If Apple was allowed to use radioisotope thermoelectric generators like the Voyager series did, then yeah, it could probably run for more than 5 years. Of course the size of the device, combined with a minimal 5mm sheathing of lead would drastically cut the portability of the IPad.

As far as I know, Pu 238 creates very little radioactive emissions, but even so, I think that the radioactivity from the nuclear battery itself would be of more hazard to the electronics than the cosmic rays would. (Less energetic sure, but more of them and emitted right beside the vulnerable chips.)

Postal codes were created by Canada Post for its own convenience in sorting and delivering mail. On that level, the data belongs to Canada Post and only they can change it. However; Canada Post is a crown corporation, all the data it generates is done using a mixture of public funds and postage revenues. Just as with scientific research results, I argue that the use of public funds mandates that the resulting data be freely accessible to anyone. Canada Post can not stop anyone from publishing this data, even for profit. I note that in my province, and presumably all the others, there are phone books other than the one published by Bell. These local phone directories include postal codes as part of the address listings as a vale-add to differentiate themselves from the more well known Bell phone directories.

Canada Post hasn't sought to stop these directories from including the postal codes, so I don't believe it should seek to stop an online publication either.

In other respects, Canada Post has shown itself to be a fairly forward thinker for a government operation. To me, the fact that Geolytica has created their website is proof that there is a market opportunity there that Canada Post has overlooked. Canada Post could; and I dare say should, simply out compete Geolytica by creating a more comprehensive and easier to use web page of its own. Canada Post might not be able to compete with the US listings Geolytica also has, but I think there is much room for improvement on the look and feel of the web page itself. (How many run of the mill users even know the difference between HTML, XML and JSON let alone *care*? geocoder.ca uses google maps, but it doesn't look as if they took any design ideas from Google)

Have they made it known that they will be checking on you to see if you have told enough lies and to their satisfaction? Is there going to be quality control of some kind? "Gee Johnson, you posted a lovely review on your Facebook page, but it just seems, I dunno, kind of phoney. I'm going to need you to go ahead and rewrite that lie over the weekend."

My take on this? Fuck'em. If you need the job and you feel your job is on the line over this, then feel free to lie to them. Tell them you made all kinds of wonderful comments about them. If they find out you didn't, what are they going to do? Fire you for lying about telling the lies they asked you to say? I personally think that astro-turfing, since it is a published act by a paid employee of the company, to run afoul of the truth in advertising laws. As far as I know, in most of the developed world, a company cannot require you to act in an illegal manner as part of your job. (lord knows it happens anyway all too often)

Let them fire you and then sue them for it.

Speaking only for myself, the only time I ever want to hear Product X does Y is when it is some unique and new gadget. If it's been around for awhile, or has competitors, I don't want anything like that. No; not even comparative reviews of Product X versus it's competitors A, B and C. I get enough of that elsewhere thank you. The Plantronics video is an a, pure and simple. Maybe /. didn't get paid, but it is exactly the kind of useless puff piece I hate. Many of us here have the engineering mindset, being exposed to a sales pitch in any media is usually boring at best, possibly torturous at worst. For a shallow piece, I want to know the product specs and I'm quite comfortable with a plain, unadorned table of raw numbers. For a more in depth piece, I want to know how it was made, what new principles or problems the engineers dealt with to make it. (examples below)

1) Current hard drives are using perpendicular magnetic domains, something I think Samsung was the key researcher in developing. All the major major hard drive companies are doing it now, so it really isn't a trade secret. Get me an interview with the engineering team that figured out how to lay down the media on the disk substrate in such a way to create those perpendicular domains.

2) Interview the guy who runs the computer system(s) at some observatory. Palomar, Mauna Kea, W.R. Keck, some place like that. I want to know how he got the job, how much data a typical nights viewing produces, how many Universities get that data, what about his job *he* thinks is cool, that sort of thing. 3) I hear James Cameron is sponsoring a dive to some new record depths. Don't do a piece on him! Do a piece on the submarine he and his team will be using, For the tour guide, use the guy who built it, someone who drives it. Pretty much anyone directly involved, knows what they are talking about, but are not someone who would usually appear on camera in some run-of-the-mill documentary.

4) if you cover a gathering, convention or conference, at the end include links to the people and organizations involved.

5) For that matter, maybe /. can do a table at a con or sponsor a con. (It'd be great to see /. sponsoring some Maker Faires or RapFab meets)

6) I'd like to see a video tour of the facilities well known websites are hosted at.

7) Once you have arranged to record some video with someone or somewhere, do what you do with the text based interviews. Ask us what parts we want to see, what questions we might like to ask. Use our input to help shape the direction and depth of the piece.

Frankly, when it comes to consumer products, all I really care about it the kind of stuff the PR, Marketing and Legal departments probably don't want me to see.

Actually; the sharing of intelligence is already required between the USA and Commonwealth nations under the UKUSA treaty. Officially, under the terms of that treaty, Canada is assigned the duty of spying on large chunks of the now former Soviet Union and shares all results with the US while the US does Latin America, and large chunks of Asia and likewise shares. However; it is commonly believed that one of the primary signals intelligence systems (Echelon) operated by the signing countries has not been limited to foreign powers.

