It's okay. His dad owns the copyright on that stuff anyway!

*sigh* It sure is looking this way. I'm appalled at all of the effort and energy the US government is wasting in a futile attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. It's kind of hard to criticize authoritarian governments elsewhere while exerting such a high level and public effort to not only suppress the information, but also crush the person who released it.

The big record companies won't do anything that the don't think is going to be profitable. So if EMI is indeed using Rapidshare to promote some of their artists' music, then there must be something to it. All of these years of arguing that piracy on sites like Rapidshare hurts their bottom line would seem to be contradicted. EMI is just following the money. If giving away songs ultimately helps sell more of them, then they will do it. Ironically, the pursuit of p2p lawsuits has damaged their reputation so much that they probably have to make songs look like illegal downloads to be attractive to their target market.

Given the lack of consent in the gathering of the organs, my question now is whether the research data gathered is now invalidated. Generally, data gathered through unethical means cannot be used in research papers that hope to see the light of day in peer reviewed journals. So you won't see any published papers based on the findings from experiments done on concentration camp prisoners during WWII, for example. Similarly, if there have been papers published based on data from this nonconsensual organ gathering, I think they would have to be pulled and the authors censured.

I'd like to see FFXI go free to play too. One of the reasons I quit was because they changed their payment system to one that didn't like my credit card. But I won't be holding my breath for it. As things stand, the launch fiasco that is Final Fantasy XIV, is effectively making that game free to play as SE has extended the free period another 30 days.

Yeah I can definitely see this happening and easily from the Chinese. Mars is the Red Planet afterall! ~_^

Did anyone else think of those three old dudes from Cowboy Bebop when the article mentions sending mostly old people first? LOL

Honestly, I really don't care if some stranger I'm never going to know sees a scan of my body. I would, however, be put off by a physical pat down. Sadly, there are some sick and angry people out there who do try to blow up planes from time to time. I have no desire to either die in a terrorist attack or endure a lot of hassle just to fly, from the airlines, the TSA, or passengers pissed off at the TSA. I'll be doing a lot more driving I think. Once you factor in all of the time for security, driving doesn't take all that much more time for most of my travels. Bye bye friendly skies...

On the whole, I think this is good news. If this kind of large scale adoption is followed by other corporations, I wonder how long it will be before we begin to notice significantly reduced noise levels in urban areas? Should totally change the sounds of the city, hopefully for the better.

It's going to take some more time for Android to grow, but I cannot help but wonder if we are seeing a replay of the Windows PC vs Mac wars of old. The more closed and arbitrary the Apple App Store becomes, the more likely it is that more open solutions are going to get the traction they need to catch up with and overtake it. I'd love to write for the iPhone, but with limited resources, it's hard to justify writing something that may get pulled in the future for no good reason.

Whoever keeps making these rules really doesn't get it I guess. Making rules, valid legally or not, that fly in the face of what people almost unconsciously expect just erodes the respect of legitimate law. So thanks a lot for further degrading respect for rules of any kind.

This reminds me of the problem of attempting interstellar travel too early. Chances are that the ship you launch will be passed up in a few years by superior technology. At least in this case, the state has a clear shot at saving some money by going with the latest and greatest, in this case, cloud computing. And being able to support local businesses (ie in-state jobs) is a double bonus as $300M is nothing to sneeze at as I'm sure the state a few hundreds miles south would attest to.

As tempting, as a longtime Camaro owner, as this is, I'm more concerned about whether the new Camaro is a durable, high quality product. I generally try to stay away from version 1.0 of anything, especially GM these days. Now don't get me wrong, my 98 Camaro has on the whole been a surprisingly good car, but it does have it's quirks as it approaches 100K miles. My much younger 03 Venture though is almost a total lemon...so I'm going slow on any more GM for now...

No real surprise here. Microsoft is in the business of making money, so if everyone remembers this in dealing with them or any other profit driven company, then we'll be well prepared for this behavior. Open Source is seen by MS and others as a threat to their profits, so many avoid it. But in the tech world, that is getting increasingly harder, and more foolish to do. So avoiding a profit sapping lawsuit is probably a good move. Yeah they could recode, but in this case it was probably easier (and cheaper) to just comply with the GPL.