I'm a little more frightened that they got his cell phone # that easily. From whom?

@15: "Where does "alleged" stop and "actual" begin. Makes one wonder why the "pc" reference has to used."

Well...I don't know that these two guys stole the stuff. I only know that a news report states that the police state that they found the stuff in an apartment that the police told the reporters was rented by the fellows. That's a lot of supposition.

In our criminal justice system, those accused aren't considered guilty until so proven. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt until that point, no matter how stupid nor how obviously guilty they may appear to be because we usually don't have first-hand knowledge. You're apparently willing to accept one or more reporters' accounts of police statements, in fact made by a police spokesperson who I believe didn't actually visit the apartment where the policy say the stolen goods were found.

That is a long chain of belief.

Also, litigation is rampant. If you write, "this guy stole this thing," and he did not, and he says it damages his reputation, he could conceivably successful win a lawsuit against you. Even if the lawsuit isn't successful, you might still be in a position of spending thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to defend yourself over a single comment on a Web site that Google indexes and which haunts someone's future rightly or wrongly.

Lot of weight attached to "alleged."

@8: "You can prevent that by launching the Open Firmware Utility and setting it to require a password before modifying the startup disk (and hence preventing a HDD wipe.)"

Except that changing system parameters (modifying amount of RAM) on system disables Open Firmware password, I discouragingly found out (not through a theft) recently.

@3: "The Little Brother wonders how secure Back to My Mac is. How easily can it be compromised so that the laptop owner is the one being monitored and having photos taken of her?"

Very very easily. Back to My Mac is incredibly secure as long as you have both physical security of the computers in question and your .Mac password is absolutely secure.

The thief could just as easily surveilled any BtMM enabled computer the owner was using!

(I'm writing a book about Back to My Mac, so I'm pretty keyed up on its encrypted goodness and security model weakness.)

#7: Hey, Paul: "The bill doesn't let RIAA take your house." This bill doesn't, but the law is intertwingled, and the specifics of this bill lead to a slippery slope. I would happily make some kind of "buy you and 10 friends a round of drinks" bet about the first seizure of greater than $50,000 or first house seizure in some period of time following the bill being enacted into law! I'd love to be wrong. But it's one of series of forfeiture bills that I am stunned conservatives haven't gone apoplectic about. It's a Rabbi Akiva reaction: Conservations should hate this and similar bills, but because they believe that the law has not come for them, they stay quiet. Or laugh.

#16: That's an LA county law, not the House bill that was passed.

#5: "House passes bill that will let the RIAA take away your home for downloading music": Yup, the current drug seizure/forfeiture laws started out as "stuff used to sell/make drugs," and were quickly expanded to mean houses, boats, etc.

#5: "and permanently seize thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in private property": 'Computers cost tens of thousands of dollars?'

The officers and court officials could decide that every computer and recording device in a home, and all personal electronics, were involved in infringing uses. While I don't have $10,000s of equipment, if you had a little four-person nuclear family with a couple of TVs and one computer per person, you could cross $10,000.

Take an avid recorder/gamer and all their AV/computer gear, and I would guess more than $10,000 is easy to reach.

See #40's note about the drug dealer's car act.

Per @6: "So it's not really hand-code vs. wysiwyg-code, it's hand-code vs. choose the story from a menu and click the publish button."

Yes, this story has gotten weird play, like Vinh was saying that they code every page by hand, rather than what they're doing: hand tuning templates.

I could be wrong, but all CMS systems I've seen really require hand tooling. You can't use Dreamweaver except for prototyping, which some people do.

I use CSSEdit on the Mac to make and clean CSS, and it allows me to write CSS by hand or use a GUI back and forth while overriding a Web page's embedded CSS or externally referenced CSS and previewing a live page that you can reload. This gives me most of what I need in a GUI.

Teresa wrote: What have you got against suppuration?

What's the point of a revolution without general--general suppuration, suppuration, suppuration.

All together now!

(Extra pts for identifying source paraphrase.)

Sad to see typesetting on this list. I was trained as a typesetter in a combination of formal and informal ways starting in about 1983 using Compugraphic equipment. It's not so much that "typesetting" is obsolete; "typesetters" are obsolete. It was a specialized field. Now, a great or lesser knowledge of typography is required by everyone who ever uses any layout programs or design programs. Paste-up is dead; typography, not.

A friend of mine while I was in college was a music copyist. Again, the profession sort of disappeared, but its hermetic knowledge was actually needed by composers and musicians. It may have been lost.

I should just note that for those who don't live in repressive regimes...uh...I'm excluding the U.S. nominally from that category...you can use a simple VPN to get around this filtering. I use Witopia.net's service. AnchorFree has a free one. There's publicVPN, HotSpotVPN, and JiWire's VPN also. All of these are designed for bypassing and protecting the local link; they pop out on the Internet in a network operation center (mostly co-location facilities that are considered reasonably safe from sniffing), but the point is really to keep any unintentional details from slipping out at a hotspot or hotel network *and* to bypass local filtering.

There's a bunch of problems with HDCP, including the fact that sometimes the encryption handshake between devices goes wrong; that chaining devices is problematic (using HDMI hubs or daisy chains); and that HDCP has "self help," meaning that your legitimately purchased HDTV or whatever could be disabled by a Blu-ray DVD or other device -- if the cartel that controls the encryption system has a problem with the manufacturer of your equipment. That's right. They can revoke HDCP, in which case, your HDTV would only be able to play unencrypted stuff over DVI or HDMI.

New dad Cory hasn't yet been briefed on the dangers of magnets. It freaks me out (says not Too Old Dad Glenn, father of 2). The NY Times recently had a story headlined something like: Swallowed 1 magnet? Ok. 2? The E.R.

