I was a starship trooper till I took a matter beam to the knee ...

Anecdotal but true: My wife went to UW-Madison and got her Masters in CS, and of her classmates only 30% reported having an IT undergrad degree. My favorite was the girl with the Forestry degree, who learned in the first 4 years she liked being inside more than she liked being out in the woods ...

vote against! This may be the best election ever for NoneOfTheAbove. Since both sides are pretty much interchangeable, don't vote for any of them - write in NOTA and vote out the incumbents.

Content is content ... get it where ever you want, the Nook is just a device for displaying it. Here's my anecdata: I get most of my videos off the web, converting them to the appropriate format with Handbrake directly onto an SD card which I then stick into the Nook. I get ebooks from a number of sites, reformat them (if necessary) via Calibre, and copy them over the same way. The device never has to connect to B&N or any particular network.

Since those top 10% are paying 69.94% of the taxes AND funding business through their capital outlays I'm thinking they ARE paying their share ... unless you think the "poor" are creating and funding new businesses somehow. FWIW, as a desktop support tech I don't make it into those ranks on my own income, but add the wife's income and we do ... and I sure-as-hell don't consider us rich in any significant way. We happen to live in the SF bay area where salaries are high but the cost-of-living keeps our discretionary income at about the same dollar level (and not percentage, either) as when we lived & worked in a MidWest "flyover state".

If this drive succeeds, don't the maintainers have to lock down the site, preventing any changes? That's how all the other "World Heritage Sites"(tm) are treated, as pretties to be seen and admired. (OTOH, the thought of a final end to the WikiEditWars makes me all warm & happy inside.)

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! Wrong answer, sunshine!

The complaint is that people are DRAWING MUHAMMAD at all - they say it's idolatry to depict him. Showing him with a panda rather than involved in gay porn is still idolatry.

Thanks for playing, tho ...

On the off chance your sig wasn't just meant to be funny: JUCHE is pronounced "joo-chay" with a slight emphasis on the first syllable, and is most-often translated as "self-reliance". It is used almost exclusively by the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea AKA North Korea) in reference to the nation - I cannot recall reading an instance where it was used by an individual to refer to himself or his actions on his own behalf.

It goes well beyond the concept of 'dependability' and has a big "In Your Face!" component - it's more along the lines of "screw you guys, we'll do this ourselves, we don't need any of you".

Just my [$0.02US | 23 won], of course ...

There is this neat feature called a keyboard. It's the best thing ever I swear to God! You press a button with a letter on it and it suddenly appears on the screen.

So you're more concerned that the managers in for-profit companies, who live and die by the bottom line and would be financially devastated by an accident of the magnitude in your examples, would be more negligent in terms of engineering efficiency and safety than managers in a government office that simply has taxpayer money handed to them via Congressional mandate? Or is it that you believe that those of us who work in the private sector value human life less than government employees? I could understand if you had concerns about project prioritization, but you specifically referenced catastrophic accidents.

Why (philosophically, rather than bounded by spaghetti-code-kernel-reality) should a plugin that would like full screen video output and audio/video input also be able to download executables and get the OS to run them on boot up with full system rights?

The question is: Was it, right before they landed, or right after?
You know how this ended when Columbus came to America...

No, the FISA requires they get a warrant within 72 hours if they want to keep the intercepted data - it does nothing to prevent gathering it in advance of getting a warrant.
There ARE Directives which govern the activities & practices of SIGINT organizations (see James Bamford's books Body Of Secrets or The Puzzle Palace for details about USSIDs) but those also limit what you can keep and not what you can gather.

Part of it all I think is the problem CNN has. They don't have enough news to fill 24 hours and I think the web as a whole might not actually have enough content to fill it all.

It's funny, but I can spend all day reading different news sites, covering different countries or disciplines (science/finance/funny_pictures_of_cats today) and yet CNN can't seem to produce more than about 43 minutes of bad summaries of (mostly 1st-) world events. There's NEWS aplenty, but they don't seem to care about sharing the majority of it.

It's not that the speed of transmission is much faster this time, since one of the scariest things about the 'Spanish Flu' was just how quickly it spread. The difference between than and now is that we will SEE it faster, in living color, on our babbleboxes ... look how the media is ALREADY in hyper-freakout(tm)mode. That's gonna be the panic-driver, like it was the economic-depression-driver, the get-Blago-out-of-office-driver (STILL hasn't had his day in court), etc, etc, etc.