Agreed about making it illegal... but many US companies store passwords in clear text too. Most notably many cell phone companies store your PINs in cleartext... any agent at the carrier can see what yours is.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years... when companies have (are required?) privacy policies about what they do with your personal information yet there's no discussion at all as to what they do with your passwords, it's like putting a bandaid on a severed artery.

My first exposure to the MS "Surface" term was a few years back when they used it to describe their TABLE offering.The coolest thing about this (IMHO) was the build-in "picture scanning" technology. (Scroll down to the "computer vision"/"object recognition" section.) I kinda hoped the new tablet would employ some of the same technology (I'd love to be able to lay a business card down on the face of the tablet and have it scan in automatically).

If MS did that... that would really rock the world!

Highway on-ramp lights.

Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine, but we're all programmers here. The situation is an on-ramp for a highway has 2 lanes each with traffic metering lights. One line has 2+ cars lined up, the other has none. New car rolls up to the neighboring lane and immediately the light turns green for him. WTF? Seems this is lazy programming. Two clock chips timing the green for each light, when the fairer method would be one timer that either gives all the traffic to the only light with cars queued up or evenly alternates between the 2 occupied lanes. Would that have been so hard for the original designers of the system to implement? To me this is the most visible sign of lazy programming I've even run across as an ordinary user.

> The cameras can also work when the tank is moving.

Did anyone else envision a 1000 heat pixel display on moving tank being made to display an image of a **moving** cow when they read this sentence? Somehow just seems funny.

I've heard this too. I believe it was an NPR story. That story (whoever it was) was relayed by a friend of Frost's who said Frost was irritated at a colleague who behaved just as the commenter posted which inspired Frost (in part?) to write that poem. Sorry I can't find the link.

I'm sorry... should have mentioned that this was done with the cooperation of school officials.

So, we were NOT trespassing. Although I do wonder if someone called the school officials and double checked and that's what called off the 'copter.

Some minor harassment happens in the US too. We were doing a star viewing event at a local elementary school. There were perhaps 3 big dobsonians and 2 or so smaller scopes, 20-30 people in the ball field of this school at 10:00 in the fall (so it was very dark, well past sundown) and somehow a police helicopter started circling us. We figured some neighbor must have called about some activity in the school and maybe there was a helicopter already near by so the local authorities dispatched it instead of a squad car. Thing is, it wasn't a quick fly-by. It circled us about 10 times, but otherwise left us alone. No police lights, no spot light, no loud speaker announcement, just 10 very noisy circles of our location then it went away.

I think unusual activity of any kind gets noticed and "inspected" these days.

AND they have to practice it at night, in the dark too!

Although this may be going in a direction different than you intended, I wish the government took a longer view on many more things. In this situation it seems reasonable to let the person "own" this as compensation for his efforts at salvage but to restrict his ability to pass it along to his heirs and instead when he dies it reverts to the government.

I recognize there are a lot of practical difficulties with this, but in principle, there ought to be a middle ground between turn over immediately and keep forever and if the government can't take a longer view of a middle path, who can?

I read the article and it appears in this case it's NEITHER the TSA nor the CBP, but regular law enforcement. The article makes no mention that the woman traveled across country lines and the password was requested upon re-entering the country. It DOES make a reference to how revealing this password is similar to giving up the keys to a safe in your home (should the LEO have a court order I assume).

back when BioSphere 2 was the rage it was easy to calculate what that model would look like spread over the whole planet. IIRC if 8 people lived in an area the size of biosphere 2 then 60 Billion could live on the planet Earth. Granted there were flaws in the biosphere 2 experiment such that the folks actually lost weight and couldn't build open fires due to slow rate of oxygen replenishment, couldn't use pesticides because the food cycles were too short, but still as an "upper limit" (somewhat beyond actually) it's a useful benchmark.

If you don't recall, Biosphere 2 had an "ocean" and a "desert" which for my calculations above I assumed were in roughly equal proportions to what's on Earth.

But that said, doesn't mean we're not about to encounter some extremely unusual times for our planet and species. What happens to the housing industry when population is stable? How much spare capacity is there in our food supplies if say a current major source is hit with a calamity (drought, fire, flood, etc)?

And because of that I'm surprised they didn't just swap out the recipe and leave the title the same. At least that would have been a bit harder to detect and may have been even funnier

"Our bombs smell like cupcakes".

The original summary mentioned that clicking on the clock itself put the user into a clock-settings page from which it was hard to return to the original alarm screen. IMHO people of all ages would be more comfortable playing with settings and screens if the "maze of twisty little passages" had an easy route to return to the previous screen.

Yea, when I'm older I might have clicked on the clock thinking I'm already IN the alarm setting and want to change the numbers of this alarm, and if I do that I might easily discover my mistake, but if I'm unable to return to the previous screen as easily as hitting a "back" button then... yea I'm going to be demotivated to play with new screens. I gotta choose right the first time or get lost trying to return to this screen.