Given that, at what point do mods that improve minecraft's program-ability go too far and turn it from a perverse simulation game of enormous popularity into a really dreadful IDE?
Compare emacs to hurd and you'll see the lengths people go to to avoid doing something that looks like actual work.
I've had dysthymia -- that's chronic, low level depression that leaves you prone to moderate depression -- for the past, oh, 20 years. When I go off meds or am under high amounts of stress, I tend to turtle. When I turtle, I get more depressed. I spend a lot of time alone, on the Internet browsing or watching videos, or playing video games. These activities are my natural coping mechanisms to relieve regular amounts of stress, but when overwhelmed they do nothing to prevent the progression into depression. Indeed, they make it worse by eliminating social contact and preventing me from confronting any issues in my life. I will stop taking care of myself, sleeping, and eventually eating. [That's one of the salient factors in most cognitive mental illness, by the way. Your coping natural mechanisms exacerbate the symptoms. It's a self-sustaining cycle.]
Thus, depression causes me to play video games excessively and hide in my room on the Internet. My personal experience is that excessive Internet use is a symptom of depression, and I have come to recognize that when I do this I need to take action to correct it.
Note that when I'm not depressed, I can play video games as much as I want without any problems. The video games don't cause me to get depressed by themselves. Depression is not a symptom of playing video games.
"Linked" means "linked". Don't blame the social scientists because journalists are lazy about language and fact checking, and write articles based on sensationalist and misleading phrases in order to increase readership.
As a side note, fuck Gary Gutting. He's an ignorant douche bag upset by the fact that Philosophy is too far from Math or Science into the Art spectrum to be useful for a career, and takes it out on Social Scientists just on the other side of that line by appealing to the fact that, hey, Science is pretty limited the more subjective you get. This is in spite of the fact of the millions of people aided by therapy. Or would you rather talk to your neighborhood priest when you need some counseling? Because before psychotherapy took off, that was your only source of emotional counseling. Everything today we call social services used to be church organized services.
Most estimates I've seen put Apple in as 60-70% of the tablet market share. They alone control the hardware channel, the OS channel, and the third party application store for their product. You can't buy an iPad without iOS, you can't buy iOS without an iPad, and you can't install an application without Apple allowing it on their store.
Every time you have to take your hand off the keyboard to grab the mouse or flick the trackpad, you lose time.
Every time you take your hand off the mouse or trackpad and line it up on the keyboard again, you lose time.
The idiot who came up with the idea of requiring both mouse and keyboard input for one UI metaphor was a complete and utter freakin' MORON with absolutely NO UI design experience worth noting.
Perhaps I'm just hyper-evolved, but I was born with two hands. Typically then, I use the mouse with one hand to designate what I want the computer to operate on, and then the other hand to specify the command I want the computer to run. The only time I need to deviate from this is when I'm producing a lot of text-based content, which typically requires enough time that moving my hand from the mouse to the keyboard is not an appreciable loss of time.
The only time when the keyboard / mouse interface breaks down is when you need to use the mouse to designate something, then type a short word longer than a few letters, then designate something else. If you've ever watched someone log in to a computer or enter their personal information on a website who doesn't know that the [tab] key advances fields, [enter] submits the current window, and [esc] cancels it, you see how painfully tedious it is. The only thing worse than watching someone fill out a form who doesn't know these key commands is being forced to fill out a form in a program or on a website where the developer didn't understand the importance of this convention and did not implement it correctly (or at all).
What machines are you using? I'm mostly familiar with HP and Dell, and just about every business-grade machine they sell (laptops, desktops, servers) has Bitlocker-compatible TPM built-in.
I was wondering the same thing. I work at a school district, and every desktop and laptop the district has purchased in the last 4-5 years (meaning every computer in use other than a few oddball donated models) has had a TPM module. I know because we had consistent problems with them under Windows XP and they had to be disabled, only to be re-enabled when the machines were migrated to Windows 7.
So if they sell stuff to other countries do they have to abide by their laws as well?
Yes. Of course you do.
What if those laws contradict each other.
Then you probably can't do business in that country. There is no inherent right to do business, and no right to make a profit. If you can't do it within the bounds of the law, you can't do it.
If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail?
They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.
The US is treating US laws as though they are the laws of the world. They are not. The US government is only doing this because they can and probably due to corruption. Not because it is proper behavior.
