Wow, that's ten tons of crazy piled into a half-ton pickup.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Your inability to imagine something is not proof of its non-existence; it's only proof of your limited imagination.

As far as the case in Germany goes... It sort of makes sense to prohibit someone from publishing compromising photos of their ex, but requiring that certain photos be deleted is impractical, unreasonable, unenforceable, and just plain dumb. Are they also going to demand that he forgets what she looked like naked? As long as he keeps the photo to himself, what's the difference between that and a memory? Nothing.

Keeping a photo as a reminder of a pleasant experience in your past is by no means crazy or immoral. That's exactly what photo albums are for, and why everybody keeps them! Just because you have a picture of someone (naked or otherwise) doesn't mean you obsess or masturbate to it. My shoebox of old travel photos (including various ex-girlfriends) just sits in the closet until I get nostalgic once every year or five and have a look through it. No obsession, no masturbation, no reputations smeared.

This is EXACTLY what the NSA is supposed to be doing.

The JOB of the NSA is to violate the US Constitution and local laws in other countries? No wonder it's always been so secretive.

If Snowden has a problem with these actions from the NSA, why did he take a job there in the first place?

According to him, he took the job so he could gather evidence and expose the NSA's illegal activities.

The rights of the Constitution only apply to US citizens.

False. The Bill of Rights limits the power of the US government, justifying those limitations by referencing inalienable human rights. The US government is prohibited from violating anybody's human rights, anywhere in the world.

It is US law, it's not natural law.

It's US law, and it applies to the US government everywhere. Even Afghanistan.

Huh. 321 - 100 - 40 - 8 seems obvious. 221 ... 181 ... 173.

I'm gonna need some of this gene after reading the articles on alien encounters and noncomputable consciousness. Me dumber now.

The human race is incapable of being second fiddle to any other life form,

Nonsense. Look back at history and see the millions of humans who allowed themselves to be enslaved, subjugated, or otherwise oppressed. Humans are excellent at playing second fiddle.

And much of that oppression / subjugation / slavery was based on race or religion, so it doesn't particularly matter if the new overlords are some new kind of "alien", and it doesn't matter what our gods tell us about them. If they stomp their boots on our necks hard enough we will kneel before them.

Correct. E.g. Bussard ramjet or laser-propelled sailship.

Snowden basically walked out of the NSA with all their secrets; who's to say a few dozen or hundred other contractors didn't do the same thing before him? Everything the NSA knew or had access to before 2013 was most likely available in blackhat circles through clandestine leaks.

Any backdoors in TrueCrypt would be a security disaster, and the NSA has already proven itself willing and able to put backdoors in highly trusted security software. It's also proven itself incapable of keeping secrets.

Worrying about NSA-planted vulnerabilities is not the same thing as worrying about a direct attack from the NSA itself.

Survivor benefits are paid to the children, not the surviving parent. The parent only get the money as the custodian of the children, and is supposed to use it for the benefit of the child. The parent doesn't report the benefits on his or her tax return. If the child makes enough money during the year to file a tax return, the child does. So the IRS is going after the party to which the money was given. But of course, it really makes no sense...the child did not actually receive the money. The child has no records of receiving the money, or of any overpayment and can't contest it. It's unlikely even the parent has the records. And it is implied that the IRS can try to collect money from whomever they can get it from, not just the child of record.

If every monkey just sits there typing 123456 over and over, they will only ever crack half the users' passwords.

Well, this is it -- an early test of whether Bitcoin can stand on its own as an underground currency. The crutch of traditional currency exchange has been kicked out from under it. Will the bitcoins currently in China be abandoned? smuggled out? or actually used as money like Satoshi intended?

There are some randomizing anonymizer services which take money from lots of people and return it randomly so nobody knows exactly which amount came from which source....

So... sort of a money laundromat?

FXCop (now incorporated as Code Analysis) is not a security tool. It looks for bad coding practices not malicious software. This might catch some stuff in the process, but it is not the main purpose.

On the other hand, Red Gate's Reflector decompiles the code into C#, VB.NET, F#, IL, or MC++. You can then look for malicious code. I mainly look for code accessing classes in the System.IO namespace, System.Web, System.Net, or similar namespaces, because these are the ones that are likely to either mess with existing files or connect to the Internet.

You can use the ILDASM (Intermediate Language Dis-assembler) program that comes with the .NET Framework, but it only decompiles into intermediate language (IL). This is enough to find the calls, but most people are not adept at reading IL.

Reflector is worth every penny. Besides looking for security problems, I use it all the time to figure out what the Framework is really doing, fix bugs in other people's libraries, sign code that wasn't signed originally, translate VB.NET code to C#, etc. (To translate code, compile it in one language and decompile it with Reflector into the other.)

I guess by the time we're ready to build this thing, every available spot on Earth will already be covered with solar panels.

Your inability to imagine a reason for browsing without javascript does not mean that there is no such reason.

If Slashdot ever starts requiring javascript, I'm out forever. FWIW.

Using "Classic" "Nested" view with no javascript. Works fine on all browsers and devices. Please keep it as an option.