The stories and illustrations are public domain in the US, but copyright laws vary by country.

Big data is like sex in high school. Nobody really knows exactly what it is or how to do it, but everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.

I see a "Share" menu has replaced what used to be the link to read each story's comments. I clicked "Share" by accident, intending to click through and load the discussion. You fooled me and my muscle memory one time. In exchange, you've pissed me off and guaranteed that I won't ever use that feature. What's the point?

I think it's funny, there's a story just down the front page titled "Are There Any Search Engines Left That Don't Try To Think For Me?" I might ask the same about Slashdot, lately!

Not only that, but at the time of the Moon landing, the Russians themselves were rather heavily involved in that arena. Had the landing been faked, Russia absolutely would have known; they would have distributed the proof far and wide to humiliate and one-up the Americans. It's just a tad late for a Russian to start asking questions.

Maybe you should switch banks. I can't speak for the UK, but it never ceases to astound me how many people whine about banking in the United States when there are thousands of small community banks you could be doing business with. It's a tough industry and the little guys are facing setbacks on a daily basis, but they're still there if people are willing to look for and do business with them.

In the day and age of remote deposit there's no reason to do business with a large national bank. I get waived ATM fees worldwide, no account fees of any sort, and competitive loan and deposit rates, all from a little regional bank that you've probably never heard of unless you're from my small hometown.

For the life of me I don't understand why Chase, Capital One, or Bank of America have any retail customers at all. They bend people over on fees, structure your transactions to obtain yet more fees, and generally do all sorts of nefarious things while offering no real advantage over their smaller competitors.

You're implying that people of the same ethnicity find it easier to agree politically. Reality suggests that's far from the truth. The Finns fought a pretty nasty Civil War, even by Civil War standards, within living memory.

The reason the Finnish system works on consensus has to do with the structure of their political system and the rules in their Parliament. I suggest reading Finland: Myth and Reality; it's a bit dated, most of the foreign policy stuff lost relevance after the Cold War ended, but the domestic discussions are still applicable.

Finland has never had a "homogeneous" culture; it only appears that they do from the outside. Read the history of the Swedish speaking minority or of their civil war sometime when you're bored. The concept of Finland as a nation-state didn't even exist until the late 1800s and probably would never have evolved if the Russians had been a little bit more tactful. That's without even getting into the outside pressures and obstacles that they had to overcome.

What they have is trust in their institutions, a willingness to admit mistakes and try something new, and a political system that operates on consensus rather than a 50%+1 majority trying to ram its agenda down the throats of the opposition.

That may be a valid point, but it's worth mentioning that the welfare state doesn't have to be run at the national level. Much of Kela is run and funded by municipalities, not the national Government. Finland leads the world in education yet has no standardized tests or national curriculum mandates. Intuitive at the local level is encouraged, not stifled.

Of course it still won't happen here, even if we got over our love affair with top-down control. Our mistrust of institutions doesn't begin or end with the Federal Government. I do find these conversations interesting though; people on the American left talk a big game about how awesome the Nordic countries are but very few of them actually know anything about them. Finland has no concept of tuition -- even foreigners can go study there for free (with only one barrier to entry, it's called "Finnish") -- but they also have universal conscription.

Think there are many people on the American left that would support universal conscription? Not bloody likely. Which is too bad, because it would actually make interventionism less likely, not more. Anyhow, I digress.....

Announcing to the world that you've been infiltrated by Mossad is a decision that must be weighed by some enormous number of calculated steps.

If you're correct, you will be accused of being anti-Semitic.

If you're wrong, you will be accused of being anti-Semitic.

The only winning move is not to play.

The important difference there is that the people of the Nordic countries (at least Sweden and Finland, where I visited and lived) still have faith in their institutions. Americans haven't had faith in our institutions since Watergate. It's not just the Government either; in increasing numbers Americans don't trust business, academia, religion, or any other reasonably sized institution.

The reasons for this are varied -- you could write an entire thesis on the subject -- but at the end of the day it's the reality of the situation, and a Nordic style welfare state is a non-starter in the United States.

Don't forget NOAA/NWS. Those folks really do save lives every day, unlike so many agencies claiming to do so.

New Hampshire gives you the option to have the photo deleted after they print the license. Or at least they used to.

If you're at Wal-Mart the trick is to keep a morbidly obese person between you and the cameras at all times. This is not as difficult as it sounds. ;)

I'm not really concerned with what Mozilla's VR research team wants, I want to know why Mozilla doesn't care what their users want. I want to know why the slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint that millions of people switched to because it was a slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint has turned into a bloated behemoth that now includes such essentials as a built-in video chat client. The list of things I have to manually disable on a fresh Firefox install is bordering on inexcusable these days. Just filtering on about:config for enabled, there are 24 options I've changed from their defaults.

If I wanted Firefox to be my fucking operating system, I would buy a device that runs Firefox OS. I don't, and I haven't. I, as a user, want a browser.

Mozilla's continued race to become Chrome makes me question more and more with each Firefox update why I don't just give in and run Chrome itself. At this point I really have to wonder if the Firefox project isn't being intentionally torpedoed by some Google plants on Mozilla's payroll. There seem to be few explanations left.