The US is treating properties which are located in the US as subject to US law, which is the natural right of any sovereign nation. Domain names, under the current DNS system, effectively reside in the US because they are managed by ICANN, an organization located in the US. That makes DNS digital property subject to US law.
Arguing that someone didn't use a word correctly is like saying
It's like saying that they don't know what they're talking about.
Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is not antisemitic. Being in favor of a two-state solution is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.
When you don't "use that word correctly", you are doing a lot more than using a wrong "naming convention". You are factually incorrect.
In a comment, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky elaborates: "(marginal is small, honest, and we just haven't determined the final prices yet based on ongoing work but we are aiming for single digit dollars but we don't control the truly marginal costs).
I'm sure these costs will be right in line with the marginal amounts they charge consumers for Windows Recovery media.
Microsoft doesn't sell that. They sell plain installation discs. If your PC manufacturer decided not to give you recovery media or installation discs when they sold you their computer, and you neglected to purchase them or use backup software included in Windows by Microsoft to create them, I really fail to see why that's MS's fault.
Ordinarily, I would agree with your sentiment. However, if your entire business and the livelihood of yourself and others DEMANDS that Google Chrome render SVG accurately and correctly, it behooves you to fix it yourself when it breaks. If your options are "do nothing, lose job, business fails" or "do something difficult" you're not going to have my sympathy for picking the former, especially when you could contract out the latter.
Intel's development model is Tick (die shrink), Tock (new features). It's been this way for many years. Honestly, I'm not sure why you expected a Tick to have any new features. They did call Ivy Bridge a "tick plus," but even then I wouldn't expect any major overhaul in features or performance. Tick is a manufacturing process improvement, not an architecture improvement.
As far as heat packaging, I believe others have covered that sufficiently.
I find that using a tool that has been designed to do the job I'm interested in doing is the most useful and produces the best results for the time I'm investing. LaTeX is a typesetter. Word is a document editor. I use LaTeX when I care about document layout. I use Word when I care about document content. 99% of the time, my job is to produce useful content. I use Word 99% of the time.
In the 90s, MS didn't care about open source because it was a different market segment. You used Unix or (more rarely) BSD or Linux where you needed mainframes or Internet services (both of which were themselves rare during the 90s). In the 90s MS was focused on the goal of getting a desktop computer in every home and on every desk. They cared about ubiquitous computing for everybody (because they wanted to sell software to them), which is not at all what the open source community cared about (which cared about good software for computer experts and professionals that you could fix or improve on your own). Both MS and the open source community succeeded in their respective goals in the 90s, it should be noted.
And it derided Apple because in the 90s Apple was shit. It only existed in art and publishing houses (thanks to Adobe) and schools (thanks to good marketing in the 80s and vendor lock-in). Why do you think the Internet Explorer/Office for Mac deal happened in 1997? Because Apple was shit.
Gag orders are issued in the US as well, but the media frenzy over this started the day the incident occurred. The cat was already out of the bag and halfway down the block before the investigation even began, never mind any court proceedings. I don't know how you expect to get this in front of a judge fast enough to get a gag order. Even in Canada, you'd have to prove that the Section One limitations clause applies, and even if you do that, doing so that quickly will almost certainly raise conspiracy and cover up accusations. That's not healthy at all.
My research suggests the police investigators do not believe it was self-defense, but that the prosecutors didn't think they had enough evidence to go to trial. That's not "incompetence" it's proprietorial discretion. There was no crime they could charge him with to get in front of a judge to get a gag order. Now, because of political and social pressure, they're going to go to trial anyway. Honestly, they have to because it looks so bad if they don't. Everybody from the Mayor of Sanford up to the Governor has to cover their ass and pass the buck to the courtroom or they'll get blamed and go down in flames just like the Sanford Chief of Police Bill Lee did.
Actually university police often are sworn police officers, making them peers to your municipal police department and giving them the ability to pursue, detain, and arrest. Many universities also operate security guard branches as well, and they are typically not sworn officers. However, those guys you see driving around in school-colored vehicles with CAMPUS POLICE emblazoned on the side are typically, in every respect, real police officers. Additionally, they almost universally have an understanding with municipal departments to work together cooperatively, so if they find themselves in a corner case (occurred on campus, detained off campus) they can simply contact dispatch and request a municipal officer.
Everything you list is a shortcoming of the specific interface that you are using, not of the database concept itself. The way I see it, the problem is that nobody bothered to write a UI for a database that makes it look easy and simple to edit like an Excel spreadsheet.
