NO! BURN IN HELL FOR'NER!

Kidding! Don't worry about it, it's much better English than probably most of the people on here can do French. If you care, the only things incorrect are the two "nor"s in your first sentence and the way you conjugate "to build" ("built" being the past tense you want instead of "build" and "builded" as you have). Also, I guess you do need an "s" on the end of "design", as "some" requires a plural noun to go with it and "design" is still singular.

And I'm done being a nit-picking jerk... (I really don't mean any offense, just offering tips!)

When I joined facebook in '04, it actually seemed like they cared about privacy. They had reasonable privacy controls, they made it easy to establish how much privacy you wanted on your profile, and they hadn't started selling ad-space of any kind, nor mentioned what their business model would really be. Unfortunately, by the time they began changing, selling user info etc., *everything* at school ran on facebook. *everything*. You couldn't be involved in student government, either as an official or just as a constituent, without being on facebook. Half the list-servs on campus, any clubs basically, switched over to facebook group messages. Saying you could do without facebook was essentially saying "you can take the entire social aspect of college and remove it. You can move off campus and never speak to any of your friends or be involved in any club or anything." If you had to ask about a party, it was assumed you hadn't been invited deliberately, not because you weren't on facebook. It was even worse when I was in school in England.

Being out of college, I avoid facebook like the plague. I sign in once every month or two. However, I get tagged in photos, websites, messages, etc at least once or twice a week, if not every day. And I can't just cut it off. There's a documentary who's production I've been following who didn't set up a website until a few weeks ago and which hasn't been updated since. It's for sale, but you could only find that out through facebook (I think they did actually update yesterday or something, so now you can get it at their website, I just checked.)

I too value my privacy, and find facebook to be the finest example of everything wrong with capitalism. Unfortunately, because of the power they wield in the sheer number of users, I can't be rid of it even if I decided to give up all those facebook only things (like the documentary) thanks to tagging, etc. I'm idling until either a) facebook does somehting really, really stupid (which I can't even fathom how stupid it would have to be for people to leave) or b) I can start help making diaspora an alternative for my friends and, eventually, all the things I find useful knowing about.

They'd have a little sticker over the optics that says "Don't laser people."

So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.

To Rice U.: http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=14734

Seriously. Has no one ever heard of encryption? Or just not allowing people to copy personal data onto computers/media not behind at least 1 locked door?

I mean, jeez, yeah. The last thing I heard about Google doing was building cars that drive themselves in traffic. That's sooo mid-2000s... Facebing is looking to the future here! Those 500 people that I once knew in HS and college that I haven't talked to in 3+ years and that every time I do I'm reminded of why I don't talk to them (nothing in common, completely antithetical views on most things, too many freaking country-club-kiddies who don't know the difference between Bing and Best Buy)? Those are *definitely* the people who's likes I want showing up first in my search engine results!

Now, to be fair, Microsoft does actually have some pretty sweet research going on. And while most of that research is in things pretty unrelated to search, a lot of Google's research is also pretty unrelated to search. But to say that you're going with Bing over Google because Bing is "incentivized to innovate" sounds like that phrase had it's own paragraph in the contract, right above where the $ was followed by a dozen "0"s.

Hey, gotta pay for the Newark school system somehow, right?

That sucks. Half the point of a pawn shop is "oh shit, I have to pay rent in 2 days but don't get paid for 4!" A short term loan where you get to choose your collateral (and which, if you default on, they're not going to come after your house or whatever).

US astronomers used their published data (henceforth called 'A') and the Swiss published data (henceforth called 'B'). The Swiss used their published data B and their unpublished data (henceforth called 'C'). So we've tested A+B and B+C. We'll see what the deal is when we can do A+B+C...

This patent was filed February 28, 2007. The only thing this patent seems to add on to what Dodgeball did in ~2000 is that location is that instead of entering a location manually and sending via SMS, the patent has the device uploading GPS location data, and having a single program within which to enter location and status data. Considering GPS wasn't commonly available in 2000, and neither were smartphones that could run programs and had data plans, I don't see how this isn't considered an obvious improvement on a previous invention.

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo#Legal_opinions

Well, yes, but you have to prove to another set of attorneys that the original attorney was doing something unethical, but you can't introduce any communications between the attorney and client as evidence and they're very good about throwing in words like "in my opinion" so it's not unethical, it's just "poorly informed". So, no.

As a side note, does anyone else having problems copy/pasting in Slashdot boxes while using Chrome, or is my computer just f*ed?

When I get my credit card stolen, I'll lose a $20 gadget instead of giving the thieves access to my $0.20 bank account or my credit card with fraud protection where I simply click "Report" on any charges that weren't mine (and I have something like a week to report it stolen, so even if I don't notice it immediately I'm still not liable)?

Also, this in no way stops credit card skimmers at ATMs, gas stations, etc., nor RFID readers.

The positive thing I see about this is the ability to program multiple cards into one card. I kinda like that. Even compared to putting it in my cell phone. If it's cold enough out, I'll have my cell phone buried deep and answer with my headphones (either corded or bluetooth), especially since it's a touchscreen and I'll be damned if I'm gonna take my cell phone out *and* take-off my gloves. Having 1 credit card that I could keep in an outer pocket, alone (so as not to be a target), would be nice.

Also, if I'm at a restaurant, I really don't want to hand my waitress my cell phone to take back to the back...

On the other hand, it means you have to have *all* of these parts to infringe on the patent. I can't think of any prior art for the things you picked up, but as long you as you, say, weigh votes based on something other than ticket price (if you weight them at all), then I don't think you'd be infringing.

The only useful parts I can see in this patent are the thing about pre-weighting all choices towards child/adult friendly options based on the time of the showing and allowing people to take a record of the story arc so that they can try re-choosing it at a later showing or at home on DVD. That is, of course, you find the entire idea of choose-your-own-adventure movies useful at all, but that's a whole other discussion...

For the less Futurama inclined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raging_Bender

The crew goes to see "All My Circuits, The Movie", which is a choose your adventure movie controlled by little PDA devices, which seems to cover about half the claims in this patent.

The new things in the patent (to me) are: weighting votes by ticket price, pre-weighting and/or post-rating specific viewings for branches more appropriate for children or adults, and letting you record the choices you made so that if you come back or later by the DVD, you can (try to) make the same choices again. Interesting, not super exciting, and certainly doesn't get in the way of all those open-source choose-your-own-adventure movie projection systems and films coming down the pipeline...

First, as a couple people have said: A cardboard box. Maybe 3 or 4 of different sizes. And some wood blocks.

Second, I'll stop insulting your intelligence and assume you already have that covered. An iPad. I don't have children (I hate them), but my cousin has 1, another on the way, and he's mormon so he's got 2 dozen nephews and nieces. He's also way more tech-savvy than I am, and the iPad serves him great for this. Load it up with educational cartoons (Barney, Sesame Street, Bob the Builder) and 2 or 3 educational games that involve some button mashing, and you're golden. Maybe throw on some soothing music or one of those white-noise generators to help him nap, and just keep it in the diaper bag (do they still wear diapers at 18 months?) and anytime you need a down moment or to distract him or whatever, pull it out, give it to him, and take five. Also, a heavy-, heavy-duty case. Maybe waterproof. Just in case...

mmmm...huuumaan steeeaaak...