OMG. How did I not know about this? Want!

Close, but to be pedantic about it, "its" is a possessive pronoun. Possessive pronouns don't take apostrophes because, well, they're already possessive. And probably jealous too.

So: its, his, hers, etc.

The rule for most people seems to be "if I'm not sure, I'll whack in an apostrophe just in case." Which is fine - not everyone is comfortable with the weird vagaries of formal English. But I do wish it were the opposite: when unsure, leave it out. It would be a lot simpler for everyone, and they'd be correct much more frequently.

Er, no. "The press" is a group term for the media industry. The Constitution isn't talking about a singular printing device.

Sheesh.

Journalists add context.

Not everyone wants to read 250,000 cables. Journalists do - they're looking for _leads_. They'll find nuggets and draw the audience's attention to them.

Also, journalists know useful things like not taking every source at face value. What looks huge might be overblown, and what looks trivial may be the tip of an iceberg. Journalists try to spot those. And they second- (third-, fourth-) source facts to try to ensure it's really a fact and not just a rumour.

That activity frequently does require protection. Protecting sources, for example, without which many stories would never come to light. So yes, journalism does need special treatment. But maybe not as special as many journalists would like to think (and I say that as one :)

However, journalists aren't perfect. They miss things, or gloss over things. So in many cases the source material should always be available, but that's not the role of the journalist. Let them find the stories for you, but if you want to wade through the mass of data, knock yourself out.

Open information keeps governments AND journalists honest.

Keep your print preview. Give me a master password already, damnit.

Do you think it's fair to force non-smoking employees (including, potentially, external contractors like facility-hired security and cleaners) to breathe second-hand smoke? Or to discriminate against non-smokers by refusing to hire them?

That's what you think. Just because you haven't found the GPS device on your car doesn't mean no one's watching. They might just be less incompetent.

Or not - maybe you're above suspicion. But I wouldn't put money on it.

That's not logical, nor necessarily true. Just because _you_ don't know about research, doesn't mean it's not being put to use in a way that may benefit you. An awful lot of research at places like GCHQ and the NSA is conducted out of sight of the communities it is intended to protect.

You don't, after all, need to know the research behind a secure government communications channel, but you may well benefit (even unknowingly) from having a government that is less vulnerable to espionage.

At least, that's the thinking - the spirit of modern cryptography suggests that a solid crypto scheme is no weaker for being published. But hey, making it that little bit harder doesn't hurt.

In South Africa there's RICA - the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act - that requires cellphone users to register every SIM card with all their details, including proof of ID and residence, before the end of the year (IIRC) or be cut off.

The likelihood of reducing crime versus feeding a booming black market for SIMs is left as an exercise for the reader.

It's standard marketing bullshit. Every time you see "up to" in an ad, replace it with "less than". "Up to 10mbps", "up to 80% shinier hair", "up to whatever". If one out of the entire sample/customer base experienced an anomalous outlier result, they will claim "up to" that. You're statistically unlikely to be the anomalous outlier, therefore you will experience less than what they're claiming.

"Less than" is more accurate anyway. What you experience may be anything in a wide range of values below that, but you KNOW you won't experience more. So do the mental substitution, and I promise your perception of advertising will change as a result.

Has the US population degraded to the point that we can't figure out what a square meter is? Do we need to measure volume in terms of SUV trunks?

Apparently so. Or don't you measure volume in cubic metres any more? :)

I abstain from buying because I don't think I can pay enough for so many games in good conscience. The games are decent, and the 20 USD I can afford now wouldn't do the games justice.

That's just silly. Whatever you pay, they lose nothing - it's not like you're buying below cost. If you don't buy, they lose.

I'm sure they'd welcome the $20. Besides, a product is worth what people are willing to pay, and right now the market says these games are worth $8 - the site shows the average payment. At $20 you'd be paying over the odds. I can't see them being unhappy with that.

The whole "experiment" is useless without this option, in my opinion.

You might think so, but although the numbers are relatively small, they're tangible, and that's not the only benefit. World of Goo pulled in an average of $3 per download in the last sale. This package is currently at a fraction under $8 - probably in the ballpark for a bundle, though I'd have guessed $10. It's also about what I'd expect to pay for a package of games like this in the frequent Steam discount sales.

When I checked, the total raised was $162,687. That's 160k more than they had before, even divided by seven individually, as well as a LOT of free publicity, and why not?

So although the numbers aren't big, it still looks like a worthwhile exercise to me.

Which is to say, pretty darned feeble. Clever work, but basically rubbish when compared to user expectation.

One of my favourite videos is this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI), dating from the '30s, about how differential gears work. The voice-over is that beautifully clear, precise American newsreader accent of the period, and there isn't any background music to confuse things. If anything should be a perfect candidate for a computer to analyse, it's this.

But the captions are worse than I'd expect from off the shelf software like Dragon Dictate, which isn't particular special itself. A perfectly enunciated "road" with a very clear final D, is misheard as "role", for example. There are mistakes in nearly every line, and while sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're just bizarre.

I'm tempted to say "nice try, good work for a first shot, and hey, it's a beta so it'll get better." But I've been exposed to software dictation software for over a decade, and it just hasn't, really. So I don't think it will, and I don't think most people will get much use out of it, apart from the odd giggle at the YouTube equivalent of "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all..."

What I would be interested in hearing is whether this, flawed as it is, is useable enough for a deaf person. In context, you'd probably figure out that "role"="road", but would you guess that "outmoded"="are mounted"? Maybe, maybe not - watch the video on mute with the captions on, and it's kinda tricky but you can get the gist of it. But then I'm reminded that this is the best case video I could find, and most will probably be worse. It'll be interesting to see what the feedback is from deaf people, and whether it really makes a difference, and whether the context makes up for the poor quality. I'd like to hope it might do just that.

Alastair Reynolds is a very good sci-fi author and a qualified astronomer. He dealt with the question of near-light speed and FTL travel in various ways in various books.

Worth a read, and hopefully after that you'd be a bit less keen to dismiss the entire community of sci-fi authors as clueless amateurs. There are some very good "hard" SF writers. Their science is still fiction, but at least it makes an effort to remain grounded in what today's science can offer or predict.

I kinda agree (and as a skinny person who travels with little luggage, I'd LOVE to be charged by weight), but realistically, that's just not how it works. The airlines sell tickets per seat, or part thereof. Your 6-year old can't share half a seat with another child. If you need half a seat, you buy a whole seat. If you need 1.5 seats, you buy two seats. If, heaven forbid, you need 2.5 seats, you buy the whole row.

Obviously charging for a fixed-size seat means that everyone who isn't exactly that size (ie: nearly everyone) can grumble about paying for slightly too much seat, or being too tight. But the reality is they're sold as whole units. That's the deal. We have to work with that, and if that means fat people buy two seats when you'd rather they bought 1.5 and shared the other .5 with your kid, too bad. Unless the airlines find a way to introduce much more flexible seating and per-weight charging, that's the only practical way it can work.