I've worked with South Koreans once, and over three months, I couldn't find any correlation between their actions and common sense. For example, when a brand new $100 million piece of equipment malfunctions, my first thought would be to get the on-site American engineer they flew in to assemble it, and not a hammer and some duct tape.

Right! The American engineer would know where to whack with the hammer, and where to stick the duct tape.

Interesting that your post is modded "funny". I think the widespread death of local bookstores is very sad. I fully support some kind of interstate sales tax.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all

Have a look!

So we can suppose this is an operation to make people doubt the safety of going to Wikileaks?

The problem with this idea is that it at least appears to be the case that Manning got caught solely because he stupidly bragged about his actions to a stranger. Maybe somehow that isn't what actually happened -- but it's what seems to have happened, and for PR purposes, that is all that matters.

The salient point I would take from this, if I were in position to leak any secrets, is that there is absolutely no indication Manning would have been caught if he hadn't confessed to Lamo.

This is the part that stands out to me -- not from the same page, but a couple of clicks away we find an edited transcript of Manning's chats with Lamo, and scrolling down we find this:

(02:35:46 PM) Manning: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing “anti-Iraqi literature” the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki i had an interpreter read it for me and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on he didn’t want to hear any of it he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees (from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/)

This, to me, is the truly incendiary accusation: that though our stated mission in Iraq is to establish a functioning democracy, in fact we are assisting the Iraqi government in functioning as a dictatorship. Documentation of this claim would be more important, IMO, than the video.

Then definitely check out the hf2 -- it sounds better than the ER-6i (which I have also used extensively), and it has an inline mic!

I haven't actually tried it, but I have used other Etymotic products, and they generally work very well. Here's the page.

I'm particularly fond of their hf2 stereo headset -- they sound great!

I like the N810 form factor a lot. I carry mine in a hip pouch -- not in a pocket, admittedly, but I've never liked to carry a phone in my pocket either. The Streak looks slightly too large to me -- it's significantly thinner, but that doesn't really make that much difference.

Nokia obviously thought the N810 was too big since the N900 is smaller, but the smaller size forces compromises in the slide-out keyboard design, besides just making the screen a little harder to read.

I like the slide-out keyboard myself, but the market is moving away from them. Given that, maybe the HTC Evo hits the form factor nail on the head. Will be interesting to see.

I've been convinced for years that regular caffeine usage very quickly (in a few days) causes tolerance to build up to the point that the caffeine provides no benefit. My test -- difficult to quantify but clear enough to me, and unfakeable -- is my productivity in writing code.

I distinctly recall that, in the days when analog cassette players were still around but digital devices had appeared, the instruction to turn off devices for takeoff and landing applied only to the digital ones -- use of cassette players was specifically allowed.

Every time something like this comes up, I try to dig a hole and disappear best I can.

I think you underestimate how much good you could do by speaking out instead of digging a hole. If you and others like you raised a chorus of voices saying you oppose censorship, and especially violent censorship, it would go a long way.

I'm not asking much. All you need to do is ... exactly what you did here.

What say I go to Alabama, defecate on a bible, wrap it in the US flag and burn the bundle. That's free speech isn't it?

No, it's me being an offensive dick for the sake of it.

Actually, it depends. If you did it just to be an offensive dick that would be one thing. But suppose the US government had done something to you that, it could fairly be said, ruined your life; and suppose you had written about it, blogged about it, contacted the press, etc. etc. and had failed to get anyone to pay attention to you. (I am certain there have been a few people who have been in such a situation.) Since you mention the Bible, let's suppose that whatever was done to you had some connection to Christianity and the efforts some have made to establish it as the state religion of Alabama. I don't think that stretches the imagination much at all.

Given all that, maybe in your frustration you might have reached a point where the only mode of expression you felt was left to you, that would make the point you were validly trying to make, was to defecate on a Bible, wrap it in the American flag and burn them. In that case I would support you in doing so. Once you got everyone's attention, maybe you could then make your point in a more conventional manner.

Perhaps not everyone who would do such a thing has such a good reason. But it's not up to the law to evaluate their reason. The guarantee of freedom of speech means that you can do that if you want to; and then it's up to everyone else to form an opinion about your motives. If we outlaw any form of expression at all, we eliminate the valid uses of that expression, rare though they may be, along with the invalid ones.

So for those of us who believe in freedom, being told that drawing images of Muhammed is forbidden is itself offensive. Worse, going along with that is dangerous -- once one form of expression is outlawed, it gets easier to outlaw the next one. There is a real clash of belief systems here, and I think it is critical that we make it clear that we will not be intimidated into outlawing any speech at all. (The line here is not really between Americans and Muslims; indeed, a sizable minority of Americans would love to have state-enforced censorship of various kinds -- witness, as just one example, the periodic agitation by some for a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw burning of the US flag.)

The original motivation for the prohibition, in Islam, against images of the Prophet (or anyone else) was to discourage idolatry. I think it is fair game to show people that it has failed to do that: that Muhammed is as much an idol as Jesus. The violence of the reaction to these drawings only proves the point.

Whoops, never mind... didn't RTFA...

It means that supply is keeping up with demand.

Justice Breyer took pains to make clear that the court was not ruling on the separate question of whether such confinement violated the Constitution’s due process clause.

I think this ruling is narrower than it sounds.

Which is not to say I'm not very concerned about it.