But then it occurred to me, it's not the card/usb-stick the dogs are smelling, it's the fact that some human touched it

No, the dog simply smells the chemicals in the device - Hell, if we can smell them, so can a dog. We just can't smell them well enough to find one hidden inside four containers at the back of a filing cabinet, whereas a dog can.

To your other point, however...


There's no way the dog can smell certain memory cards with certain content on it

Absolutely true, but largely irrelevant. They had a warrant to seize storage media, plain and simple. The dog just helped them find all of it.

That said, I still see a dog alerting to the smell of electronics as increasingly useless in the modern world. Assuming no malicious intent on the part of the handler (false, but let's roll with it for now), a drug dog can sniff out your bag of weed precisely because you don't have hundreds of bags of hypothetically-legal weed hidden around your apartment and they need to find the one illegal one. With electronics, however, I do have hundreds (possibly in the thousands) of circuit boards randomly scattered around my house - I'd dare say that even Joe Sixpack easily has over a hundred boards around the house, when even things like car keys and teddy bears and thermostats have them nowadays.

So while the police might love cataloging 150 individual drug charges for every seed they find in your carpet, they won't take quite the same sick pleasure in documenting your three computers, your smoke detectors, two external HDDs, your TVs, 18 thumbdrives, random old PC parts you have lying around, a third of your kid's action figures, your vintage SNES and dozens of games, a few hundred burned DVDs... And then someone actually needs to check out almost all of those to decide whether or not they have any storage capacity, and if so, what they contain? In all seriousness, if they raided my house for storage media, even narrowing it down to "real" storage devices (HDDs, burned DVDs, flash drives... as opposed to every recordable greeting card etc), someone could literally spend the rest of their life trying to decide whether or not they had found anything incriminating in the collection.

I thought GoPros were supposed to be good.

GoPros really do rock - You just have to turn off the ultra-wide FOV. The originals will go down to 137 degrees, and the GP2s will go down to 90 (basically a normal shot).

That said, it all depends on your intent... While the fisheye distortion seems annoying, how much of this show would the drone have missed with literally half the effective FOV?

Google really does occupy both an enviable and a pitiable niche as regards the war on censorship / copyright / privacy.

On the one hand, they constantly get orders to remove search results that the likes of DuckDuckGo never need to deal with.

On the other, when they actually do remove links, they almost uniquely have the power to make the asker instantly regret the request... Whether through the "Streisand" effect, or in the present case, by "innocently" applying the demand in an overly-broad manner, Google comes out smelling like roses while those who would silence them become the next internet pariahs-of-the-week.

Truly beautiful! And for a change (though I in no way mean to claim Google as any sort of White Knight), this effect works largely in favor of the public.

Let's take TFA at face value, and assume one in 10k stars start their evolution as count as "metallic" stars.

Hydrogen main sequence stars burn for a a few million years (for the class O supergiants) to literally trillions of years (for the class M all-but-failures). Helium burning, in a star with sufficient mass, lasts between a few hundred thousand to a few dozen million years.

The subject of TFA starts after helium burning normally finishes - Next on a typical star comes carbon, lasting for only a few hundred years; Then comes neon lasting for a single year, oxygen at half a year, and silicon finishes its run in a single day.

So whether or not a star begins life with a high concentration of trans-lithium metals, it will have a very, very short lifetime; That one-in-ten-thousand creation ratio therefore reduces to more like one-in-a-trillion among those stars still shining in our nighttime sky.

Ok, given that, what would a work-based social network be?

Short answer: A delusion by either marketing ("We can use our coworkers as guinea-pigs for our future piss-off-Facebook spamming campaign!") or a member of the senior management team with no clue how the internet works ("I want my own Facebook, make it happen, peons!").

I think the real problem with this discussion involves calling these things "social" networks. You can successfully have a Sharepoint or a Wiki or even a communal message board, as long as it gets used solely for organizing factual content. As soon as you start having "friends" and "likes" and "retweets", it will inevitably run into the fact that most of us don't choose to associate with our coworkers except to the minimum degree necessary to keep getting a paycheck. Yes, I have a couple of "real" work friends, we go out for beers on occasion and go to each other's holiday cookouts, that sort of thing - But I don't need (or want) Big Brother's oversight to maintain those relationships.

tldr: Work is inherently not social, beyond the same "social" transaction that occurs between a prostitute and her John. Simple as that.

With power from a commercially available solar panel provided by utility company Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G)

Why the hell would you even mention that? The source of the electricity for an electrochemical proof-of-concept reaction matters not at all - Much less, the company that happened to sell you the solar panel. If the core reaction works, you can prove it just as thoroughly using grid power as you can using Product Placement-powered Greenwashing.

That said, running this reaction from the grid would more directly expose the real problem with it - at 2% efficient, it would produce far, far more CO2 than it sequesters; which in turn means you would never, ever want to actually do this using solar power, rather than just using the solar power directly instead of coal.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I would love to see massive adoption of solar, and consider the residential zero-net-energy movement a huge step in the right direction. But the planet will sequester CO2 all by itself; we just need to stop making more.

Which personal beliefs would that be? That people who create wealth should be compensated accordingly?

Okay, I'll bite - That the most productive creators of wealth should receive the most compensation. That seniority doesn't equal value. That the state shouldn't pay four people to stand around watching one dig a hole.