Yes they did. It's called Access.
The fact that nobody who isn't a tech knows how to use it and most techs only encounter it when people use when they should have gotten a network database is a little beside the point. Access does everything the parent wants, and although it's complicated to use it's not much more complicated than Excel is.
There is a lot of overlap between Excel and Access because both applications use tables, but if each row of your table is unrelated to the rows before and after it, you probably should be using Access for anything non-trivial. And as another poster mentioned, you can link an Excel document to an Access DB if you need to manipulate the data.
Personally, I've found my opinion of lawyers is concisely stated in this quote from Henry Peter Brougham, a British Lord, statesman, and, yes, lawyer: "A lawyer is a learned gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it himself."
Or paraphrasing a friend going through a divorce: Seeing my lawyer has all the all the discomfort of a dental procedure, all the frustration of a visit to the DMV, and all the aggrivation of a cell phone bill. Except I don't get anything as useful as a root canal, a drivers licence, or a cell phone. I just get the promise of another visit in a month.
Every time I read one of these stories I think of two things.
One is the full quote from my signature (damn Slashdot's absurdly short truncation): "The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of a nation." -- Alan Dershowitz
The second is that the founding fathers of the United States did not fear Terrorism. They feared tyranny. All the famous phrases from the American Revolution are phrases attacking unjust laws, unjust abridgment of rights by the sovereign government with no redress, and general what-the-fuck-King-George-edness. And don't say the early Americans had no knowledge of the evils of Terrorism. I'm sure every one of them could remember, remember the fifth of November.
It's getting to the point that the DHS is calling anything the directors of the DHS don't like "Terrorism". The whole problem is the damn word. It's meaningless. It means "something that is intended to cause general fear or panic". Gee, that's as clear as a summer day in San Francisco. You know what we used to call the types of events like Oklahoma City and 9/11 before we called them Terrorism? Because they did happen before, and the word 'terrorism'. If the person committing the act was a citizen, we called it Treason. If the person committing the act was a foreign national, we called it an Act of War. Personally, I find those terms a whole lot easier to manage in my head. It makes it really clear what the problem is. Because "causing fear" is too damn easy to do. Hollywood makes millions of dollars a year "causing fear". We have an entire holiday dedicated to how fun it is to "cause fear". Anthropologists and behaviorists will tell us that fear is one of the most primal and varied motivators. You can't make a law against making someone afraid any more than you can make a law against making someone cry. Not that some asshole isn't trying to do exactly that as we speak, I've no doubt.
Congress, the Presidency (the office, not just the man), the DHS specifically, and the TSA most especially have embraced ambiguous language, ambiguous laws, and inconsistent and ever-changing standards. They are using them as an excuse to police and confuse the citizens of this country in ways which the founding fathers found so onerous that they chose to take up arms against. One of the first acts of which was citizens storming a military fort to steal the cannons. To our founding fathers, treason and acts of war were less distasteful than the continued governance of a tyrant.
Yes, I understand (and agree with) your reservations and concerns about what the government would do with such data, but it's really not like the alternative is demonstratively better. Yes, the government *could* abuse this type of information, but a bot net operator can abuse his bots, too. What's to stop a bot from installing a key logger and browser history scraper? Or from scanning your personal files? Or from turning on your webcam?
Additionally, owners of systems infected with bot net software are the victims of a crime and their systems are themselves being used in the commission of other crimes. Are you going to argue that MS doesn't have an obligation to tell law enforcement about their knowledge of such crimes? What if the bot net is used to coordinate a StuxNet-like attack on US infrastructure?
Honestly, this sounds like complaining that the police are searching your house for evidence when the neighbors called them about a break-in they saw going on.
Sort of. He, along with C.S. Lewis, established the sub-genre of "high fantasy," but fantasy isn't exactly new. Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian) died in 1936, which was before LotR was even begun. He's generally considered the modern father of sword and sorcery fantasy, which is not much different than high fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that, at what point do mods that improve minecraft's program-ability go too far and turn it from a perverse simulation game of enormous popularity into a really dreadful IDE?
Compare emacs to hurd and you'll see the lengths people go to to avoid doing something that looks like actual work.
What's the German word for "the boner you get from too much Schadenfreude"?
"Schadenfrisky".
