If someone takes an open source project and removes some components for privacy concerns, which obviously appeals to a certain audience, who cares if he has ads on his webspace for it? Should his bandwidth be free out of the goodness of his heart?

(And why on earth would you trust some random guy on the internet in the first place?)

Why do you think there's a trust issue in the first place? It's open source. If you're that paranoid go look under the hood, see if you can find anything objectionable.

Can you step back and look at the big picture?

1) Going to the moon has what tangible short _or_ long term benefit to human kind that you can articulate now?

I'd argue you can't really. The science learned will be invaluable to certain fields, but right now it's a gamble at best. Yes, something good will come of it, granted, but what and when? Noone knows. I'm not saying it's not worth it, I'm suggesting there are more tangible things that can be done with money, now.

2) "Spreading the wealth around" is exactly what we need to do.

Bill Gates is doing a good thing for humanity and helping out in fields such as medicine (malaria), he even donates money to PBS, etc for education among other things. Can you say the same for the other billionaires on the planet? Probably not.

Look, the truth of the matter is, we have enough problems here at home (both in the US and in the world) that need to be addressed and fixed before we spend billions upon billions of dollars on building things on other planets.

Healthcare in the US is an absolute mess. I have friends that are downright uninsureable. One, due to cancer while he wasn't covered, he's absolutely boned. Noone will touch him with a stick let alone their money.

If that means my taxes go up 5%, so be it. If something happens to me, my wife, kids, parents, etc, I want to know they will be taken care of and not just looked at in terms of profitability.

Capitalism works to a certain extent. Human health is _not_ one of them.

The short of it is, I'm a science guy and I can see the benefit in taking money from pure science and potentially moving it to the health of our citizens.

I'm pretty well off as I live quite comfortably but I know many who aren't and they should have the same health care as I do. End of story.

* Yes, I took the healthcare "socialist" stance with this post. It is something I believe in and can articulate with personal experience.

I was posting photos taken at events run by an organization where I was a volunteer for 16 years. I couldn't remember the name of the bands in a couple of the photos, so I went back to the web site. Only, the new management had completely deleted all the detailed band information!

It wasn't captured in the Wayback machine either.

That is why I would support an archive, but given how sites are built today, that may be difficult to do.

Not a new idea. Google is working actively to stop this kind of abuse, which they do by forcing you to go through a captcha if you try to search for terms that are related to malware. I have taken apart a few "evil" programs that did google searches, and each time I found that the search terms had a captcha block.

State of the art for malware is to use a generator function (typically a hash) to generate random domain names. If it loses contact with the C&C servers it will use this generator to try domain names until it finds a new configuration file (propperly encrypted and signed). For the controller they only need to register one of the domain names generated by the hash and eventually the bots will all reconnect.

If your neighbors are assholes holding hands and singing ain't going to happen, it's best just to grow a pair and tell them if you don't have the balls create a login page to your hotspot that plays the recording of you neighbors having sex, or pictures of dog shit from your neighbors dog, just make sure your shit is in-order before you do.

Do you really think you could understand the motives of a being who can create a universe?

According to some religions, I am "made" in that being's image, so, yeah, why not?

Churches (whether Wiccan, Hindu, or whatever) don't question their gods or the motives of their gods, nor should they.

Odd you should choose those two religions as an example. Not only do a lot of Wiccans and Hindus ask such deep questions, many (though by no means all) could be identified as pantheists, who do not believe in a creator god who pre-exists and stands outside the universe.

Set up your devices with static addresses and set a dhcp scope above the addresses that you need. Then you transparently redirect any http request originating from the dhcp scope to say, www.google.com (or something nastier to be left to your imagination), using the power of iptables. Now, no matter what website the piggy backer tries to visit, he will be greeted with the ubiquitous google.com home page. Watch how quickly the neighbors will learn to leave your network alone.

I don't that's really true, at least any more true than the fact that almost anything can kill you.

The only withdrawals that are often fatal are alcohol withdrawal, benzodiazapine withdrawal, and barbituate withdrawal.

Heroin withdrawal might be the most unpleasant of all, but it isn't all that likely to be fatal as far as I know. I'm sure some people have died due to heroin withdrawal, but it's not a significant risk.

And how will this be determined?

If it's the state government's decision, I highly doubt they'd overturn anything since they're likely as corrupt as Washington (note: I might have a skewed view of state politics since I'm from Illinois - here's hoping our next elected Governor isn't arrested).

If it's based on a public ballot, I don't have faith in the general populace to be skeptical enough of any laws passed, and will likely be pushed through as "the Government would do wrong."

Actually, I believe the GP post had it right. "We don't have time to do stupid stuff like this. However the "do-good" people in other departments would. AND they would easily justify their actions with "for the children" statements you often see." The IT department has a technology focus. I suspect they simply didn't think about anyone abusing the system...

The camel has put his nose into the tent. What next? Maybe Ford needs to be forced to install Toyota gas pedals in their cars to ensure that they crash in a politically correct manner!

I agree, very cool.

But, in regards to the GP, I'm pretty certain that he does not depend on the touchscreen resolution, but instead has worked out techniques to implicitly extend the resolution. Two that seem good candidates

1) custom brush shapes.

2) Magnified "pixel" editing view.

The Moto Droid does have multi-touch, just developers are not utilizing it yet. Two apps that come to mind that DO utilize it are "PicSay" and "Simply Draw (Multi-Touch)", both of which are free on the android marketplace.

As a droid owner, any app you install lets you know what services it has access to. I don't have many apps installed because most of the time I'll load an app and it will have access to something it has no reason to access.

The freedom of the droid is nice; but at the same time it requires more responsibility on the owner.

Which was worse? The abbreviation, or the undocumented SQL command?

Or maybe the characterization of those who write to DB as "clerks"?