For basically all of human history, people didn't live past age 40.

I agree that OS X is not a walled garden (yet?), but the App Store is not optional. Some developers have elected to use that as their only distribution channel and don't offer downloads from their own website anymore.

Personal data, i.e. data that is linked to a person, belongs to the person it is about.

This is the law in the EU. The US seams to have a similar view when it comes to medical data.

The seams and exposure differences can be fixed with a little automatic processing. I sometimes take panoramas with my cellphone camera, a 4-year-old Sony Ericsson W570i with a 2MP sensor. Even if the source pictures are differently exposed, as in the image in the article, stitching them together with Hygins normalizes the exposure levels and the seams are unnoticeable. I believe Hygins uses enblend internally. (Of course, the panoramas still look somewhat cheap, due to JPEG artifacts and crappy optics, but sometimes a cellphone camera is all you have.)

The Supreme Court has asserted its authority over the President and Congress for over 200 years without the need of armed enforcement. If there's a conflict between two branches of government it is up to the people (who are the found of all power) to resolve it.

Laws will always be open to interpretation and that's a good thing. If the law was automatic like code we wouldn't need courts, because the executive could just apply the appropriate law and be done with it. This would open the doors to blatant abuse and achieve an effect opposite from your intent, namely, that the laws are arbitrarily interpreted by the executive.

There's a distracting piece of paper in the corner of the picture I want to take. I have three options:

a) "staging": physically remove the paper from the scene,
b) "framing": slightly move the camera so the paper is no longer in the frame, or
c) "doctoring": cropping or cloning the paper out of the picture in post-production.

What is the difference between these three options except for a minor technical detail? There is no fundamental difference. I agree with the GP. Every photograph is staged, unless it was taken unintentionally.

Exactly. Slightly off-topic, you can give almost the same reply to people who think that Photoshop isn't real photography. Of course it is, it's just another tool at the photographer's disposal.

Chrome is integrated with the OS X keychain, Firefox is not. Also, until recently, Firefox generally sucked on OS X. But the latest versions are pretty decent. I was a Safari user, but switched to Chrome because it was faster, had better plug-ins and I like the rapid release cycle.

Unlikely to happen, at least in Germany. Informational self-determination has been a constitutional right since 1983. And today, in a speech celebrating the 60th birthday of the constitutional court, the director of the court said that privacy and self-determination with regard to private actors (as opposed to the state) will become even more important in the future. These are significant hurdles for any law-maker or lobbying group to overcome.

The _hypothesis_ that electronic voting is somehow less open to interpretation has been thoroughly disproven by reality in the last decade. It can also be shown to be theoretically false very easily: The integrity of the manual hand count stems from the fact that any idiot^W^W the average voter can monitor the process and be reasonably sure that no tampering occurred. An electronic voting machine^W^W^W general purpose computer is completely opaque in that regard. Ken Thompson showed 25 years ago that even an expert cannot be sure that there's no tampering unless he built the entire system from scratch (including the hardware).

A lot of database systems start out as academic research systems that are later commercialized. Examples include H-Store (commercialized as VoltDB), C-Store (commercialized as Vertica), Monet (commercialized many times, the latest incarnation is VectorWise).

Actually, the entire database field traces its roots to academic systems, starting with INGRES which was published in the 1970s by UC Berkeley.

But the title is wrong/hyperbole though, isn't it?

It's not genes which are affected, but the function they regulate in the body.

Not if the pace of technological progress outpaces inflation. IOW, in a country where productivity keeps rising such a deal will most likely make them money in the long term until the cost of supporting an outdated technology outweighs the income from those contracts. At which point they can simply upgrade you.

E.g. when DSL was taking off in Germany, most DSL providers would offer you an upgrade which doubled the speed of your internet connection without raising the price. They got a renewed contract out of it. Now that normal ADSL speeds are maxed out they are offering much faster VDSL lines for the same price.

Same here. It's not like they radically change the user interface every 6 weeks.