I've not read the entire case, but it definitely lays down precedent that something like this would be a search. Via the Wikipedia entry, "Justice Scalia also discussed how future technology can invade on one's right of privacy and therefore authored the opinion so that it protected against more sophisticated surveillance equipment." That leads me to believe that even though there's a different electromagnetic wave involved, the court would likely see it as a "search," thus necessitating a warrant.

It's definitely a dumb idea to have these things just roaming the streets, and that's without even considering the privacy concerns. It's absurdly hard to actually identify items that only rarely occur, say weapons, in samples like this. The human eye just isn't that good at it. It gets worse the more samples you take. The only place I can see for this is scanning at the border where people being smuggled in would be pretty obvious. At the border, a search like this makes sense since by law it's necessary to declare many items that you bring into a country. Otherwise, not only is it mostly a waste of time, but a dead ringer for an unreasonable search. The article was light on just how prevalent their use is outside of ports and points of entry, so it's hard to say if there's any serious danger to the average person on the street. Also, health concerns are probably overblown. If the dose is in micro Sv, that's a small fraction of the regular background dose.

I don't mean to be hectoring or to be advocating any kind of liberal guilt complex here, but living in China has restored my appreciation for the whole mess that is American democracy. Granted, It's also made me a sharper critic of its foibles. Living in a place with very little public discourse, silly or not, has really highlighted just how valuable it is to have a give and take relationship between a people and it's government.

Sure there's lots of puffed up rage, but you'll get that when you have the threat of depression stalking the land. The fact of the matter is that we are facing a political sea change, and I don't mean the false choice between "constitutional values" and "socialism". I mean we face a decision about uprooting our political class. America could have a record number of first term Senators this coming Congress. On a bigger scale, we're living in a graying world where America's immigration policy holds the key to continued American vitality. Things like these are huge generational shifts that are occurring within the country. It's hard to predict how it will all play out, but America is at a demographic crossroads and this election will play a huge role in determining the legacy of the Obama presidency and the direction America takes as it faces new and serious challenges.

Sure the election cycle is absurdly long, and most of what passes for debate is less than scholarly or professional. Still, to say that one is uninterested in the election is an immature and glib fashion statement meant to reinforce the haughty notion one is above it all. Being interested in the election doesn't necessarily mean that you're a poll junky or a "culture warrior." It just means that you're a sensible person that cares about the direction that America is taking.

Team viewer is a powerful remote access tool that is free for personal use. I use it to manage all of the machines on my home network. it has 256 bit encryption and uses a one time use access key of a permanent password. it is very secure and allows full control of the remote machine. You can even switch places so they can view your screen.

If it's going to become increasingly easy to build nuclear weapons in the future, why worry about maintaining obsolete stockpiles and fading institutional knowledge of said obsolete, more difficult to build stockpiles?

I just recently converted to android. Maybe I'm just late to the game, and we're on the tail end of this exodus now. My first impression, having been on the platform for a week, is that there has been almost no development, especially in making games, for android that is anywhere comparable to the iphone. I would posit that this "exodus" is made up. The market is still nowhere near as developed as the app store. Any discussion about a comparison of the two models is premature at best.

Ironically enough, it appears that the post-lawsuit relaunch of Napster almost hit the mark in October of 2003:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_42/b3854093_mz063.htm

It has a subscription option, and you can download content, but the problem is that the subscribed content is "streaming" and not automatically downloaded to the client computer. I'll be following this story as this patent would invalidate my Miro player.

I wish just one of these frivilous "process patents," which the high courts have ruled acceptable because they modify the physical components of a computer (ie. hard drive), would go to the Supreme Court, as the recent comments from its members signal they think the patents are ridiculous as well and would probably invalidate them.

Thats Stallman actually ..

