Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion man.

No, there is a very good reason for this law: if you can show which way you voted to third parties, then it's possible for you to sell your vote to those third parties. As it stands, it's not possible to "sell votes" (at least, not in the direct sense), because you could just take the money and say you voted a certain way, when you didn't.

(Incidentally, I see a lot of people proposing reformed voting systems that include a hard confirmation that your vote for X was counted. Voting reform is good, but that particular idea is bad, for this exact reason. Cut it out).

If someone tried to defend their right to post a picture of their ballot on First Amendment grounds, I'd be willing to bet that a court would rule that a fair election represents the overriding concern and would still prosecute.

Oh wait, some NPE just sued me for patent violation. Never mind, guess I'll go develop it in some other country.

Just a quick FYI: for those of you still assuming that D-Wave is a bunch of snake-oil salesman (like I did for a long time), take a look at this bit from Ars Technica. Basically what they've built is not a genuine quantum computer, but a sort of "quantum optimizer" that delivers speedups for some kinds of problems. Their crime might be that they just use too much marketing hyperbole, instead of being complete frauds.

'ang on, 'e says e's not dead yet!

Care to cite one? Since it sounds like you're so well-informed.

Zimmerman's claim of being badly beaten up before he shot the kid doesn't hold up either: there's some footage taken at the police station the night of his arrest, and he looks totally unharmed. No cuts to the back of the head, no broken nose, nothing. Guy's story has more holes than... eh, I'm on my eighteenth hour without sleep due to a project and can't come up with an apt metaphor, but something with a lot of holes.

A few months ago a friend and I went to Japan for a week and a half of tourist-ing it up. I had been before, he hadn't. When we got off the plane and he had to go the bathroom, I made sure to follow him in and stand outside the stalls so I could hear the scream as he used a Japanese toilet for the first time. That alone was worth the price of my plane ticket.

You have, unironically, used the term "Bro" on Slashdot. Guards!

Simple: they'll disable the automatic update, by force if necessary.

Realistically, though, these users tend to be behind corporate firewalls with lots of antivirus protection and a forced patch schedule, so I doubt Microsoft is too worried about them contributing significantly to continued security holes thanks to IE6. This is an update to save the clueless from themselves.

Want to know something amazing? You can find out! You can click that link up in the summary, read the full text of the decision, and find out! Isn't technology amazing?

For what it's worth, the judge ruled that because Sony had not actually removed the functionality- what they had done instead was ban unmodified PS3s from accessing their service- what they were doing was legal. You may not agree with the decision, at least try to get a grasp on the logic behind it before you start yelling.

For the first time ever, the term "war on Christmas" is actually accurate.