The Virgin Islands TLD is ".emacs"?

Yeah, no kidding. For instance... almost every person I've ever played monopoly with - even from different geographic regions - has generally followed the convention where all fines go into a pot that is collected by anyone landing directly on "Free Parking".

You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.

It doesn't matter if the Washington Post is personally owned or not - Bezos' personal fortune is dependent on both it and on Amazon.com, and he's the one calling the shots with both companies. So this attempt to use one of his companies to drive business to another of his companies shouldn't be surprising.

There were a LOT of those "buy it now" links scattered all through the article!

If I were a Washington Post subscriber, I might very well cancel my subscription over something like that - it completely breaks up the flow of the article. That's highly annoying.

Yup. We were paying $135/month for a particular tier of Comcast's cable + internet service. We looked at going internet only, but for basically the same price ($70/month) we got internet, broadcast channels and HBO (and Discovery, but who cares). And it keeps my wife happy because she wants to watch all those cop and hospital dramas.

What's really maddening is how we got to $135 in the first place. It wasn't that long ago that our cable bill was closer to $80 for that same level of service. But Comcast kept pushing the cost upward... I think when they doubled the cable speed, called it "Blast!", and started charging $10 extra for it (without asking, of course) is what finally motivated us to act - they just throttle any services that extra speed would be useful for, anyway...

We are too far away from the central office to make DSL a viable choice, so Comcast is basically the only game in town. But I have toyed with the idea of testing T-Mobile's unlimited data plan in its place - if the Comcast price creep continues unabated, I might actually do it. If Netflix streaming works adequately, that'd be good enough.

Three anonymous racists trolls in one JE. Brown probably had a slashdot account, the kid was a nerd. He'd just graduated high school and was enrolled in college to study engineering. He'd never been in any trouble with the police, and those who knew him said he was a peaceful young man with a good sense of humor.

Now heartless racists, like the Ferguson police chief, are trying to demonize him.

This hits close to home for me, I have family and friends in the St Louis area and grew up in Cahokia. And yes, there are a lot of racists there. Idiots, if you ask me. The Ferguson government was the stupidest of all, they were begging for riots and still are.

It's the one group game I get to play semi-regularly - my wife and I have been playing it with the same friends ever since we got out of college, back in the 80s.

When I was still in college, Cribbage, Hearts, and Spades were all very popular in the dorms.

I've always wanted to learn Bridge, but since I'm the only one in my circle with any interest - it's never happened.

Like putting too much air in a balloon!

He misspelled the guy's name several times? Then he's an idiot, and any point he's trying to make is worthless.

Another shady practice is faculty writing their own textbook and then requiring it be used when they teach related courses, when it appears there's a well-accepted standard text in use by 90% of other schools where the particular subject is taught.

And here's yet another news story about a rather well known Korean astronaut.

While I have made this same argument here on Slashdot numerous times - particularly when, a few years ago, people took umbrage because "hacker" was supplanting "cracker" - in this case you'd first need some supporting evidence that the phrase "begs the question" is actually changing meaning in popular speech.

As far as I can tell, that is not the case - the submitter simply misused the phrase.

What we really need - but will never have - is some sort of independent civilian oversight group designed to make sure these sorts of programs operate within some specific narrow parameters - with effective enforcement power.

Looking for passport fraud? Go ahead and look through all the passport pictures... as long as you immediately discard every single one that doesn't match.

Looking for a stolen car? Go ahead and use that vehicle-mounted license plate scanner... But you can't store any of the non-matching plates for even a second.