I've had dysthymia -- that's chronic, low level depression that leaves you prone to moderate depression -- for the past, oh, 20 years. When I go off meds or am under high amounts of stress, I tend to turtle. When I turtle, I get more depressed. I spend a lot of time alone, on the Internet browsing or watching videos, or playing video games. These activities are my natural coping mechanisms to relieve regular amounts of stress, but when overwhelmed they do nothing to prevent the progression into depression. Indeed, they make it worse by eliminating social contact and preventing me from confronting any issues in my life. I will stop taking care of myself, sleeping, and eventually eating. [That's one of the salient factors in most cognitive mental illness, by the way. Your coping natural mechanisms exacerbate the symptoms. It's a self-sustaining cycle.]
Thus, depression causes me to play video games excessively and hide in my room on the Internet. My personal experience is that excessive Internet use is a symptom of depression, and I have come to recognize that when I do this I need to take action to correct it.
Note that when I'm not depressed, I can play video games as much as I want without any problems. The video games don't cause me to get depressed by themselves. Depression is not a symptom of playing video games.
"Linked" means "linked". Don't blame the social scientists because journalists are lazy about language and fact checking, and write articles based on sensationalist and misleading phrases in order to increase readership.
As a side note, fuck Gary Gutting. He's an ignorant douche bag upset by the fact that Philosophy is too far from Math or Science into the Art spectrum to be useful for a career, and takes it out on Social Scientists just on the other side of that line by appealing to the fact that, hey, Science is pretty limited the more subjective you get. This is in spite of the fact of the millions of people aided by therapy. Or would you rather talk to your neighborhood priest when you need some counseling? Because before psychotherapy took off, that was your only source of emotional counseling. Everything today we call social services used to be church organized services.
The USPS is not taxpayer-funded.
Then who the hell is buying all those stamps?
You should have said: "The USPS is not funded by tax dollars."
Secondly Apple doesn't have a monopoly to abuse.
Most estimates I've seen put Apple in as 60-70% of the tablet market share. They alone control the hardware channel, the OS channel, and the third party application store for their product. You can't buy an iPad without iOS, you can't buy iOS without an iPad, and you can't install an application without Apple allowing it on their store.
Who's not a monopoly now?
Every time you have to take your hand off the keyboard to grab the mouse or flick the trackpad, you lose time.
Every time you take your hand off the mouse or trackpad and line it up on the keyboard again, you lose time.
The idiot who came up with the idea of requiring both mouse and keyboard input for one UI metaphor was a complete and utter freakin' MORON with absolutely NO UI design experience worth noting.
Perhaps I'm just hyper-evolved, but I was born with two hands. Typically then, I use the mouse with one hand to designate what I want the computer to operate on, and then the other hand to specify the command I want the computer to run. The only time I need to deviate from this is when I'm producing a lot of text-based content, which typically requires enough time that moving my hand from the mouse to the keyboard is not an appreciable loss of time.
The only time when the keyboard / mouse interface breaks down is when you need to use the mouse to designate something, then type a short word longer than a few letters, then designate something else. If you've ever watched someone log in to a computer or enter their personal information on a website who doesn't know that the [tab] key advances fields, [enter] submits the current window, and [esc] cancels it, you see how painfully tedious it is. The only thing worse than watching someone fill out a form who doesn't know these key commands is being forced to fill out a form in a program or on a website where the developer didn't understand the importance of this convention and did not implement it correctly (or at all).
What machines are you using? I'm mostly familiar with HP and Dell, and just about every business-grade machine they sell (laptops, desktops, servers) has Bitlocker-compatible TPM built-in.
I was wondering the same thing. I work at a school district, and every desktop and laptop the district has purchased in the last 4-5 years (meaning every computer in use other than a few oddball donated models) has had a TPM module. I know because we had consistent problems with them under Windows XP and they had to be disabled, only to be re-enabled when the machines were migrated to Windows 7.
So if they sell stuff to other countries do they have to abide by their laws as well?
Yes. Of course you do.
What if those laws contradict each other.
Then you probably can't do business in that country. There is no inherent right to do business, and no right to make a profit. If you can't do it within the bounds of the law, you can't do it.
If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail?
They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.
The US is treating US laws as though they are the laws of the world. They are not. The US government is only doing this because they can and probably due to corruption. Not because it is proper behavior.
