Most people in the military are severely lacking in kind of skills needed to protect America's electronic infrastructure. It has to do with military culture more than anything else. Techies just don't get promoted the way fighter pilots do. I would shut the whole thing down and start a new branch or something. Otherwise, it's a giant waste of money.

It just has to be a web app. The App Store model is actually a response to software piracy. If anyone could write and execute app store programs without permission, it would be much more difficult for app developers to make money.

Artists are actually doing much better since the dawn of the Internet because of increased ticket sales from live performances, and box office sales are better now than ever. I highly doubt illegal downloading contributes very much to lost revenue since a very small percentage of the people who download illegal media would actually buy the product.

My point is essentially that successful opposition candidate in Iran will necessarily have to be perceived as anti-Western, so it makes it little Westerns to try and help the opposition.

I'm not arguing Mousavi's policies aren't better. What I'm saying is that Westerners rallying behind him will not help him.

It's statements like that why the vast majority of Iranians want the Americans out of their politics.

My point isn't whether Mousavi's economic policies are better. I think they are. However, I think it's ridiculous for Westerners to think they can help the Iranian opposition.

You are not helping the reformists. You may think you are, but trust me you are wrong. No faction of Iranians want Americans interfering in their politics.

1.) If you're somewhere in Europe or North America, it's the same deal. 2.) You should, but in practice you almost never do. 3.) Hitler was democratically elected.

Everyone who thinks they are helping by siding with the Iranian opposition has a very poor understanding of Iranian politics. It doesn't matter whether it's from the government or whether it's from regular Western citizens, helping the opposition figures does not help the United States in any way. It just puts a different face on the same anti-Western government. The difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi is on economic policy not foreign policy. What makes you think that if they opposition was successful in their political ambitions that they would become pro-American? Did they become pro-Israel after Israelis sold them weapons during the Iran Iraq war?

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I read a lot of blogs, and the best ones are seldom very profitable. If you want to make money from advertising, your best bet is to run around chasing celebrities (TMZ/Perez Hilton), but if you want to make a difference in the world around you, don't expect get rich doing it. I would suggest getting a real job, so that you can afford doing you're passionate about.

...you know that a small random sample of the population tells you what the general population is like to a very high degree of certainty. A random sample of 10 percent of population is virtually guaranteed to be within the margin of error of the general sample. Now the early vote counts are not exactly random sample, but it's not unreasonable to announce the result of an election with a very small percentage of the vote counted.

Allowing everyone to help out with Google's product development is a smart strategy because of how difficult it is becoming to keep up with software enthusiasts who like to collaborate on open source projects. It will be interesting to see how Google will be able to harness the power of collaborative development in their core products.

Nothing new here... almost all ISPs retain data regarding you traffic which includes what sites you visit and what e-mails you send. This informal policy is now being extended to mobile platforms. Governments do this, not to prevent crime, but just because they are paranoid. There should probably be some sort of international body to monitor abuses of this power.

Why? There isn't a closed source rendering engine that processes JavaScript anywhere near as fast as Gecko or Webkit. Eventually, this is going to make it very difficult for IE to maintain its market share when common web developers start writing applications that require this kind of performance. There will eventually be web based applications that match Windows or OS X in responsiveness and functionality using only JavaScript HTML and CSS. When ordinary web developers begin to develop software that requires the performance advantage of open source rendering engines, Microsoft will be faced with the decision of switching or becoming obsolete on the web.