeling was required would presumably depend on the publication context). On the flip side, there are no doubt other photographs that could be "manipulated" in a formal sense without intending to present artificial meaning. For example, photos (digital or film) that are damaged in various ways might need to be "manipulated" to produce the "true" image. Again, courts and laws can make that distinction on a case-by-case basis.

If you are running Windows, you are part of a botnet. If you are running a real operating system, your system is clean. Simple, huh?

I run mostly Apple machines myself. I have installed Linux distributions on them, but I wind up running OSX in the end. It does indeed "just work" better when it comes to peripherals and hardware features (sound, external video, power modes, etc).

Here are my favorite applications for the Mac (as measured by frequency of usage):

* Firefox
* bash (and all those lovely utilities one uses in bash: ls, grep, cut, head, vim, cat, find, wget, etc)
* Python (often iPython)
* jEdit
* OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice)

Notice anything they have in common? They are all Free Software

There are a few proprietary applications I also keep in my Dock:

* Safari
* Mail.app
* GraphicConverter
* Preview
* iCal
* iTunes

These have something in common too. They are proprietary, but they are applications whose whole purpose is to manipulate or utilize files in non-proprietary data formats (HTML, mbox, PDF, png, jpg, CAL, mp3, etc... OK, I know mp3 is a little bit proprietary). If I were to need to give up any of these, nothing would stand in the way of manipulating the data files I had created using other tools.

There are a few other applications I use that are less clear, and that I don't feel quite so good about:

* Dictionary.app
* VirtualBox
* Acquisition
* Skype
* Finder

Well, the dictionary is handy, and the way the data is stored is probably not very open. But if I didn't have it, I'd use some other dictionary; there's not any bad lock-in there. VirtualBox is free-of-cost, but proprietary format; I'm not so happy about that, but it does let me run Linux in a VM. Acquisition is a nice (shareware/nagware) fileshare program that I paid for... well, I use to download non-proprietary data files. I could use something else if I wanted to to get the same data. Finder is... well, I could use a different file manager if I wanted. I don't love it, but it's there and is basically fine. The only really locked-in program on my list is Skype. It's hard to get around that... but it's the same story on my Linux machines.

I am in general agreement with a number of posters about the effectiveness of Gmail's spam filtering. However, the claims of only getting uncaught spam once on the order of weeks or months baffles me. I get at least several spams a day that make it through Gmail's filter. Of course, next to that, I also get hundreds of spams that are caught correctly (and once in a while false positives too though, so I really need to review the spam folder manually, which is a fairly quick visual scan). It's manageable, but not completely negligible, work.

It's possible (quite likely) that I have a more public identity than many posters (I'm widely known, and never hide or disguise my email address). But I still have to wonder if their accuracy claims about Gmail filtering are a bit exaggerated.

The difference between HTTP and Gopher has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with ability to serve multimedia content, nor with bandwidth. HTTP, or really HTML, just allows more diverse linking patterns than Gopher's hierarchical format. But there's nothing non-graphical or content specific about gopher. I RAN graphical Gopher clients perfectly happily (well, including early Web browsers that supported that protocol.

I wrote my own little program 'calc' to answer exactly this question. I want something that does nothing other than answer a basic numeric expression, and something like 'bc' has too much syntax for this.

I also like to have the thing work without needing to add the quotes around my expression, so I allow the somewhat kludgey 'x' for multiplication (since '*' is a shell wildcard if not quoted).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
from math import *
 
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    args = ["".join(a.split()) for a in sys.argv[1:]]
    expr = "".join(args) # Remove extra spaces in expression
    print >> sys.stderr, expr
    expr = expr.replace('**','^') # Temporarily write exponents as "^"
    expr = expr.replace('x','*').replace('"','').replace("'","")
    expr = expr.replace('*','*1.0*') # Cast terms to float
    expr = expr.replace('/','*1.0/') # More floats
    expr = expr.replace('e','*10**')
    expr = expr.replace('^','**')
    result = eval(expr)
    iResult = int(result)
    if result == iResult:
        print iResult
    else:
        print result
else:
    print >> sys.stderr, "Enter numeric expression"

I guess the summary is technically correct, since it mentions "through its teeth". But platypus is notable for also having venomous spurs. Certainly that doesn't change the observation that venomous mammals are rare.

The lack of sufficient filtering on language of spam emails also strikes me as a flaw of GMail (and also of Apple Mail's junk filter, for example).

Per the parent, obviously there are people who *want* email in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Korean, or whatever character set. Clearly it wouldn't be appropriate to make global filters against those character sets. However, it's not too subtle to know that *I* can't read those and don't want to receive them (well, I actually -can- read Cyrillic/Russian poorly and slowly, but not enough that anyone legitimately writes me in that alphabet, except maybe a word or two thrown in for effect). I think I am like a lot of people in this regard of only knowing one or two alphabets (probably the vast majority).

Giving me some checkboxes about what alphabets I understand would be really nice in filters. To be smart, these should have a bit of a threshold to them. If some real correspondent of mine throws in a word of Hebrew, Chinese, etc., the larger volume of Roman/English words should let that pass as OK. But notes that are 90%+ in languages I can't make any sense of are clearly spam to me. Or if Google wants to eschew too much explicit configuration (as they often do), just accelerate the learning of that. They *know* what language emails are in (this is dead simple NLP statistics, none of their fancy stuff), even among languages that are written in Roman alphabet. If I have always spam-flagged non-English, take that as a really strong hint for my personal filter.

Personally, I've been boycotting iTMS for a couple years. I got so fed up with being repeatedly stung by DRM bugs, that I decided it would never be worth it to buy from them. The nail in the coffin was Amazon MP3 coming out with an equally good interface to easily download a similarly broad range of music. I'm sure there are songs here and there that are at one site but not the other, but it's easier to do without those specific tracks that to expose myself to DRM crap again.

The parent suggests a fun game. I'm trying to count in my head the computers that run in my house:

* 2 wireless routers, both running Linux (Ativa and D-Link). I assume so anyway; I honestly haven't interacted with them except via their web interfaces.
* G1 phone, running Linux/Android
* Razr2 v9 phone, running Linux
* An old-ish Pentium-M laptop running Linux (Ubuntu 8.10)
* A MacBook Pro (old-ish, Core Duo, not Core2 Duo) running OSX 10.4 Tiger
* A MacBook (pretty new) running OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard
* A Mac Mini G4 running OSX 10.4 Tiger
* A horrible laptop that belongs to work that runs Windows XP (wouldn't be a bad machine physically, if I could install Linux on it though)

Technically, I also have two big tower desktops sitting in closets, that haven't actually been plugged in for over a year. One runs/ran OS/2; the other some version of Linux from 2 years ago (maybe Slackware, I forget what I last put on it).