You can bet your sweet ass that if Pat Robertson thought driving a bus full of true Christian believers who were willing to be martyrs into an abortion clinic would make him and the people that follow him martyrs and spark a great fundamentalist Christian conversion, he would do it in a fucking heartbeat.

He's smart enough to know that the backlash would destroy the evangelical movement, but don't think for a second that something similar hasn't crossed his mind.

Five years of working retail from 14-19 certainly taught me to hate the vast majority of humanity and swear like a sailor.

However, the good customers made up for the meager paycheck and the idiot boss.

I didn't know you had a Slashdot account! Tell me more!

Um, no. The Fourth Amendment says no unreasonable search or seizure, not no unwarranted search and seizure. It does, however, set out what a warrant requires, but it does not require a warrant for a lawful search:

There are many cases where a warrentless search has been held to be reasonable, and thus not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

That being said, warrantless wiretapping of the entire US population is, indeed, an unreasonable intrusion, in my opinion.

The problem with a system that relies on trusted third parties is that these third parties have to be, well, trusted. This implies that they are trustworthy. Have you evaluated all of the CAs on the list included with your operating system and browser for trustworthiness? I know I haven't. I've delegated that to the OS vendor and the browser vendor. Should I be doing this? Do I have evidence that shows that my OS vendor and browser vendor are trustworthy? And whose interest do they work for?

These are all things that need to be evaluated when dealing with a system that requires trusted third parties. The problem, of course, is that very few people actually do this. SSL is a system that requires trusted third parties if you are to put any trust in the fact that the certificate signed by a CA really belongs to the person the CA says it belongs to.

[This is, technically not true with self-signed certificates. Anybody can be a CA. Just self-sign a certificate and use that to sign the certificates of others. The problem is that you're not included by default. Of course, there are some sites that have their own CA, either for business reasons or because they can. They have an internal CA that they use to sign certificate for business purposes. These CAs are verified and pushed to machines, either by Active Directory at Windows sites or some other mechanism. There's no reason that an individual can't do the same when they generate certificates. The problem is that the fingerprint of CA certificates needs to be validated out of band in order for you the avoid a man in the middle attack when distributing the CA certificate to somebody else. This sort of distribution of SSL certificates would not require a trusted third party, but you would need to be able to identify the person or organization giving you the fingerprint and judge their trustworthiness.]

It sure does. When someone signs up for online banking, make them go to the branch to set a password and give them documentation showing how to verify the certificate and set it up in their browser. Bonus points for making this a bank-specific CA and then having rotating certificates on the bank website that are signed by this bank-specific CA so that this only needs to be done once per computer/browser.

He has another option, which corporations like to use. My wife works for a company that manufactures cheap chain saws, weed eaters, blowers and such stuff. Cheap power tools often break down, or cause accidents. They get sued for their crummy products from time to time. They offer little to no defense, sometimes settling, sometimes ignoring the issue, whatever seems right to them.

When they figure they've had enough heat, they change names, transfer ownership other members of the families, and other wierd crap. Working at the same plant with the same supervisors, the wife has signed paychecks from at least six different companies in the last 12 years.

So, this guy can just "give away" the rights to his script and/or software, and allow someone else to be the owner. He may or may not actually retain control, but he has "ceased and desisted" the distribution of that software. Facebook can't demand much more than that. He can change the name of the software, the name of the "owner", the place of business, and anything else he cares to change, as often as he likes, and thumb his nose at Facebook.

...the Netherlands. Oh, and Venice. We'll all end up as game addicts in a suburb of Sprawlopolis.

The disk drives weren't faster, it was the I/O interface to the computer that was faster. PET's used the IEEE-488 parallel bus, while the C64 used the IEEE-488-"C" serial bus. Obviously a parallel bus can move more bits at a time than a serial bus at the same operating frequency. When compared to the tape drives, the disk drive was blazing fast. :)

Modern construction techniques and materials are actually really good. Except for the occasional airliner or two crashing into them, our buildings are able to withstand tremendous strain. These days, most new buildings in the modern world are built with these techniques and materials. Flexible yet firm. Light yet strong. We've come a long way in this respect.

But we also have the money to build these things. Take a look at some recent tragedies caused by earthquakes. Bam, Chile, etc. These aren't places that have especially tall buildings. In fact, most of their buildings are slapped together walls with heavy roofs. When the ground starts shaking, these things are death traps.

So this new technology is great, but don't expect to see it saving lives in the Third World. Those places will continue to lose people by the thousands every time a 6+ magnitude earthquake hits. They just don't have the money to build correctly.

Think of anti-virus as a vaccination. When you receive a vaccination, it protects you against the specific threat that the vaccination is designed to protect you from. The same holds true for anti-virus software. There is no magical "this program will destroy your computer or steal your personal information" opcode in software, so anti-virus software is designed to detect things it knows to be suspicious. If something is unknown (either because it is new and there aren't virus definition files for it or if your virus definition files are out of date because your 30-day trial has expired or you're not connected to the Internet or the software fails to automatically update or your anti-virus software has been compromised or switched off), your anti-virus software has a very slim chance of picking something malicious.

That is why an anti-virus package wouldn't stop threats newer than its definition files.

The constitutional definition of treason is as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

It's rather difficult to get a conviction for treason, and there's a damn good reason - the Founders wanted the people to be able to criticize their government freely. That's why it's "levying war" or "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort". That being said, the maximum penalty for treason is the death penalty. Judges sentencing have leeway in what they decide, and unless someone died, critical state secrets were passed along, or troop movements were disclosed, it's unlikely that any judge would sentence someone convicted of treason to death.

Thanks.

I love you too?

Yes, but who makes the APIs that do all of the hard work? Nerds! That's great that what they make can be easily used, but as long as humans want to do something new with the computer, there will always be the need for a nerd that knows more than the average person to implement it.

There are still many open questions in computer science (which is to computer programming as astronomy is to telescopes) which will both push the boundaries of what computers can do as well as make computers more usable for the average person to solve problems. If you're concerned about job availability as well as not being treated a cog in the machine by your co-workers, then work on the edges of the field, not in the well-defined center.