I'm not going to argue for McCarthyism. But you're providing a false comparison.

In this instance, you're demonizing the tools themselves as a problem. But under McCarthyism, government used the tools of the day, tools we *still* use today and see nothing wrong with when applied correctly.

This isn't, and shouldn't be an argument about tools. It should be an argument about *rules*. Due process, and who gets to collect and use data and how.

I don't have any problem with government collecting massive amounts of public information. I just want the way that data is collected, archived and retrieved to be regulated.

You wan to know what cars were on Maple St. between 1:00AM and 3:00AM on the 5th of May, because of a murder investigation? We've got the records. Any sane judge would issue a warrant to retrieve those records when a serious crime like murder is involved.

You want to check the records for what time your ex-wife's car left her house on Monday, because you're spiteful and you happen to be a cop? Sorry, you don't get the records without a warrant.

Will there be rule breakers? Probably. Will there be abuses? Probably. But we have that now with the current tools, and we punish these folks when we catch them.

• Just because we have stalker cops, doesn't mean we don't give cops police cars.
• Just because we had McCarthyism doesn't mean we stopped having Congressional investigation or wiretaps.
• Your speed limit example is just wrong. If you go 65.1 in a 65, you can get a ticket now. Just because you don't *see* a cop there doesn't make it suddenly legal.
• Your First example, five cars near three murders, starts out sane. We could do that today if this was discovered by eyewitness or by security camera footage at a gas station. But then you make the leap to "the cops will beat all five suspects". This could happen, or it could not. It would have everything to do with bad cops and nothing to do with the tools. It could happen today.

Don't blame tools for bad actors using them in bad faith. Put controls in place to restrict how these tools can be used.

We give cops lethal weapons. But we hold them responsible for how they use them. I think they can handle *cameras* if we apply sane standards to them.

A good friend of mine lives in South Carolina. There's a barbecue chain there called Maurice's Barbecue. Big chain, everyone knows about them. And everyone knows that they are openly unapologetic racists.

The guy who runs them fought a court case all the way to SCOTUS to keep blacks out of his restaurants (lost by unanimous decision). Walk in today, and you'll find literature on shelves with racist tracts and his book promoting "a lost way of life" and promoting slavery.

http://www.amazon.com/Defending-My-Heritage-Maurice-Bessinger/dp/0971336903

The Chick-Fil-A analogy is apt. These guys can't keep blacks out of their restaurants any more than Chick-Fil-A can keep gays out of theirs. And the kids behind the counter making minimum wage, along with the management of individual stores may or may not have a prejudiced bone in their bodies.

But the owners are intolerant dinosaurs from a bygone era. They may not have a completely free hand to run the company the way they wish with regards to bigoted policies. But they're still jerks.

The point is bigots of all kinds are still around. But there are disgusting things that we have decided are lawful (for instance, hate speech), and disgusting things that we've decided as a society that will be unlawful (discriminating in places of public accommodation).

The problem is that that's not a good analogy.

Chick-Fil-A doesn't refuse to serve gays. If they did, your analogy would apply. Instead, the owner supports policy (read: laws) that would deny gays certain rights (in this case, the right to marry).

A better analogy would be if a restaurant owner supported legislation banning interracial marriage, but still served blacks and interracial couples in the restaurant.

Support for the laws that discriminate is detestable, but it should not be illegal. Discriminating against who you serve, however is both detestable, AND illegal.

Are you kidding me?

Do you think you can shoot down any aircraft that flies over your property?

These are / will be treated no differently than manned aircraft until such time as someone decides to pass a law / laws differentiating them.

Browse through the FARs. Most Federal Eviation Regulations make no mention / distinction between manned / unmanned aircraft.

It's unlawful to fire upon aircraft.

Doesn't matter if the aircraft is American or not, armed or not, manned or not. It's unlawful to fire upon, set fire to, explode, or otherwise screw with the operations of an aircraft registered in the U.S. or other countries. If it's manned, it also prohibits you from screwing with the crew.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/32

Just out of curiosity, what keeps you from shooting at the guy who hands menus on your door knob from local restaurants?

WNYC's excellent program, RadioLab will have a Google Hangout and possible a meatspace meetup somewhere in the Lower East Side in NYC.

Headliners for their event include:

• Packing for Mars author Mary Roach
• A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines author and physicist Janna Levin
• Martian Summer author Andrew Kessler
• Other unspecified scientists and journalists

Side note: RadioLab is a production of New York's NPR affiliate. Apparently the show is just a couple years old and apparently it's not carried on stations everywhere. If you haven't heard it, and you like science, check out their podcast. It's quirky, incredibly well produced, and overall very well done.

I can see a compromise making sense.

A database is updated with the OCR time and position of all cars. But only flagged cars are accessed.

The advantage of this is the ability to research later after the fact. "Oh, you were nowhere near that bar on the night of the 16th? Let's see if we can confirm that..."

Car stolen? Don't have LOJACK or whatever? File a police report and just as the cameras can continue to watch for your plates, they can go back and see if they already saw your plates before you even knew the car was missing.