Or how about simply that the "right" candidate doesn't always have a "(D)" after his name? And before you get any ideas, I would point out that he rarely has an "(R)", either.


I'm super glad you're such a special snowflake that you never need help with anything

Thank you. As long as you can admit that, we can move the conversation forward. Because...

you might want to consider that constantly falling wages affects your bargaining position

Oh, absolutely! It makes my position better every year, make no mistake! Because while Joe Programmer gets his 2% COL increase every year, I have commanded - and demanded - and gotten - an average of 9% per year since entering the workforce. Yet you seriously wonder why I don't want a union "representing" me? I find the USSC's stance on that outright hilarious - Unfair that some "benefit" from collective bargaining without chipping in??? Thanks, but you can have your contractually-extortionate 3.5%, I'll take the higher rate that I earned, thankyouverymuch.

Unions keep the week employed, and drag the strongest down to the average. Nothing more, nothing less. Once upon a time, I'll admit that they did some good; today, they amount to welfare-for-the-employed, and have long since burned up any karma they earned in the post-industrial-revolution days.

No, we don't need a union...

Or, we could just all refuse to sign overly-broad non-competes and NDAs. I do (refuse), and manage to do so entirely without needing to fork over a cut of my weekly paycheck to group that would then use it to lobby largely against my personal beliefs.

If you choose to sell your soul, don't cry when the Devil demands his due.

The problem is, quite simply, that people don't read their bills. If only people would read the contracts they sign and the bills they get

I realize you make a joke here, but you have it 100% right. In the US, I consider it reasonably safe to say that 90% of the people this affects had a monthly contract (yes, I know T-Mobile offers reasonable contractless plans, but unlike the other big carriers, their contracts don't keep penalize you once their phone-subsidizing portion finishes). That means 90% of the people this affects should have completely predictable phone bills from one month to the next. I pay $82 and change every month for a family plan with more minutes than I would ever use. If I get a bill for more than that, I read the bill and find out why.

"Oh yeah, I made that call from outside the US"
"Damn, I actually went over my minutes when Dad went in for surgery"
"I sent how many text messages? Well, okay..."
"What the fuck does 8888906150BrnStorm23918 mean and why did it cost me $10?"

One of these things is not like the others - You don't need to understand 99% of the bill to know that this month you paid $10 more than last month for no good reason.

"Plagiarism" does not belong in the same bin o' offenses as data fabrication. The former commits an "offense by definition because citations get academics off", an "offense" solely of non-attribution; while the latter produces fraudulent and untrustworthy outcomes.

By the time 200 people have cited the same landmark study's findings, I can guarantee you that half of them have "paraphrased" it into the exact same thing. The whole idea of plagiarism amounts to a race to the bottom as to who can rephrase something otherwise-simple in the most awkward manner possible

So when a new study lumps plagiarism in with fabricating data, we see all too plainly what really drives this shit - Credit, credit, credit. Publish or, worse than perishing, you get stuck actually *gasp!* teaching those obnoxious freshmen your name attracted to the school in the first place.

More importantly, does taking a picture of an airplane with this phone commit a felony?

Only if DirectTV has an issue with it or maybe if your neighbor is an asshole and charges you for it and is also doing this for every other household in the country.

DirectTV should have zero say in the matter. And whether my neighbor lets just me, or a million people do the same, how does that materially differ? He has let people use his rooftop to mount an antenna, nothing more, nothing less.

And there you see the real problem - If it makes sense to allow one person to do it, you can't really discriminate against a million people doing it.

The problem with ignoring the trolls, in this case? They understand the issues involved far, far better than the geriatric asshats on the USSC.

I didn't use Aereo, so have no skin in this game. But they effectively rented an antenna to people. Not a shared antenna, a private, one-to-one, real live antenna.

Nevermind Dropbox and the like - This ruling sets a much darker precedent than merely whether or not you can store data you don't strictly "own" in the cloud. Although those seven uselessly-obsolete bastards might not realize it, they have effectively outlawed your neighbor letting you stick your DirectTV dish on his roof because he has a better unobstructed Southern view.

First, in the interests of full disclosure, I do consider this a likely scam.

That said, I don't understand why so many people consider it physically impossible - Passive RFID works in very much the same way as what this Kickstarter describes. An RF pulse gives it just enough juice to do a miniscule amount of processing (looking up a stored number), then broadcast it back out to the world. Yes, capturing background RF would take some doing, but I don't know that I'd call it all that far outside the realm of plausibility.

For comparison, an RFID reader has the same FCC-imposed limits as WiFi, an EIRP of 4W (or put another way, a 1W transmitter with a typical 6dBi antenna).

Suspicious in the absence of a working prototype? Absolutely! Impossible? Not even close.

I don't know if I'd brag about my tenure there in the context of selling security consulting.

This.

Detecting and stopping an insider from downloading a library of proprietary/classified info outside their job description? Fail.
Capable of searching emails to fulfill a court order for information? Fail.
Bringing a basic (if high-end) new datacenter online? Fail (for not securing a reliable source of electricity).
Obeying the rules that govern their core mission? Fail. Performing their core mission? Fail.

No doubt, the NSA remains every bit as scary as ever, but in more of a "CIA goon" sense than their traditional so-flawlessly-smooth-you-won't-even-know-what-happened reputational sense.