They thought the google street view cars are on the prowl catching escaped prisoners. May be that caused the laxed security. "Where can they hide? Google will find them!" must have been the attitude of the wardens. http://www.psfk.com/2012/08/un...

Very different from my experience definitely. I am not in the publish or perish race. Commercial software development of design analysis tools. Finite elements, finite difference, mesh generation, strong architecture for managing large number of simulations form our core competency. Very clear metrics on performance. Your code works, or it does not. It solves customer's problem, or it does not. Tilll we were acquired by a bigger company we would rather ship a feature rather than delaying it to file for patents.

But I have heard of very difficult funding situation in grad schools in basic science, and in liberal arts side.

Looks like the places I have worked in USA must be very much off the norm. Grad school, followed by a small company founded by a professor and his two grad students... Very relaxed atmosphere, never heard any raised voices or snide comments behind the back belittling anyone. Very international workforce. Most arguments will take the form of "Can you prove your algo will terminate?" "It will take longer to prove, easier to code it up and test" "Engineers! blah, you will get a few test cases working and you will ship the damned thing, customer projects will get into endless loop" "Mathematicians, argh! yeah, but we can add an endless loop detector and bail out" "OK next meeting on Monday 2 PM, let us go catch some lunch, did you print the crossword puzzle?". My workplace has above average pay, highly educated colleagues, with long and stable marriages, with kids doing very well in schools along with low incivility. The last one is perception, all others are backed by hard data based on US median for those statistics.

I think incivility in work places would be common in places with poor pay, larger worker turn over, very interchangeable skill sets among the workers, and tough management practices. As one who has been solving crosswords for two decades (not the NYT trivia based one, the London Times Crypic with a decent mix of anagrams, double definitions, cryptic definitions, hidden clues and puns). I can tell you anything can put off anagram performance. Somedays you look at the words and the solutions leap at you. Somedays you don't get it. For all you know it could be the breakfast you had that morning.

I recall an NPR piece about a post doc talking about ants. She said, "Ants can't be addled". She had a built a contraption that will pick an ant and place it back some 12 inches behind, making it retrace the last 12 inches of its path again and again. I think it was not computerized or robotized. Seemed like she was operating the contraption manually and after several dozen attempts (or a few hundred can't recall) she gave up. So it gels with this summary that says forgetfulness helps.

For the first few times I saw IMAX it was good. Then IMAX decided to create just a large flat screen and slap IMAX logo to wring cash. The large flat screen is nowhere near the IMAX parabolic dome screen. Then very good head phones came to the market that will compensate for outside noise and deliver deafening sound without all the 18 kW speakers IMAX uses. After all the technical things, what really sucks is the fare they are showing. How many times can one watch the Colorado river and the polar ice caps? It has become so bad local science museum has made IMAX free with membership.

Now will they dare to ask slashdot to take down my comments?

Sorry I am not familiar with British law, though my grandma taught me the first line of "God save the King" in Tamil, curiously it was not any generic King, it was specifically King George the Fifth, Emperor of India when grandma went to school, probably the only thing she remembered from school. Poor old soul. But all the old novels used to talk about "appealing all the way to the Privy Council". Is this privy council above the high court? Is there an appeal winding its way? Who defended the rights of the people making personal copies? Also there was this novelist Leon Uris who wrote a novel titles QB-7 Queen's Bench-7 which I imagine could be higher than even the Privy Council if it is not the same.

Any chance of this ruling being reversed?

It all looks like some old re-run of Who's the Boss followed by Golden Girls. Who buys blank CDs to copy ripped music anyways? It is all being saved in hard disks and SDcards anyway. Blank DVDs and CDs have gone the way VHS cassettes and D-90 audio cassettes have gone. Create a tax, limit it to these media, make sure the tax is not extended to hard disks and SD cards, and make the ripping legal.

Greedy carriers don't want you to check bags, don't want you to bring carry-on, would rather you slim down and weigh less than 135 lb and have a 28 inch waist, that way they could cram one more seat per aisle, would like to do away with rest rooms, want you to line up nicely and fill the plane as if they are pouring water..

Actually they would rather you don't fly at all, just give them the money they feel they are entitled to and stay home.

Amazed he (or she) has not discovered how to set IEEE exception handlers. The only platform that would not let me set the handlers is DEC-Alpha. Technically it would let me set it at compile time, but at run time it will blithely ignore it and invoke the default exception handler. Default is crash. At some point we stopped doing purify, boundschecker etc. If it does not crash in DEC-Alpha, it has no memory violations!

Let me be the first one to dub this program Obamanet.

Next question, please.

If you receive the call on a POTS phone, the call got transferred to POTS somewhere. If you get it in a cell phone, it too got into the cell phone network, probably through a POTS gateway. Only people who use VOIP phones would be able to get it all the way in VOIP.

The scammers mostly target elderly and not so tech savvy people. Most of them are not on VoIP phones. They all use trusty old POTS phones, probably the beige monstrosity pushed by AT&T back in the 80s.

The VOIP calls come through some point of presence over to the POTS system. At the transfer point, the POTS knows the originating number of the call, and it can verify the caller-id record and abort the call, if it wants to.

The plain old telephone system evolved in an earlier era, security by obscurity was the norm. There were using simple whistling tones added/removed to regular conversation for data communication between exchanges. All analog. Blind phone phreaks were stealing just long distance minutes from the phone companies. But now the phone companies feel they have no liability to detect spoofed caller id. If some courts hold the phone companies liable for transmitting false phone numbers, using some lawyerly language like "aiding and abetting" "knowingly providing false information" "negligent" etc, then there could be some relief.

Even if some phone companies feel that this fraudulent calls will eventually destroy their entire landline business, they alone will not/could not do much because the dynamics of free markets. Unless there is some cost associated with not catching the spoofers, whatever marginal revenue they get by not catching them would always win.

But opportunity is on its way to own half of mars.