Please tell that to the slashdot maintainers. The site currently looks like crap in Safari 4 (did so as well in Safari 3), with colored dots (friend / foe / blabla) and strange widgets all over the place. The "Reply to this" button is also rendered broken, and i don't know what else as well. WTF is going on with /. at the moment? Huge public beta test?

That was annoying the hell out of me too. I found that if I add http://c.fsdn.com/sd/cs_sic_controls_new.png to my adblock list then the random graphics disappear (as do some other bits, but I'll live with that).

How did this not get picked up and fixed already on a site this big??

Can't they just as well play the DVD???

I suggest you try playing a 20 second clip from the middle of a commercial DVD sometime to see how practical it is. Thanks to the inclusion of unskippable logos, trailers and informative films telling you how downloading music is stealing and makes you a criminal, it takes forever to actually get to the content. Whoever came up with the idea of locking DVD player controls should be made to try to start up Toy Story for an audience of 100 impatient toddlers and see how good an idea it seems then.

We could insist that all educational DVD players don't implement these controls, but then that would break the DMCA and we're back to square one.

On the evil scale I don't think this move by Google comes close to what Phorm is trying to do. Tracking your behaviour across multiple sites is kind of creepy, but in Google's case it will be limited to their partner sites. Opting out would simply be a matter of deleting the Google cookie at the end of each session. Were they to do this I'm sure that a 'Don't track me bro' firefox extension would quickly appear.

Phorm is much worse. They intercept your connection at your ISP and they process everything you do. All web sites (whether they want their users to be tracked or not), all emails, IRC, newsgroups, everything which isn't encrypted. They use the tracking cookie mainly to let affiliates serve out (in)appropriate ads, but they could do their tracking with no help from you at all. They are also able to track you over multiple devices, and to opt out you have to set a cookie on your own machine, so if you use a new device or clear out your cookies you've just opted in again. This is evil on a whole different level.

In ten years, this thing will be useless, because we will be able to reprogram somatic cells to do all the work.

Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.

We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.

At a web message board I setup, I used some popular software and was getting a ton of spam bots. So I added a simple "are you a human" question--no captcha or anything, just another checkbox to check... Not 1 single piece of spam. Same principle: the bots aren't that smart--you avoid the norms even by a little, and you're okay.

I've had the opposite experience. I run a website for a small choir and we have a contact form on there. This is something I wrote myself, not some popular package, and it's very tightly tied down so that the worst which can happen is that an attacker can send more junk to me.

Over the last year I've had at least two repeated and persistent attacks against this script. They were random bits of text with a random URL (not working or registered) at the end. After playing cat and mouse changing field names and blocking certain phrases which kept reoccurring I only managed to stop it in the end when I completely blocked the ability to include URLs in any message (which I didn't really want to have to do). We are a very small site and none of the attacks ever worked - but someone spent a considerable amount of time trying to break our site.

The moral is that noone is safe and it's just the luck of the draw if someone decides to focus their attention on you.