Make no mistake, this is intended to force Tom Tom to violate the GPL, or change to Microsoft embedded software

There are other embedded kernel choices besides Linux or Microsoft. The FreeBSD license is much less restrictive than the GPL and wouldn't be broken by most, if not all, cross licensing.

Why must slashdot polarize things so incorrectly and ignorantly?

The problem with religion, science and other forms of popular thought is that once they are in the hands of the massives, they cease to be a fluid body of knowledge that can be shared, experienced and grown, into something more formulated that can be readily grasped, identified with and pointed to as an authority.

People who proclaim Darwinism blindly with no personal investigation of the theory and associated facts have the same affliction as a neo-conservative who blindly states that the Earth is 100,000 years old and a large military with an aggressive foreign policy is the only way to protect America.

Oh lord, let's hope there are similar law suites against Safari in MacOS, Iceweasel in Debian, Firefox in RedHat, etc. etc. etc.

Just where is the dividing line between package choice in putting together a desktop environment for a user and a monopoly?

This whole thing is bollocks to me.

You want to encrypt everything across the boards, regardless of level of classification or how many people need to access it.

In essence, that is going to create an environment where everything is as secure as they are on a password protected environment with much more computational overhead.

The reason for this is that there is no classification between what should be encrypted and what shouldn't be encrypted. Those that need uniform access to unspecified, disparate data across the network (i.e. system administrators) are going to need some easy-to-use convention to get access to debug issues.

Either there needs to be some sort of root/administrator access or you are going to destroy the supportability of your systems. Maybe the user just gives his encryption key to the IT help desk on a regular basis... that couldn't be broken through simple social engineering.

Maybe that isn't necessary... maybe there is a feature that allows unauthenticated access to the encrypted data that only your teckies know.

Basically, too much security equals too little usablility. Thus, too much of the wrong security backfires and becomes bypassed because of the need for maintaining usability.

He needs to use the shower version though.

"What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something? Would it be great, or would it just get bogged down in the techno babble?"

Unfortunately, the latter in Strauss's case.

From the original article - "In this situation, the promiscuous women quickly caught the virus and became a sort of viral clearinghouse, spreading HIV to every man with whom they had contact."

I really am amazing at the commonly portrayed concept that AIDS is 100% communicable. Have there been any studies done to show the actual percentage chance of transmission of the HIV virus from one infected individual to one who isn't? Also, are there different probabilities for different types of sexual activity?

The media makes a lot of issues look like bad science with their hype, whether it be global warming or SARS.

Does anyone know where to get the solid scientific data regarding this issue?