At the start of the war holding slaves was not unconstitutional, each state made their own laws and there was slavery on the Union side as well. The United States simply did not want 30% of their population and 70% of their exports seceding away, it would totally cripple their economy. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 - long after the war started - was just directed at the slaves in states in rebellion, those under Union control still remained in slavery. In short, it was a wartime measure to cripple an armed rebellion and recruit soldiers to their own side. I'm sure the Lincoln movie is not the most accurate historic source but there was huge doubt if the proclamation had any force once the war was over or if they'd all be returned to slavery.

There was huge resistance to passing the 13th amendment even with the southern states broken away, it was rejected as late as 1864 and only passed with the smallest possible 2/3rds margin (119-56) through the House in 1865 before the South rejoined. And that was only after years of negros serving in the Union army and dying for the north, at the start of the war... no. The abolitionists might have been on the rise but in 1860 support for slavery was alive and well all over the United States. They might have climbed to the moral high ground during the war, but initially it was a simple case of the government fighting down a rebellion like any other.

No, you think you've found a possible security hole and you email your friend Mike and ask him to look over it and see what he thinks. The NSA intercepts the email, and immediatly sends you the security letter.

Ever notice it's always anonymous coward who respond to people who oppose obamacare? It has already been widely established there is an army of people hired by government and political agencies to troll the internet forums. Here on slashdot, we are seeing them here and now.

The slashdot demographic is not generally of the opinion expressed by these leftists. It's very out of control.

How much tyranny before it's too much? I expect this one to be the last straw and yet some will suck this one up too and start blaming their relatives.

In case you've been sleeping under a rock for the last year, the target of the NSA is everyone. Not that they put you on the same level as the Chinese military of course, but nobody's under their radar and if they can grab your data or metadata easily they will because you could be a terrorist or at least the friend of a friend of a friend of a terrorist. It's not that the average joe would stand a chance if they threw everything in their arsenal at us, but those "zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques" don't come free and using them highly increases the chances of exposing them. The question is more like "Does NSA grab all the TrueCrypt containers used as backup on Dropbox/GDrive/whatever and rifle through everyone's data?" than "If the NSA really wants the contents of my laptop, would this really stop them?"

Not only is it a good idea, but it may be a necessary idea (to our survival). And the idea that ppl don't want to finance it? I know, let's spend more money on weapons to invade other nations on false pretenses. That's a way better use of funds.

This is pretty easy to fix though. Releasing carbon is exothermic, so if we overcorrect, we just burn more fossil fuels. It's taking and sequestering carbon that takes energy input.

As far as the fundamentalists go. . . no quarter asked, none given.

If we had anti-gravity cars like those in "The Jetsons" then I think it'd be fine, we'd need some kind of virtual lane system with upwards/downwards corridors as a heads up display and an emergency parachute (space capsule style?) to save your ass but it'd work and you could stay to sane consumer speeds with high speed high altitude "interstates". Anything that depends on wings for lift though has to stay at very high speeds and can't practically stop for anything, even if you have a VTOL system hovering for even an extremely brief time will burn through your fuel in no time. If you think it's bad now, wait until slamming the brakes is not an option.

Of course, y'all have significantly more accidents than us mollycoddled city slickers, so you may want to reconsider the use of "fine" in this context.

I know what rhetorical means but really, there's so many obvious ways. Take a piece of string, tie down one end and draw a circle in the sand with the other. Now use the same piece of string to measure out the circle. You'll get an approximation of pi more than good enough for any practical purpose, the only thing "special" about it is that numbers that aren't fractions like pi, e and the square root of 2 was fucking with their understanding of math. Even the ancient druids of Stonehenge could map out a circle, long before Euclid.

Well, he's using the only sales argument he has from the customer's point of view. From the store's point of view though they won't sell it at the same price you get online because they need to pay for location, staff, deal with shoplifters and books that go stale and unsold that need to be taken off the shelves again. It's better for them not to take your business rather than open up Pandora's box and have people coming in expecting to be price matched, taking up sales rep time and getting angry if they're refused. And if word got around you could get it cheaper just by pointing to a webpage on a smartphone, other people buying it at normal markup could feel cheated and generate a lot of negative publicity about you. As sales pitches go it's a honest one, but it's not the real reason why they won't price match.

What celebrity did this Jenny person get medical advice from?

So the question here is should the NSA put every single American SSL using business at risk for years on end to protect a single source of SIGINT?

The big question, for real, is; is there a backdoor in SE Linux?

If they were irresponsible enough to leave Heartbleed alone for 2 years, then how can we believe they haven't discovered (or inserted) compromises in other software?