I may not be rich enough to benefit from the Republicans' policies, but I'm also definitely not rich enough to pay for the Democrats'.

Good thing I just finished my drink. Thank you for my new non-Slashdot sig.

It began way before they were in high school. They got them as preschoolers.

You need to put a television show on aimed at preschoolers. Make it have a fuzzy stuffed bear who helps kids with things they don't know how to do themselves. Make it a "special assignment" for this bear to help the kids.

The kids are told to do X or Y (make their bed, change the lining in their rabbit cage) by themselves with no parent guidance. That's key number 1.

So how does this external agent, this "stuffed bear" change agent, know how to visit the children to help them? How else? A flying ladybug, that conceals a camera in it. The camera flies in the neighborhood, sees the conundrum of the child, deploys the camera and takes some footage. It then flies to a line-of-sight position, and sends the signal to an orbiting satellite, from where it's beamed to the special agent bear's headquarters. His employer then takes him off of whatever he's doing to go help the child with what they want to accomplish. After all, "it's all part of the plan" (we'll make that a tagline of the show, too.)

Farfetched? I don't think so, unfortunately.

I'm seeing that a bunch of repliers to this opine that Gatto is a candidate for a tinfoil hat. However, I want to push the idea back upstream from the time that you first give up your kid to the state institution. It's too late by then.

What is REALLY needed to make acceptance of this sort of surveillance is to get them when they're preschoolers.

You need to put a television show on aimed at preschoolers. Make it have a fuzzy stuffed bear who helps kids with things they don't know how to do themselves. Make it a "special assignment" for this bear to help the kids.

The kids are told to do X or Y (make their bed, change the lining in their rabbit cage) by themselves with no parent guidance. That's key number 1.

So how does this external agent, this "stuffed bear" change agent, know how to visit the children to help them? How else? A flying ladybug, that conceals a camera in it. The camera flies in the neighborhood, sees the conundrum of the child, deploys the camera and takes some footage. It then flies to a line-of-sight position, and sends the signal to an orbiting satellite, from where it's beamed to the special agent bear's headquarters. His employer then takes him off of whatever he's doing to go help the child with what they want to accomplish. After all, "it's all part of the plan" (we'll make that a tagline of the show, too.)

Farfetched? I don't think so, unfortunately.

I'll one-up you: I think it's improper to put recording devices in children's homes EVEN IF THEY WERE INFORMING THEM. But, with the greatest sadness, I'll guess that if they had informed them then this whole thing would blow over and be a-ok.

I have heard, but can't yet confirm, that there was an EULA that actually said this very thing and needed to be signed before the laptop was deployed.

Not sure whether the EULA specifically spelled out "You. Can. Be. Spied. Upon" or words to that effect, or whether it was more mealy-mouthed stuff. Given the EULAs that I've endured, it was probably full of goo and dribble.

yup. Spent 5 years there. It's now the Iron Pigs baseball stadium. I have a commemorative brick from the Union Blvd. site with an Agere Systems plaque on it, from when they tore down Building 30.

A life? Where can I download that?

I got my FB account just after Christmas. Deactivated it last week. No thanks.

I have a strange feeling about this 'social networking' thing. Not really comfortable with it, I'm not. I can "get" LinkedIn, but I think that's as much as I want to share.

I also seem to have three Buzz followers already. Keep following me, peeps - I ain't gonna be there, either.

I worked at Lucent Microelectronics in Allentown - not known to be a seismic area, true dat. However, the opto group in Breinigsville was right off of Rt. 222 and in the midst of a very busy beehive of distribution centers, with the concomitant truck traffic. Constant truck traffic. Neverending truck traffic.

All of the cleanrooms in Breinigsville were built on large springs to isolate them from the movement of the buildings; yes, the tractor trailers could affect them even though they were on a highway a good couple of hundred yards away.

And our sniffers in the Allentown MOS fabs could sense when a truck went by on Union Boulevard from the diesel particulates.

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

The least amount of urea or sand was said to 'poison' the chips despite the mammoth water filtration system in the basement.

Ugh. The least amount of urea or SALT, not sand. How lame.

Maybe there's more to this story, but it'll end up being something rather mundane.

I worked for a time at a chip fab in Allentown PA and they were slavish about the use of only sand to lay down over icy walkways in the winter. The least amount of urea or sand was said to 'poison' the chips despite the mammoth water filtration system in the basement.

The contamination they're worried about is not from process water, I would wager.

Mod me redundant if you must, but I depise all of them equally.

According to the NY Times article, a scientist (Georg Kaser) warned the working group in 2006 that the findings were erroneous. How did it take four years to bubble up?

I'd call that a pretty glacial response time. (rimshot)

Amen to A Christmas Carol. I had recorded it when it was on TNT originally in 1999, but set it aside and never watched it. About two weeks ago I picked it up and me and my family watched it. We loved it, even the four year old and the 2 year old. They rendered their opinion of Scrooge as "He's a grumpy old man who doesn't like Christmas."

I liked it so much I ordered the DVD from Amazon so I wouldn't have to put up with the commercials. Of course, the kids found the "Muppet Christmas Carol" so now it's tough to watch anything but that; but it's okay, I like Michael Caine too.