In the US, which by virtue of the 1st Amendment has some of the strongest free speech protections in the world, those words would probably constitute "fighting words'.
Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire
"insulting or 'fighting words,' those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality."

I think it was stupid, but it doesn't look like it was a vast Google conspiracy to inhale as much data as possible for the takeover of the world. It looks like a stupid decision by an engineer and a layer of incompetent management.

I certainly don't condone anyone collecting WiFi data that most people expect to be private, but correct me if I'm wrong - they didn't crack WEP/WPA/hack their way into routers to obtain this data. That means it was floating free and unencrypted over the air for anyone to observe. It's shady and makes Google look bad, but technically it's not much different from receiving FM radio signals; perhaps short range walkie talkie conversations are a more apt comparison - still not illegal and not patently immoral.

Did you see this article today? Goes right along with what you're saying - getting people informed isn't even the root of the problem - it's that people are incapable of judging competency/quality because they always over-estimate their own abilities. http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-flourish-scientists-185601411.html

No, it isn't pointless. By virtue of the fact that the average lifetime of a $100 bill in circulation is 5 years, seeing older $100s will be less common after 5-10 years. When older bills are used, they'll raise suspicion, thereby reducing a counterfeit note's utility.

NTFS's default cluster size for volumes up to 16TB is 4KB anyway. Anyone with a new computer (Vista+, anyone who wouldn't know what a file system is, have reason to choose another one and not know how to manually align it) will be using 4KB clusters.

Comcast has been using twitter for a while now, under the @ComcastCares account. Multiple Comcast employees monitor twitter streams for complaints and are empowered to take action to resolve issues. ComcastBonnie (as well as a few others) are authorized (cs? pr?) representatives for Comcast. Given that her twitter page says the same thing as her post, you can probably take it at face value.

Yes, but it's often many days out of sync with the official releases. In more bureaucratic organizations you're not going to get some random 3rd party build of an application that handles as much sensitive data as a web browser approved. Mozilla needs to realize that wider corporate adoption requires easy manageability. MSI + Group Policy Template FROM MOZILLA would be huge.

Nope. If you trace back the trail of links, the link for appeasing the riaa goes to a forum post that only mentions the details of the registry workaround. This was already determined to be hearsay on days ago when the story broke. Congratulations to the /. editors for their diligence.