The US is treating properties which are located in the US as subject to US law, which is the natural right of any sovereign nation. Domain names, under the current DNS system, effectively reside in the US because they are managed by ICANN, an organization located in the US. That makes DNS digital property subject to US law.
It's like saying that they don't know what they're talking about.
Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is not antisemitic. Being in favor of a two-state solution is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.
When you don't "use that word correctly", you are doing a lot more than using a wrong "naming convention". You are factually incorrect.
You're saying he's being anti-semantic?
In a comment, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky elaborates: "(marginal is small, honest, and we just haven't determined the final prices yet based on ongoing work but we are aiming for single digit dollars but we don't control the truly marginal costs).
I'm sure these costs will be right in line with the marginal amounts they charge consumers for Windows Recovery media.
Microsoft doesn't sell that. They sell plain installation discs. If your PC manufacturer decided not to give you recovery media or installation discs when they sold you their computer, and you neglected to purchase them or use backup software included in Windows by Microsoft to create them, I really fail to see why that's MS's fault.
Ordinarily, I would agree with your sentiment. However, if your entire business and the livelihood of yourself and others DEMANDS that Google Chrome render SVG accurately and correctly, it behooves you to fix it yourself when it breaks. If your options are "do nothing, lose job, business fails" or "do something difficult" you're not going to have my sympathy for picking the former, especially when you could contract out the latter.
Two words: Tick Tock.
Intel's development model is Tick (die shrink), Tock (new features). It's been this way for many years. Honestly, I'm not sure why you expected a Tick to have any new features. They did call Ivy Bridge a "tick plus," but even then I wouldn't expect any major overhaul in features or performance. Tick is a manufacturing process improvement, not an architecture improvement.
As far as heat packaging, I believe others have covered that sufficiently.
If only you had access to the source code for Chrome, and could submit patches and bug fixes yourself.
Yes, and soon enough six million dollars will be mere pocket change! Our cybernetic programs are getting cheaper by the decade!
I find that using a tool that has been designed to do the job I'm interested in doing is the most useful and produces the best results for the time I'm investing. LaTeX is a typesetter. Word is a document editor. I use LaTeX when I care about document layout. I use Word when I care about document content. 99% of the time, my job is to produce useful content. I use Word 99% of the time.
In the 90s, MS didn't care about open source because it was a different market segment. You used Unix or (more rarely) BSD or Linux where you needed mainframes or Internet services (both of which were themselves rare during the 90s). In the 90s MS was focused on the goal of getting a desktop computer in every home and on every desk. They cared about ubiquitous computing for everybody (because they wanted to sell software to them), which is not at all what the open source community cared about (which cared about good software for computer experts and professionals that you could fix or improve on your own). Both MS and the open source community succeeded in their respective goals in the 90s, it should be noted.
And it derided Apple because in the 90s Apple was shit. It only existed in art and publishing houses (thanks to Adobe) and schools (thanks to good marketing in the 80s and vendor lock-in). Why do you think the Internet Explorer/Office for Mac deal happened in 1997? Because Apple was shit.
Yes, their assets were bought by UnXis and they're called TSG (The SCO Group) now. Yes, their company is now a nested acronym.
Their website looks like it's from 8-10 years ago, if that's any indication of how well they're doing.
Gag orders are issued in the US as well, but the media frenzy over this started the day the incident occurred. The cat was already out of the bag and halfway down the block before the investigation even began, never mind any court proceedings. I don't know how you expect to get this in front of a judge fast enough to get a gag order. Even in Canada, you'd have to prove that the Section One limitations clause applies, and even if you do that, doing so that quickly will almost certainly raise conspiracy and cover up accusations. That's not healthy at all.
My research suggests the police investigators do not believe it was self-defense, but that the prosecutors didn't think they had enough evidence to go to trial. That's not "incompetence" it's proprietorial discretion. There was no crime they could charge him with to get in front of a judge to get a gag order. Now, because of political and social pressure, they're going to go to trial anyway. Honestly, they have to because it looks so bad if they don't. Everybody from the Mayor of Sanford up to the Governor has to cover their ass and pass the buck to the courtroom or they'll get blamed and go down in flames just like the Sanford Chief of Police Bill Lee did.
Actually university police often are sworn police officers, making them peers to your municipal police department and giving them the ability to pursue, detain, and arrest. Many universities also operate security guard branches as well, and they are typically not sworn officers. However, those guys you see driving around in school-colored vehicles with CAMPUS POLICE emblazoned on the side are typically, in every respect, real police officers. Additionally, they almost universally have an understanding with municipal departments to work together cooperatively, so if they find themselves in a corner case (occurred on campus, detained off campus) they can simply contact dispatch and request a municipal officer.