At least in the post-WW2 era, I think this is true. Even in the pre-WW2 era, you could argue that too much emphasis was placed on the negotiators of peace treaties (many of which were more like terms of surrender) than the other part of the definition. I do think that, in retrospect, Gorbachev did deserve it (or at least led a group of people who did so) "for the abolition or reduction of standing armies" by pushing the Soviet Union towards a peaceful end to the cold war. But... awarding it to him in 1990, when the relatively peaceful transition of Russia out of the cold war was far from a certain outcome, meant it was really just luck that they actually got one right. Not to mention that the credit really belonged jointly to Gorbachev and Reagan, but it seems like the Nobel committee has a distinct dislike for those on the political right.

It might be also of some comfort to note that one of my law classes just went over a stat that said something to the effect like 95% of all cases never even make it to trial. Most cases are settled outside of the courtroom and handled pretty much by the attorneys. Only the most complicated usually make it to trial. Come to think of it, that may actually not bring any comfort at all. My point is, though, that most of the workings in the criminal justice system are out of the hands of poorly informed jurors. They only get the really tricky ones that are hotly contested and the most difficult to rule on.

Let me be the first to say that this sounds awesome, and I have a very strong urge to attempt to try and enter the sixth grade again! I can't tell you how much I would have loved to have had the opportunity to be so fully engaged in grade school.

Basically 90% of my public school education consisted of insufferable lectures with a worksheet at the end, and maybe if you're lucky a paper to discuss. Not until I got to the very end of high school did I get to engage in anything that wasn't essentially passive rote learning. Even the dual-enrollment/AP stuff I took relied soley on often dry discussion though, and had nothing on the proposed pedagogical model put forward by Q2L.

I'm sure that my public school education is somewhat representative of the majority experience. I'm sure there is a lot of collective envy with stuff like this:

A core goal of our pedagogy is to help students learn to reason about their world. Systemic reasoning, or the ability to see the world in terms of the many interrelated systems that make it up--from biological to political to technological and social--supports students in meeting this goal.Enduring understandings include:

1. Understanding of feedback dynamics (i.e., reinforcing and balancing feedback loops): understanding that small level changes can affect macro-level processes.
2. Understanding of system dynamics: understanding that multiple (i.e. dynamic) relationships within a system.
3. Understanding hidden dimensions of a system: understanding that modifications to system elements can lead to changes that are not easily recognizable within a system.
4. Understanding of the quality of relationships within a system: understanding when a system is working or not working at optimal levels.
5. Homological understanding: understanding that similar system dynamics can exist in other systems that may appear to be entirely different.

I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy.

While it may be good science, it is probably a very bad for the journalism business, and really would make things terribly inconvenient. A large enough section of the population is not at all interested in reading articles that take the time to painstakingly prove each assertion made in an article, and for the most part this is for good reason. Good journalism is about taking complex ideas from many disciplines and distilling them into consumable, simpler ideas for the masses. There are many who would describe this as "dumbing things down" and hate the impurity of it. The fact of the matter is that we can't all be purists about everything. The point of journalism is not to make everyone experts about everything that gets reported on, but rather just to offer primers and spark interest. Holding journalists to such high expectations is idealistic, and ultimately unfeasible. Sometimes they have to deal in broad strokes. As for the situation with libel law in Great Britain, as long as it's true in my book it's not libel. If your business or reputation can't stand up to the facts, then you need to change business or remake your repuation.

That is like inventing a new car that won't run on current roads.

Umm - that doesn't even make sense.

An airconditioner cannot effectively 'cool' per se, it merely move heat around from inside a room to outside the room. Whereas of it's pretty easy to convert electrical energy to heat. Accordingly, the efficiency rating of cooling an area below the outside temperature is *always* worse (A *lot* worse IIRC but I don't have the numbers at my fingertips) than heating the same area above the outside temperature. Talk to someone that works in air conditioning.

Pug

The short and sweet solution is to buy it on a credit card, print out the EULA, highlight the pertinent part, mail it to your CC company, and then have them charge back the OEM cost of Windows. You'll have to prove you contacted customer service, but that's typically not hard, and just notify them you're going to do a chargeback for the cost of the OEM windows install. I doubt they'll balk much about it; there's not much they can do once the laptop has delivered.