Why not look at broader behavior? People jaywalk, drive while intoxicated or talking on their cell phones, etc. There is some popular notion of what acceptable risk is, and somehow that includes shopping at TJX stores.,

Interesting. I used an e-mail gateway product that had a modified a modified version of Sendmail for their e-mail gateway product. The vendor declined to share the source code with me. What recourse could I have possible had?

In Washington, DC, they are supposed to be illegal in the major tourist areas, but the local government just ignores this since some businesses now have "Segway tours". Why do I hate Segways? The people on them, oblivious to pedestrians, actually push pededstrians out of the way and sometimes run into them. I don't think that "smug" captures it.

If some company deleted materials from your laptop or your iPod, what would your reaction be? Furthermore, if someone damaged your work by accessing your laptop or personal computer, what would your reaction be? If the licensing terms allow it, I would say sue them, big time.

Does anyone remember the time McAfee distributed a signature file that caused its software to delete executable binaries from computers? This caused me and many other persons much grief. A few months afterward, a vendor asked me what McAfee could do to make up for such a thing. My response was that that they couldn't, that they should just go out of business.

In areas outside of copyrighted photos, such fine art, the photos seem to be very good. For example, search for Rembrandt. So far as photos of current celebrities, however, isn't there a way to create a composite photo of the many photos already in existence? In some sci-fi entertainment, I've seen where computers could simulate moving images of people, but is this science fiction only? Presumably, a simulated photograph could not be held subject to copyright.

For some meaty programming, I'd suggest writing a chess engine for Winboard. To get into the project, the sentence above is all you need to know. Everything else is online. One starting point is "Chess Engine Protocol" in Wikipedia. I hope you'll find out that programming isn't really about a specific language.

"'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,"' Well, yes. But it is not just that. We already pay for Microsoft product defects in other ways too. Let's say you are doing a major rollout of Active Directory or Exchange. Sometimes, the only way you get a bug fix is to get a support contract from Microsoft or hire a company that has a support contract. Any Exchange administrator of a good size organization can tell you that Exchange has more than its fair share of bugs, and this new one, Exchange 2007, is no exception. Which leads to the question, where is the incentive on the part of Microsoft to produce really good software? Why not just produce mediocre software and then ask people to pay more money to fix it?

How are we supposed to pay? Here is an example. Remember when a US senator got the bright idea of changing daylight savings time? Users of Windows 2000 had to pay Microsoft thousands of dollars for the fix. You pay by the fix.

"Azure" could be interpreted as "second rate". In the 17th century artists used Azurite as a second-rate blue pigment .... the first rate version was a semi-precious stone, Lapiz Lazuli.