Mr. Byrne needs a VPN! It's sort of staggering he doesn't have one, given his clear sophistication and his helpful friends and colleagues. This lets you bypass filters, since you're surfing out wherever your VPN terminates its tunnel.

Otherwise he's just...Naked.

WiTopia's personalVPN is $40 per month, and secures data over the local link. I've been using their service for years, and they seem like upstanding individuals. (witopia.net)

You may ask yourself: how did he not get here?

Hey, I don't care if they call it a Bhlogyspear if they are actually in some way listening, changing, discussing.

@Clint: I left SFO on the Thursday night of Macworld with a colleague. Both loaded with electronics. No hassles, nor was anyone else being asked.

Read as: formerly secret passage.

I don't believe your conclusion is correct.

Verizon will use LTE, but that doesn't translate to their phones being GSM compatible. European carriers are also planning on using LTE. Which means that LTE networks could interoperate worldwide.

For Verizon to switch to GSM, they'd have to duplicate all the base stations for all the voice traffic they currently carry. That seems unlikely. LTE will be an overlay, and while it will carry voice, it also will likely not reach the far corners of the US for many years, just like EVDO may be the 3G flavor of the day for Verizon, but it's only found in large cities.

So we'll see how Verizon phones work elsewhere, and it's likely that software-define radio or cheaper convergence chips that do GSM and CDMA will make an impact, too, before Verizon builds GSM as its basic telephony standard into its network.

Joel, did you just have a review-a-lanche? I mean, holy mother of god almighty, how did you write this much?

The reason there's a fee attached is "cost recovery," or at least that's the case by law for the LOC's Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS), which has similar public information records, in this case, the LOC records that document various holdings and other information that's been filed, like CIP (Cataloging in Publication) data. It's not Books In Print, but it's useful.

The CDS is required by Congress to charge fees for data dissemination that reflect its costs in performing its tasks. They can't give it away. However, there's no copyright assigned to the material per much of what's created by the government.

The set of retrospective catalog information representing the sum of their holdings is tens of thousands of dollars, and would be of great interest to those working on various library and book projects, especially for older books and to supplement Amazon and others Web services that allow ISBN-based retrieval.

If someone had the set of LOC information, they could distribute it at no cost, and, like the Copyright Office, there would be no complaint, because there can be none. I wonder if anyone has that dataset and wants to distribute it?

I am reluctant to put plastic in a microwave these days given the concerns about components in the plastic leaching into food or liquids inside.

You also have the danger of superheating the water. Depending on the shape of the container and solids (minerals, etc.) suspended in the water, you can heat water over boiling in a microwave and then it sort of explodes when it contacts cooler liquid or other substances.

I used to use this in a controlled fashion to make americanos with a slightly tapering cylindrical mug that would keep the water in a weird state after overboiling, and then burble (but not blow out) when I poured the espresso shot in.

I was waiting to see if another commenter pointed this out, but when I read Watterson's review a few days ago, I found it particularly strange that one of the most reclusive popular cartoonists of our age wrote a review about a life-exposing account of one of the best-known cartoonists of all time.

I loved Charles Schulz and his cartoons as a kid. I wrote him at least once, and received some nice stock reply and cartoons (copies, not originals) in reply. Ditto, huge C & H fan.

I'm not sure how much I needed to or need to know about either gentleman, but my interest is piqued. Watterson writes about how an unhappy marriage led to seemingly many of the Lucy/Schroeder dialogs, but also that Schulz was sympathetic in the strip to Lucy and not always kind to Schroeder.

Which, of course, makes me wonder about Watterson's family dynamics. Calvin's parents aren't exactly unhappy, but they do seem to blame each other a lot. Calvin is rather amoral. Not bad, but not located within any Western moral system that most people would want inculcated in their children to avoid them growing up to become criminals, insane, dead, or destitute.

Still, I expect Watterson is a relatively well-adjusted guy. A writer tried to track him down in Frostbite Falls (I think that's really the name) a few years ago, and local residents protected their own, giving him the, "Don't think I know the feller" response.

Twain had gone through bankruptcy a few years before, and although he had paid creditors and clawed his way back to solvency by 1906, it's clear that he was highly concerned about his children living in penury. He eventually lost three of his four children during his life.

"the latest US carrier to promise in-flight wireless internet to customers": Turns out that AP was a bit more positive than later coverage. Alaska is equipping just one plane for its test, after which it could choose to equip the entire fleet.

Still.

Alaska also did a trial a few years ago of a portable entertainment player that could show five hours of movies, play audio, etc., that would be handheld and available for rental on flights. The brilliant idea was that no plane seatbacks needed to be retrofit.

The idea was a good one, but just didn't take off in trials, I'm guessing.

In Feist v. Rural the Supreme Court said a collection of facts can be copyrighted (the selection and omission constituting unique efforts), but that the facts within that set cannot. So if I create a list of 10 book prices with their ISBNs, my list is copyrightable, but none of the information within it can be protected. Pretty straightforward.

The American Airlines deal is to equip all of a specific class of plane for a trial -- their intra-US long-haul craft. AirCell has said a few times that their installation costs about $100K, and can be installed in a routine maintenance cycle. So with hundreds of planes, American would probably take 1 1/2 years to get fully equipped once they decide to pull the trigger.

So Virgin is in a better position to make this a fleet-wide brand promise because they simply have very few initial planes, and all of them will travel long distances.

I suspect Virgin's integration of the service across many initial applications will make it very valuable in increasing passenger happiness and return flying.

Pure Internet access would be useful to many flyers, but I think to get maximum usage, you have to have fun and absorbing stuff to do.