FNARF@3, a "shooting war"? Who exactly would be waging war - the Utah National Guard vs. the Colorado National Guard, or something? Come on, water is a problem, but don't be ridiculous.

I was traveling with my wife recently and actually showed the wrong boarding pass (I gave the TSA agent my wife's boarding pass for the next leg on our flight) instead of mine. The ID checker looked at my ID, looked at the boarding pass, scribbled on it, and sent us along, no questions asked. I didn't even realize I had the wrong one until after.

I recently had my Amex card used fraudulently. I was able to get the shipping address (in the US) of the goods that were purchased; I then googled this address. It showed up at kidala.info in some sort of discussion forum between Russian carders (in Russian). A friend translated it for me - basically, kidalo.info is a blacklist of carders who have scammed other carders. In this case the guy who "owned" the US shipping address wasn't sending the money to the other guy, and the other guy blacklisted him as a result.

So Rob, let me get this straight: your entire software development business is dependent on accurate Dtrace timings on OS X (said timings not even existing until Leopard), and as a result you are going to abandon OS X? If that is true it would be a pretty foolish business decision.

I don't see any Malware code in the original article. I see Apple source code which prevents gdb or dtrace from attaching to specially-tagged processes. 'top' or 'ps' would still show the process though. Of course, a hacker could replace top and ps, but then again they could replace dtrace too.

1. Rob: The malware issue is entirely separate from DRM. If Apple is introducing security flaws, then yes, that is a problem. Can you point to an exploit that could use this flaw?

2. If Sun were in the media business like Apple is, I can guarantee you they'd do exactly the same thing. The media content providers are scared to death of digital media and don't trust their own customers. Apple clearly does this sort of thing only because they are legally bound to (for example, Leopard has no copy protection or activation codes at all, the user is trusted to do the right thing).

3. If system-wide Dtrace capability is that important to you, don't use OS X. I'd guess that will affect about 0.001% of the existing OS X base.

Dtrace wasn't available at all on OS X until Leopard, so the fact that you can't use it on iTunes doesn't count as "crippling" it in my book. Leopard offers new functionality over Tiger, without taking any functionality away - so how exactly is that "crippling"? If you mean it is crippled compared to the Sun version of Dtrace, you aren't comparing apples to apples, since Sun's OS has different features and capabilities anyway (for example, there's no iTunes for Sun OS).

Here's a very good explanation for what people saw (summary: there's an Air Force base nearby, they fly a lot in the area and release flares as part of training).

http://jimr75.blogspot.com/2008/01/stephenville-ufo-hardly.html

This guy is a pilot and therefore claims he can estimate that it was going 3000 mph - but how many times has he (or ANYONE) seen something going 3000 mph? And how exactly do you estimate a flying object's speed without knowing how big it actually is, how far away it is, and having no landmarks it the sky against which the motion can be timed?

If it was really going 3000 mph, there's no way F16's would have any chance of keeping up, and if they were going all out they would be going close to Mach 2 and making huge sonic booms, which it doesn't sound like they were. So how could the F16's even be close to it in the first place?

Selden, TX isn't that far from Crawford (about 60 miles, short distance for an airplane), where Bush's ranch is. Maybe they saw some airplanes and helicopters flying security in the area or something, misjudged the distance and therefore misjudged the speed and size.

This sounds like a major screwup. Bad, yes, but its hardly the official policy to treat people like this.

And for all you "Europe is better" people, I traveled to West Germany from the US several times in the late 80's. Screening was VERY heavy, including physical pat-downs, extensive luggage search, etc. When transferring planes, we walked out onto the tarmac, where our luggage was piled up next to the plane and surrounded by armed soldiers. An armored troop transport was parked nearby. We had to point out our bags and walk on to the plane as the luggage was loaded. I've never experienced anything like that in the US. Basically they were assuming we were ALL criminals.