out of curiosity, where would one find mousepads like that?

A war crime by any other name....

The Unit 731 stuff is particularly abhorrent.

If you're keeping the data offline, why bother putting it on the cloud anyway? Save yourself the bandwidth and just make a hotsite or warm site with your data backups sent over a leased line through a VPN instead of over the internet.

You can talk all about encryption, but if you're going to /use/ your data, at some point, the hardware will need to touch it unencrypted -- even if only to actually encrypt it before storage or transport or whatever. If you don't have control of the hardware, you don't have control of the data. Period. End of story.

Snark is all well and good, but this was a decision by AT&T about what they'll allow on their network; Apple's involvement is closer to being as a 3rd party vendor. Based on AT&T's decision, Apple will allow apps that the platform could already handle (cf jailbroken iPhones that can run VoIP apps).

You forgot to capitalize "Damen" and "Herren". Yeah I know I'm being nitpicky. ;-)

I think you mean that you're being a "Grammar [REDACTED IN GERMANY]"

Well, ubuntu's not for sale -- I'm sure someone will charge you for it if you want, but you can't walk into a store and buy it. But you can get some netbooks, laptops and desktops preinstalled with it, and their publicity and userbase evangelism has certainly increased their marketshare; even 3 or 4 years ago, you'd have been hard pressed to find a linux distro that had the kind of community and popularity that ubuntu has now. Redhat might have been close, but their focus on corporate money/marketshare put a bit of distance between the average user and them; debian has the fanatical userbase, but can be technically difficult for newbies and is therefore destined to never have the broad userbase that ubuntu has. If you're looking for a desktop OSS OS, it's not only available, you can get it preinstalled already. And they've got help/support etc forums available.

Be's downfall was threefold: no apps, no inroads to consumers and Apple went with Jobs' NeXT instead of Gassee's BeOS. Haiku's OSS nature means it can't be killed in the market -- there's no market that it *needs* to survive -- but without some kind of push to get it going and into people's hands, it's going to be as great as the next linux distribution you've never heard of. Which is a shame, because it's a nice OS.

The beauty of leaded gasoline is that even your children's children's children will know about it.

Is there a push from the Haiku folks to get this onto machines? Or is this the equivalent of another hobby linux distro with no publicity and no one that cares for it except those that worked on it to begin with? I mean, finally, they have a product; but what now?

"i put on my wizard hat and cloak"

This is a function of how many /. readers are hostmasters/HNIC's for TLD's. The people with a hardcore interest in this have already done it for their domain (or it doesn't matter to them because their tld isn't signed, and so even if they signed it, there would be an ultimate break in the chain). I wouldn't expect a /. story about enterprise-level hardware or software that only fortune 500 companies use to have a lot of comments either; the reader base is small to begin with. Kindle's are dirt cheap in comparison to say, a production oracle environment.

Right now, rule 34 is making someone put pencil to paper (or stylus to graphic tablet, as the case may be)

This is ha-ha-only-serious; porn has been a great motivator for pushing technology forward. Porn is the reason VHS won out over Betamax; porn's the reason the internet has gotten into the hands of the hoi-polloi (although AOL does get it's own mention for it's part in The September That Never Ended). It's one of the reasons why I don't worry about DRM -- if anyone were going to make DRM work, it'd be porn producers, who are really motivated to get people to pay for their product. The RIAA/MPAA's losses are really peanuts compared to how hard the pre-internet and post-internet porn money books differ. Consider that a porn VHS could easily go from anywhere between 20$ for a POS title to 60$ for something popular.

Note also that there's a project that gives away porn only if you connect to it via IPv6. IPv6 is coming in it's own good time (no pun intended).

The "no central authority to fix things" argument w/r/t/ the internet is BS at best, and likely just a ploy to get some kind of control over the net. It's meant to be an amorphous self-healing entity. The DNS bug from a few months ago is a good example; this affected everyone, and it got fixed. I don't remember getting a call from The Internet Boss telling me to fix it; I saw the bug report and decided I should fix my part of it.

if it were a service the lawyer/doctors/etc were paying them for, how would this be different than say a lawyer's office contracting their IT work to a tech firm?

that blocks all updates, including legit updates. If you're running a server that needs to process non-malicious updates, your best bet is to run a hidden-master/public-slave combination of servers (the attack doesn't work on slave zones).

Sure, but where's the silver surfer come to warn of Galactus? Maybe Jack Chick was right all along