Exactly! That's why I think the suitable punishment is to have this person's reproductive equipment deactivated. Someone this stupid just shouldn't breed.

This reminds me of a story about England's cracking of the German enigma codes during WW-II. Apparently, Churchill had ordered that, if any action were to be taken based upon information gleaned from the enigma intercepts, that they'd first have to have some other plausible reason for taking that action. For example, when they intercepted the location of a U-boat through the enigma messages, they couldn't just send a bunch of destroyers out there to sink it, because the Germans would have deduced that there was only one way the English could have found out. So, instead, the English arranged to have a reconnaissance aircraft just "happen" to be patrolling the area... spot the U-boat... and then they send the destroyers.

Okay, so back to the brain-dead school official. So, you decide to start surveillance on your students. Okay, I get that. You're a douchebag, but whatever. You discover some student doing something that you don't like and decide that you can't let that go unchecked. Okay. So, what you do then, is concoct some other way to accidentally and legally, "discover" what the student did, and then nail them with that evidence. So, to summarize: do the illegal snooping to discover where to go to "accidentally" discover what you already know. Jesus... how do you not know this? Don't you know any cops?!?!

Saw an old charger today, some late sixties model..guessing a 68 or so, heavily modded into a street rod. Good looking but dang I don't want that guy's fuel bill. He had two hugemongous four barrel stacks sticking up out of the hood. I'd have to guess again, proly holley double pumpers. (for back then though I think the studebaker avanti had it over all the rest of the detroit muscle cars for styling)

I'll stick to my boring good mileage and reliability choices over speed I guess, old or new models. Of the newer rides out there, if I was looking for speed and etc, plus at least somewhat decent mileage, on this side of high end Italian or German prices, guess I would pick the nissan gt-r. Next option up is a million buck pizza ride or a veyron...so this is pretty cheap for what it is.

I don't understand you. You claim there is no competition but you mention a lot of competing markets players: Cable, DSL, Cell. If that is not enough you are lying to yourself. In addition, the main evidence for successful competition is that despite all this worry, High speed internet rates have not risen, have not kept pace with inflation, and have not kept pace with usage (bandwidth) increases. How do you explain that?

Me and some gamer mates are going to beat up the Amsterdam chapter of the Hell's Angels. I mean, we are thougher then them right? What could possibly go wrong? They are wusses and I will make sure to tell them loudly and clearly, what are they going to do? None of them has scored as many kills in Counterstrike as I have.

I completely disagree. Data mining becomes more effective the more information it has. Connections begin to form. Bogus information begins to stand out. Missing information becomes apparent. Public information transforms in to private information and private information uncovers secrets. The more data points you have to work with, the more successful you are going to be making these connections.

Physical commodities are given value based on scarcity (real or perceived) while raw data enjoys a network effect. So anyone in the business of data analysis is going to be pleased to get as much information as they can get their hands on. There was a time where storage and processing power were expensive. However, as noted by Moore's Law, these things are only getting cheaper and more plentiful. So even "worthless" information costs little to store until a large enough amount has been amassed to become valuable.

And stores will often have two-for-one sales. But I don't think they'd be too happy if they caught me shoplifting and I said "heeeey, buddy, how about we make this one of those deals you sometimes run?" They'd bust my balls before they called the cops.

But given Microsoft's size, this is just an illustration of that old saying: "You owe the bank a thousand bucks, that's your problem. You owe the bank a million bucks, that's their problem." Microsoft gets away with it because they're big enough to get away with it.

If Burning Man were anything like most Steampunk material I've seen/read, they would build two of those giant effigies and play the world's largest game of Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots... on fire.

A giant rock has been on Earth for forty years, and just now they're discovering that it's contains organic compounds? Um...did it fall directly into a controlled vacuum?

If you find organic molecules which do not exist on Earth OTHER than on this meteorite, the likely conclusion is that the meteorite is the source, not the recipient.

Point is that Google is already ignoring certain countries laws on what they can show, by showing politically sensitive things, supporting freedom of speech. So foreign countries are already benefiting from Google, I don't expect that to vanish. At the moment though people in first world countries are not benefiting. If Google uses this patent as a way to remove censorship from things (Such as Google Books) then it could be a good thing for us.

Also, not everyone needs access to the proxies, proxies are holes in a wall. Only a few people need to go through and get the information to spread. But again, it all matters whether Google uses this to censor more or censor less. Also, having this particular patent is meaningless, since they were already censoring by region, Canada not getting access to many things Americans do. It might signify some kind of shift, and with the recent China change I am hopeful that it is for the best.

Someone working for a company cares about what the company pays them to care about. If they spend time on something the company doesn't want them to, it will cause them to get a bad review and/or fired. A company paying someone to make open source software is going to care more about the code being clean than a company paying someone to make propietary software. this is because with open source software many more people will see the actual code than with propietary software and shoddily written code will reflect badly on the company.
None of this reflects on the work ethic, morals or ability of either the open source programmer or the proprietary source programmer. It is possible for these to be the same person and the analysis still applies.

These machines were not creating any greenhouse gases while they were broken.

It's Xfinitesimal! Oh, wait...

That would be the Zune, with all those competing music stores that had similar catalogs to the iTunes store. Not many of those around.

We also have no idea what the iPad app store is going to come up with - there have been some exceptional iPhone apps, so no doubt some third party app will amaze us.

Also, conveniently, Apple has some cracking deals with video content providers - sort of ideal for a 10" screen, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, but the point is more that the Verizon brand is only 10 years old.

I knew Ed Begley Jr. had something to do with this.