Never heard of that, anywhere I've been it was always black and white, either fireworks are legal or they aren't. In the US most places where they're illegal it's because of injury and fire risk. They're illegal where I live but nobody really cares, it's about a 10 minute drive to the county line where you can stock up to your heart's content. The police do respond to fireworks calls when Debbie Downer makes a complaint, but unless you're doing something egregious like firing Saturn Missiles in the middle of the road or aiming stuff at someone's house on purpose, they usually just "remind" you that it's illegal and tell you to knock it off.

MADD is notorious for that sort of bullshit.

The answer is fairly clear: NSA has sufficient dirt on anyone with the power to fight this that they're too afraid to do so. We know they've tapped Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, presidential candidates, etc. We've reached a point where it's going to take one or more of these officials to get so fed up that they're willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Whatever's being used to keep them quiet, they're going to have to air it up front and then start in with congressional hearings.

If I were NSA, my biggest fear would be an unfriendly Senator who discovers he has a terminal illness. Not long to live, no re-election to worry about, and done giving a fuck whether people find out he's secretly gay and loves snorting coke with illegal immigrants. That man, the one with power and nothing to lose, that's the one who can bring the whole thing down.

And that's hardly anything new, either. Andrea Mitchell of NBC married Alan Greenspan in 1997; he was Chairman of the Fed at the time, and continued in that role until 2006. Nice little bit of "extraordinary access" NBC had there during Clinton's and W's presidencies.

The obvious joke response is that Facebook probably gets all kinds of funding from NSA.

A more serious response is that it's not quite clear. UCSF and Cornell both participated in this project to some degree, and they're both subject to HHS regulations since they do get federal funding. Whether or not the whole project was then required to follow the rules depends on what exactly the university participants did.

None of us know the whole story, and it's not likely that we ever will, unless he contracts some terminal illness and decides to write a telling memoir on his way out.

I'll agree that no one like you or me would ever have the same amount of "luck," primarily because it can't be luck. Kim has money and he has leverage. One doesn't always buy the other (to the chagrin of a litany of folks from George Jung to Bernie Madoff), but it seems clear that Kim has banked plenty of both. He's freely given out some of the juicy bits, like the MegaUpload accounts that were registered and used by USG and MAFIAA entities to engage in various copyright infringement. But he has more, and he's keeping it to himself.

The man may be a complete and total pompous douche canoe with a proven track record of dubious activity, but he isn't dumb by any stretch of the imagination.

Anyone who doubts this statement should have a look at this graph. Turns out that "Just Say No" was actually referring to whether or not you wanted to live outside of prison.

Mark Karpeles is a guy with a failed trading-card website who hired a few c0d3rZ to dabble in Bitcoin and wound up with a disaster. Tim Draper is a fairly well-known VC who's spent 30 years building both his reputation and a company worth billions of dollars. If you can't see the difference, I doubt anything I say will help, but Draper is incredibly unlikely to issue a statement like this if it isn't a) true, b) fully vetted by his legal team, and c) fully vetted by the other company's legal team.

Perl may be legacy to an extent, but it's a Swiss army knife that will get any job done. I don't see it going away anytime soon.

I know it's in vogue to hate on PHP, but PHP is relatively modern, robust, and fully capable of handling enterprise tasks. It's widely adopted and there's support everywhere. Probably half of the websites and services you use every day are built on PHP, it's certainly not the worst language you could choose.

That's good information.

Now, who has the binaries? Let's get a look.

Do you not have private prisons in the UK? If not, I suppose it's only a matter of time. We have them in the US, and some judges are already rotting in prison for exactly the sort of thing you were imagining. They were sentencing juveniles with petty offenses to long term detention, in exchange for multi-million dollar kickbacks from the private detention facility. When imprisoning people becomes a profitable enterprise, abuse is guaranteed to follow.

Fleeing the country over half a million bucks, some of which was probably "pledged" through sock puppets using their own money? I rather doubt it.

The fun part is that a lot of these miracle mining rig builders are suspected of using those new rigs themselves for awhile before finally delivering them. So it's kind of like people selling used outdated beat-up shovels during the gold rush. The scam seems to be:

• Pre-sell insanely powerful mining rigs
• Use pre-sale money to order hardware and build rigs
• Mine for a month or two with awesome rigs while delaying delivery to buyers
• !!!PROFIT!!!
• Newer, faster hardware becomes available
• Pre-sell rigs built with this month's even better hardware
• Finally ship last month's batch to the buyers
• Repeat

Just another pyramid scheme and there are still suckers falling for it.

At a former job, we had a similar situation, no budget for graphics so we only used photos from places like morguefile. We handled it through version control. A subversion pre-commit hook was set up that would reject any commit containing an image file unless specific properties were set on the files (subversion allows custom "svnprops" which are essentially user-defined metadata tags). One of the required attributes was the source URL that the file came from.

I guess this may not have helped much if an image was later re-licensed. Perhaps taking a screenshot of the source site, with some visible indication of the license, would help.

At my last workplace, we officially got two 15-minute breaks per day, one before lunch and one after lunch. Now this was at a non-regulated, non-union, private company and we were salaried employees who routinely showed up early, occasionally stayed late, and many of us were still checking (and responding to) emails and tickets, fixing things, etc. from home at all hours of the day and night. This was not a scenario where we had time cards or where everyone worked exactly 480 minutes per day or where being away from your desk for a few minutes had any negative impact on productivity.

Over the course of some years, a group of smokers had aligned our patterns so that we'd break for a quick smoke at 9:30, 11, 2:30, and 4. We kept it legit, it doesn't take 7 1/2 minutes to walk outside, smoke a cigarette while chatting, and walk back in. No one was taking four 15-minute breaks. Eventually HR sent out a warning to everyone who was "abusing" the break policy by taking two quick breaks during every 4 work hours instead of one 15-minute break.

So we shifted to taking our allotted break once before lunch and once after. And we used every last second of those 15 minutes, every time. We'd wave at the cameras on the way into and out of the building and one of us would always keep track of our remaining time on their watch or their phone. Guess which folks stopped showing up at work 20 minutes early, staying late to finish things up, leaving our email clients open and monitoring work emails 24/7, and handling shit outside of business hours? Guess which folks stopped bringing their lunches and eating in 10 minutes at their desk, and started taking their full lunch hours offsite every day?

Somehow there are still plenty of employers who just don't understand that if you treat your employees like a bunch of kindergarteners, you're not going to get things like "loyalty" and "amazing work ethic" and "110%" in return. No, you're going to drive away good talent, and with that talent will go many years of your institutional memory. And you deserve to lose it.

By the time I was out of there, we had a running joke that they were probably keeping records of anyone who took more than 2 minutes to take a shit. I suppose it's a function of HR feeling a need to justify their own existence from time to time. That company is currently advertising for an HR director, a little bit of schadenfreude to end my night on a pleasant thought...