As a result, this bill will change nothing new on that front. It can be assumed that the US has been spying on Canada extensively and sharing almost everything it gathers with Canada since 1947. (And vice versa)

What I believe it will achieve is a dramatic increase in the size of the intel databases, allowing intel to go from detective-style work to wholesale data mining.

replying to undo accidental moderation

I have no ethical objection to the concept of the death penalty. I just don't see it as being of any value in deterring crime by others the way most countries practice it now.. There is that whole out of sight, out of mind problem. Your average street thug a) Doesn't think he'll get caught b) doesn't think the crime he intends to commit warrants the death penalty anyway. He's not thinking about what's gonna happen if he gets caught by the home-owner and kills him or her in a panic, he's thinking about not getting caught period and whether this place has enough loot to make it worthwhile. It's a basic psychological principle, death or any other seriously bad thing is something our minds are convinced happens only to other people. (Seriously, how can you live in New Orleans and NOT be convinced you need flood insurance? Who in their right mind buys a home in tornado alley that doesn't have a storm cellar and shelves for stored food?)

We don't need still more laws, I don't think we even need more cops. What we need are better funded crime labs so that a DNA test doesn't take months to wind it's way through the backlog. Better trained police. I remember Illinois State Troopers were a model police force, as are my own countries RCMP, but that was for the uniformed patrol. Is there such a organization that is the model for the plains clothes detective divisions other than the FBI? What sort of training can we provide the average vice or fraud detective to make him or her a smarter, better organized catcher of criminals?

Better punishments. Not harsher punishments, better ones. For guys like these? lets bring back the stocks or pillory. Let them be publicly "named and shamed", let the bilked investors pelt them with rotten refuse. More to the point, if their pillories are set up in a well travelled section of the financial district, you give a VERY visible reminder to all the others in the industry of the price of fraud. Whether you're wearing a stained hoodie or a tailored 3-piece suit, if it is *easy* to commit a crime and you think the odds of getting caught are very low (regardless of the actual odds), then there is a much higher risk that you will commit the crime.

Perceived risk has to outweigh perceived reward

Which is why the guys who seriously try to invent such devices in their garage or basement often use the term Over Unity. There are things that many people might consider perpetual motion, certain for any considerations within a human lifetime, such as two bodies in orbit around each other, a single body travelling through space and so on. The thing is; they can't be harnessed for energy. What the people with the shaky grasp of physics are trying to do is create a device that outputs more energy than it took to get going/takes to keep going.

If I hand my car over to a shady back alley "garage" for repair because he is the cheapest in town, especially in replacement parts, and the local LEOs come along and shut him down, every car, every loose part on that property is evidence and would probably be held until well after the court case. Where I live, the laws allow for me to petition the judge to have my car released IF a) I can prove I have genuine need of it (commute) b) the investigators have determined that my car hadn't been worked on yet, so therefore there were likely no stolen or counterfeit parts in it. c)the investigators are willing to tell the judge that I myself am not a potential suspect as the investigation uncovers further criminal acts. d) I have or will pay the impound lot fee

Having my car seized would be, in the eyes of the court, part of the risk I knowingly or unknowingly accepted when I dropped my car off. I believe that the US feds would use similar logic in regards to the data they impounded. Places like megaupload are generally known to host damn near anything and everything. It's my understanding they are pretty good at self policing at taking down CP when it's found, which in the Feds eyes is proof that they could also be self policing in regards to copyright infringement if they chose. Thus; if someone posts infringing material on MU and it doesn't get taken down, then MU is at fault. If I then upload some non-infringing material of my own and it gets caught in the dragnet, that is part of the risk I knowingly or unknowingly assumed when I chose MU as my filesharing host.

Pardon me for asking; but what the hell was an open can of paint doing in the same room as your keyboard (and presumably computer, monitor etc)???

When I painted my home office, I couldn't get all the furniture out ( no room elsewhere for the items) but I made damn sure my computer was shut down, draped in old sheets and put in another room, away from foot traffic.The furniture got draped with cheap vapour barrier grade plastic sheeting.

That's not being anal either; like removing the outlet and light switch covers, that's just doing house painting properly.

For what it's worth; I'm hard on keyboards as well. In my case it's because I learned to type first on a manual and then later an IBM Selectric, so my fingers are well trained to press a key more firmly and far more deeply than modern keyboards require. I'd break down and buy one of the Model M based designs if I could find a vendor that also a) Used double shot keycaps, b) has greater stagger between rows than the 1-5 mm I usually see c) the keys are mounted on a slight curve, not a straight plate d) has media and common shortcut keys e) (optional) backlit letters. I have given serious thought to building my own keyboard from scratch, since it seems no one makes keyboards with all 5 features.

alone or in pairs....

Suddenly I feel all cold shivers, nauseous and a creeping sense of horror, like someone has opened the eldritch tomes...Dude, please don't do that over the holidays...

mmm, I certainly agree that a high UID is not proof of a new member, but I have to disagree that a UID is arbitrary. For it to be arbitrary, a new sign-up might get awarded an abandoned and now recycled low UID.

To me, a low UID is proof that a member created an account a long time ago*, but doesn't mean they are a long time slashdotter, since they could well have signed up years ago, forgot all about the site until recently and been able to log in using that old account.

Similarly, a high UID to me is proof that their account was created recently, note that this says nothing about when the person first discovered the site, if the person had been a regular reader prior to creating that account. It certainly doesn't rule out the possibility of the member having multiple accounts with a range of low and high UIDs. When all is said and done, no a high UID is not proof of recent membership, but I think it is fair to say that it is highly suggestive

* I seem to recall that a while back there was a charity auction where one item up for bid was a low UID. The winner of that auction would be an obvious exception to the rule of UIDs being created and assigned in strict numerical order. As far as I know however; that would be the only exception.