Global warming is part of a machiavellian plot by...by...someone...who wants to make Alaska closer to habitable (but not civilized, let's not go too far). Why else would they pump so much oil out of the ground in order that it be burnt? They get rich AND a warmer climate.

'do not call' works because its meaning is clear and I can easily detect if it's violated (someone calls me, duh). But browsers cannot effectively 'stop' tracking unless they refuse to load URLs that appear 'personalized', change IP address very often, refuse cookies, and so on, and probably not even then. And if the site continues to manage to track me, and correlate that tracking with other activity, how do I know? Unless the data comes back to me, I probably don't.

The best way (long-term) to deal with terrorists is to make them irrelevant, by not responding to them. Once you make it clear you'll make arbitrarily large changes to your policies and practices in response to a terrorist event, you have given them the lever they want; all they need now is to find the right event for the effect they want. Bush handed that to them on a plate -- actually, two plates, both domestic and foreign policy. Brilliant.

Improving on JPEG's image quality is not hard. Improving on its deployment and compatibility status is very hard. JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR are both fine codecs, for example.

if a hypothetical passenger for a private plane passes through public secured areas on the way to their plane, it's reasonable to put them under the same restrictions as everyone for access to that public area. they might be robbed on the way to their plane. I have no idea what the boarding arrangements for private planes are in Osaka or elsewhere. I'm not that rich.

I think it's fairly easy to make sure the only Wifi channels/networks that are in range are either (a) base stations you set up that are not connected to an uplink or (b) base stations that you monitor by sniffing the traffic to detect any attempt to communicate. You will get at least a Mac address and probably more of anyone trying any kind of communication. Cell-phones are not so easy; but there is no justification for taking a phone into an exam.

surely the fair return to the 'status quo ante' is for the government to restore the money to the *buyers* and the property to the *rightful owner*. The buyers can they buy another property, if they wish; they are back where they started.

I agree that the ubiquity of USB charging makes this unlikely. But "But the whole point of phones is that you replace them every 1-2 years." Dang, I thought the whole point of a phone was to make phone calls! I am so misled!! I shouldn't *use* it, just replace it! Duh!

The internet was designed to be de-centralized, self-healing, made of redundant parts and pathways, and so on. What, exactly, would you 'kill' to disable what? I guess you could power down large numbers of phone/data routing centers, which would reduce the US's data and voice connectivity to local islands. But this might have ... collateral effects

um, if I were employing somebody, and there was indication that they may have an ... interesting ... history on the internet, I think it would be remiss of me NOT to know what my customers and business associates may find there. If they are representing the company, their online persona is part of that representation.

It's a pity that people continue to rail about something undefined - 'software patents'. What is patented is a technology/technique, often realizable usually in many ways. Think about codecs - these are signal processing patents, essentially. And why should software be exempt from patents when other fields (e.g. mechanical instruments) are not?

probably psychosomatic...so, do a blind experiment where the WiFi transmitters are turned off some random weeks, tell the parents you are doing the experiment, and see if there is any correlation. Or give free tin hats to the loonies, it might be cheaper.

Software is one of many ways to reduce many techniques to practice; trying to ban the method is silly. What is patented in, for example, a compression technology, is a set of digital mathematical signal processing operations, which can be implemented in software or hardware, in a variety of technology bases in each case. People who rail about 'software patents' are confused between the concept and its medium of expression.

I think the reviews of Quicken Essentials for the Mac on amazon.com pretty well debunk the idea that if the company spends money and years, it'll be worth something. Almost every comment would give it zero stars if that was possible; with a minimum vote of 1, it scores an average of maybe 1.1...

I'm appalled. It could easily be that, in general, the roads are getting much safer, but that *of the pedestrian accidents* a disproportionate quantity are by electric/hybrid vehicles. It could be that the roads are getting safer *because* there are many electric/hybrid vehicles on the road and people drive them like they are on novocaine. Assuming a proportional result from an overall quantity seems, to me, highly suspect.