True on the technicalities, but seriously? Electric radiant heat is terribly inefficient, and more often than not you'll be putting the heat source literally at the ceiling.

Or hell, I dunno. Maybe you guys have fond memories of clustering underneath the bare bulb in your bedroom for warmth when you ran out of heating oil or something.

Just think: if they had been Jersey Shore viewers, it would have been called Sensor NOdes for lo-Ohm Carrier Infrastructure.

In other news, I may have just set a record for worst backronym.

Depends on where he was when he sent the text. It's widely recognized that constitutional protections don't only apply to citizens, although they've never been construed as applying to non-citizens in other sovereign nations, as far as I know.

The US of A is not the government's property, and is not "collectively owned" by the nation, as much as I love Woody Guthrie, so that's a pretty terrible analogy.

But with all that said, this sounds really, really stupid and fishy to me. Like, "is there something else going on here" fishy. Like one of those "evil vs. stupid" debates, a la Wyatt Cenac and John Oliver.

Use an ad blocker? I'd have one less thing to complain about, and bitching and moaning are two of my favorite pastimes.

Oh man, the "Tiny wireless camera!!!" ads? I remember them from the late 90s. I think that they were just flat out ubiquitous, as opposed to following specific people around.

The worst part of those ads was the pervyness. The ads would blare "for security," but they all ran with pictures of half-dressed women.

For certain items and types of purchases, it makes sense. Maybe I'm looking at purchasing a new TV, then decide to hold off for a bit. But because I happened to browse for one on Overstock.com, I might keep seeing ads for it everyplace that Overstock runs ads. In this case, it makes sense: I was about to make something of an impulse buy, and after seeing the ad repeatedly, I may be induced to do go through with it later.

But in other cases, it's annoying as hell and makes no sense at all. I'm in the middle of renovating my house, and was recently looking at ceiling fans and vessel sinks online. Now I can't click on a site without seeing ads for sinks and fans, despite the fact that I made my selection and purchased them weeks ago.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

We trust government employees to do all kinds of stuff we don't allow the general citizenry to do. For example, it is generally illegal to walk around visibly strapped, but cops can do it all the time. The catch is that there are some responsibilities that we don't trust government officials to perform without some form of review. The search warrant is a perfect example: you want to bust in someone's door, you need to demonstrate probable cause to a judge.

How this managed to escape that kind of review is beyond me - this strikes me as a truly terrible decision, but one that might seem to flow naturally from our lack of a constitutionally enshrined right to privacy. Feh, I say. The whole thing stinks.

Re-read what I wrote. I'm aware that the patent mentions jailbreaking: it's in the part I excerpted as well.

Jailbreaking, however, is not presented in the patent which is automatically grounds for remotely bricking (or whatever) the phone. Instead, it's named as a potentially suspicious behavior that may indicate someone is trying to steal a phone.

This makes pretty obvious sense to me.

"Apple yesterday applied for patent to allow remotely disabling electronic devices when 'unauthorized usage' is detected. The patent application covers using the camera to take pictures of the unauthorized user and using GPS to determine location, and it involves ascertaining whether the phone has been hacked or jailbroken, using that as criteria for detecting 'suspicious behavior.' The patent would allow the carrier or any other 'authorized' party to disable or restrict the functionality of the device. Is this Apple's latest tool to thwart jailbreaking?"

This is why we should be able to rate stories -1 Troll.

Nothing in the linked article references jailbreaking. This looks way more like remote disabling for stolen phones - the same way that OnStar customers can call to say that their car has been stolen.

The specific means of identifying whether or not the current user is the one who is supposed to be operating the device is discussed, and in that context:

The method of [identifying a particular activity indicating a suspicious behavior], wherein the particular activity comprises one or more of hacking the electronic device, jailbreaking the electronic device, unlocking the electronic device, removing a SIM card from the electronic device, and moving at least a predetermined distance away from a synced device.

So in other words, if someone steals your iPhone, they won't be able to thwart anti-theft devices by jailbreaking your phone or yanking the SIM.

"It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. By 3:44 am, it has a comfortable nest-egg and is on track to retire early, perhaps with a nice condo in Hernando, Florida."

Ideally you'd move all non-solar power generation offplanet and either beam the power down to a rectenna array or run it down a superconductor woven into a space elevator, the former being possible with today's technology if only we could get the hardware up there.

Rectenna? Damn near killed Tenna!

(This post brought to you buy the Foundation for Jokes that Depend on Pronunciation.)

Were you being facetious? The EFF are the lawyers - when you make a donation to them, you're helping to pay for litigation for people who may not otherwise be able to afford lawyers. Check out some of the legal battles they've won here, and consider making a donation.

Werd.

I may actually be more likely to buy an iPad now that I've seen this. Just out of spite.

If the two events were to be truly compared, then the First Amendment should have made anyone with a printing press unable to refuse to print and distribute whatever someone else wants based on content, and that includes the major newspapers of the time - the First Amendment did no such thing, but network neutrality will do if it were to be implemented as trumpeted on Slashdot.

Your analogy is deeply, misleadingly, and vexatiously flawed. Net neutrality legislation doesn't enjoin people attempting to produce content, as do the printers of your example. It enjoins people attempting to take part in a public infrastructure which transmits that content to would-be consumers. As it happens, the founders did have an opinion about that, and the US Postal Service was established in an attempt to give equal access to that service.

For a lot of reasons that should probably be obvious, I don't think that the USPS makes a very good point of comparison with the Internet. But your analogy is simply ludicrous, unless you think that the passage of Net Neutrality is going to force, say, HBO to produce my four part special on toe cheese.

Out of curiosity, why? One would assume that you already have the "source" of the theme, since there's no compiled code in there.