GP is misunderstood, and is mostly correct. He's not saying the Constitution is meaningless; he's saying it can't in and of itself restrict the power of government. TFS lays it out: unconstitutional surveillance has been approved by all branches of government. So was slavery. Condemning a government action as "unconstitutional" doesn't have any direct effect unless someone enforces it. The one method of enforcement he doesn't cover is the ballot box. If the voters of the country cared about the government being restricted by the Constitution, we could choose representatives that made that a priority.

Yeah, I did too :)

Slashdot cracks me up
"Beware the surveillance state!"
"Give all cops cameras!"

As for the poll topic, I voted "It's not needed" because it was the closest to "It's not always needed all the time". Specifically, it's generally only needed when officers are interacting with the public (which is a lot of the time, but not 100%). Supposedly the Ferguson police chief had ordered body cameras, but they hadn't been deployed yet (that article cites unnamed sources, so the info is questionable).

But there are many times when cameras can help, both in protecting citizens from abuse, and protecting cops from false claims of abuse, and this is more important in some areas than others.

Dammit, clicked the wrong mod. +1 Funny.

These comments reminded me of this story, where even sending exceptionally creepy stuff to the guy's house, and making specific threats against his family weren't actually indicative of genuine intent to do harm. This is what I think of when I see stuff like this. Not that there couldn't be some genuinely disturbed person who would cause harm; but I suspect that in all or nearly all cases of sick trolling like this, it's just "a game thing."

Not just any soundboard, a George Noory soundboard!

Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Pay me $10,000 to stop hitting yourself.

I just checked, and the laptop battery I bought last December for our Toshiba is an Anker, with a higher mAh rating than the OEM battery. It's still working great with a decently long battery life, so consider that yet another recommendation. I didn't know anything about the brand at the time - I bought it because it offered longer life than OEM, and it was highly rated on Amazon.

As for cell phones, I bought a couple EC Technologies batteries for our Samsung cell phones one year ago that are still going strong. I get two full days of life from a charge with moderate usage on my Exhibit 4G.

I'm imagining a scene where a typical 16-year old boy, having written an obviously nonsensical, nonthreatening comment, is corralled in the principal's office. There are a couple of stern, serious police officers staring him straight in the face, asking in all seriousness about shooting his neighbor's dinosaur. How could he possibly react EXCEPT for an irate "are you f-ing kidding me?!?" I'm not sure that I, with 20 years of life experience on this kid, could react very differently.

Do it - imaging yourself, sitting in a chair surrounded by a bunch of stern authority figures, some in uniform, asking you: "why did you want to shoot your neighbor's dinosaur?"

Sure, maybe he was unruly towards the officers, which is never a good strategy, but some people are provoked to anger by (accurately) perceived lunacy on the part of people who should know better, which would include teachers, principals, and officers of the law.

Of course, I wasn't there - perhaps he actually did something criminal, but I haven't seen it mentioned yet.

Reminds me of the time when that list of crosswalk-button hacks was published - it created quite a stir.

FWIW, I originally had a regular expression to try to extract the video id parameter (something like v=([\w\d-]{11})), but it didn't properly preserve other parameters. Yours is better! I was going to say you needed to change the first & to a ?, but apparently youtube doesn't care. Also the last ampersand doesn't matter, but in case someone is as needlessly pedantic as I am, here's the version that makes them all pretty, which passed all my test cases:

javascript:window.location=String(window.location).replace(/\/watch\?(.*)v=(.*)/,"/v/$2&$1").replace(/&$/,"").replace(/&/,"?");

The way these can all fail is if youtube introduces a different URL parameter that ends in the letter "v".

In Linux, I have this problem. The performance of Flash is fine. More generally, the toolbar bookmark allows the video to be sized arbitrarily based on the browser. This is nice in Chrome, which has a minimal GUI, and allows a really flexible video window.

Assuming how many ads per page? One? If most pages have more than one, that 200 could come down to a more reasonable number. I'd think less than 50/day is achievable for the average internet surfer.

Totally with you. FWIW, YouTube offered to let me "monetize" my videos - I assume by showing annoying ads - but I've declined because I hate YouTube ads so much, and also because it'd probably net me a whopping $0.05/year.

Anyway, I created a toolbar bookmark in all my browsers with the following in the URL field:
javascript:window.location=String(window.location).replace("watch?v=","v/");
If you click it while watching a video on YouTube, it causes the video to fill your browser window (for better resizing control, also to get [nearly] full-screen Flash in Linux), but also has the unintended but welcome side effect that it skips the preroll adds. Obviously this won't work if the "v" parameter in the URL doesn't come first, but that's rare enough that doing it by hand isn't a nuisance.

That's redundant. Like Mel said, if you can prove it, it wouldn't be a good conspiracy now, would it?

Looks like your TV uses Imperial volume, like your receiver, but is displaying metric units.