Sony has launched a multi-million dollar effort aimed at figuring out how to put a rootkit on a vinyl record.

So, the Wachowski brothers are famous, but not famous enough for people to remember what they're famous for?

I am drawing a blank coming up with a scenario whereby I couldn't just create a hash of the SSN, and use it as the key instead. Most databases servers can do this for you. If you need to search by SSN, you can just hash the searched field, then match the hashes. Obviously, you need to be extremely careful passing the SSN to the server, but it doesn't seem insurmountable.

While I don't disagree that all diplomatic avenues need to be exhausted prior to military action, developing weapons is hardly contradictory to that. The lead time on weapons development is long, and you need to be able to field a first rate army, if it does come to that. You can pursue diplomacy as the first, and virtually only option, while simultaneously preparing for the worst. I like the US carrying the big stick. It's the not walking softly I'm not too keen on.

Ted Nugent's kids?

The bloody party is always field dressing. It's no stretch to imagine cutting yourself while field dressing an animal. I wear very thick rubber gloves when dressing deer. Not getting messy is a luxury villagers out hunting for "bush meat" probably don't have.

People get really bent out of shape about cellphones. I don't like them going off at inopportune times, either, but I see that as a small price to pay for the convenience of always being able to place a call, or be reached, if I so choose. If you forget to turn the phone off and it goes off in a movie, I'm not going to freak out, as long as you look like you made an honest attempt to silence it ASAP. Just do better next time. Most people don't like looking like an ass in a college class any more than you like having their phone go off. Thankfully cell phone usage has gotten beyond the point where people liked to be seen on them. Remember this?: "Oh, I'm sorry. My CELLULAR phone is ringing." As they proudly whip out a Motorola MicroTac (nothing "micro" about that beast), and yammer on it just to be seen doing it.

Just two, my man, but how you get them in there is the tricky part.

You magnificent bastard!

It wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of those saying they have an "HD DVD player" actually own up-converting DVD players.

Here comes the Fun Cooker!

In hype, perhaps... I thought that "search overload" commercial was clever the first time I saw it. Then, when I saw it 3 more times in the same hour, I wanted to hurt someone. It's about twice as long as it should be, and it gets unbelievably tedious. It annoys me so badly that I've already sworn off ever using it.

My first thought (aside from "invisible" submarines) is what this could do for kidney stones... Somebody with more knowledge on the subject may want to check my reasoning (the best part of /.), but I would think that better-focused ultrasound could really cut down on "collateral damage" from breaking up kidney stones, possibly allowing the technique to be used more effectively on a wider variety of cases.

Do HydraShoks count as "water"?

I have to take exception with your statement that it's "worthless to a LARGE amount of end users". There are LARGE numbers of people who only use their computers to look things up online, check their banking, do some email, etc. My father's one of those users.

He's got an older desktop system that had a completely hashed copy of Win98 on it. This machine would run XP acceptably, but why pay for the license for something that old? I sure as hell wasn't going to put Win98 back on it. I consider it irresponsible to put on an OS that isn't still getting updates. There were 3 choices: buy a new machine for him to barely use, buy a copy of XP to put on an old machine, or install Xubuntu. Xubuntu saved him money, and does, literally, everything he needs it to do.

Also, you can't make the blanket statement about installation. Installing Ubuntu is significantly more intuitive than Windows. Other than the partitioning, which is just as big of an issue for Windows, if not bigger, I'm betting my wife could pull it off. It really is pretty slick.