The key part: "darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light." I'm the last person to push theology, and not remotely christian, but that's... poetically pretty.

Yes, the waters were here long before us, before the earth, before (our) star. I don't have to agree with anyone's religious tales to appreciate and share a sense of wonder at the bigness and oldness of it all.

Ah, dammit. My bad.
I did a bunch of work in Atlanta, and Pinewood Atlanta Studios (a good sized film/sound stage facility over 1/2 square mile in Fayetteville, Georgia) is just "Pinewood Studios" over there...

They're overthinking the problem. It's in Georgia. All's ya need to do is give BillyBob's thousand-year-old grampy a decent slingshot and a bucket of marbles, and tell him you'll pay him $250 every time he can hit one of those tiny little gummint spy planes.

Better yet, get him to tell his fishing buddies about the prize, and his buddies, etc... until you have a low level permeation thru the community. Just remember to pay 'em (and pay out of the set's lunch fund on an obfuscated line item that says something suitably snarky like "humble pie" or "tasty crow".) Oh, and tell 'em old guys: you can't eat what you catch, but you can resell the parts on ebay.... :)

Oh, wow, dude... Calm down. Have some water.
I gotta say, "goosestepping neckbeard" is the best thing I've been called in weeks. And no, a low UID only means I showed up. Just like you did.

I could type something nice about Minecraft, but I already did in another thread today: stuff about minecraft being an excellent UI for 3D printer data.

And try not to lunge so hard at obvious trollage. :)

Do not poke the elder gods.

The killer app for a commodity 3D printer would be a MineCraft-like interface. I was talking to my teenage kids and their friends about the 3D printer that sits unused in their school lab, and they all complained that the software was incomprehensible. But since they all create amazing structures in MineCraft, I suggested the obvious.... the idea of a crafting UI for 3D design had them jumping up and down yelling “HELL YES we would use that to build amazing things.”

Notch? Are you busy just now? Don't you have some spare cash and free time?
Howzabout a 3D crafting UI that looks like a holodeck room and adopts the standard controls for MineCraft to frame up basic block structures, plus some of the better mod controls for curves, smoothing, and multi-size blocks?

User scenarios would follow something like this:
- Adjust the size of the room you want to work in,
- Rough design using building blocks off the hot bar,
- managing multiple materials or colors from the inventory,
- more complex design with other objects (maybe compound objects) from the crafting table,
- fill/smoothing/spanning following the methods/controls of some of the better mods,
- view/flythrough, save functions, import, export, etc...,
- .... and finally printing.

I’d buy it. Seriously, I would plunk down a grand for the hardware in a heartbeat if the design GUI was fun to use.
(And HP needs to get on the stick, if they want to extend their "ink" market... :)

NOTCH!!! Seriously, you need to get on this.
DREMEL!!!?! Seriously, you need to talk to Notch.

An oversimplification. The US, UK, and allies variously broke many cipher systems throughout WWII. Still the US benefitted from this.

What if the Germans were using, say, Windows, Android phones, SSL, Gmail, Yahoo, and Skype, instead of Enigma machines?

I presume you wouldn't say it was "wrong" of the United States to crack the German and Japanese codes in WWII...

...so when US adversaries (and lets just caveat this by saying people YOU, personally, agree are legitimate US adversaries) don't use their own "codes", but instead share the same systems, networks, services, devices, cloud providers, operating systems, encryption schemes, and so on, that Americans and much of the rest of the world uses, would you suggest that they should be off limits?

This isn't so much a law enforcement question as a question of how to do SIGINT in the modern digital world, but given the above, and given that intelligence requires secrecy in order to be effective, how would you suggest the United States go after legitimate targets? Or should we not be able to, because that power "might" be able to be abused -- as can any/all government powers, by definition?

This simplistic view that the only purpose of the government in a free and democratic society must be to somehow subjugate, spy on, and violate the rights of its citizens is insane, while actual totalitarian and non-free states, to say nothing of myriad terrorist and other groups, press their advantage. And why wouldn't they? The US and its ever-imperfect system of law is not the great villain in the world.

Take a step back and get some perspective. And this is not a rhetorical question: if someone can tell me their solution for how we should be able to target technologies that are fundamentally shared with innocent Americans and foreigners everywhere while still keeping such sources, methods, capabilities, and techniques secret, I'm all ears. And if you believe the second a technology is shared it should become magically off-limits because power might be abused, you are insane -- or, more to the point, you believe you have some moral high ground which, ironically, would actually result in severe disadvantages for the system of free society you would claim to support.

I have been in a few jobs where the managers were verbally and/or emotionally abusive. In both cases I left ASAP.

THIS. Life's too short to put up with loser companies.

That being said, one needs a financial cushion of 6 months-ish. The easiest way to do that is to skim off 10% from every paycheck, no matter what.

Remember, you canâ"and should!â"evaluate the company you work for, daily. If they "fail the interview" (i.e., it is more hassle to work there than to find another job) then it is time to Let Them Go.

Sweet Jag, though.

True. It's possibility the cop would have made-out with him or become drinking buddies with him instead.

Today that enlisted man would have been tasered, beaten, and arrested for assault on a police officer and resisting arrest.

Ahhh, progress...

How would that be different than someone, say, texting while masturbating in the passenger seat of a moving car? A lot of sudden awkward pauses, shifts in position, device gets put down to pinch a nipple.

Frankly, I'm shocked that Iceland extends pilots licenses to volcanoes. That seems like a terrible idea.

This. By stating that none of the bulk data can be disclosed because of "potential charges," that's a little different than redacting "ongoing investigations" against specific individuals. The latter is a pretty reasonable limitation on the information disclosed from a FOIA request, but the former is a pretty literal form of treason: an appointed or elected official is seeking to subvert the US Constitution's prohibitions on warrant-less searches, and also to bypass constitutional checks and balances by essentially turning judgements into decrees removing rights from every citizen in perpetuity. Add the notion that the topic is secrecy of scope as well as content, and that's pretty much a literal definition of "conspiracy" to violate* the constitution.

*Perhaps "provide a legal contortion that exempts all citizens from certain constitutional protections in a manner that clearly and purposefully violates the intent of the law."