To become a eunuch go to page 82. To hit puberty and discover unix, go to page 64.
Why would those have different paths?
Once you discover Unix, it helps to have an epic beard.
Yes they did. It's called Access.
The fact that nobody who isn't a tech knows how to use it and most techs only encounter it when people use when they should have gotten a network database is a little beside the point. Access does everything the parent wants, and although it's complicated to use it's not much more complicated than Excel is.
There is a lot of overlap between Excel and Access because both applications use tables, but if each row of your table is unrelated to the rows before and after it, you probably should be using Access for anything non-trivial. And as another poster mentioned, you can link an Excel document to an Access DB if you need to manipulate the data.
Well put.
Personally, I've found my opinion of lawyers is concisely stated in this quote from Henry Peter Brougham, a British Lord, statesman, and, yes, lawyer:
"A lawyer is a learned gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it himself."
Or paraphrasing a friend going through a divorce:
Seeing my lawyer has all the all the discomfort of a dental procedure, all the frustration of a visit to the DMV, and all the aggrivation of a cell phone bill. Except I don't get anything as useful as a root canal, a drivers licence, or a cell phone. I just get the promise of another visit in a month.
Every time I read one of these stories I think of two things.
One is the full quote from my signature (damn Slashdot's absurdly short truncation):
"The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of a nation." -- Alan Dershowitz
The second is that the founding fathers of the United States did not fear Terrorism. They feared tyranny. All the famous phrases from the American Revolution are phrases attacking unjust laws, unjust abridgment of rights by the sovereign government with no redress, and general what-the-fuck-King-George-edness. And don't say the early Americans had no knowledge of the evils of Terrorism. I'm sure every one of them could remember, remember the fifth of November.
It's getting to the point that the DHS is calling anything the directors of the DHS don't like "Terrorism". The whole problem is the damn word. It's meaningless. It means "something that is intended to cause general fear or panic". Gee, that's as clear as a summer day in San Francisco. You know what we used to call the types of events like Oklahoma City and 9/11 before we called them Terrorism? Because they did happen before, and the word 'terrorism'. If the person committing the act was a citizen, we called it Treason. If the person committing the act was a foreign national, we called it an Act of War. Personally, I find those terms a whole lot easier to manage in my head. It makes it really clear what the problem is. Because "causing fear" is too damn easy to do. Hollywood makes millions of dollars a year "causing fear". We have an entire holiday dedicated to how fun it is to "cause fear". Anthropologists and behaviorists will tell us that fear is one of the most primal and varied motivators. You can't make a law against making someone afraid any more than you can make a law against making someone cry. Not that some asshole isn't trying to do exactly that as we speak, I've no doubt.
Congress, the Presidency (the office, not just the man), the DHS specifically, and the TSA most especially have embraced ambiguous language, ambiguous laws, and inconsistent and ever-changing standards. They are using them as an excuse to police and confuse the citizens of this country in ways which the founding fathers found so onerous that they chose to take up arms against. One of the first acts of which was citizens storming a military fort to steal the cannons. To our founding fathers, treason and acts of war were less distasteful than the continued governance of a tyrant.
You'd rather trust the bot net operator?
Yes, I understand (and agree with) your reservations and concerns about what the government would do with such data, but it's really not like the alternative is demonstratively better. Yes, the government *could* abuse this type of information, but a bot net operator can abuse his bots, too. What's to stop a bot from installing a key logger and browser history scraper? Or from scanning your personal files? Or from turning on your webcam?
Additionally, owners of systems infected with bot net software are the victims of a crime and their systems are themselves being used in the commission of other crimes. Are you going to argue that MS doesn't have an obligation to tell law enforcement about their knowledge of such crimes? What if the bot net is used to coordinate a StuxNet-like attack on US infrastructure?
Honestly, this sounds like complaining that the police are searching your house for evidence when the neighbors called them about a break-in they saw going on.
Sort of. He, along with C.S. Lewis, established the sub-genre of "high fantasy," but fantasy isn't exactly new. Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian) died in 1936, which was before LotR was even begun. He's generally considered the modern father of sword and sorcery fantasy, which is not much different than high fantasy.