"...not only is Weev's conviction bad law, if upheld, it will destroy independent security research, and perhaps the rest of consumer safety research as well."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the point. What in the world makes them think the government and the mega corps that they've merged with wouldn't want to "destroy independent security research" and "consumer safety research"? You think those federal-corporate cockroaches want you shining a light on their clandestine behind-the-fridge data gorging?

Scarily, I can hear that exact phrase sounding actually rather good coming from that Orbit gum gal

As I said of Western governments many years ago, "WE read 1984 and took it as a warning. THEY read 1984 and took it as a blueprint."

Yes please for the love of god can we kill QWERTY on small-form keyboards? Putting three vowels right next to each other is a major annoyance. bug/big/bog, suck/sick/sock, un/in/on, if/of ..... so many common words that can end up wrong by just a couple millimeters, in such a way that autocorrect will never catch them.

Oh? We went after Eric Holder and his justice department employees who facilitated the sale of thousands of guns to murderers in Mexican drug cartels?

Good to know.

And here's why -- just imagine if police were forced to provide this in the '80s. Kevin Mitnick could have used a Google search box to activate a script running on WOPR to launch a nuclear missile!

We wouldn't even be here on Slashdot now, just huddled in our underground shelters for decades waiting for the end of nuclear winter. Although now that I think about it, I haven't been out of mom's basement since World of Warcraft was released. So I guess no real difference there.

So am I the only one who read this part of the summary and saw it as "The patient is an unarmed man in his 20s...."?

Thanks Slashdot. I've always thought all root beer was caffeine free. TMYK

I don't drink colas anyway except the once or twice a year when I'm somewhere with a soda fountain and I enjoy a refreshing mixture of root beer and lemonade.

I think his point isn't necessarily flat earth, but the real reason people "feared the vast ocean just as much as we do space". They weren't at all afraid of water or being at sea -- during the time in question naval power was the dominant military power and every emergent imperial power did so through their navy. People didn't "fear" the vast ocean, they just didn't know other continents were out there, and so they quite rationally "feared" that if there was nothing but thousands of miles of water between Gibraltar and Canton, it would be extremely difficult to stock a ship sufficient to support all the crew over that long of a journey while still preserving room/mass for the cargo necessary to make the trip financially worthwhile.

So there's a significant difference here, in that we can actually see what's in space between us and our destination. And we don't see a damned thing that looks anything remotely equivalent to the luxuriously resource-rich American continents discovered by early European explorers like Columbus. When European ships pulled up to the New World they were encountering basic natural resources which have high utility for human beings with no special technology -- timber, fresh water, game, plant foods, arable land. And those two land masses are truly massive, stretching nearly from pole to pole across the surface of this planet. Space on the other hand, contains almost entirely, well, empty space. Hence the name, Space. Any matter/energy we do encounter is going to be in a form which will take significant technological infrastructure and on-the-spot engineering for us to have any use for it. We're not going to just accidentally stumble on a Kwik-e-mart with rechargeable batteries and slim jims between here and Proxima Centauri.

Therefore, the "fear" of the vast ocean in the 1400s is not at all equivalent to our "fear" of the hostility of dead empty space -- because we can directly verify that space does indeed consist of millions of light years of cold dead nothingness. There's no "there" there.

...and how is this different from Google reading all your mail discussions and targeting ads to you? You've already accepted that a corporation can listen to your conversations and build a profile of your likely purchasing habits. Does the difference in medium - from text to audio - really make that much difference?

This just demonstrates that you live in a liberal filter bubble, because you think that threat is some kind of game-ending trump card. On the contrary, you'd have total bedlam as millions of people rushed to line up asking where to sign their names.

In the last 6-7 years I have witnessed is an increasing number of rank-and-file conservatives (especially under the age of 45) who have started saying, "Look, I know the system is going to implode and evaporate long before I get there. And even if it doesn't, I find the policy/economic side effects of the federal government filling this role to be inherently, inescapably hostile to a free society. Therefore, LET ME OUT NOW. I will gladly forego any benefits I would have received at retirement. You can even keep whatever I've paid in up to this point. Just LET ME OUT NOW to stand or fall on my own financial choices with whatever money I earn from the sweat of my labor."

Pragmatically, a very very large percentage of the younger conservative generation has ALREADY kissed their "benefits" goodbye because they believe the system is irredeemably corrupt and bankrupt. Your threat doesn't scare them any more than it would if you threatened a terminal stage 4 lymphoma patient with execution.

http://www.newairplane.com/welcome/

I'm looking forward to sitting next to the guy in Boeing's "Passenger Experience" video/stills wearing headphones with his drumsticks out. What, is he gonna be drumming on the armrests or something? Even if he's only playing "air drums" and not making noise, how totally obnoxious is that visual gonna be?

This old man
he played 4
he played knick-knack on the emergency exit door.
before the rest of the passengers beat the everloving crap out of him for bringing out drumsticks on a freaking plane ferchrissakes! Jeez!

I wonder if any top-level tracking system would notice if you booked a ticket on two separate airlines leaving from the same terminal around the same time. I don't know that doing so would be exploitable in any way, but now I'm curious toward just how broad the software-based aggregation/collation/analytics are.

If any circumstances can be called justifying to say that some things shall not be discussed, then all censorship can be justified eventually; it's just a matter of organizing a sufficient majority of voters/protesters/terrorists.

Which has NOTHING to do with how easy it is to simply purchase instantaneous access to existing databases today.

"OCR" never read a phonebook because "OCR" is just a piece of software. Actual human beings had to do actual tedious legwork to scan, recognize, and correct thousands upon thousands of text pages. If you think this was trivial or inexpensive you never worked in data processing before 1995. I did and I can tell you it wasn't just sitting around having tea and finger sandwiches while "OCR read the phonebook".

Viol8's point was about the enormous contrast in ease between harvesting small amounts of directory information 20 years ago versus a couple clicks on a website to access a database of hundreds of detailed profiles of hundreds of millions of people.