"They don't want to endanger the space-farers or the public, and they can't let the industry get started and then have a Titanic-like scenario that puts an end to it all in the eyes of the public."

Right, because after the Titanic, there's never been another cruise ship. The very idea of sea travel came to an end in the eyes of the public!

Ten years now. Slashdot covered that story, too. Belkin has been on my boycott list ever since.

One-in-a-billion is a thousand times more likely than one-in-a-trillion odds, right? I'm still not anywhere likely to win that bet, though.

The article doesn't even have any odds/numbers. Yet the headline contains "far greater." And then ends with this:

Dr Perrillat said there are no known supervolcanoes that are in danger of erupting in the foreseeable future, and it would take at least a decade or so for the magma pressure within a caldera to build up to a point where an eruption is likely.

In other words, there's no story here. Researchers figured out that the volcanoes can go off on their own rather than being precipitated by an earthquake, and this somehow translated to "far greater" by the hack writers who wrote this story.

My main point was "vote with your dollars" against sleazeball behavior from companies like this. Some of their products may work fine, without incident, but that doesn't mean I want them to have a single dollar from me.

I always blast the software the router came with. Even router software from a company with an otherwise untarnished reputation I don't trust; if it's closed source, you may as well assume it has a backdoor in it.

But I will never give this company another dime for what they did back in 2003, and I will take every opportunity to inform people about that incident, so they may make the same decisions.

Wow, I've seen so many inventions claiming to "end the need for complex passwords" over the past twenty years that we've certainly ended the need for complex passwords by now, haven't we? Wait, we haven't?

On another topic, has the Voyager probe left the solar system again yet?

Never trust a product made by this company. "Belkin Routers Route Users to Censorware Ad", reported by Slashdot:

The Register has a story today about Belkin routers redirecting their users' network traffic. To me, this seems like the logical next step after top-level domain name servers piping ads to your browser. Now the routers themselves hijack the traffic they are supposed to, uh, route -- and you'll love where they send you instead. But it's OK because you can opt out. Incidentally, the Crystal Ball Award goes to Seth Finkelstein, who in 2001 quoted John Gilmore's famous aphorism about the internet, and asked "What if censorship is in the router?"

This company has been on my shitlist for ten years and always will be.

...global warming is supposed to be melting all this ice.

I can't wait to see how they fit this into the "climate change" theory. The ice is melting, it's climate change; the ice is not melting, it's climate change; more ice is forming, it'll be climate change.

And of course the irony of a "climate change" research expedition getting stuck in sea ice will be entirely lost on them.

Eventually insurance companies will make use of these sensors required in order for you to purchase their policies (or at least not pay exorbitant rates), and of course they'll penalize you if the sensors detect you living an unhealthy lifestyle, not following your doctor's instructions, and so on. And now that we have compulsory insurance in this "free country," there'll be no escaping being surveilled and coerced like this.

Aren't you glad you supported Obamacare? Say goodbye to yet more of your freedom.

'We believe that the case is closed — supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit ...

So, if most have no clear benefit, that means some do, and considering most Americans are not well-nourished, but eat quite unhealthy diets, the results of this study don't apply to them. Perhaps multivitamins provide a benefit to people who don't get the 100% daily allowance of all those vitamins from their diet.

Of course, multivitamins are a form of (self-)medication outside the control and regulation of the medical establishment, so the self-serving results of this study (or rather, the weasely way it's been summarized) are no surprise to me.

Whining by buggy whip salesmen. That's all.

And post a dupe of URL three days later.

The parallels to certain historical incidents in the same country are rather interesting, aren't they?

Seems nearly every population needs a hated underclass to dump on. Let's them avoid dealing with whatever their true problems are.

#1. Absolute freedom of (written) speech, at least for the most part, to a degree that I am not aware of existing anywhere in the civilized world.

It's true that the U.S. has the broadest free-speech laws in the world, but I'd hardly say it's "absolute" (and you even immediately contradicted this with "at least for the most part").

As another comment pointed out, there's libel and slander.

Then, apropos to the article here, there's hate speech, where if the government can claim that it was an immediate exhortation to violence, they can prosecute it. This is an expansion of the old court precedent against "fighting words."

And then there's so-called "child pornography," laws which started out meaning actual pornographic images of children, but which have been broadened to mean anyone under 18 and/or depictions of children that aren't in any way "pornographic" but might be considered somewhat sexual in nature to someone, such as fully-clothed child models. The rationales for these laws have been used to create ever more laws proscribing "harmful" imagery such as so-called "animal crush videos" and other depictions of animal cruelty, gory accident and crime scene photos and videos, and the like. And on the reverse side, despite the fact that these laws were rationalized as not prohibiting speech but intending to prohibit actual harm (to the children, animals, &c., in the photos), the government has also attempted---but so far failed, but only after lengthy court battles---to expand child-porn laws to cover cartoon/CGI imagery in which no real children were actually depicted let alone harmed.

There are also still plenty of old-fashioned obscenity laws on the books, and the government regularly uses these against more extreme kinds of pornography. Bush II's attorney general John Ashcroft launched several major prosecutions, and state governments do it all the time.

Then there are laws against making threatening statements. These laws may have started out meaning things like making direct "I'm going to kill you"-style threats, but nowadays anyone claiming to feel "threatened" by someone else's speech can get someone in trouble. There are both general "criminal threatening" laws in most jurisdictions and special laws protecting our privileged classes such as the president, judges, politicians, and so on.

The Federal Government still has a law on the books from 1918 that directly prohibits political speech if it calls for the overthrow of the government itself. Many states have copies of this law from the same era. There are laws against espionage that can be used to go after political speech, too. Look at what happened to Edward Snowden and what would probably happen to Julian Assange if they got their hands on him.

And of course there's the government's massive and ever-expanding war on "piracy." Try distributing someone else's "copyrighted" speech without their permission and see what happens.

There are also many, many laws prohibiting publishing "advice" without the requisite government permission. Try giving investment or medical advice without a license, or legal advice without being a lawyer, and see what happens. The IRS also regularly goes after people publishing books on how to get around taxes, books that claim the income tax scheme is illegal, unconstitutional, and so on.

There's no freedom of speech when "commerce" is involved (or the government can claim it is). Advertising, packaging, labeling, and so on, are highly regulated. Companies are prohibited from including a multitude of claims on labels, prohibited from using certain terms, required to use others, and in certain fields like alcohol and tobacco, there are even more stringent regulations, such as advertising that seems to appeal to minors. I know a microbrewer who was told by the ATF that he could not include an American flag on his label.

There's no freedom of speech on network television or radio. They censor anything the FCC considers "harmful to minors" such as sex, nudity, strong language, or violence.

So, there is your "freedom of speech" in the United States. This is the legal landscape we ended up with even with something as strong as "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" in the Constitution.