I myself doubt that wiretapping (even without encryption) is a desirable approach to get at data, as opposed to stealing computer drives. With the drives you get everything that has not been mailed yet as well as everything from years back, all in one go. Most evil doers would not only be interested in current correspondence, no?

It is also an issue of practicality. Drive encryption is very easy and unobtrusive to deploy and manage. The basic variant uses just the same password in the same login screen.

As opposed to that, key management, and other basic usage concerns on PGP or similar are not easy. Average Joe needs to know too way too much about how these things work, and IT Staff / Power users don't get enough flexibility. Your white collar people may have spared you a LOT of annoyances while you still were sysadmin, in fact.

It may be technically true but not meaningfully so.

No it isn't.

It's technically true that everyone will die sometime, but it isn't really meaningful in the context of making a film about it in the near future, which I presume the story is about (no, of course I didn't read it).

Hey babe... wanna taste of my plankton?

Sorry, I fscked it up for you. :-)

The central government in China is seen pretty positive by most people in China.

However many "mass incidents" (protests, riots, etc) are taking place, and the number is increasing. I have heard numbers of tens of thousands of such "mass incidents" each year, but hard to impossible to get any reliable numbers on that.

It is the local governments that are highly unpopular, down to local leaders being murdered and the village celebrating: such a case is now going on. This as many if not most local leaders are very corrupt, and have local business interests as well. This has issues for land rights and environmental pollution. It's those leaders that the protests are targeted against primarily. E.g. the local mayor owns a large share in the local coal mine, and will thus turn a blind eye on safety issues. Large brothels or gambling dens that were housed across the police station - the owner being a brother of the police commissioner.

You won't see much protest targeting the central government, and most of those are people asking for help in problems with local officials.

Reminds me of a line from "V". "They're using the most powerful weapon - devotion"

You could be right, but none of the things you listed creates wealth, so I'm not sure what the point of listing them was. What, other than labour, creates wealth?

Knowledge. And not just knowledge gained through experimentation or research, sometimes you can gain profitable information just looking out the window at the right moment.

> but that one about the bike helmet just outright seemed silly.

And hence, you miss the OP's point entirely.

Each individual restriction has some benefit, and may have even saved some people some misery. And each one may make sense - depending on how much you value freedom vs safety.

As a kid, I had a pocket knife and a bb gun (later a .22). I worked for local farmers and rode (on the public road) on top of hay wagons and in the backs of pickup trucks. My folks let me wander off some pretty long distances without them. Much of what I did as a kid would not be allowed today for safety reasons. And that has probably saved somebody some grief, or maybe even their life.

But if I'd grown up in the same situation today, I imagine I'd probably have spent all day with the TV and Playstation. I'd have been safe, but out of my mind with boredom.

Well, while your opinion is appreciated, the article is talking about reboots. As far as "new" what about Fringe or Sanctuary?

That's a very good point- I hadn't thought of it. A series set in Gaia, start with a movie for the climb to the top, and then a series with the Wizard & Sidekick Gabby, exploring the world- You wouldn't even really need to get to the events in Wizard or Demon for a long, long time...

You would need to translate them to an absolute scale (Kelvin or Rankine) to do a really meaningful comparison, but I would hope that most people that read English would be able to at least translate the temperatures into "pretty hot" and "a whole bunch hotter".

Even then, the temperatures may be less interesting than the amount of energy required to bring the materials to those temperatures (but adding energy at lower temperatures is probably easier).

Please tell me there's an actual MP3 of this song. PLEASE! Lie if you have to. I can't go on with life knowing that this song doesn't exist in a full audio version...

It's a franchise, they can't not have a new one. That's how Hollywood works now: yearly installments of something that's proven to be successful, with three-move reboots to relaunch the franchise and introduce it to new customers when the current viewership grows out of it.

>>>when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. Gee, us 50+ folks thought the same about *you*. :-) Then realized we sounded like our parents. :-) :-) :-)

The problem is there's truth in it. The pace of technological change has been much faster than the pace at which society and individuals can adjust in a sensible fashion. Witness the thread about privacy expectations.

Creep is generally a term reserved for men. I believe only women TSAs can pat down females. Please correct me if I'm wrong as I've never had the opportunity to be patted down in security.

Excuse me while I find some wood to knock on.

"Princess Ardala, Col. Wilma Deering, ... What more could any nerd boy want?"

I'm not a nerd boy anymore; I'm a nerd MAN, and the "more" I want is Ardala and Deering naked in a lesbian scene.