Your comment might me more insightful except for the fact it's the so-called right-wing nuts proposing the anti-spyware legislation and the so-called level-headed left trying to gut it.

Let's dispense with the American-style left vs. right. The Canadian Liberal party has not put forth a platform that's fundamentally any different than the Conservatives. They both occupy the EXACT same spot in the political spectrum with a teeny little bit of left/right wiggle room. The Liberals were actually quite conservative during the Chretien years. Although as a Canadian you might think that the Conservatives are right-wing nut jobs, they're actually to the left of even the American Democrat party. The US Democrats can't even pass health care reform Democratic president and majorities in the senate and congress.

The statement is worded in such a way that it strongly biases competence over personality. Competence is expressed as an absolute -- ALWAYS right or wrong. The adjectives used to describe personality are relatively central on the good/bad scale. If you reversed the bias and say asked IT pros whether they'd rather work with a serial killing evil psychopath who's usually right or the most wonderful person in the world who's usually wrong then chances are the results would come out reversed.

The article's author is simply trying to debunk negative stereotypes of geeks with the geeks' own stereotypes of how they *want* to be seen. Neither extreme is particularly valid.

Holy crap, that's brilliant. Seriously. You guys are just pissed off you didn't think of it first.

I think you're mixing up the concept of mass-energy equivalence with the theory of relativity. Mass-energy equivalence (ie. e=mc^2) was used during the development of the atom bomb.

In any event, you can't say their lack of nuclear weapons contributed to their demise any more than you can say not winning the lottery contributed to somebody's poverty. Nazi Germany has more than sufficient compelling causes for their demise before you can start to get into their inability to produce whatever hypothetical super weapons they were working on.

They're not out to circumvent their laws per se. It's more part of a long term strategy to weaken or destabilize the governments of their enemies. It just so happens that their enemies are repressive whose survival partly depends on their ability to control the flow of information to their citizens. Iran is a present annoyance to the US, while China is a future threat to American world domination.

Where you go, what applications you are using, what web sites you visit, what businesses you call are a marketing gold mine. A provider can analyse this information to serve you content that is appropriate to your interests and locations. Have you ever ordered pizza on your smart phone? You might be sent pizza coupons for the nearest pizza joint. Do you visit football web sites? You might get ads for the local football team when you're traveling on business. This is extremely creepy, but companies ARE working on developing this kind of technology.

Are you kidding me? Publically announce that your product exploded and acknowledge that there's a likelihood that all of your products may explode? Yes that would be a complete non-issue all right. Don't give up your day job. Apple did the right thing (for them, in the evil corporation sense) in trying to keep it secret, but did it in a way that treated the customers poorly. If they had treated the girl like a queen, like bringing her down to a store, presenting her with a new top of the line ipod, some Apple swag, free itunes download vouchers and other trinkets I bet they would have signed on the spot.

I find it amusing how there's this presumption that Apple's shit doesn't stink and that they're some paragon of virtue simply because they're Apple. Then Slashdotters find out that it's just another sleazy corporation doing all the evil corporate things that every other company is doing. I can guarantee you that the person whose job it is to dispense the legal boilerplate is not up on the Streisand effect or any other Slashdot memes. It's not like this issue went up into this Jedi council of engineering PhD's for top level strategy planning.

This is pretty scary, actually. We're randomly adding this stuff to food for no reason other than to turn it blue. So it turns out it has some sort of medicinal power, but it could just have easily caused cancer or horrible birth defects.

If our factory food looks so disgusting that it needs dyes, maybe we shouldn't be eating it in the first place.

Scraping photographs that somebody spent a lot of time, money and effort to capture and process from their website and uploading it somewhere else where it is presumably relicensed is an obnoxious thing to do even if it's not illegal in the US due to some legal technicality. If these guys wanted these images so badly they should have arranged to use their own resources to either license or take the photographs themselves.

People these days are so morally bankrupt when it comes to digital content that they can't recognize right from wrong. My guess is buddy would have done the same regardless of the actual legal status in the US and he just happened to get lucky.

People don't know what they want; it's the job of the innovators to tell them. 20 years ago, nobody was "asking" for any of the features we have in a modern operating system. The operating system did more or less what they wanted or needed based on their understanding of what computers were all about. The innovators would think of some fancy new feature and people would just go 'hey wow, this is pretty cool' and that would a standard or necessary feature of all subsequent OSes. It fundamentally changes how we think about computers and how we use them. The new features are what adds excitement and drives the adoption rate. We could have had the "perfect" cell phone 15 years ago but the market would be saturated and stagnant. If the Linux desktop stops its innovation then it will just get steamrolled by all the "useless" features in Windows/MacOS.

See I don't get this. IT people have this attitude like you can't possibly understand my ultra-specialized IT job, you HR bozo. It's not like HR is this generic homogeneous specialty. A high tech company should be hiring HR people who specialize in hiring high tech workers. These people have to understand the market and the jargon so that they can hire the right people for their market segment.

If you see stupid job postings, it's because of flawed specifications from the hiring manager. The HR department isn't going to just randomly start adding requirements to the job posting. They just post the job and screen the applicants.

So what happens if all these site with "anonymous" accounts all changed them to "Microsoft". Would we be reading about Microsoft as a terrorist organization? Or how about if Al-Qaeda had actually called themselves "The Catholic Church"?

I actually hope that this is a matter of the analysts fitting the "threat" into a simple model of an organized group with a catchy name so they can feed it to the idiot politicians and general public for some more funding.

First let me say that you're far less important than you think you are. Nobody is going to care about your photos. If they do, you must seem pretty sketchy.

Take some crappy holiday snapshots and stick them into "My Pictures". If they ask to see your holiday snapshots, happily show that to them without going off on some ranting libertarian diatribe. That will satisfy 99.9% of the population. Put the rest into a vmware image or something. If you get the resident TSA IT genius, you're probably getting the rubber glove treatment.