"Given NASA's experience with writing software that's just gotta work or else, I'd be very hard-pressed to think of no better team of programmers for the job."

You're right! I can't think of a better group of programmers to work on car acceleration issues than the guys who've lost 3 probes to software errors (mariner 1, mars climate orbitor and mars polar lander)!

NASA is not the organization it once was, and implying that their programmers get everything right is not only dangerous, but silly. Everyone makes mistakes, NASA is no exception, and calling them in is more of a PR boost than anything else.

"Almost every single piece of non-trivial software written has bugs"
"dangerous development practices that aren't catching bugs like this."

You can't have it both ways. Accusing Toyota of doing something wrong because a bug like this slipped through and then saying (correctly) that all software has bugs is just a bit silly, you're effectively accusing them of not being perfect...which isn't much of an accusation.

You want truth in the comments? Geez! Next you'll be expecting me to read the articles!

"You know, bathroom locks in most homes and apartments can be opened with a straightened paper clip."

If you used bathroom locks on your front door I wouldn't be surprised if your house got broken into.

Is it still wrong to break into your house? Yeah, but making it far easier to do isn't very smart. If you want to be secure you put a secure lock on your front door, you don't accuse the person breaking in of violating your privacy. Same principal.

I think the GP's point was that spraying this kind of stuff is no different than any other gas attack, and there's already defense against those so rather than use some silly thing like yogurt just use a standard anti-gas measure like a gas mask and covering exposed areas.

I use it for getting directions. I have a horrible memory for names, but a great one for pictures, and so while I can't remember the name of the street I'm supposed to turn on I can remember what the street corner looked like from above on google earth, imagine what it would look like from a perspective on the ground, then see if I've reached that spot yet.

Google Earth is my goto mapping tool because it makes it FAR easier to know if you're going the right way or not if you've seen it, even just from above (though with more and more incorporated street-view you can now see street-level views of most areas).

"If your manuscript does that, eg tests the abilities of a digital camera or is used in psychological testing then I can see that it should be protected by patents as well as copyright."

It's possible to write a compiler that takes any manuscript and converts it into a useful software program. I know for a fact it's possible, because I've seen it done with other pieces of work (the Shakespeare programming language is just one example). So where are you drawing that line then?

To put it another way, give me a copyrighted work, and I'll give you a patentable* piece of machine-code for which it is the source code, which makes it a patentable piece of work. So yes, the line is very blurry.

*In the US at least.

Odd...firefox just autosaves it to the default folder (accidentally ended up bookmarking /. when I was testing looking for the bookmark shortcut and couldn't find it, which was terribly ironic when I later found the bookmark :P).

And how does this judge get his email without pinging/accessing any routers that he hasn't specifically gotten permission to access? Does he use a specific vpn hardcoded to run over a small number of routers to which he has requested and gotten permission (written in triplicate of course) to access? Or does he just break his own ruling everytime he gets a spam message?

Riiight...because putting a bookmark in someone's browser without their approval is so absurdly hard to do that the existence of such a thing is evidence. Don't like this site? Press control-D* to navigate away, or press control-D to win a prize, or press control-D to scan your computer for bad files.

* I'm pretty sure that's IE's shortcut, I don't use IE so I'm not sure, but if it's not replace it with the appropriate shortcut

Or that someone using his computer had accessed a page that contained such data. Or would you be fine with being arrested for viewing such things if I put a virus on your machine that cached some pictures?

"What actions (if any) did Google take to change these practices once they took ownership?"

The report this video link on every video and the constant takedowns of copyrighted materials not enough for you?

Youtube has deployed in force against copyrighted materials since google acquired it. That alone should be enough evidence to prove that google had nothing to do with these practices, be they evil or not.

What's the difference? Seriously, we live in an age where the lines are so ridiculously blurry (software patents) that they might as well not be there. Copyright and Patents are based on the same idea.

A manuscript is as much a device as 20 lines of code are. And since the current official ruling is that that code is a patentable device what's the difference.

Looking at esoteric languages like Shakespeare blurs the lines even more. That language produces code which is a manuscript, but, as code, is patentable. So what's the difference?

This is slashdot. The article is not 'right in front' of anyone's eyes :P.

The Tabula Rasa theory is junk quite frankly.

Try doing a web search for 'youngest murderer' sometime, there's 6 years olds who have killed other with some purpose. And that's not even getting into 'accidental' killings.

People are not blank slates. We have hard-coded instincts the same as any animal, and one of those instincts is to compete for resources, which, taken to the extreme, is killing.