That totally depends on the area. I live in a moderate sized US city, not really even a bad area, and I've had tons of packages stolen off the front porch. I finally had to just rent a mailbox to ship packages to.

In the suburbs, you can get away with it because the houses tend to be back from the road and there's not a whole lot of foot traffic. It's often not easy to even see a package from a passing car, and you'd be conspicuous as hell stopping and running across the front yard to grab it. In a denser neighborhood like mine, the houses are five steps from the street and there is lots of foot traffic. It's a piece of cake to step up, grab a package, and disappear before anyone notices.

Correct, and the way copyright law advances society is by giving creators the exclusive right to exploit their work for a limited period of time, thereby creating incentive for creators to produce said work. So his desires are in fact the whole point.

Holy crap, I missed the 2007 update to this story. The dude's turned into the Trashcan Man. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,299362,00.html

I don't get it, what grounds would Adobe have to sue Apple? Last I heard, there were no laws against having a closed platform. Even some sort of antitrust angle doesn't make sense. The iPhone is huge, but it's hardly the only smartphone on the market.

I was starting to wonder if I was the only one. I use Windows full time, though, for web, e-mail, games, everything. My rules are: 1.) Don't use IE, 2.) Keep everything up to date, 3.) Always use a hardware router/firewall. 4.) Don't execute anything unless you know what it is and where it came from.

Every once in a while, I'll use Trend Micro's web-based scanner, and do a quick scan with Spybot and/or AdAware. They've never come up with anything more serious than tracking cookies. The one time I had a serious problem, I had launched IE (breaking rule #1) to look at a page that wouldn't render in Firefox and mis-clicked on a popup, hitting "OK" by mistake. I knew I had been infected immediately, and spent about 4 hours ripping the bastard out. I really can't understand how people who know what they are doing (or at least should) get hit with random viruses that "just install themselves."

Two problems with this idea. First, the people who actually buy stuff from spam can be difficult to identify. I think many of them know deep down that they are doing something exquisitely stupid and will deny it if asked. Second, even if we can identify these spam patrons, it is quite illegal in most places to bash their empty skulls in with a baseball bat. Barring some significant changes in legislation, I just don't see how the problem can be tackled from this end.

Like the YouTube comments section... *shudder*

I have to say, I missed the part about shutdowns starting in March, too. It seems kind of pointless, since a machine that shuts down every two hours is essentially useless. Might as well pull the plug in March and call it done.

In their defense, there really wasn't much to sell of Pontiac other than the arrowhead and some trade dress. Basically all of the technology in modern Pontiacs came from other divisions. And unlike some of the divisions they decided to sell, *if* they found a buyer for Pontiac, all they'd be doing is creating a competitor on their home turf competing in their core market.

I remember editing some documents for a woman who apparently learned this way. The problem is it looks OK in fonts like Courier and Times New Roman, but if you change the font they can stick out like a sore thumb.

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."

-Douglas Adams

Exactly. Nothing irritates me more than to have the manager who agreed to the ridiculous, unreasonable schedule that forced us to work late going, "OK, see you guys. IM me if you need anything," and then going home to have dinner with his family. Fuck that, you're at least party responsible, you should stay and suffer with us, even if all you're doing is ordering pizza and answering questions. I think if more managers had to work 16 hour days they'd push a little harder to work out reasonable schedules.

It's kind of amazing, I know. The Bill of Rights has proven incredibly resilient so far, having resisted most attempts to convert it into toilet paper.

Just turn it around. Try to even think about the uproar if some game developer released a game where Americans are associated with terrorism and the famous "No Russian" level would take part in lets say New York Airport, instead of Moscow.

Uproar *from the people* is fine. The problem here is that, as I understand it, the ban is coming from the Russian government. There is no way the US government could get a game banned over content that portrayed Americans negatively. Any attempt would rightly be overturned as unconstitutional.

I believe that's correct. I find it's kind of a mixed blessing. One one hand you get the lying bullshit artist who will say anything to make a sale. On the other hand, you tend to get better service from someone working on commission.

A while back, I needed to buy an AC on the first really hot weekend of the summer. We went to Best Buy, and there was one unit left on a high shelf, with an angry crowd milling about beneath it. At least two employees were standing safely out of the way, just watching the proceedings. We walked out and went over to Sears, where the salesperson practically met us at the door. It probably took about 15 minutes to get the AC we wanted, including the time it took to load it in the car.