Especially in Oregon, where public nudity isn't even against the law:

http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/163.465

And generally, nudity is considered free speech here.

It's not against the law in Oregon to be naked in public, unless the purpose was "arousing the sexual desire of the person or another person", or it includes "an act of sexual intercourse". As a fellow Oregonian, liberal, and opponent of these ever-increasing draconian searches before flying, I think it's great he made this political statement.

http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/163.465

But not in Oregon. Public nudity isn't even against the law here, unless there is "the intent of arousing the sexual desire of the person or another person" or "an act of sexual intercourse" is involved.

http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/163.465

Nudity is generally considered "free speech" here. Our free speech laws are MUCH stronger than most states' are, and much stronger than the federal laws are. This guy may get off with just a charge of disorderly conduct, or if he has a decent lawyer may get off completely. There were lots of witnesses, and from all accounts he wasn't disregarding any of the screeners' commands...except removing all his clothes of course.

Here's the thing though: Oregon has VERY liberal laws as relates to public nudity. In fact, "Public Indecency" is defined as only being a crime if the intent was to arouse sexual desire, or includes sexual intercourse. It is hard to argue that this guy's intent was to cause arousal. (Full disclosure: I'm an Oregon native, currently living in the Portland metro area, and I fully support what this guy did. But IANAL.)

http://www.naturistaction.org/StatesFrames/State_Laws_Frames/Oregon_Laws/body_oregon_laws.html

Each year, we have a Naked Bike Ride through the streets of Portland, and the only people that get arrested are stupid drunk gawkers that cause problems. We have the Oregon Country Fair each year near Eugene, where half the women go topless (it's a weekend of great fun with crafts and drum circles and just a great hippie vibe.) There's nude beaches in the Portland area. There's the annual Gay Pride parade where there's plenty of nudity of both sexes. Every once in a while there's a huge controversy in some smaller towns where a nudist will parade around naked through the streets - and the police can generally do nothing about it. Nudity is also considered "free speech" - consequently we have the 2nd highest per capita number of strip clubs in the US in Portland - second only to Springfield Oregon just south of here (yes, THAT Springfield that was the inspiration for Matt Groening's "The Simpsons.")

So it remains to be seen whether any of the nudity-related charges will hold up in court. I suspect he'll end up just being charged for disorderly conduct, if he has a halfway decent lawyer ... and possibly be put on the No Fly List.

As someone who paid several thousand dollars in taxes for 2011, I fully approve of my taxes going to preserve history such as this, for everyone to enjoy (no matter if they are poor enough to pay for admission or not) at the Smithsonian. My wife and I visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and the Natural History Museum a few years ago, and it's one of the coolest places I've ever visited.

Now these stupid wars we've been in for the last decade - THOSE I have a huge problem with my taxes going towards. But I digress...

This would be about 1995 or so that we got our 28.8 modem. We bought the computer in 1994 I think, and it had a 14.4 modem. So jpeg's were getting common by then, but yes you're right there were a lot of gif's around also. Jpeg's, being better at skin tones than gif's, were more common by this point in certain Usenet groups dedicated to the arts of Playboy. ;)

Of course, decoding a jpeg or gif from Usenet at the time was a multi-step process of marking the parts to download in a newsreader program, downloading the parts using the newsreader program, then running a separate program to put together the UUencoded parts into the completed file. When newsreaders finally built in the ability to UUencode, it was like a whole new world.

Today it's even easier: search on a website, select your desired files, save an .nzb file to your desktop, and the newsreader does the rest, including checking for errors and correcting if necessary, and un-raring the files for you. (Newsbin Pro FTW!) Bittorrent or file download sites? Who needs them. Been using newsgroups for all my file download needs for almost 20 years.

So you can easily tell if it's connecting correctly and at a decent speed...

Hey! You ruined my record man, I just bought it!

Ha, I know exactly that sound, I had an Apple IIc as my first computer. Shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt....

Had a really gnarly sound when you formatted a disk though. I always imagined it was banging the write head against something, it would vibrate the whole computer.

Speaking of formatting: As an Apple II user in the 80s, like everyone else of course I copied a lot of floppy games. ("Don't copy that floppy!") One game in particular had interesting copy protection: every time it booted, it would attempt to format its own disk. First copy I made, it of course formatted my copy. Then I made another copy but taped over the 5.25" copy protection notch: bingo!

Good times...

Oh give me a break. They're giving you free content, you paid nothing for it. If they want to make a few cents off of their ads, in exchange for my viewing it, then more power to them.

And in the summer if the air was dry, you could get a nice static charge from running your hand over the front of a CRT if it had been on for a while. Actually, I don't miss that at all, that's the main reason dust tended to stick to the front of a CRT I believe.

I did telephone end user tech support for an ISP for almost a year, and listening to the sounds the modem made when attempting to connect was the best and easiest diagnostic tool you could use.

A short quick series of tones or squeals followed by white noise then silence meant you probably had a pretty good connection. Repeated tones or squeals and attempts to connect (the sound would change on each attempt, meaning the modem was stepping down its speed before retrying each time) usually meant you had noise on the line and you'd connect at slow speeds, if you could connect at all. (Better ask the phone company to test your lines, ma'am - be sure to tell them that you're trying to use your fax machine, not a modem, because they're obligated to provide a good connection for a fax machine. They regard modems as competition for their expensive ISDN, and they hate people that keep their modems connected to local numbers all the time on their lines for "free".)

Listening to the sounds (I sometimes had them hold the phone up to the tower) was much simpler than attempting to direct the often-clueless users to the modem diagnostics control panel and read off a series of cryptic messages.

And the joyous change in sound (ba-dung-ba-dung-chhhhhhhhh replacing squeals and static) when my wife and I splurged to buy a "super fast" 28.8 modem to replace our original 14.4 modem that came with our first PC in 1993...knowing we could now surf the web with Netscape twice as fast and download jpgs in 10 seconds instead of 20...good times, good times. :)

I see CRT monitors all over the place at thrift shops, but they're usually way overpriced for their current value. Dial up modems too - I've seen prices on them at thrift shops of $15-20, when they really should price them what they're worth - $1 maybe. If you want a dial up modem, I've got 5 or 10 in my closet I'll give you for free. (I probably should get around to recycling those one of these days.) There's a surprising amount of people around the US that still use dial up though.

I still put a 3.5 floppy drive in my computers (I build my own), because even now some BIOS updates only come on floppy images, although that's starting to be much rarer. And it's good to have options in emergency situations. But store data on floppies? No way. Probably in the next computer I build I'll skip the floppy.

I hear this complaint about the battery cover feeling like it's going to break in the Galaxy Nexus all the time, but I've never actually heard anyone say theirs broke. It seems like a perfectly durable, flexible piece of plastic to me, I swap my battery all the time and it's a piece of cake once you figure out how to do it.

Like you say, it's the only way to get a nice thin phone and still be able to swap the battery. Once the cover is on, it's a very solid and durable phone - I've lost count of the times I've dropped my Nexus and no damage whatsoever.

Whoosh!