Want to put legal protections into the system that keep it from being mined without probable cause? I can live with that.

Both casual observation and hard data disagree with your assertion.

Samsung makes lots of phones (I have not read that they make double the number of Apple, but I have read recently that they surpassed them. It's hard to imagine that they doubled Apple's production numbers the same quarter they surpassed them), but they make a lot of *different* phones.

All of the Android manufacturers do. How many Android phones do you think are one step up from a dumb flip phone, but run Android as an OS?

All the major carriers offer these phones.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of the "true" smart phones at the lower end aren't used as smart phones much, either.

Through observation in the wild, I see iPhones everywhere, every day. Android phones? They're there, but they are hardly ubiquitous like the iPhone.

Now the data: Look anywhere that is likely to have a wide representative share of users. Let's take Wikimedia, for instance: the iPhone accounts for 7% of traffic. Android is 4.73% (and tablets are probably included in this number, unlike iOS, which has the iPad segregated).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_chart.png

I think the Android market share is either inflated, or they're counting people who bought an Android phone, have no data plan, have never fired up a browser, never opened the app store, and never did anything but make calls with it.

It counts if all you're interested is how many devices are in the wild, but honestly, what can you do with this statistic that is useful?

If I want to develop and deploy an app, I want to know the actual audience that can potentially be reached by it. I have some visibility of that, but not much. It's further complicated by wide fragmentation on the Android platform.

According to the math they did here, Google is doing about 1 Billion downloads a month. Apple is doing about 1.25 Billion. That's a notable, but not insurmountable gap. But, yeah. Right now Apple is winning by any objective, realistic, meaningful measurement.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/google-play-about-to-pass-15-billion-downloads-pssht-it-did-that-weeks-ago/

Disclaimer: I don't own any iOS products, and I really want Google to get their act together, because I really dislike the whole walled garden approach Apple and Microsoft are taking.

Android isn't something people *want* now. It's something people settle for because they don't want to pay the Apple premium. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Windows wasn't something people clamored for, either. It was just a standard.

My problem is that I don't want to see a standard that has a walled garden model win.

What makes it military equipment? The fact that the military has used it?

The military uses helicopters too. What about helicopters? Ban police use of them?

And underwear The military wears underwear. Should police be prohibited from wearing underwear too?

I get it. Drones are the scary thing de jure lately and the Slashdot crowd is particularly paranoid about privacy issues. But seriously, they can observe. So long as any non-public observation continues to require a warrant, I really don't care.

I've not heard of him, but looking over his Wikipedia entry, many of the books he's written ring a bell.

As for his definition, yes it *can* be. And it certainly is sometimes. But to say that that is what it is implies something else, that this is the exclusive, or at least main point of it.

In practice most people who would identify themselves as political scientists are closer to historians / sociologists.

But even "controlling" or "influencing" people isn't always necessarily nefarious. The League of Women Voters has political scientists. Their primary concern is how do they increase the amount of information available to voters and maximize voter turnout. They also are jealously non-partisan.

Certainly less useful. But not useless.

I agree that we have our priorities backwards, but that doesn't mean being physically fit can't be nice.

I agree that $150K seems way overly optimistic.

But why should it surprise you that you've never heard of a board for what may be a one-off prototype?

Particularly since Zelda was the first game to have battery-backup save (and you can plainly see what looks like a battery on the board), it would make sense that they might create a custom board for testing.

No, political science isn't about controlling people any more than zoology is about controlling animal populations.

It's a study. It's no more unified than politics is, because that's what political science is: the study of politics, government, and state.

Also, I'm sure some fringe school somewhere does what you say, but the UK has a standardized uniform grading system that is widely used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_Kingdom

I think this guy's idea is dumb too. But your assertions don't seem grounded in reality.

I get your point, and I agree with your sentiment. But I think you have your facts wrong in this case.

I don't think Ride was eligible for any kind of federal benefits. She wasn't a career federal employee. She served as an Astronaut from 1978 to 1987. After that, as far as I know she returned to academia in California.

Would nine years as a federal employee have made her eligible for spousal death benefits after she left?

I don't think so, but does anyone know for sure?

A couple problems:

First her first flight was in 1983. 49 years before her flight would be 1934. Clearly this is not correct.

Second, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space flew 1963. But the Soviets didn't fly a second woman in space until Svetlana Savitskaya 19 years later. And she flew just a year before Ride's first flight.

So even though she was beat by 20 years, Ride was actually the third woman in space. So it's unlikely that one of the two before her was a lesbian also.

Both the Russians who went before her are still alive and as far as I know still married. But who knows for sure?

Personally I think it's a irrelevant to her legacy. Her accomplishments were the things she did, not the things she did as a woman, or the things she did as a lesbian.

Scientist, astronaut, educator. She sat on the Rogers Commission, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and the Augustine Commission. Her contributions to human spaceflight are innumerable. The way she touched the next generations are incalculable.