This news is about as surprising as the Sun rising in the morning. As I, and others, have explained multiple times across the years - the average person isn't the tinfoil hat privacy nutter that so many here on Slashdot are.

they government wants you to keep paying taxes instead of dying.

caning and flogging them would be ok.

That's quite the difference, and something you entirely failed to mention.

I didn't mention it because it's a difference without a distinction - whether you press a key and the command is saved to a file for later replay, or immediately processed and sent to the "instrument", it's all the same. It's something that's been done many, many times before.

And NASA?

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum

What I'm curious to see: do they have any actual ice sheet data? You know, from this half of the past decade?

Because, yeah, we know this shit already, up until around 2009, it got warm and ice melted. Then it started cooling again. And now, we're passed the 'benchmark lots-of-ice' from the 1970s (the one that's been used for alarmist claims since then about ice sheet levels), according to NASA. There's now markedly more ice in the arctic than ever before*!

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum

* or, at least, since it started to all melt in the 1970s.

No doubt inspired by this guy, or any number of others like him who've been doing this for several year now.

Though admittedly without the buzzword worthy but otherwise pointless 3D printed plastic brackets.

Exactly my thought.

The review is useless without mention of battery life, frankly. If it's not at least comparable to a Nexus 4, well... I'd hope for significantly more.

I'm mostly concerned with "do I have to put this thing on a charger to just make a phone call every now and then".

that last time I went to the courthouse, I had a seat belt cutter/glass breaker on my keychain. The guards confiscated it because "it had a blade". Yeah, a blade surrounded by enough metal and plastic such that the only thing that one could really cut with it would need to be less than 1/4" thick and flat. I'm sure the people in the traffic court were relieved such a dangerous tool was caught at the door. Sheesh.

If his backpack is waterproof, he could dump everything out and use it to carry water.

It also should be noted that the provinces are in charge of the systems. IIRC, the Feds just collect and share the revenue, so your experience in Quebec may be totally different than what is done in SK.

A way to fix that would be to have a "student minimum wage" that's a significant percentage lower than the regular adult minimum wage. It would encourage businesses to hire kids.

Just raise the stupid gas tax and have it adjust each year based on the CPI or make it a fixed percentage of the price. The Federal tax hasn't been adjusted since the early 1990's, so it's long overdue for it to be changed. I'm not sure how often Oregon has changed theirs.

For decades launching these rockets was not a problem for Russia.

Actually, for several decades, they had just about as many problems as they do now... and their success ratio was more-or-less in the same range (.98-.99) as the Shuttle (or pretty much any other launcher*). The only things that have significantly changed is that until the fall of the Soviet Union you never heard about the failures in the first place, and in the last decade or so the failures have started being covered in the non-specialist/popular press. These changes have conspired to create the illusion of 'extremely reliable' Soviet/Russian boosters and a recent and unusual string of failures.

* Yes, essentially all boosters that end up in regular service pretty much end up in this narrow range. There's a few a hair lower, and few a bit higher, but they're outliers.

I try to keep my keychain as small as possible. So I have a house key, a work key, and a USB key (super tiny).

This. My keychain has my house key, my garage/shop key (it's a seperate building from the house), my car key, my wife's car key. That's it. Other than that, I carry a lighter, my cigarettes, a pen, a sharpie, a medium swiss army knife, and my phone.

I have no need to carry a complete toolbox in my pockets, and have never grasped those who do.