Behold as I ... give it to my friend and tell him the code!!!! UNBELIEVABLE

Also what if I just throw the tracking device in a lake and continue skipping school? This just seems like a waste of resources - buying expensive GPS (they must be at least a GPS module and probably a cell phone radio?) units and giving them to kids who, as they are often skippers, don't really care about school or keeping in good condition the expensive thing you gave them.

This seems like the kind of tactic that would encourage a (potenital) miscreant who skips sometimes to just stop coming all together.

My friend barfed in his pants halfway through the movie (hilarious story, he was drunk, went to the bathroom to chuck, then failing to do so sat down to crap, then immediately leaned forward and barfed in his now-pulled-down pants) and I was relieved I got to drive him home instead of sitting through the rest of the movie.

There was so much "let's talk about stuff and be really deep and shit and check out this scary flashback" - which maybe reflects the comic well, but doesn't translate into a very good movie. It took forever, was boring, and unlike the comic, I couldn't put it down half way through and have a sandwich and think about the cool stuff happening. Perhaps watchmen just was't a good choice for a movie adaptation, or maybe it was poorly made, either way, I hardly think it qualifies as a really great movie.

Every time I read a story about technological advancement in some [non friendly to the US] nation it's always portrayed in the light of "Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology OMFG THEY'RE GONNA NUKE US"

What's up with that? What possible use could a stable, financially self-sufficient nation have for nuking a much larger nation (who has a lot more nukes)? I know people like to portray them as crazies and always extract the most radical-when-translated-and-taken-out-of-context quotes about how these countries/groups of people want nothing more than to wipe Israel and the US off the map, but I find it hard to believe that the leaders of such countries have any serious plans to this effect. I'm sure it drums up some good publicity in certain mainly arab nations, but every politician likes to talk big, few like to ask a country to pay for a dangerous and expensive war with a nearby nation.

Maybe if we worked with countries like Iran instead of just antagonizing them to the max and declaring their religious government illegitimate (even though the only reason they don't have the secular government they used to have is because we installed the shah because they weren't doing what we wanted, oops!).

If you're feeling threatened by someone, perhaps you should examine why they don't like you - is it because you are always a dick to them? Maybe don't be such a dick? (and apologize for forcibly removing their democratic government just so you could get a bigger piece of the money cake)

The men in their scary black vans will totally park outside my house and steal my wifi!

Oh wait, that's not scary at all because people don't do that. And in real life, I type all my passwords only into sites secured with ssl, which is way better than crappy wifi encryption anyways. So I guess that the neighbor kids might get some free wifi (don't care, not a big deal to block them, mac whitelist, upside-down-ternet etc). If there are people parked outside my house gathering my non-secret data (since my secret data is encrypted regardless of wifi), I either
a) Don't care (google, engineering students, etc
b) Have bigger things to worry about (the FBI, and since I don't have brown skin or read a Koran, I probably won't ever fall into their highly sophisticated detection network)

See also: http://xkcd.com/341/
and furthermore: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/01/securitymatters_0110

"Boeing believes the SolarEagle could fly as early as 2020 or maybe whenever they get around to finishing it after going tens of millions over budget"


There, fixed that for you

Publishers should go pound sand if they don't feel like they can make enough money leeching off authors in the digital world. Perhaps the real problem is that they have all of the sudden found themselves to be completely superfluous middlemen who failed to grab the e-book device and distribution channels when they had the chance.

I can't imagine why any author would really need a publisher anymore (editors and publicists perhaps, but there's no reason editors and publicists need to own copyrights, they provide a service that authors can choose to pay for at their leisure). I want to write a book? I write it, send it to an editor I know, pay him some money, get my friend to do the cover art, put it on amazon. If i'm good, I'll get a publicist to help me advertise and get the word out. Just like authors (and musicians and every other kind of artist) before big media.

That's such BS, there are tons of tools (even commercial tools) which REQUIRE programming ability to make the most of. Take matlab, yes, most of it's features are technically available through the GUI, but if you want to do anything at all interesting with it (like, let's say, multivariate analysis of fMRI data), I think you'd be hard pressed (it would be impossible) to do it without writing a program to do it.

It seems to me that you attitude is the real problem, yeah I could do it in excel with clicky buttons, or I could write a python script that does 10 times more 10 times faster. Not to mention that if someone learns how to program, learning baby stuff like excel and power point won't even require classes.

I recently tought a bunch of psych kids how to write some matlab to run their experiments and analyze their data (see sassy fMRI comment above) and It seems ridiculous that anyone could hope to be any sort of exciting scientist without the ability to at least to some simple data handling in a scripting language.

Very true.

Even the best "lie detector" could only prove what someone believed or remembered to have happened. Many studies have shown memories to be very open to manipulation, children have been convinced by their doctors that they were raped by their own parents (when they were not). People have been manipulated to believe that certain individuals (who look nothing like the real perpetrators) committed acts of violence against them.

Even without overt manipulation, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and there is no reason to believe that even suspects who have not been coerced might come to believe falshoods about their own actions through some combination of internal and external pressure.

Furthermore, as one with personal experience with fMRI data analysis, the though of using fMRI to sentence someone to years in prison or worse is frightening. While over large sample groups certain types of analysis can be reliable, fMRI data is frought with noise, is very low resolution (both spatially and temporally), and due to the huge amount of pre-processing required to get any useful data, would be very vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous types (or merely accidental bad analysis by poor technicians or bad software).

No worries, I'm sure that with their new laws, they'll only use this technology on those pupils who don't look "white enough"

I'd say based on the fact that all your characters were lower case, and the overwhelming proportion of characters to digits, there are significantly fewer bits of entropy in your so-called random comment than you would have us believe.

So you don't buy anything ever? Have you ever eaten anything ever that was not organic? (monsanto), have you ever once used or purchased any product (undoubtedly involved microsoft software somewhere in the build/distribution pipeline). It's dumb to say "I don't buy from these companies" when you really have no choice but to support them with your every action.

home and end keys that go TO THE BEGINNING AND END OF A LINE. LIKE EVERY SANE COMPUTER SYSTEM ON THE PLANET!?!?!?!? what's that you say? I can just ctrl-shift-alt-apple-R-left arrow instead? IF I WANTED TO DO THAT KIND OF SHIT I'D JUST USE EMACS!!!!

God damn do I want one of those!