Does that mean they are exempt from the protection of it, too? I.e. are you allowed to robocall the government?

This is not meant as a joke, but as a serious question. But the answer I'm thinking of might lead to interesting results...

And in the next iteration, account names will be mandatory, together with the passwords for them (verified on the spot by your friendly customs people) and the PINs for your banking cards?

The PSA (Paranoid States of America) still shit their pants because of one terrorist incident a decade ago, while local yokels with guns (including the police) kill ten times that much people per year.

The HP books have a certain information density to them, so I dropped the speed of reading them down to about 100 to 120 pages per hour, And I have read them in English, which is not my native language. You could have quizzed me back then, and I would expect not to have failed (I actually won a radio quiz on the first HP volume which I had read weeks ago). Because I do read, not skim the text.

I've always been a fast reader. I actually started reading English books as an adolescent to reduce my reading speed (I'm not a native speaker of the English tongue). Even as a kid I did not need my members passes at the local libraries (they all knew me), and I was exempt from rule "children may only borrow two book at a time". In university, I attended a course on speed reading for fun, and my initial test was way faster than the tutors, and I still managed to gain an additional 10-20% boost by the course.

So I read about 100-200 pages per hour in English and 600-800 pages per hour in German. All while remembering a lot of details and enjoying fine points that even 'normal' readers might miss. I can sit down with the Lord of the Rings right after lunch and have read it by dinner, and still see the fine linguistic differences between the individual people in Middle Earth. And you can ask me about different scenes, and I can e.g. tell you that this scene is about _here_, on the lower left side.

This is also quite power consuming, i.e. my heart frequency and body temperature rises, and I actually absolutely cannot do this with a clogged-up nose, making having a cold many times as miserable...

I would not say that I miss out on things because of the speed reading - I do not skim, I _do_ read. And having information and storylines 'more present' due to the short temporal distances usually helps understanding a story better. I cannot imagine how people can cope with a story like Ted Williams Otherland when they have to spread reading it over weeks and months - all the issues of normal life in between reading a few pages here and there must be horrible (I spread reading the series over four days).

Over time, the detail knowledge of a story fades, of course, usually after having read some more books in the mean time. But something is always kept, and pops up when I re-read a book, or when I need the knowledge.

Have you ever tried to get a GPS signal inside a house (A real house, not cardboard or wood)? No chance.

We've got a time signal here called DCF77, which is quite strong and reliable (at least since tube TVs went the way of the dodo), and I even get a sufficient signal in my concrete basement.

Disclaimer: I'm a so-called LEGO Ambassador, i.e. I represent my LUG (Lego User Group) to LEGO, but I'm not a representative and/or work for LEGO itself.

LEGO is very interested in this 3D printing topic and had a workgroup on this on the Ambassador forum. I did not participate in this workgroup, but I can give some of the results. None of them come as a surprise, if one thinks this topic over, though, so I'm not telling any secrets.

- for standard bricks, it is too expensive, and except for a few classical basic bricks, there are patent and copyright issues.
- for bricks that do not exist from LEGO, this may work, but color, clutch power, surface structure, and durability are nearly impossible to match with current technologies
- best use for 3D printed stuff is to technically link LEGO parts to other things, e.g. a RasPi case that can be connected to a LEGO technik frame, where color and surface structures don't matter at all, and clutch power does not matter that much
- A lot of 3D stuff is accessories for Minifigs, like tools, weapons, hair pieces, etc.

Basically, while there are thousands of 3D data sets for LEGO parts available on the net, actually printing a box of bricks to build is far from being practical.

LEGO uses 3D printing in their design process, but only for prototyping. They are more likely to cut and glue existing parts for the prototyping, though, as this is still faster and better.

When I see those phone-junkies getting younger and younger, and kids having problems letting their phone go even for a short period of time, a blanket ban of Facebook & Co for minors in general would be an excellent idea.

Mr. James Clapper, best known for lying to the congress.

We have an application where we still need a real serial connection. USB serial adapters have too much brain for their own good, and don't cut it in realtime scenarios.

And from the embedded point of view, a UART can bed one with a handful of registers, maybe an interrupt, and a few lines of code, even in assembly. For talking USB, I need a whole protocol stack with hundreds of things I never ever need.

Back in ye olden times, fond memories of hours lost at a green serial terminal, TALKing to peope all over the world.

When things worked solely by agreement, i.e. if you registered your nick at some server (IIRC NICKSERV), it was yours, and nobody touched it.

When the first predator manages to groom a little girl via a hacked barbie, this kind of toys will be history.

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches? - The Quarterly Review, March 1825.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895

640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981

I admit that humans are going to Mars to settle. But there, human space travel will end. - Louis Friedman (1941-), Engineer, in 2015

So if one is e.g. discussing how much money the government wasted, and wasted, and wasted again will lower the posters credit score? Primarily, the money was wasted on the banks that use the customer scoring in turn.

About 30 years ago, we already had pocket calculators in school. My elder sister, though, still had a book about calculating with a slide rule. I managed to get the book from her and a slide rule from someone else, and started exploring. Being the math geek in class, I could afford a bit of risk, so I brought the slide rule to a test where all my classmates used calculators (I still had mine in the bag in case the teacher would forbid using the slide rule). You should have seen the faces when I used that "plastic thingie" - and still was the first to finish, and later got the top score in class (again). Some even accused me of cheating, but the teacher was quite amused about it.

It was a fun experience, and I could even teach other people about it in university - we had a giant, working slide rule (a few meters long, probably an old demonstration device from a lecture room once) as a decoration on a wall.

Because not adhering to the red book standard can be interpreted as being "intentionally defective". Which was the legal way to go until SONY caved in and started to replace the CDs.