I wish you all the best, and hope your mom really does figure out that if you're the most important thing in her life, she's really doing it wrong.

I do have sympathy for her; I'm sure that like my daughter her choices aren't wholly under her own control, and that as hellish as it is to live with her, it's got to be a thousand times worse to be her. But that doesn't change the fact that close contact with someone like that wears on you in ways that you don't even realize until they're gone. My family is still recovering from the unbelievable tension and stress she put on all of us until she moved out. I didn't even realize until she was gone how irrationally snappish and defensive her brothers had gotten, but now I see it because they're finally unclenching their jaws. Me, too.

Your mother is mentally ill, and she needs help. But until she decides that, and decides that she needs to get help to change, or until she bottoms out in some way that legally removes all choice from her, it won't happen. Having compassion for her suffering is good... as long as you don't get sucked in, and that's really hard. I don't think I could bring myself to cut ties, but maybe it would be best. Nobody can tell you what's right, and odds are that whatever you do will bring some misery. It's balancing on razors and job #1 is not getting cut any more than you can avoid :-/

Yes. If you are charged with the murder of Bob, by shooting him, and you can prove that he was dead from a heart attack, the most they can charge you with is desecrating a corpse, which wouldn't stick if you could prove that he was alive when you shot, and dead when it hit.

Hacking doesn't have to have an effect, though. It's not a crime to make a plane divert. It's illegal to try, whether or not you succeed. So that's different.

The article claims that the actual lice hack was done with default usernames and passwords. If that's true, the CEO of the airline should be in jail for 10M counts of criminal negligence.

That their "proof" is targeting a stationary black, soft object as the demonstration of capability. If it were as good as people say, why aren't they detonating an incoming HE artilllery shell at 2 km range? When they can do that, I'll believe it's something other than a David Copperfield demonstration.

The only reason you would take cash regularly from a drug user is if you are supplying him with drugs.

QED

Nerds are interested in politics. This is news for nerds, not tech news. That you confuse the two is your problem, not Slashdot's.

Nope. She was named, as Jane Doe.

Sure, it seems pretty unlikely, but that's how it works. That was one of the delays with Hans Reiser. They "knew" he did it, but if they named a time, and they were wrong and he could alibi our for it, they'd never get a conviction. That's why they took so long, so they could narrow down the crime so they charged him with the right one the first time, or a murder could walk.

You spin and cool your weapons, and make them as reflective as practical and this system won't do any damage. When the power is 100x or so, it'll be able to do real damage. But by then, there will be more countermeasures.

When we spend $10T on this, the "bad guys" will spend $10k on making their rockets spin gently, increasing the time to kill by a factor of 10, allowing a much smaller number of rockets to saturate the defensive capability of a laser system.

And after their $10k system nullifies a $10T system, and the $10T system is replaced with a $100T system, they'll install cooling lines within the rocket that better distribute the heat, nullifying the next step.

When they use internally-cooled mirrored rotating targets, then let me know. But when they use soft, black targets to rig a "pass" for a mostly useless system, this is more a story about military waste than cool tech.

Since the government does it, whether they should or shouldn't, they are bound to do it equitably. Abolishing marriage would be one way, and the other is allowing interracial marriage, or gay marriage, or whatever "undesirable" minority that's demanding human rights these days.

It's not illegal to be "able" to hack something. A crime is an illegal act, done at a specific time and place. You can't charge someone with having killed "someone" unless you name that someone. You can't even charge them if you have a name of the murdered, unless you have a time and place named.

You can get a warrant for someone "able" to do it, and they did. If they arrested him, the charge should specify what he did that was illegal, and when and where it happened. I haven't seen a pic of the actual arrest paperwork, but the media stated it was for hacking a specific flight. This means that the media reports are that he was arrested for actually having caused a flight-path diversion mid-flight by controlling (at least part of) the flight control systems from his passenger seat.

If it is drug-tainted, it's up to you to prove you didn't get it by selling drugs to a drug user. That's how Civil Forfeiture works. It's not illegal to have drug money, but it's also not illegal for the government to take it and never give it back.

The movie marquis at the time listed it as Rambo (at least in the US, where I was at the time). IMDB indicates that most of the rest of the world listed it at Rambo II. The working titles (As in the used titles, not the pre-release titles) were: First Blood, Rambo, Rambo III, and Rambo. IMDB and other places where character limits don't apply list Rambo II differently. But I didn't check the references, because I was there. I remember the ads and marquis. The posters make "First Blood Part II" look like a subtitle, not an extension of the title.

Rambo V is rumoured to be in production (or pre-production, the exact timing is hard to work out).

More was added to the definitions because the "villain" could be the main character, with the "hero" being the opponent. To help clear up that, the definition of protagonist is more complex than you assert.

The tech is there to get a 80000 lb truck to perform like a car. The issue is cost. Dead people are acceptable, so long as we save 1/10th of a cent on our Wal-Mart purchase.