And if you get one of these national security letters or other absurd warrant from the feds, publish it. The right of the press to publish otherwise classified material was affirmed in the 1971 case New York Times Co. v. United States, although that was a pretty weak ruling. But unless you've agreed to keep something secret, you're theoretically free to do with it as you like. Also, I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't take your legal advice from the internet.

As long as you landed your plants along the equator, some should be able to live. Find some high desert plants or lichens. Land them on Mars and wait 30 years to see what happens. Unfortunately, some boring people oppose putting foreign life forms on the surface of Mars. Boo. This is the most important and interesting study of climate and evolution we could possibly ever make.

Ok, next step, let's find some plants that might be able to grow there. Let's make Mars a green planet. I think that's really the next step, can we take a desolate planet and make it remotely suitable for life. I'd like to do the same thing with Venus, which I'm sure will be much more of a challenge.

It seems they can do all the routine parts of driving. The hard parts will be navigating detours, construction zones and obeying traffic cops, and doing all of that without reliable GPS. Still, it's exciting. I don't know if we'll even have a fully autonomous car by 2030, but I expect great advances in collision avoidance that will really help with all the baby boomers retiring.

Your analogy might make sense if power usages was an all you can use buffet for one low monthly cost. As it is, power is metered at a flat rate.

Somewhat similar, water usage is also metered. However, in some areas, high water usage is charged at a higher rate to keep people from excessively watering their lawns, and only faces minimal backlash because most people use relatively little water.

Really, what ISPs should be doing is charging a base rate (say, $20/month) and a per GB rate (maybe $0.10/GB) so that the heavy users get charged for the costs of data exchange and upgrading capacity. And then just take the speed caps off the lines because you want to sell more GBs of data. The way things are handled now is backwards and retarded.

Likewise, but I'm paying for it. Or rather, my business is and I've got backhaul from my office to my house. The backhaul is really nice. I can telecommute at 100mbps speeds.

Well, it's complicated. Last week, an a road trip, I started downloading an app (about 20mb) just as I was leaving 4G territory. So it kept chugging along at 2G speeds until I got to the next major town. Finished just before the battery died. Amateur mistake, but live and learn.

And knowledge was passed from the notes of the instructor to the notes of the student without passing through the brain of either.

According to my own research (n=1), the best approach is to read the text before the lecture and use the lecture for further understanding.

Completely disagree. A competitive marketplace is almost always a very good thing. Android has become the new destination for malware. I've been saying from the beginning that if Microsoft wants to play in the tablet/mobile market, they're going to have to effectively give the OS away. Some people might pay a bit more for the Apple experience. Microsoft doesn't have that sort of appeal. For everyone else, they've come to expect cheap hardware. Google and Amazon are making money from tying their tablets to other revenue generators - search, shopping, app stores. Microsoft has become so spoiled with the fat margins they get on Windows and Office, they don't know how to work a market where they don't have a monopoly.

Yep. Having issues here as well. Not good, but surprisingly I haven't had any calls from angry customers yet.

Also, turn off 3rd party cookies. And run an ad blocker. That will substantially cut down on things. Until things eventually get integrated on the back end so that everything appears to be coming from the site that you're visiting. Like spam, it's an arms race. While spam is 99.8% solved, do not track will be much more challenging.

Someone wake me up when a mobile device has the following features:

can install any arbitrary OS (does not have a locked bootloader)
The default OS is secure
The default OS is not a walled garden

It took my kid hardly any time at all to get her Nexus 7 tablet filled with malware.

My thoughts as well. I kind of wonder how many people out there are still overclocking. It's so rare that anything I do is CPU bound anymore. Maybe I'm getting old becuase I just want things to work.

And you also better be damn sure you're attacking the right person and not some poor company who has already had their own systems compromised. Most people are really bad detectives and just aren't qualified to determine who to hack back against. And usually your attacker doesn't have much of a footprint to attack. So while I support your right to actively defend yourself, don't be a Zimmerman and shoot some unarmed kid with a bag of candy in his pocket.

That's ok. If it's anything like my wife's phone, any idiot could see the finger smudges and retrace the sequence that unlocks it. She's practically worn a grove into the screen.