Only "weakly encrypted" PINs. How do you "encrypt" a four-decimal-digit PIN? Even if they only had PIN hashes that were as yet uncompromised, it wouldn't offer much protection. if Target changed policy and invalidated your card immediately after you entered the first wrong PIN, the crooks still stole 40 million cards and would have scored a list of about 4000 working card numbers. At least if the PINs were required to be base-64, the crooks would only find a few.

Another challenge is the fines and penalties for installing solar cells on your roof.

An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilising to penalise homeowners who install their own solar panels- casting them as "freeriders" - a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.

These people are actually freeloaders but of course he can't say what they really are because of political correctness that forces him to use softer words like "freeriders".

Further details of ALEC's strategy were provided by John Eick, the legislative analyst for ALEC's energy, environment and agriculture program.

Eick told the Guardian the group would be looking closely in the coming year at how individual homeowners with solar panels are compensated for feeding surplus electricity back into the grid.

"This is an issue we are going to be exploring," Eick said. He said ALEC wanted to lower the rate electricity companies pay homeowners for direct power generation - and maybe even charge homeowners for feeding power into the grid.

"As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other non direct generation customers are being penalised," he said.

Eick dismissed the suggestion that individuals who buy and install home-based solar panels had made such investments. "How are they going to get that electricity from their solar panel to somebody else's house?" he said. "They should be paying to distribute the surplus electricity."

I don't want sewage electricity being forced down my throat after it's been on some other guy's filthy roof already! I'm an American; I have a right to choose clean electricity!

In November, Arizona became the first state to charge customers for installing solar panels. The fee, which works out to about $5 a month for the average homeowner, was far lower than that sought by the main electricity company, which was seeking to add up to $100 a month to customers' bills.

IN THE BEGINNING God created heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was floating on the surface of the waters. God said "let there be light" and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness with a thin film of perovskite on glass so that the material formed tiny crystalline islands. The islands absorbed photons and converted them unto electrons, whilst light striking the empty areas passed through. And God saw that it was good. Then God said "let the rooftops sprout with panels: panels bearing light from the heavens"; the ceilings brought forth electricity, freeriders yielding current with voltage in it, unto the grid. And God saw that it was good. Then to be fair he charged the freeriders $100 per month, which Arizona reduced to $5, for those who drilled the formless void of the earth for the Spirit of God, and have to distribute the unwanted surplus electricity. And God saw that it was good.

Now that we have Obamacare, why can't HIPAA be crumpled up and tossed?

The whole point of HIPAA was to keep your health info secret from insurance companies, so that they wouldn't deny you coverage or overcharge you for being a sick person. Of course, that was a stupid idea- insurers don't care about the juicy details of why you're sick. They only care about which policyholders are costing money. You obviously can't keep your insurer from finding out about the claims payments they're making on your behalf. And nothing ever seriously prevented insurers from conspiring with each other about whether to blacklist you, even if your doctors were gagged and prevented from revealing your blood type to each other.

The central feature of Obamacare is supposed to be preventing insurers from overcharging or denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. If that's the case, then WTF is the purpose of HIPAA anymore? Keeping your spouse in the dark about your herpes? Making sure potential bosses can't google your name against "DSM-5" or "virus"? Preventing WalMart greeters from tackling kleptomaniacs? Ensuring food charities won't withhold green bananas from the terminally ill?

Since HIPAA was enacted, people have really gotten in their heads that the privacy of their health information is their most treasured possession. People are even screaming about HIPAA violations on healthcare.gov because it has a radio button for smokers to click on. But if *insurers* can't do anything with this information anymore, then who cares? Should we still be forcing sick people to make extra trips to the hospital so they can pick up their X-rays in person? This info should still be confidential, but I don't know why it deserves its top secret status anymore.

They shouldn't need to prove it's "absolutely" safe with the certainty of a mathematical proof. Obviously that's impossible. But it's not hard to define some sort of reasonable standard for what the manufacturer should demonstrate regarding safety. The FDA simply defined that standard as "nothing".

The U.S. FDA differs from the corresponding agencies in other First World countries because it has a different standard for determining safety. Usually, a manufacturer has to prove a new chemical is safe before they can put it on the market. In the U.S., the standard is different. Unless a third party can prove to their satisfaction that the product is unsafe, the manufacturer can continue to sell it. This is why bisphenol-A, for example, is used in the lining of all canned foods in the U.S. and not in other countries. Although studies have repeatedly come out indicating that it binds to estrogen receptors and mimics estrogen in some ways, the FDA has claimed that no one study in humans has conclusively proven that BPA has effects. BPA studies are difficult in humans because it's impossible to shield a control group from exposure to it- virtually all foods sold in the U.S. are laced with it, with no labeling requirements whatsoever. China has banned the use of BPA, but still manufactures millions of tons for exports to the U.S.

That's a pretty accurate observation. Just look at this one-sided episode where they bash people receiving disability. It's obviously geared toward people over 65.

Sure they can. All genital selfies can be reproduced by discriminating between just two images.

But Google doesn't need to prefetch all of them for everybody. That would be merely equivalent to just flat out *removing* their "Load Images" link feature. Maybe that is what they're doing, if their marketing department has gotten vicious enough. But they may be smarter than that.

Presumably, a spammer will send the same image to a million email addresses using a unique image URL for each one. For this maneuver, all Google needs to do is load some images that arrive in emails that bounce or that are addressed to a population of dummy recipients. They can store them along with the results of any algorithm that can recognize the same image when someone else gets it from a slightly similar URL. If a few thousand dummy recipients are getting the same image from unique image URLs, they can test whether the images look the same and how they can doctor the URL in various ways without changing or losing the image. If they figure it out, they can perform the same munge algorithm on the image URL in your email, or simply display the image they have already cached from their dummy recipients without hitting the external image server at all anymore.

Your example of devious spammers using single-pixel images is a really poor one. Google probably has all those images stored somewhere already.

Or, go to Settings, click on the "Always ask before displaying external images" radio button, and then on "Save Changes".

There are plenty of reasons to avoid Google, but this one isn't very compelling.

Light bulbs are a stupid way to heat your house. The power company uses 150 watts of heat to generate that 100 watts for your light bulb, because even in Wisconsin their cooling system has a temperature above absolute zero. They can't extract all the heat energy with 100% efficiency. The waste heat is lost at the plant, and heats the air above Wisconsin, but you pay for it anyway. Turning up your thermostat is much smarter than switching on light bulbs because you're cold.

As if we need another reason for Japan to keep its heavy water out of the ocean...

Just get some Utah Boy Scout leaders to give that fault a nice shove. It's all about saving lives!

I'm not arguing, but for such a small app, Clock seems to really piss people off and I've always wondered why. Is it too simple, or complicated, or invasive, or clumsy? What is it doing wrong or not doing? What's a good replacement for it?

I assume you meant no disrespect, but "Mass" begins with a capital "M". At Mass, my brain is in fact less constrained by its need for oxygen. I pray for my own short lifespan to become greater so I can attend even more sessions of Mass. I agree there's an amazing amount of universe out there and we do need to get our act together. We need to speedily apply forces to our worst enemies and make aliens spend their time at Mass too.

The report from the NIPCC ("Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change") is a piece of trash propaganda from the libertarian Heartland Institute. To confuse people, It was released just two weeks prior to the IPCC report ("International Panel on Climate Change", a board of U.N. climate experts). The real IPCC report is at http://www.ipcc.ch/.

The cop she lived next to didn't know she was autistic, and when someone kicked his screen door he assumed it must be her and had her booked on assault and vandalism charges. A judge ruled within hours to let her go and expunge her record, but those sites have her photo all over the place.