Anyone can be labeled a spook and you can have people who are spooks who never know they are spooks. There are unwitting spooks who think they aren't.

No there aren't. If you are unwittingly providing intelligence to a spy or other intelligence operative, that makes you an "asset" , not a spook. The spook would be whomever is exploiting you to get to the information.

Nintendo had improved the input protection on the Super NES version of the CIC, making it harder to defeat by reversing the polarity

That'll show everyone who laughed at Nintendo when they hired Geordi LaForge to work on the SNES...

Probably because Firefox is the default browser in Ubuntu.

Because in real life terrorists have never attacked a US Navy ship while it sat in port before. Oh, wait.

Individual sailors' downtime habits probably aren't very interesting to an attacker, but the same data in aggregate might very well be -- it could be useful for determining when watches begin and end, for instance.

This is the Federal goverment we're talking about. He's probably still waiting for authorization to procure the two 's'-es.

Because it's simpler and cheaper for the small number of factories that actually make the displays that end up in everybody's devices to make them all 16:9 than it is for them to make some 16:9 and others 16:10.

Yeah, but titles that never made it to home video are unlikely to ever have been revived in theaters, either. Song of the South, for instance, has been suppressed because Disney is embarrassed about its racist content; it's hard to imagine that if home video suddenly disappeared Disney would ever consent to it being shown in theaters.

Now imagine Kate Winslet's nipples popping out at you, Captain Eo-style. You have just discovered the marketing hook for re-releasing Titanic in 3D.

The reason is called "home video." Before the VCR came along, studios would periodically do revival showings of popular older films in theaters. But when home video made the entire Hollywood back catalog available for viewing anywhere anytime, the economic rationale for re-releasing classics in theaters disappeared.

eBay. Or at least that's where NASA went when they found themselves needing to buy 8086s, which were key components in circa-1981 Space Shuttle diagnostic equipment, in 2002.

The Nazi's burned the Reichstag to gain popular support

Most historians today believe that the Reichstag fire was actually set by the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe as an act of protest against the Nazis; what debate remains centers around whether he acted alone or had ideologically-aligned accomplices. It's generally felt that the Nazis had no involvement in setting the fire and were just very aggressive and clever at using the unforeseen-by-them event to push forward their agenda.

Countries that treat their citizens with respect and dignity generally don't need help improving their image.

Like many have pointed out, if you get used to it and know it, it's intuitive.

Which is sort of the exact opposite of what the word "intuitive" means, but whatever.

That's what makes the *NIX command line even worse as a tool (not saying the Windows command line is better, but you needn't use it) is that commands are all kinds of random abbreviations.

They are abbreviations, but they aren't random. Neal Stephenson explained the "why" of this in his essay In the Beginning Was The Command Line :

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

They're called "Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response" teams? Seriously? That has got to be a backronym.

"OK, so we put these teams together. What do we call them?"

"I dunno. Should probably be something that sounds all scary and badass. You know, to scare the bad guys when they hear you're coming."

"Snakes are badass. How about COBRA teams? Cobras are scary."

"Nah, that sounds like a GI Joe episode. I like the general idea though."

"OK then, how about VIPER teams?"

"Ooh, that's good. VIPER. I like it."

"Great. Now we just need to figure out what the hell VIPER stands for."

... six hours later ...

"I can't think of a word for the E either. Screw it, we'll just leave it out. VIPR teams. Same difference."