There's the problem right there. To mangle the quote: You can't very well dust CO2 for fingerprints. If we could pinpoint how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere is actually generated by humans, we wouldn't be having this debate. Unfortunately, all we can do is infer through other means of estimating, and that wiggle room is all people need to start an argument about the data.

Love it! You want more power than a Camry V6? That makes you an unreasonable person.

The postal service is struggling. Just ask Obama. http://www.breitbart.tv/obama-its-the-post-office-thats-always-having-problems/

Why in the world is the answer to every question: more _federal_ involvement?! Why can't we just let local municipalities or companies lay a piece of fiber to your door, and then let you choose which providers you want to hook to the other end of your line for service? That's the answer I'm looking for.

I suppose it will be just like any other corporate field, though. One of the slightly larger companies will start buying a smaller, struggling one, and the rest will snowball until we get something like Ma Bell. Again.

Alright, maybe the feds should be involved in this. But then we get horrible market distortions that lead to other problems.

Well, I guess it's either Scylla or Charybdis.

So it's all just legal double-speak then. You don't really "own" your comments, except when Geeknet wants to disavow itself from them to avoid being held responsible for them in some sort of litigation.

I've just narrowly averted posting in a couple of other threads here this morning. This thread has got me thinking that I want to just go ahead and delete my Slashdot account. (I deleted my Facebook account a couple months ago.)

I hope the ACLU cleans the government's clock with the lawsuit, and establishes precedent which guarantees there won't be any more of these things.

Further, I agree that the cop drawing his gun was outrageous. However, what everyone seems to be missing is that there was another, marked squad car right behind the unmarked vehicle, making the stop along with the plain-clothed officer. The motorcyclist had no doubt that he was being stopped by a legitimate police action.

And what, pray tell, is "backwater" about the Midwest? We have a Starbucks on every corner, just like you do.

I'm pretty libertarian on these issues, and I think that the courts upholding the idea that you can't film ANYTHING in public view is ridiculous.

However... some people really deserve to be treated much worse than they are. It really makes my blood boil when I see these car chases on cop shows that go on and on and on, at 120+ mph on crowded freeways and city streets. The driver causes several near misses and maybe even some collateral damage, entire police stations have to be mobilized miles ahead of the guy to get helicopters going and spike strips laid, and then the guy finally plows into something or someone else that ends the chase. Then they jump out of the car and cause a long foot chase and / or search before they finally put him in cuffs. These people don't just deserve a beat down. After all that effort, they deserve to be fed into a wood chipper.

And, if we're all being perfectly honest about it, it's those kinds of people who are causing the police to act over-zealously when the slightest thing happens in an standard police encounter.

Isn't that the exact argument for evolution?

I'm with you. I took a couple of hours and literally, manually deleted 99% of the stuff I've done on Facebook, and have stopped using it. (Yes, I realize that the company has this stuff forever, but I've learned my lesson.)

The problem is that "free" will always win. Always. People, in general, are willing to trade anything for "free." The few, vocal persons who are not (willing) will always be inconsequential in these matters.

First, Wordpress is GPL software, so you can't lump it in with Flickr, et. al. (I just converted my personal site from a custom Rails app to Wordpress.)

Second, what I haven't seen anyone remark about in this thread so far is RSS feeds. If people create their own sites, put whatever content and restrictions they would like on them, and then make different feeds for different groups of people, those people can aggregate what they want with a good feed reader, and everyone's happy!

But, yeah, that's a lot more work.

You must have been using it with a VERY low duty cycle.

I keed, I keed.

Whatever. I just did my umpteenth virus cleanup on a friend's computer. It took me 6 hours of fooling around with it (off and on) to get it cleaned up. As I didn't know the user's password, I had hacked the Administrator account, and used that one for the exercise. Turns out the virus had some stuff still stuck in the user's profile, and reinfected the machine when she started using it again.

So I'm done with trying to "clean" a PC with one of these newfangled super-virus/rootkit/remote-spam-server/fake-antivirus infections. The next time someone comes to me with a virus-infected PC, I'm going to get their data off, scan it with a couple of online virus checkers, wipe and reinstall their machine, and put their data back on. I could be done in a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, that's probably too much work as well, considering how few people keep their reinstall disks. If they haven't, it would be a reboot-fest of installing service packs, drivers, updates, and software. Bleh! Is this the best you can do, Microsoft? Really?!

Maybe next time, I'll just tell them to sell the PC on eBay and buy a Mac. (I'll even wipe the disk for them!) Will it solve everything? No, and spare me the usual rhetoric. The bottom line is that they'll be better off.

Where I work, a dismissed employee refused to tell us what a password was. Legal action was threatened by the owner, who claimed it was theft: denying someone of something they owned. My father-in-law is a lawyer, and I asked him about that. He said that refusing to give your employer a password would be classified as "illegal control" (or something close to that), not "theft." Apparently, the laws would be less severe for this. In the end, we just worked around the problem.

I researched long and hard before I bought my iPhone a couple months ago. I had been using some form of Palm device for about 15 years; the last two of which were a model of Treo. The bottom line is that I needed NON-EXCHANGE-TYPE access to calendars on mail servers. Specifically, I have a Zimbra FOSS mail server for my family, and a Zimbra NE server at work (which handles 2 companies). I didn't want either server to be "canonical," so I refuse to use ActiveSync and let it "take over" all of the PIM functions of the phone. For calendars, I use CalDAV, and the iPhone has KILLER CalDAV support. (I use a Funambol server at home to sync contacts, and the Zindus plugin to make them work with Thunderbird, though SyncEvolution works almost as well with Evoltion.)

Neither the new WebOS-based Palm phones, nor any of the Android phones I can find, have any support for CalDAV. At all. How this situation exists, I have no idea, but I don't care. The iPhone has been great. However, I am one of those people who has used Linux on the desktop for about 11 years now, and I'm watching and waiting for an Android phone that will integrate with my collaboration servers as well as an iPhone. When this happens, I'll give the iPhone to my wife. Heck, I'd pay an early-termination fee to switch providers if the Sprint Evo could do it!

He's a well-above-average-skill-level hacker. Maybe one of the best. To me, this qualifies him to comment on anything that's a non-trivial coding exercise, and anything around it. News for nerds, and all that.