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Maybe Hollywood's worried that target audiences won't identify with a female lead, maybe the formula's considered too risky for a blockbuster. But surely there's an alternate universe somewhere with aliens or magic where (hold on to your hats) a matriarchal society somehow evolved and manages to be part of the fabric of the story without characters constantly drawing attention to it, comparing it to Earth, having it set up a battle of the sexes, etc.

The relationship between offenses and consequences is a major part of the learning process. And education itself isn't something to be yanked away from a kid because of a drawing. What's being taught here?

Of course, as long as I'm planning utopia here, maybe we could properly fund public schools, wash out teachers and administrators that have no business dealing with kids, improve teacher education, expect students to clean their lunchroom and classrooms as a matter of course so they learn shared responsibility, reduce the influence of parents over grading and discipline, etc. But if anything we're going backwards.

Will keep an eye on the U.S. part of the map to see if it starts turning red as school gets out in each time zone.

If there isn't a political solution, it falls on the technical community to design encryption and privacy into their products that "just works". Here, ideally, the default state of Internet servers and clients would be to encrypt traffic so that they can be used through a service like TOR without worrying about an exit node snarfing usernames and passwords. Then look at integrating TOR functionality into these servers and clients as transparently as possible such that they will relay internal traffic by default and prefer hidden service connections to servers that are both public and private to reduce the need for exit nodes.

At the end of the day strong encryption can simply be made illegal, so it's more important to try to get society back to a "mind your own business" outlook. That can start with a concerted effort to talk about it among family and friends, especially at the moment when it's not a partisan issue.

A forensic analyst doesn't get started until it looks like a crime's been committed.

The one tiny aspect I've been thinking about a lot lately involves the anti-Spotify crowd. This piece throws in some speculative numbers about iTunes vs. Pandora vs. Spotify, and explains that if only non-paying Spotify users listen to a given track it takes 600 listens to equal one iTunes purchase, in terms of royalties. (For paying Spotify users, BTW, it's only 60 listens.)

Although some artists, notably Radiohead, are taking Spotify to task over this, I'm curious about why this is considered differently to the old dynamic of broadcast radio vs. LP/tape/CD, where there was no way one broadcast of a song cost the station as much as buying a single, and that broadcast was nearly guaranteed to reach more than 600 listeners. Is it that Spotify users can choose the songs they listen to, and maybe burn themselves out on their favorite tracks, where in radio they'd run a few chosen songs into the ground but if you wanted to hear anything else you had to buy the album?

What's even more noteworthy to me was Pink Floyd putting just about everything they've got on Spotify. They were one of the famous holdouts on iTunes ostensibly because they wanted their works to be experienced as entire albums, and are part of the group attacking Pandora over its seeking of royalty cuts.

My twist: reinvest those renewal fees in the arts. Then new artists have financial support and education and publishers sitting on copyrights still make a sizable contribution to the creation of new works.

Within a few days, if I recall correctly, he was asking the audience to buy copies of his new book and mail them to whoever it was in England that set the rules in this regard, to send her a message.

I'm on the left edge of the political spectrum, assuming that's 2D, but every time Michael Savage was on and I was doing something where I could listen to talk radio I'd tune in. Guy knows how to put on an entertaining show.

(http://www.gallup.com/poll/20887/public-divided-whether-wire...)

Perhaps in a different direction than we were assuming, but still...

Especially considering that it's possible to be wrong about a volume being encrypted.

At the start a 14 year copyright term (+ 14 if author was still alive and chose to renew) was considered sufficient in the U.S.; these days, it's life + 70 years. And copyrights are recognized (more or less) internationally, and we live in a time when nothing has to go out of print and most copyrighted material can be paid for and delivered over the Internet rather than cranked out on a printing press and carried by horse into the territories.

In other words, routinely creating artificial scarcity strikes me as a relatively modern usage of copyright protection -- there might have been the odd case where somebody only wanted to produce five books or something, but as a matter of course it seemed like authors wanted to get their material out there. Things seemed fairly hunky-dory until copyright terms got extended, publishers and movie studios began amassing libraries of content, and alternative strategies to simply publishing content to meet demand became viable.

If nothing else, it seems weird to me that a radio station can go out, buy an album, pay set royalties to the appropriate organizations, and be clear to broadcast or stream... yet the equivalent does not exist for streaming audiovisual content.

Wish it could be left at that. People make mistakes sometimes.

Besides, if Microsoft's upcoming console ends up requiring always-on Internet, it's not like there's going to be a particularly delightful way for them to deliver this information.

In case you really are kidding yourselves with this press release, you are likely being voted the worst company because your millions of customers are suffering your "innovations" -- not enjoying them -- in order to play series they've come to love: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and SimCity. You are cashing in the stored value of these brands, not building on them.

But look, Microsoft was hated for a long time, too, and it didn't seem to hurt them any. Well, except maybe in the instances where they got into telling their users what they wanted instead of finding out what they wanted. It's not like you folks are going down that road, right?

If you only have one or two things you're selling, and somebody has already downloaded and watched them, you're out of luck. But if you're bundling with other content serving diverse interests, offering the promise of new content down the road, and giving your audience something for paying that they can't get for pirating, you can set a better hook. Suddenly, when content from you or your partners is pirated, it becomes a loss-leader advertisement for your venture, and the cost of that (and benefit from it) is shared across your group. There's a site that just got featured on Reddit not too long ago, http://www.swearnet.com, that really captured my interest in this regard, if you want to see an example of how this type of thing could work in action.

Piracy always struck me as something only the biggest interests could gain anything from worrying about; an efficiency problem where so much product is being moved that getting 1-2% more of it paid for could make more sense than trying to reach 1-2% more audience, perhaps because they've already saturated their target market.

Perfectly acceptable (?): futzing with electronics when dining with others, talking loudly into the ether regardless of setting, sending passive-aggressive links to Google

Manners aren't passé, simply underappreciated in some quarters. In others they can make all the difference.

http://www.whoismcafee.com/i-am-safe/

If the plot gets any thicker it'll be impenetrable soon. Guy should have written chess software while he was at it.

So I wonder if that's what's getting them. With all the fun with SOPA/PIPA/ACTA and domain takedowns there's a smidge of poetic justice to it. Hopefully they get to enjoy the same response and support for resolving the problem as is offered to the average person.

We mostly rely on government to handle this. It's not perfect and it works in some folks' interests more than others, but I feel comfortable saying that it does increase the cost of most socially undesirable activities beyond their worth to most people most of the time.

Is it possible to come up with similar protection for Bitcoin without such an authority? I think you have to find a way to introduce risk for people handling Bitcoins they don't own, where they've got an amount of their own Bitcoins held as a security that could be forfeit if they fail to meet obligations.

But then, who holds the security? Who determines if it's forfeit? This doesn't have the feel to me of a situation that can be handled without human interaction, but I would definitely be intrigued if somebody figured it out.

It comes back to the most difficult problem: you inevitably need to trust someone, so how do you minimize your risk in that trust? I always thought the Bitcoin trust issues would revolve around the inability to trust that a service would be delivered once the provider is paid -- something that could theoretically be worked out with their reputation over the long run in a free market.

But it's unsettling to see that breaches like this don't evidently leave the impression with the Bitcoin community that a believer in the free market might hope they would, that providers in this market might not be driven to produce quality and reliability because somehow there isn't the demand for it.

The drawbacks were things like confusing lowercase L with 1 (one) in the sans-serif font I preferred, or the sort of editing where I was trying to change stuff at, say, character position 67 in a series of lines. It seems better for writing code than for editing it. Definitely give it a try if you haven't yet.