Except for band allocations and licensing. Even if you operate as a 'pirate' you have to rely upon repeaters, which even if you set up illegal repeaters you've got to worry about access to a suitable location. For DX you've got to worry about sun spot cycles and/or the time of day and ionosphere conditions. Even if everything is in YOUR favor, you've still got to rely upon someone at the other end having access to equipment to receive and/or transmit back. I'm lucky enough to live near a Ham Radio Outlet where I can deal with a bunch of attitude because I'm a ham under 50 years old. Before moving to this state the nearest brick and mortar was this same HRO, over 1000 miles away from where I lived. I can walk a few hundred yards from almost anywhere to a convenience store, Wal-mart, etc. and buy a pay as you go cell phone for $50 USD and talk to my parents who have a cell phone and are currently volunteering at a clinic in rural Romania.

For those that don't follow graffiti news, Banksy articles are appearing in media all over the world right now as his pieces (or imitations of the original, Blek le Rat , and Banksy style) appear as promotion for his movie Exit Through The Gift Shop

Banksy pieces showing up in San Francisco
Banksy in Seattle
Banksy feud with King Robbo

From TFA: "A calculation by town accountant Trudy Brazil indicated that 136 votes are two-thirds of 206 total votes, said Town Clerk Cynthia Slade." Sadly, their city directory still lists her as town accountant.

If you put up Matt and Trey's info someone may attempt to kill them. Sure, all the geeks in the world can probably figure out what Al-Amrikee had for breakfast this morning or post some distasteful pictures of them on 4chan, but other than a bunch of anonymous phone calls and general harassment I don't see much happening. We're geeks, not lunatics wanting to kill people over something, no matter how angered, even if many of us are well armed lunatics. That is the difference between a terrorist and a geek.

Apparently I haven't been watching enough Discovery channel as I've never heard of this type of fox procreation before. Does a Firefox come Ubuntu when you Google it or only when you get it to Yahoo?

A large number of the parts ARE shipped halfway around the world and the cost to ship a complete vehicle likely isn't much more if more expensive. The reason Toyota has a large number of factories in the US (which employ UAW union workers) is because it was a lot cheaper to produce vehicles in the US and Canada and not pay huge tariffs. There is a lot of information on this decision by Toyota in Episode 403 of This American Life.

FA is a troll and the article likely would not have been published if it wasn't a UK news outlet and didn't include a jab at NASA. NASA funds Spacegrant Consortiums doing high altitude balloon research at several US universities. The one I worked on was very similar except we had a license amateur radio operator so we could legally use an APRS system for tracking the balloon. Back then where was no CHDK to use for a cheap Canon camera so camera was controlled by a 555 timer circuit wired to the shutter button. The highest cost was the helium when you figure in the cost of storing large tanks of compressed gas. Our system was slightly more expensive because the payload usually also contained a logging system that stored additional sensor data like temperature and pressure.

His security question should have asked where he was born. A huge portion of the population of the US still can't figure that out :)

This is why every woman I've ever met hates Monty Python but most males I meet understand that Monty Python, at least in a sense, is the original.

I had not realized that properly coding leap year algorithms was a moral issue. On slashdot is everything a moral issue? I must be new here.

The number of union made autos in the US these days is next to none. A great number of domestic models, but very few in number. Toyota actually is one of the few companies that still produces a large number of vehicles with US union labor. The Corolla, Matrix/Pontiac Vibe, and Tacoma are all made with union labor and are some of the most reliable vehicles ever made. Poor reliability has very little to do with lazy union workers assembling vehicles on Fridays and everything to do with poor business practices and bad engineering decisions made by US auto makers.

Wal-mart would fight this type of regulation to the death as they want all the profitability of offering banking services without all of the regulation and they have the deep pockets to prevent the type of regulation that both Paypal and Wal-mart ought to fall under.

You most have missed all the reports on the virus spread through torrents for Photoshop CS4 and iLife.

They are busy patching their Macs.. LOL they got pwn3d d00d..