This raises another question. What happens when these people refuse to answer questions or allow a search of their home?

IANAL, but I've done quite a bit of reading about this topic. The rule (at least in the US) is very simple: You are not required, nor should you allow any law enforcement officer into your home or business without a search warrant. Needless to say, you should not be talking to them at the front door either. They are not going to bust your door down, and it's likely they will not return.

Keep in mind that you should never talk to a federal agent without your attorney's advice. The reason? It is a federal crime to lie to a federal agent, and there are many cases of people being charged with lying rather than the original crime for which they were being investigated.

Don't take my word for it. Read the words of a former government attorney (scroll down to "The Raid"). There are any number of good articles and videos authored by attorneys. Here's another one that's worth a read.

...and since I have an interest in chemistry, I do a lot of Google searches about things that are mentioned in the show, such as the process of meth production and the precursors of meth production. I noticed Wikipedia has an article on meth production, not to mention alternative ways to produce precursors such as phenylacetone without getting the attention of the feds.

So why is it that I stand a better chance of getting a visit from the DEA than does Jimmy?

And no, I don't use Tor because I refuse to submit to a tyrannical government (at least not while I don't have an M-16 pointed at my face).

The American people did vote. They voted for a candidate that explicitly promised the closing of Guantanamo

Not only has Obama not closed Gitmo, he closed the office that was charged with closing Gitmo . Go figure.

No they didn't. Nearly every consumer ISP has clauses that state you can't run "business servers" through the residential connections. While that term is broad and hard to enforce, ISP's don't hassle you if your traffic is light or unobtrusive. I've only been notified by Charter about my server when it got a PHP/SQL injection and hosted a virus. As soon as that was cleared up and patched they didn't care about it.

I can assure you from personal experience that Comcast will move heaven and earth in order to ensure you don't run any type of server on their networks. My point being is that your point is totally anecdotal (as is mine) and not necessarily representative of all ISPs.

I haven't laughed so hard at anything posted on /. in months. Anyone who mods this down is fucking dead.

Geez, what a manipulative waste of time. Randal is a smart guy; maybe that was the point of the exercise: To see just how many morons out there (including myself) followed this banal story to its bitter and anticlimactic end.

For those just dying to poke sharp sticks in their eyes, I recommend this link instead.

The summary makes it sound like the truck was at fault, when in fact the school bus driver stopped "forward of the stop line" then proceeded into the intersection with the truck having the right of way.

Also misleading: The NTSB is not calling for wireless technology in vehicles. In fact, the report simply states (as a conclusion, not a recommendation) that such technology may have prevented the situation from occurring:

Connected vehicle technology could have provided active warnings to the school bus
driver of the approaching truck and possibly prevented the crash.

Oh, and no amount of "active warnings" would likely have helped an impaired driver. Nothing to see here, just more sensationalism.

Apparently by linking to that image, you were stealing it. Who knew?!

But wait! It says, right here in their TOS:

"8. Links

      You are welcome to link to hardwaresecrets.com. Links may include text
      of headlines and brief summaries up to one paragraph of the linked
      article."

(Of course, I had to copy this from lynx since they do some JS chicanery that prevents you from hightlighting text on the page.)

These boards are only half the solution to a parallel problem. I used to write satellite imaging software that was parallelized on a 12-CPU server. A lot of work went into the code necessary to parallelize the mapping and DTM algorithms. It wasn't trivial either. I'm failing to see the usefulness of these boards for anything other than intensive scientific computation. Because if the code being run isn't written for parallel processors, you're getting no advantage to running it on a multicore/multiprocessor computer.

Or am I missing something here?

IMO, if students don't show up for roll call too often, you talk to them. Then you talk to their parents. Motivating them (children AND parents) is your job

You mistakenly assume every kid has a parent (or parents, if they're lucky) who actually care about the welfare of the child. I teach at a large high school that is 60% Hispanic, 50% or more on free lunch. I can tell you that most of these students don't have parents that you can just call and say "Little Hector wasn't at school today, can you please explain to him the importance of class blah blah blah?" These parents are out working, many working 12-16 hour days. They don't have the time nor the inclination to get involved with the child's education process. Many of them have never themselves graduated from high school.

The point being is that parental contact is not the panacea that you make it out to be, especially when you are teaching young people who basically survive on the streets and don't have the traditional family structure from which you and I were lucky enough to come.

In dismissing the case, the court agreed with the precedent set in two other cases, which basically said that Americans donâ(TM)t even have the right to sue their government over its surveillance program, unless they can prove that their communications were intercepted. Of course, thatâ(TM)s essentially impossible since the program is classified and you canâ(TM)t use classified documents in court, even if you somehow got your hands on them.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/why_you_cant_sue_the_government_for_spying_on_you/

I don't get it... we can't even secure our nuclear power plants, water and waste processing facilities, and other critical public infrastructure from attacks on industrial infrastructure. Why would anyone in their right mind think home automation would be any more secure?
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Because some of us are in our right mind. I use an SSH tunnel accessible by my smartphone to control a Radio Thermostat via my wifi router, with WPA-2 authentication and MAC authentication. Perfect? Of course not...but I'm reasonably comfortable with the level of security I'm using. So yes, home automation can be done securely. It would be far easier for someone to just bust a window and change the thermostat by hand than to hack their way into my setup.

Unfortunately, doing it right is beyond 99.99% of the population's technical know-how to pull it off successfully and securely. The GP nailed it: So long as there is a commercial incentive to give the public a shiny interface to their home automation stuff, it will never be done securely.

and yet, we'll continue to lie to our kids at school when we teach them about our 'constitution' and how we have the high moral ground on all the issues and that the US is the most free country in the world.

We'll continue the "lie" in the hopes that our children will take up the mantle and fight for freedom from domestic spying and all the other Constitutional abuses that we have permitted to creep into our lives. Since us adults have utterly failed at the job.

...started with a phone interview a couple of years back (2006 maybe?). I was asked some run-of-the-mill questions, then the bombshell: An obscure question about an obscure RFC that had to do with big integer number representations. I told the interviewer that I really didn't know, and would she like me to wing an answer or get back to her on it? She told me to wing an answer. So I did. Later, I looked up the RFC and saw that I was more wrong than right.

Strangely, they offered to fly me to Mountain View for a second interview. Not so strangely, I declined. And I've never regretted the decision.

Interestingly enough, a quick search of the Wayback Machine no longer returns copies of this site. Oh wait, let's look at who funds Internet Archive:

http://archive.org/about/credits.php

Enough said.