I read the ruling. There is an actual offence which was committed. It is against the law (a law passed by parliament) to communicate with a child under 14 (at the time this offence took place the law said 14) for the purposes of facilitating a secondary crime such as abduction or a sex crime or a child porn crime.

The accused admits to have had sexual conversations with the child who had represented herself as 13 (she was 12). The accused admits that he stated a desire to have oral sex with the girl. He denies any desire to actually meet the girl or to actually have sex with her or to actually abduct her or to actually get dirty pictures of her or whatever.

The trial court ruled that since he didn't want to meet her he wasn't facilitating a crime.

The supreme court ruled that "facilitating" means, among other things, "making easier" or "making possible" or "making more possible" the acts in question. So there is a question about whether or not he "facilitated" under the terms of the law.

Thus the accused will receive a new trial.

So there WAS a law and it sounds like he did break it. This is not a new law. This is a clarification of the wording of the old law. The sticky point seems to be that facilitating merely involves gaining the trust of a child, so any talk which gains the trust of a child could be facilitating. However it would require a strong burden of evidence to prove that such talk was for facilitating the crime.

That story sounds fishy. I thought most places had age-of-consent laws that make more sense than that. In Canada the age of consent laws allow, for example, a 16 yo and 14yo to have sex even though the age of consent is 16. And a 16yo could have sex with a 40yo and it's not a crime (well, excluding other categories, such as if the adult is in a position of authority over the child).

They didn't remove it because the 32-bit driver situation is not improved, and with Vista the official way to access 4GB of RAM on a desktop is to use the 64-bit OS. Seems fairly obvious.

The Intel Xeon processors introduced a mode called PAE that increases pointer size to 36 bits. This allows the OS kernel to access more than 4GB of ram. Individual processes typically can not access this RAM directly but the OS and CPU handle this using hardware and virtual memory.

The Slashdot post is typically alarmist in claiming that there is an MS conspiracy afoot when in fact it's that PAE causes problems for countless drivers that are used on consumer computers but aren't used on servers. Servers have a much smaller range of hardware and the hardware and drivers are tested for PAE. Your desktop was not tested for PAE. So Microsoft disables the feature because you probably don't need it and it probably won't work anyway. If you know what you are doing you can get a Server OS and make it work.

Now, you say, "Gee, it's 2009! Who's Microsoft to say I don't need 4GB of RAM?" Well, XP is 8 years old and that is when this limitation was introduced. And your consumer version of Vista or 7 will work fine with 4GB if you get the 64-bit version. So everyone can calm down and pick the right OS for the job instead of whining about the sky falling.

Remember, most of the time bloat-free == freature-free. Sure, your mobile phone will be really really fast but you won't be able to add any software to it since nobody else uses this OS.

Just look at the difficulty systems like FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD have with apps like KDE or Gnome: changes to these apps frequently work fine on Linux and break on *BSD. Now imagine some tiny OS trying to maintain ports of everything. This OS has its own API and everything. Every single app will need to be rewritten.

And in the end their claims for performance will only take them so far: Linux and Windows and MacOSX have had lots of performance tuning by very smart people, and Minuet will have some real challenges in the general case. Sure, Linux could be faster, but overall, when you're getting real work done, you'll usually get it done faster with mature tools.

Automatic updates weren't enabled on XP until one of the service packs. So millions of PCs will never know about the new browsers.

Fair Dealing != Fair Use. Fair Dealing is far more constrained. Note: format shifting is typically believed legal under fair use but would need to be explicitly specified as allowable under Fair Dealing. Note how time shifting is given its own line item.

exactly. And the med students can dissect cadavers at home too.

If you've stabbed 5000 people, why stop? Keep going and reduce your marginal cost further!

Because leukemia is such an exotic disease, nobody ever dies of that while waiting for a bone-marrow transplant.

Shipping IE with Windows wasn't what violated anti-trust laws. It was their manipulation of the markets surrounding that that was. I read the judge's findings of fact back when the lawsuit was taking place; I remember the details clearly. MS didn't let OEMs remove IE (naturally, it's part of the OS) but they also didn't let OEMs install competing products. That, and other related market manipulations involving the price of the Windows OEM license, was what violated the law.

The browser and the HTML controls are a fundamental feature of a complete operating environment. If the government can step in and say "you need to take X out of your OS because someone else might want to sell and X", that does not actually benefit the customers whose software, which used that X, no longer works. Consider notepad: it's such an important program that Windows won't even let you replace it. That's because, for the decades that it's been there, there are hundreds of programs out there which have come to rely on it. If you take it away, those programs will malfunction. Even if you install a different text editor. The same is true for IE.

All that MS has to do to satisfy antitrust violations is to provide a way for people to replace certain IE functionality with equivalent COM objects, or to allow people to install other browsers. The applet which allows you to specify system-wide default browsers, media players, etc, is the right idea. Getting rid of the MSHTML control or iexplorer.exe is not.

I guess nobody cares about the countless applications which depend on installed apps like notepad or iexplorer.exe to get stuff done? Sure, those apps may be badly coded, but they exist and people want to continue running them.