It's very likely that Apple knew the FBI could break in, but they figured it would take some time and therefore chose the good PR route by saying they wouldn't help ...yada yada ... civil liberties... yada yada.

There are (reportedly) 10,000 govt employees in the Ashley Madison hack that would probably disagree with you, Jeb.

Well, the good news is that by the time they get this working, we'll all have self-driving cars. The bad news is that we'll all have self-driving cars.

You know what they say: All is fair in love and war and overpriced A/V accessories.

The linked article leaves out one important detail. This isn't about retaliation... Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey told the station: 'George Lucas said, "if I’m not going to do what I wanted to do there, what can I do that would be really beneficial to this community?"

"It may have had survival advantage in caveman days..." Oh, it still does. It's just not the survival of our particular species.

The next time someone asks "What good is Perl anymore?" or "Who actually uses Perl?" or "Why use Perl?" you can point them to this article. Perl is perfect for this type of quick development. Sometimes the older languages still have a lot of value.

Nobody buys Volvo because of who assembled it. They buy because of who engineered it. There is a difference there. Parts are made all over the world, are interchangeable to a degree, and can be assembled rather easily. What differentiates cars is who engineered them.

Al Franken has earned my vote for pretty much any office he ever runs for, ever.

Don't assume that access to the internet is making anybody smarter. I think that's the real question. If anything, access to the internet is making people less intelligent, and I think there is more evidence to support that claim. The child who walks to the library and picks up a book and reads is going to end up smarter than the kids who hits up wikipedia, youtube, and various blogs to get his information.

A programming language is technically not a "language" at all. The word "language" is used as a sort of nickname for what programming really is. That's like giving physical education credits for "web surfing" just because it has the word "surfing" in it, or biology/entomology credit for debugging just because it has the word "bug" in it.

"Currently there is no "successor" to Facebook". Well, of course there isn't. And there wasn't a successor to Myspace for a while either. What we are saying is that we "can't imagine" a successor to Facebook, because, let's face it, if we could we would certainly build it. But the way these things work is that something will come out of nowhere and we'll immediately feel like we "need" to be a part of it. It will fulfill a need we didn't even know we had. Oh, there will be something that knocks off Facebook and probably Google as well.

It can't be that hard to disable or remove the GPS. I'm sure anyone who can assemble their own computer (which is probably everybody at Slashdot) could do it in an hour. My assumption is that it won't be illegal to tamper with either.

A worse punishment would be for them to have to live the rest of their lives in Tijuana. I'd say they got off easy.

Use of the internet is NOT a basic human right, no matter how much Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg want us to think it is. It's a privilege and should be revoked as such.