Americans seem to have a better chance at shaming the NFL into dealing with Ray Rice than they do at shaming the government to do something about the NSA.

Pissed off customers have the potential to lead to empty seats and lost profits. Pissed off citizens... well, you might get less votes if the "other guys" seem a little better, but the "other guys" are really part of the same system and many of the entrenched interests don't actually change when a different party is voted in.

I did think about that. If that's the case,then they would alert on innocent persons approximately 90% of the time, and thus are completely ineffective in determining probably cause and should not be legally allowed as reason for a search.

I love how in several of these cases, they force the person to wait, bring in a dog, and then the dog "alerts" but there are NEVER any drugs... just money. This seems to contribute well to the theory that many dogs are just acting on a signal from the trainer (whether implicit or otherwise).

Really? Try protesting in a non-designated area. Especially if you're non-white. Not the Gulag, but you'll likely be arrested and imprisoned.

Yes, because in the U.S. you'd never have for-profit prisons, civil forfeiture, or even outright cops stealing cash under the pretence of fighting crime.

The U.S. certainly wouldn't have issues with police beating minorities or killing them, leading to riots. They wouldn't have a growing number of cases of false imprisonment, or police militarization

Actually, this is very important factor of the "cycle of life" in many cases.
Being able to eat plants is good, but having them be able to recycle humans/animals waste products (including bodies) is equally important. Otherwise, what are you going to feed the plants?

Minecraft as a "concept" is great. A fairly open, semi-dynamically generated world. A focus on (generally cooperative) construction and innovation rather than blowing sh** up. In later versions, some fairly serious modding capabilities.

There's definitely some value in the player-base, but in terms of the code-base? The *idea* behind MC was new and is what makes it great, but I don't know that the code itself would be particularly difficult to reproduce or even improve upon. Other than artwork and some specific mechanics, I don't see what's copyrightable that would prevent an improved offshoot. At the moment, it's mainly "we've sunk a lot into MC and it's been good enough," but if MS starts shenanigans that might change dramatically.

I wonder how much tidal energy could be harvested to charge a ship while at rest/dock if the appropriate hardware were installed.

As always, storage becomes the issue in general though.

I think the names were to make the ships scary to other people, not the crew.

The industry is even worse though. It's always pissed me off that they can make the DVD's in a country where it's the cheapest possible, then slap on "region codes" to prevent you from buying it from said country so they can jack up the local price.

Oh how I miss those.

Ah, that one would make sense to me.
I still think the stupidest part would be having *any* anonymous server with direct access to the internet. I'd assume that - in order to know the hosts IP - it actually had a public IP address.

Firewall, then server. Server gets a NAT'ed address, and only implicitly allowed connections make it through the firewall/NAT. It should never even know what the public IP is.

A lot of ISP's ban home servers if - par example - you're divvying out content to the internet (though often not unless you're caught, those port 25 and/or 80 blocks are also common).

However, a lot of "home servers" these days are just media boxen used to personal consumption. The cloud-enabled ones usually have some service for allowing remote-access as well. Geeks may have a file/media server along with maybe a game host of some type, which doesn't necessarily break the TOS for the ISP.

I would be very surprised if the BBC themselves (well, their IT dept) didn't use VPN's. Almost any mid-large sized business will be using them in some fashion, and even many small businesses do these days.

A friend of mine has a game where he responds to the "free vacation" guys with just "yes" for every question. He then posts the results to his FB along with how long he managed to bait the faux-telemarketer, and what their last words were (usually profanity).

Quite entertaining