Oh no! Phil Robertson was suspended from a TV show for nine days! The horror!

Right. Because No Such Agency would never be able to find a way to read data encrypted by an open source program. Why, that's a magical band-aid for everything!

I was under the impression that gasoline vapor ignites easily. Gasoline itself doesn't. (I mean, didn't Mythbusters try this in an episode? They tried to light a gas trail on fire with a lit cigarette, and it didn't work for beans...)

ALDI also charges a refundable fee for grocery cart use. It's a quarter to get a cart, and if you return the cart (don't leave it in the parking lot) you get your quarter back. Pretty smart move.

Because judges don't want to try and read briefs written in Wingdings because the plaintiff or defendant feels like being a jackass.

1) There are actually several homeless shelters in Columbia, SC.

2) If you're referring to that thing the city council passed a few months back, that shelter is about 10-12 miles outside Columbia city limits. I don't believe it's open yet, either. Certainly, the homeless people a couple blocks away from the Judicial Center (read: courthouse) don't seem to be worrying too much about it. Yet.

I could be very snarky and say that religion is the willing suspension of rational thinking. And I just did. (A talking burning bush? It must be God, it said so. It's not possibly a massive amount of hallucinogens.)

Someone get Scott Manley to figure it out using KSP.

One of the reasons I don't have a smart phone is that I don't have to charge my current phone every day. It's more like once a week. (Another of the reasons I don't have a smart phone is that I still have a 'dumb' phone that works fine. If/when it breaks, I'll think about moving to a smart phone, but I don't jump at getting new tech just because it comes out.)

Er, no. Just because it has the word socialism in it does not mean that National Socialism is actually a form of socialism. It's a form of fascism, and they don't get along with socialism. (Or communism, or liberal democracy.) You may have noticed that the Nazis ended up fighting the Russian communists. (Okay, to be fair, it wasn't just because of competing ideologies. Both Hitler and Stalin knew that the peace treaty they signed wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, but Hitler wanted time to deal with the rest of Europe, and Stalin had all kinds of shit going on back in Russia, so they pretended that they weren't going to go to war, even though both sides knew it was inevitable.)

I happen to actually live and work in the South full-time. I am white. My room-mate is black. Trust me, there's still a ton of racism here.

Just because they aren't marching in full Klan regalia as often doesn't mean it went away.

I'm (sorta) one of those admins.

It's not that local sites are refusing to go along with the data center consolidation, as we have to justify anything that stays here instead of moving to the data center 400 miles away, it's that in a lot of cases the data center people are saying, "You have to move", and then not understanding the reasons why we can't.

Whether or not this lack of understanding is deliberate or not, I'm not sure. We lowered our explanation to about a 6th grade comprehension level, and they finally seemed to get it, at least while they were on site.

Stuff like:

"These are the daily and weekly tasks we must perform with this system - you will have to sign an MOU/MOA (Memorandum of Understanding/Agreement) where you will accomplish these tasks how we tell you to." (Often, they didn't have the trained personnel to do it.)

"You will have to provide 24/7/365 uptime, with at least three 9s reliability (yes, I know that's low, but we couldn't justify higher), including the ability to do file level restoration." (They really balked at the file level restoration.)

"You have to have trained support personnel with OS experience." Their response was, "We can upgrade that to ." Our rebuttal, "No you can't, it has to stay in that exact configuration until changes are tested and approved by Echelon II."

We got to keep most of our stuff, at least so far.

People are supposed to put on the glasses (even if they don't wear glasses) and then also remember to bring three or four handfuls of batteries, and not lose them also? And you also have to remember to charge three or four sets of these tiny things every day?

People did that regularly with several models of cell phones.

But there's also that new battery model, which if it scales well, could solve the entire problem. (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153614-new-lithium-ion-battery-design-thats-2000-times-more-powerful-recharges-1000-times-faster) Seems like this is something Google should invest in.

Since google has been better at design (lately) than Apple (who came up with craptacular earphone jacks for the latest iPods)

The latest iPod earbuds are the only ones ever made I can stand to wear more than an hour. That includes the custom shaped ones.... I spent a few hundred on a nice set of earbuds but after I got the newer Apple earbuds, the Apple buds are the ones I use on planes simply because I can leave them in. The sounds is not as good but the shape is far, far better.

Apple also apparently understands that most people hate recharging batteries, a fact that seems lost on Slashdot.

I said jacks, not earbuds. The buds themselves are fine; I like them. (Far better than the "stuff into your ear" kind; I can't wear those at all.)

But the (female) jack point in the iPod is fragile and has only one set of contacts, so if there is any significant lateral pressure on the connector, the jackpoint cracks slightly, allowing future pressure moments to cause intermittant disconnections of the plug from the contacts, turning off the sound.

This lateral pressure can easily be applied if you have your iPod in a pocket and are just walking around.

Apple's response to me (other than replacing the iPod) was, "Well, just keep the iPod in your hand; don't put it in your pocket."

Yes and no.

Depending on the location (nation, state, municipality, etc) there are laws about deliberately filming someone. ~Sometimes~ there are legal differences between casual recording (you walking past in the background) and deliberate recording, but sometimes not.

Sure, you're not going to be (normally) busted for filming your friends at the beach and getting some random people in the background, but it's still possible. (IIRC, there was an Australian case very recently about this.)

Batteries.

Since it's, effectively, a pair of glasses, make each of the temples or temple tips be a rechargable battery, with a good enough connector to handle connecting/disconnecting and plugging / unplugging hundreds of times.

Design them so that it won't shut down if even one of the two power sources is present, and ship with two+, allowing people to buy additional. Power temple #L1 is low? Disconnect and plug in power temple #L2. Power temple #R1 is recharged, replace power temple #R2 that are on the glasses.

Since google has been better at design (lately) than Apple (who came up with craptacular earphone jacks for the latest iPods), this should be easy.