Hell, I remember seeing it on NBC in the late '80s!

That's because that's how the media refer to these criminals. They give their full names so they won't be confused with another John Berkowitz or another Rick Ramirez, both of whom are perfectly normal, non-serial killer citizens. It's not like these folks went by their full names before they became well-known in the media.

And G.W. Bush's middle name is Walker.

What "freedom of association"? There is only "guilt by association".

Correct answer. 100 internets to you, my friend.

Sorry, it ain't gonna happen. I have a kid that is roughly the same age as yours (turned 6 last month). For kids today, the massive amount of TV/movies/associated tie-ins being slung their way has pretty much guaranteed that no one movie will be a "special experience" seeing it in the theater. They know good and well that if they didn't see it in the theater, it will be on DVD in three months, and forgotten about three months later...unless there is a sequel to hold their interest.

I have told my kid plenty of times about the magic of seeing Star Wars in 1977, or how we all gasped when Darth Vader claimed to be Luke's father in 1980, or how magical ET was. It just doesn't sink in to this generation. I think most of them prefer to watch movies at home. Until more theaters convert to digital projection, I can't really blame them. The setup for watching movies at home is pretty cool, and you don't have to sit and be quiet for two hours.

Well, they could just use a bandwidth stretcher. I think we've got one down in the basement. Haven't had to use it in a while; it's probably rusty and could use some WD40.

I'm not sure using deceptive text would work in this case. It doesn't seem to be automated like a spam filter. It's blacklist of the "worst of the worst" sites, according to TFA.

That makes it sound like somebody at Interpol is viewing the sites, rating them, and adding the "worst of the worst" to the list manually.

Yeah, this is neat, but I already thought a lot of movies premiered on Bit Torrent before the cinema!

In all seriousness, filmmakers have been working around Hollywood since there has been a Hollywood to work around. There have always been independent filmmakers getting their movies made, and then using non-traditional means to exhibit them. In the past, this may have meant selling directly to the home 16mm market, with hopes of getting enough money to strike some 35mm prints and distribute nationally. Or they could have taken it in on the college circuit, or the art-film circuit, first. Later on, public access and more traditional cable TV were outlets to get films noticed. Just a little more than 15 years ago, The Last Seduction premiered on HBO, and later became a cinema box office success.

These developments just represent the latest technology coming in to play. But sorry, this is not going to dethrone the MPAA or any other part of the Hollywood machine in our lifetimes. It's just a way that will potentially mean more people can see the films than before. There may be access to more finances for the filmmakers, but do you seriously think that the Bit Torrent downloading community is going to cough up serious bucks? No, they want their stuff for free (read: they think they are entitled to free entertainment). The only people who are going to cough up tens of thousands of dollars just to see their name as an "Executive Producer" on screen are people who want to be in the film business anyway...just like the guy who funded Manos: The Hands of Fate 40-some years ago.

So yeah, this is neat, but don't read too much into it. It's not a revolution. And if it were, Hollywood soon swallow it up, just like they did with Easy Rider and its progeny in the late '60s/early '70s, or like they did with Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino, and all the other Miramax filmmakers that broke indie filmmaking through to the mainstream in the late '80s/early '90s. The great thing about capitalism is that it eventually swallows up all threats to it.

No, they didn't need the space. It has been Canonical's plan for a while to drop Synaptic and Update Manager (and any other GUI apps that are front ends to the various apt tools) and roll everything into Software Center.

It's been on their roadmap for a while, and I was surprised that Synaptic made it into 11.04. I am also surprised that Update Manager is hanging around.

This is all in the interest of average-Joe users who don't need to know the differences between Synaptic and Software Center, or how they overlap with each other, or with Update Manager. Long-time users or power users can go install Synaptic from the repos if they like, or use apt or dpkg at the command line. Me personally, I always update with 'sudo apt-get update' on the command line because I find it faster than Update Manager. But Grandma doesn't need to do that; software installation and updating should be done all in one place for her.

They are trying to copy or catch up with Chrome on the version numbering thing, but they are missing something important here. With Chrome, it gets auto-updated all the time (at least mine is, on both OS X and Ubuntu), to where I've always got the latest and greatest, and all the inherent security fixes and such. If I had to manually download a new copy of Chrome regularly, even every three months, I would grow tired of it. But the auto-updater does it for me; I installed Chrome once and am now done with that part of it. I couldn't tell you what version of Chrome I am running, except for I know it updated itself earlier this week.

Firefox, on the other hand, won't auto-update to a "major version", like going from 4.x to 5.x. Mozilla should know they had a hard enough time getting people to download a new copy, even when it took 18 months between major versions. People are not going to re-download it on such a quick schedule.

And Mozilla needs to update Firefox's handling of extensions, with its "max version" attribute. Once again, it was bad enough when there was a new FF update every 18 months and it took forever for the extension developers to make the simple integer change. All I have read this week with FF5 is how this extension and that extension disabled itself, when it will probably work just fine.

I was a long-time Firefox supporter and didn't like Chrome at first. Now I am either going with Chrome or Safari all the time, and feeling sad for the days when Firefox was the shiznit.

Because of language that is in most contracts saying that certain provisions are "non-transferrable."

While the Lala contracts weren't made public, many speculated at the time of the sale that the Lala Uploader feature could not be transferred over to Apple without re-negotiation. The labels were happy to give this kind of feature to a startup that hardly anybody knew about, but they weren't going to give it to Apple without more money. Hence, the speculated language in the contract to prevent Apple from buying up Lala (which they did) and taking over the Uploader feature.

And in the end, the labels did get more money, because you now have to pay $25 per year to use iTunes Match, when the feature was free at Lala.

Lala had this feature. They called it "iTunes Uploader" or something along those lines. Of course, it didn't actually upload your iTunes library; it matched your rips with the rips Lala had in their library.

And yes, the record labels (the big ones along with a wide selection of indies) agreed to this with Lala. When Apple bought Lala, it wasn't immediately clear that the deals that Lala had made with the labels would apply to the sale, but clearly Apple has worked it out to the labels' satisfaction.

Yes, there is some merit to this argument. And Apple is not the only company who feels this way.

In 2009, the Beastie Boys reissued their classic LP Paul's Boutique, and those who ordered online got some downloadable content, including a video commentary with the Boys discussing the album's making while it played in the background. When the song "Johnny Ryall" came on, Mike D talked about the real-life homeless person who inspired the song. D gave the homeless guy one of his Def Jam jackets. Def Jam head honcho Russell Simmons promptly chewed him out for giving such nice gear to a "bum" because he didn't want the Def Jam image to be associated with poor people.

Typically, Apple uses BSD boxen when they are not using OS X Server. Since OS X's kernel has some BSD heritage, that doesn't seem too out of line. I think they only time Apple stuff has been identified as being served up from Linux has been on third-party hosting services like Akamai.

...with "Generation Z" college students that we hire as summer interns. So far, our answer to personal devices is a pretty firm "no." They can check company email via the web interface from any internet-connected device, which is by far our most lenient security policy. Personal devices can join our guest WiFi network if they like (password changes every week), and any and all machines need to be in our asset database to join the LAN or connect up via VPN.

So far, they are fine with it. Well, OK, they bitch about it, but they like making money better than fighting for use of their personal devices.