It gets to be time consuming and seemingly pointless. I read the article that is linked on the /. entry (usually) and then wade through the comments. Unfortunately the comments pretty quickly tend to veer off into off-topic smart-assery of no interest to me or to have any relation to the topic or trope of the story they are supposed to be a comment on. It makes me wonder if the game is worth the candle.

Four year sentence means he'll get out in 19 months. But it's a start. Stock fraud is what got him rather than the spamming itself. Cause that's how the feds roll. If they can't get you on the actual charges you're guilty of (in their opinion) then then they go after minor, but still criminal side issues. And it won't ever stop either. If you send out several million emails and only a few of them work, you still win big. If you can stay outta jail, that is. At least that's the way the scamming spammers are looking at it.
'Godfather of Spam' goes to prison for four years

This is about the most off-putting and egregious violation of a person's dignity and privacy that I've heard to date. When I got stopped the police for [sic] "not having enough reflective material" upon my person while riding a bicycle after sunset and was force by the officer to give my thumb print and be photographed before he'd release me on my way. I was told when I went to pay the fine (($50 USD in 2002) that the purpose was to make sure that I was who I claimed to be and didn't try to do an "somebody stole my ID" defense. I grudgingly bought that line since I wasn't carrying any ID. I thought at the time that this was beyond merely embarrassing but was deliberately humiliating. But now I hear this stuff from England and it makes me wonder anew. Especially so coming from GB where the traditions of privacy and personal autonomy go so deep culturally. And now this shit. Is there any point where the UK population will just say "enough already!"? Or American people as well.
Police routinely arresting people to get DNA, inquiry claims H/t to the Boing Boing blog.

Thank god! A guy with 17 live lizards taped his chest was detected and detained at LAX. Thank you TSA. All your bullshit is worthwhile after all. Now if you could improve your detect & bust record with some of the other dangerous items prohibited in airports.
Man tied lizards to chest at airport

Yes they can and quite easily too. But should a insurance snoop be able to cut off her disability benefits because there is a pic of her smiling on her Facebook page? The insurance company sure thinks so. Well, we'll see. But damn is this kind of health care by bureaucratic diktat really what people want? I know I don't. So far I've been seriously underwhelmed by the Dems health care reforms. Ordering people to buy a policy or else is reform? WTF you guys? No wonder the whole effort is losing steam.
Creepy insurance company pulls coverage due to Facebook pics.

It now seems that using pain to control the merely unruly has become the new standard operating procedure for police. If you don't respond to the voice commands from LEO's immediately, you get tased. An officer recently tased a 10 year-old girl in her own home and it barely made the news. OMG.

We were (and often still are) assured that tasers are a much better LE "tool" (as opposed to say fists, clubs and guns) for getting a handle on violent or intoxicated offenders but was it ever anticipated that it would quickly morph into becoming an acceptable LE technique to tase people who simply argue with cops, won't sign tickets, give their names or IDs, or finally even little girls who are arguing with their parents? I was afraid this kinda of abuse would become the new standard and now it seems that it has.

Cop Tases 10-Year-Old Girl

Why is it that people can rattle off meaningless shit like the names of all of Paris Hilton's BFs or the ERA of an obscure MLB pitcher, but that genuinely heroic people that seriously did change the world for the better end up living and then dying in relative obscurity? Go figure?

"Sir John Crofton, a pioneering clinician who demonstrated that antibiotics could be safely combined to cure tuberculosis, a dread disease that once killed half the people who contracted it, died on Nov. 3 at his home in Edinburgh. He was 97."

Dr. Crofton's full NYT's obituary here.

...is it safe to drink? Anybody heard yet?
LCROSS Kicks Ice

Paul Watson the captain of the anti-whaling ship on the Whale Wars tv show got seriously mocked on the South Park tv show. I looked up what that was about; it was kinda interesting. "Like Parker and Stone, I am an unashamed misanthrope and that pretty much makes me immune to criticism and ridicule." So there. As it usually is with these pissing contests it comes down to which skunk stinks the worst. So take your pick. South Park or the Sea Shepard Conservation Society's captain Paul. Cheers.

Sounds like a plan! Says the politico-talking head: "it would be far better for this appalling underclass to be offered financial inducements not to have children, given the toxic environment that they would provide for any child in their care."
And why the hell not? We've tried about everything else. Given the toxic brew our current society has become it's well worth a shot. Maybe paying illegal immigrants to repatriate and paying the lumpen to emigrate both would be well worth the cost IMHO. With the strict proviso that they can't return. Ever. Even for a visit.

The NY Times had a story from their correspondent in the UK about a school district sending an investigator to check on a family to see if they really in fact lived within the boundaries of the district. Oh well. Here in Ann Arbor, MI where I live school officials do this sort of thing all the time. Ann Arbor school taxes are high but the educational opportunities they provide are well worth the cost. Enough so that people who live in lesser rated districts (and with a correspondingly lesser school tax) try and enroll their kids here all the time. This kind of fraud is especially rampant in metro-Detroit where every parent worth their salt tries to get their kids into either a private school or a suburban one rather than give their kids over to the DPS. And which is understandable given the Detroit public school system's dismal record. But I digress.

No, what shocked me in reading this article, mid-western rube that I am, is that the UK has become such a "surveillance society" that the land of the Magna Carta now has a public official who is known as "the chief surveillance commissioner". Egad! What the hell have the English done to themselves in the name of safety? And this just in: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.....

Talk about a Republic of Fear vibe, eh? George Orwell himself wouldn't have believed things could be pushed this far. Or maybe the pasty-faced suburban morons who buy into this notion have never been mugged and so they fail to rate their fear level properly to pollsters. Sheesh.