Good god, I hope this doesn't become a long-running meme (especially the misspelling of "heard"). If it does, I will make an effort to show up in every /. thread to post a reply to these saying "Wurst. Meme. EVAR. </comic book guy>"

If I customize Firefox, the Linux kernel, or Gnome to make it easier for me to do things, it does not affect the experience of anyone who is using the official client without customizations. If I do the same thing for an MMO - and change it to give myself an unfair advantage, such as the ability to see through wall, rather than just to make it work better with my video card - then it will affect the experience of other players. And given that we have seen this kind of behavior in closed-source MMOs, you can bet it's going to happen in an open source one. But it will happen faster.

Why am I cheering about what seems to be a complete breakdown of what geeks want?

Simple - for most books, the "rightsholder" is the AUTHOR, not the publisher. (This is the opposite situation from the music industry.)

So authors will need to contact Amazon to disable this, and I'm betting that generally they won't bother. If the book publishers tell Amazon to do it, Amazon can just point out that the copyright is not in their control.

Really? I've pretty much stopped going to CNN.com because it seems like 75% of their stories are only only available in video format. (That's hyperbole, folks - I know it's really less than 50%. Probably lots less.) Now, a story that would take me half a minute to read is only available as a three minute video. It's a waste of time and bandwidth as far I'm concerned.

Except there's no such thing as permanent safety. See, the safety is only as complete as the people in charge of making things safe are trustworthy. Creating safety requires giving people power, and power corrupts. Therefore, the people in charge of safety will be corrupt. Sure, the system may work for a while, but eventually a person that is very susceptible to corruption will be put in charge, and it will break down, probably quite spectacularly and quite quicky.

Using spaces as tabs is the Right Thing to do. Say you've got your editor set to tab stops every 4 characters, and I've got mine set to every 8 characters. If your files have tabs following other text (such as to put single-line comments in C sources), things that look perfectly lined up on your screen are all over the place on mine.

So set your editors to insert X number of spaces when you hit Tab.

Or install Firefox and the Flashblock extension, which blocks ALL Flash content until explicitly allowed (which can either be once or always for a particular site). Which is better than AdBlock's version, that lets you block Flash but makes you explicitly block rather than blanket-block. (Blanket-block is better because 90% or more of Flash content encountered is ads.)

- Does it work in law to say "He's doing it too"?
- Isn't it "unconstitutional" (illegal) to have a law that applies to lots and is only enforced on some?

No, to both of your questions. Try this with a cop the next time that you get pulled over speeding. Not only will you get a ticket, you'll get the cop mad and he will find probably half a dozen other things that you can additional tickets for.

They won a battle. It doesn't mean that they've won the war. Especially since the settlement was out-of-court, so the legality of their action hasn't truly been tested. (There are many reasons for settling out of court - you know you can't win; you know can win but it won't be worth the price, you might win but the cost of the judgement against you plus legal fees will be higher than what the other party is willing to take in settlement, etc.)

And as other people have pointed out in this thread, there's a good chance that deeplinking actual drives increased page views by sending people directly to content they are interested in rather than relying on them to find interesting content on their own via the site's main page.

What? I provided you with a link so you could find out more. It wasn't like you were going to RTFA that the summary linked to!

So was I. It's a "Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device", it's made by General Dynamics, and you can read more about it here.

You too? I thought that I was the only that was going to end up looking like Thufir Howat from the David Lynch version of Dune in 10 or 20 years.

Revs

Hey, unlike the Sox, at least they actually play football, even if not the American variety.

But I'm curious why you believe flour would be more easily obtainable than other foodstuffs?

I don't. I believe that, immediately before a disaster, everyone else will be stocking up on canned goods. Which will leave the store's stock of flour, sugar, and other baking basics for me to buy, along with a whole bunch of charcoal to actually run the smoker. (I'll also be letting my 300-gallon hot tub, that I never use, drain so that I can refill it and skip the chlorine so I can use it as a stock of drinking water.)

Your boss's plan wasn't that bad, actually - nicotine addiction is horrible to try to overcome, and I bet he would have found a few people to trade with in the event of a disaster on a scale that would return the US to a barter system. But given that that hasn't happened, did he end up throwing the cigarettes away, or giving them away, or what?

"There has been a lot of research into high reliability systems, and mainframe systems can remain operational with no interruptions in service for decades on end."

As it happens, I work on a high-reliability, high-availability minicomputer in the financial industry. Even if there are no problems with backups (unlikely), there will be network problems that prevent accessing the data, unless there is a pair of high-reliability high-availability systems available at each hospital. (Pair because every machine needs to come down sometime - even if only for maintenance of its connection to the power grid - so you always have a second system to fail over to.) And the cost we'll pay to replicate all that data to every hospital in the country? It'll be huge.

"Sounds like a typical engineering challenge."

See the comment below about 11TB of radiology images for a city of 100K. Can you imagine what the requirements will be for that type of system scaled up to 300 million people?

"Take a look at the NIST security criteria for certified systems some time."

I admit that I haven't looked at that. But it's not bypassing the security I'm worried about. If it's possible for the police to get a warrant for certain records, how long do you think it's going to take before some fast-talking cop flashes his badge to someone who does have proper access and ends with a copy of his wife/girlfriend/mistress's medical records?