Oh, yeah, put a smiley face on this and it'll be Toppin' Fresh for the kids. "Look, Mommy! It's ... the Pillsbury Doughtower! Can I climb him, pleeeaaassse?"

Heck, if you're gonna mess with inflatables and a lot of mass, why not just make a strong lightweight carbon-nanotube/aluminum alloy airfield and float the thing way up there in the sky with near-space to orbit aircraft/spacecraft? Perfect for Han Solo!

I was curious about one of the prototypes listed, so I searched for it. One of the pictures, for example, shows what seems an okay sized keyboard displayed on a touch-sensitive screen, but one wonders how it would feel to actually have to type very much on it. One of the reasons I've been waiting for prices to drop on the Asus EEE PC 1000HE Netbook is that I wanted a small-form laptop with quite long battery life which also offered a keyboard large enough to allow a decent amount of typing before my fingers would suddenly thrash around and reach for my throat.

I do like the idea behind these "smartbooks", especially with Linux distributions, but just how small is it possible to make keyboards (virtual or real) on what looks like a small laptop before people will simply balk at them (sometimes without quite knowing why)?

How has this worked for other common ultra-portable devices with semi-full keysets that haven't been explicitly marketed as "smartbooks/netbooks/notebooks"?

It'll be interesting to see if this latest provocation makes Japan finally go nuclear.

I'm typically a "small-ell" libertarian, but I'm strongly moved to advocate that the principals in the acceptance of vast sums of public money during the 1990s to provide nearly universal broadband be given the choice of either being sent to prison for fraud, or agreeing to the nationalisation of their companies, with control over operations specifically delegated to individual cities or counties. It might be unwise in some ways, but how can it be worse than the situation that exists today, with greedy, infinitely arrogant corporations butt-raping their customers in semi-monopoly markets?

Tor is far overrated. I'm surprised it has any notoriety. Last time I used it, which was a few months ago for a research project, it was quite easy to set your self up as an exit router and capture clear text information for mail, telnet, ftp, etc. It only protects to the extent of the knowledge of the user (like most systems/programs/features). Frankly if your not encrypted end to end and only using IP addresses I would avoid it completely. The added latency of around 19 seconds for just google.com to load from the word go makes it suck even more, however that is not a Tor issue directly, that is from people loading down the network with p2p traffic. In summary, use only if encrypted end to end and no DNS is utilized, to protect yourself....and order a latte, because your going to be there a while. Don't believe me? Look at some of the research the Uni of Colorado and Washington have done. Mine was based on their great work.

Without knowing the details of the settlement, I suspect the RIAA agreed to drop the entire case, in return for silence on the subject and a non-binding secret precedent. Ms. Santangelo and her family are doubtless by now dreadfully tired of the entire mess and anxious to see it go away, and the RIAA is doubtless in a thug lawyerish way dreadfully tired of the entire mess by now and anxious to sweep it under the rug, leaving them with freedom to continue their other cases without an embarrassing public precedent.

Of course, this leaves Ms. Santangelo and her family uncompensated for having been put through the mill, but that's the legal system for you.

By all means set up your own blog and "swamp" mentions of your name with positive links and commentary. It will help anyway, and push mentions of the pervert down on search engines in general. Don't even mention the pervert, because you don't want any attention drawn to him (or her) with which to begin. Don't try too hard, though. Just gradually build up a body of links and commentary via blog entries and trackbacks or comments on other blogs, using your own name naturally. Anyone who purposefully searches for dirt on you will find the pervert anyway, and realise in all probability quickly that the pervert is a different person.

We desperately need a special police force and judicial system that has the power to arrest, try and jail or execute *only* public officials, with no power over ordinary citizens. Seeing a few hundred corrupt judges and prosecutors and police officers and government employees hanging from yardarms or rotting in prison will do wonders for shaping them up.

I strongly suspect that making a game bot truly act like a human calls for heuristics that approach those in real humans, meaning something like "true" artificial intelligence. Those heuristics would be be worth way, way, way more than a measly $7000 or $2000, and a trip. Billions, in fact.

Still, it'll be interesting over time to see if someone can, in fact, make a highly "human-like" set of heuristics without actually achieving this "true" artificial intelligence, or if someone does invent heuristics for "true" artificial intelligence then is naive enough to give it away for not peanuts, but a half a single peanut. Either way would say something important about so-called "human" intelligence.

Wait just a second, now! I ... oh.

The more computers come to handle criminal and civil matters, such as with traffic light monitors, the more Joe jobs will become a problem. I can foresee underworld specialists in Joe jobs commonly offering for a fee to destroy your enemies with anything from this simple tactic of photocopying license plates, up to using well-known tricks to get child pornography onto victims' computers, followed by anonymous tips to the F.B.I.

If this stands, this sets a terrible precedent. Suppose some ambitious prosecutor has decided that you must have committed a Federal crime by using a pseudonym to have a nasty war of words with someone on a chat forum on a politically touchy subject, in violation of the Terms of Service? He can use this terrible precedent to railroad you on charges of "unauthorised access", claiming it has nothing to do with, say, opposing abortion on demand, or supporting it, or whatever. If you don't think this can happen, well, it *has* happened, over and over, with other laws meant for originally limited purposes. The anti-Mafia RICO laws come to mind. There is indeed a slippery slope here, and a steep one at that.

Prosecuting what can only be called a venomous viper isn't worth it for what it'll cost all of us.

You might also find it mildly interesting to check out this slightly newer thread and this slightly older thread at The Volokh Conspiracy, both begun by Mr. Orin Kerr, who is one of the attorneys for Ms. Lori Drew.