A playlist made by user X is not labelled as originating from artist/publisher/whatever Y. Spotify will say that the playlist is from user X and not imply any relation to the compilation album the playlist is trying to mimic.

It's a whole different situation. If I bring a peanut butter sandwich to work, then I'm directly responsible for putting my colleague in danger. However, if I'm sending a text message to someone I know is driving, then my sending that text message is in no way directly responsible for whatever accident may happen due to the driver picking up the phone and reading the text message. The big difference is that the driver still has a choice here. It's the driver that makes the choice to check the text message. He isn't forced to. Your allergic colleague doesn't have the choice of being exposed to peanut butter or not (assuming this is a real, terrible case of peanut butter allergy) and has no real way of avoiding the consequences.

With a C++ program it is up to me, the programmer to make sure there are no exploits.

Guess how many programmers are adequately up to that task... And when I say "many", I actually mean "few".

I wonder what would've happened if they labeled the box as containing religious items rather than "atheist".

Problem is, if you're boycotting EA, then you'll soon enough be boycotting Activision as well on the same grounds. Ubisoft will follow right behind them and I bet eventually you'll do away with Take 2 as well.
Not a whole lot of games left to play then.

Jade, from Beyond Good & Evil.

Yeah sure, blah blah blah.
He hasn't actually released the modified game and big gaming corporations don't give a fuck about a dad hacking a 30 year old game this way to make his daughter happy. To "squash" this, a corp needs to spend more money than it's worth, so they're not going to do a thing about it. Simple as that.

Start braking a bit earlier. Jeez, it ain't freaking rocket science.
Besides, I'm sure you can come up with some exotic situation where you absolutely can't help but cross the line, but that doesn't invalidate the whole setup.

Just engage the tractor beam!

All I worry about is that the RIAA and their kin will interpret this news as their witch hunt on piracy is finally paying off, and all they need to do now is increase their efforts tenfold with even more invasive and restrictive measures.

The author of the article must be a really bitter, bitter man who doesn't realize Minority Report is just a movie, with computer interfaces designed to look cool rather than practical. In fact, I think Minority Report is one of the lesser offenders when it comes to totally unbelievable bullshit UI's (Jurassic Park and Swordfish spring to mind).

I've never heard or seen any serious designer strive for interfaces that are identical to what we see in Minority Report. Sounds to me like he works with amateurs who can't differentiate between "cool" and "absurd". And he's blaming movies for the rise of touch screens and the touchscreen gestures we use now? Maybe it's the other way around and the people who designed the stuff in Minority Report had a pretty good grasp on what the future would actually bring us.

In the end, the design of Minority Report's "orchestra screen" was brilliant in that it exactly matched it's purpose: to look cool, look (somewhat) realistic and get the necessary information across to the viewer of the movie. That interface probably wasn't designed to be intuitive for the actual user, it was meant to be intuitive for the cinema going audience.

If there's some elite group of hackers who like to target high profile websites and services that can get past the most complex forms of encryption, then does that automatically mean we shouldn't use encryption anymore? For all I know, at the very least, encryption will keep out the 13 year old bedroom hackers who write vbscripts and call it a virus.

Similar to me having MAC filtering enabled on my wireless router. I know MAC filtering won't keep out the determined hacker, but it will be enough of a blockade for some wannabe punk that thinks it's cool to spend a weekend trying to access insecure wifi routers. To keep out more advanced and experienced intruders, more is needed, but that's no reason for me to just open the gate to every laptop owner with half a braincell who bookmarked a "hacking 101" tutorial.

Good point. Also, after I posted my message I clicked one of the links in the article and found that so far it appears to work only for the HTML5 version of YouTube, which makes me believe that this only works for HTML5 controls, which means that annoying flash ads with sound can still creep through.

Yeah I think it's a great idea. I just hope it works beyond HTML5 implementations of audio and is also able to tell me if plugins are playing audio (like flash or silverlight animations).

Actually, meteors hitting the earth's atmosphere is a very common event. It happens almost every night. The only difference is that this time the meteor was large enough to be visible and have this result. The big 45m piece of asteroid passing by isn't that uncommon either, it's just passing by relatively close compared to other asteroids.
In short: we're not talking about two uncommon events (certainly not "very rare"). You're falling for the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy here.