"From the article: 'Cherie Anderson runs a travel company in southern California, and she's convinced the federal government is reading her emails. But she's all right with that. "I assume it's part of the Patriot Act and I really don't mind," she says. "I figure I'm probably boring them to death."'

I recall reading something like this in the beginning of a book I recently finished reading. It was called "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"

Very insightful book I must add.

This is a very slippery path we're walking down. There is a reason we have the fourth Amendment.

"Ubisoft has gotten itself into such a complete knicker-twist over the PC games market via its groteseque DRM efforts that it wishes to give up on the whole affair as a bad job. But, like the classic stroppy teenager, it wishes to make clear to all and sundry that it's not being sent home in disgrace, it's making its own decision, for its own reasons, to take its ball and go home."

and that's the reason I don't purchase Ubisoft games. Period.

Their DRM has more than once caused my computer to freak out and force me to reinstall everything over again. I did purchase one years ago and I traced it back to their DRM solution. I gave up and today won't purchase any of their games. If one is a gift I go back to the store and with an unopened product replace it with something else (or just get the refund or credit).

Too much of a pain and not worth my time troubleshooting their crap.

It is interesting. I've been messing with Hadoop a bit before speaking to my employer about it. We were using Sensage at the time performing data mining which it was sorta able to handle (they have a SQL like environment available). But performing joins has never worked properly (one of a few peeves I've had about the product).

About a year ago I went out to Hadoop training and built two small clusters of 10 data nodes each for work. Hive and some HBase running (and yes we can do joins in Hive). Pretty cool stuff.

The last few months I've been contacted through linkedin by several recruiters asking if I'd be interested in an interview. They notice my Hadoop cert from Cloudera and it doesn't matter that I said I'm not currently looking. They seem to be very interested in finding people.

Hadoop isn't the silver bullet for all big data needs however it does plug a big hole in my current job. Companies are willing to send people out for training (as in my case). But there definitely is a growing demand :-)

Did you offer him a +1 Funny or -1 Troll? :-)

And Concast was the other one who terminates people's internet access for a year because they were experiencing a full and rich media experience from the internet. That's what happens when people watch shows like "The Event" from web sites like NBC.com (and yes I know NBC.com is now a Concast company ::grinz::)

Ironic...

Agreed. This is why the government (I know.. nasty word but..) needs to get involved and finally protect the consumer. Today these guys can do whatever they want (just about) and get away with it.

In 2007 when Concast terminated my families internet we were shocked. The contract says we had purchased unlimited use for a flat monthly fee. It was even on their web site when we signed up. But after 4 years while they still said they were unlimited, they didn't mean it. That's why I started my blog to document for everyone what kind of a mess we're in today.

Today we're on CenturyLink. The TOS and AUP are the same as we remember under Concast however we are monitoring the hell out of our usage. I'm running a linux firewall server with all sorts of cool bells and whistles. I know what we are doing and how much bandwidth we're using. Even though CenturyLink says we're unlimited usage (sounds familiar?) I don't believe it for one second.

We can't run any servers which sucks. I'd love to setup a Team Fortress 2 or Counterstrike Source game server. But the risk of being terminated for violating a TOS/AUP is too high.

because we'll know when they are lying.. Oh wait! I've mistakenly suggested they tell the truth now and then. Silly me :D

Rumor has it CmdrTaco is the new CEO of Apple.

Truth? :-)

Whenever I perform an investigation I first look at who benefited or where the money came from in a case. Generally it's helped in establishing who's guilty as I follow the evidence.

Money is a great place to start if you want a clearer understanding of who's guilty. Depends on the case of course :-)

Steve Ballmer, is that you?? ;-)

Interesting... My LG Vortex running Android came with BING as it's default search engine....

Not sure how much water these complaints against android are holding but I intentionally switched out BING for an alternative search engine :-)

What's really amusing is the TSA are using less effective techniques for checking for explosives. My representative (Jason Chavetz) and I have had an interesting conversation about this recently. He mentioned the pentagon's latest report on explosives detection stated that dogs were still the number one method of choice today in detection.

But the TSA still insists on using something less effective.

Like I've been saying for years, they are highly under trained if they still believe they are doing the best job possible.

Actually they are targeting the other 89.1%. I'm running linux :-)

I find it amusing that the TSA continually argues that the scanners are effective in detecting not only weapons such as knives and guns but their number one argument has been in detecting explosives. The latest lawsuit against the TSA basically was thrown out because the Judge said the search for explosives in the TSA's argument was more important than our right to privacy.

Amusing. Then why not use a proven tech and get dogs into the airports to check ??

Just received a letter from my representative (Jason Chaffetz) on the subject. He received a Pentagon report recently which they say dogs are the most effective way of detecting explosives.

So much for the TSA's argument. . .

Has Micro$oft ever come out and EXPLAINED what their 235 patents that Linux violates were?

I'm curious if this is where the rational comes from. Not that I agree ( I don't ) but I'd love to see their explanation for this. And if they owe anyone a refund!