Well, let's take what he says at face value for a moment.

Basically, he is arguing the ends justify the means. There's nothing in the US Constitution to support that, though, so it's an invalid argument. The Constitution states - pretty much as absolutes - what our rights as citizens are. There's no "well, you can have this freedom only if it doesn't make things too hard on the police" clause... as far as I can tell, anyway.

He also says that, because of the Snowden revelations, "the intel community, the military community, and law enforcement are going to work harder." Well, good! If the threat is indeed growing, they *should* work harder. To stop threats against the country and its citizens, they should use every tool that's available to them within the law. But what they *shouldn't* do is violate the constitution or civil laws in pursuit of those goals.

I always thought those acoustic coupled modems were cool... now I just need to get a landline again and dig that old Ma Bell phone out from the junk box!

Well, no - with Windows it's handing the decoding tasks off to the OS. It's only on Windows that it does it - it doesn't work on a Mac (even though it could do the same thing), and on Linux without gstreamer you're SOL.

Although until they start supporting h.264 and h.265, isn't this whole discussion a bit premature?

You've just detailed why Slashdot submissions - unlike links posted as part of the discussions - don't display the name of the site any included link directs to. If it did, there would likely be 99% fewer clickthroughs.

1) Yes - for a wormhole to stay open longer than 38 minutes, a crucial plot point must require it.

2) No, you're thinking of the opening scene from Stargate Universe - it only seemed to drag on for days.

I think we'd better learn the words to Waltzing Matilda and maybe keep the cyanide pills handy.

I remember hearing Wally Broecker talk about the ice dam + flooding hypothesis back in the mid-1990s (or possibly earlier).

I believe you've just described a Tracker Jacker.

How about a picture of a dead bee with a cigarette hanging out of its tiny little mouth?

I heard he invented the Internet!

I mainly interact with my work gmail via IMAP - so I probably won't notice the redesign for a good, long while.

Same as always - they are getting paid by advertisers to place ads alongside our email messages. So it is reasonable to assume any redesign is being done with the goal of improving the efficiency of those ads - improving click through rates and maximizing each ad's visibility.

Yeah, it seems to me the main thing this mask would accomplish is helping Leo Selvaggio hide himself from surveillance, not the rest of us - unless we're willing to wear it 100% of the time we go out in public.

It's not clear to me how a bootable thumb drive is going to resurrect a non-functional computer. Neither is it clear what this will accomplish for all those people too poor to own one at all - although in the article it says these guys did provide five old laptops to a school where they were testing this.