It is not a "near miss", it is a "near hit", or more properly "Heathrow Plane Nearly Hit a Drone". If it were a near MISS, then the two would have collided.

We keep hearing this is going to be the vehicle that's going to take us to Mars. Excuse me? Exactly how is a vehicle that can only carry 6 people carry supplies for even one person for nearly a year?

Multiple launches to first put supplies for the trip in orbit, with the last launch bringing the crew up on one of these. Assemble the Mars-bound bits in orbit, then send them on their way. I read something about this the other day, but don't remember where.

Actually it'd have to go through the Tropicana, and/or swerve around several blocks because the side of the airport that faces the strip is the runways. Getting the monorail out there would be a clusterfuck to say the least.

The part of Trop that passes north of the airport is mostly empty near the street, with the few businesses in there set well back. They could bring the monorail down to ground level (or even dig a trench for it) to keep from obstructing air traffic. Instead of bringing it down alongside Paradise Road, they could avoid that disruption by turning south sooner and going through the economy-parking lot and by Terminal 2 (which AFAICT is no longer in use) to bring it to Terminal 1. There should already be something in place to move people between Terminals 1 & 3, but if they want to extend the monorail out to Terminal 3 (I've only flown through it once), that'd be a bonus.

ownCloud's worked pretty well for me the past few months, but v7.0.3 caused all sorts of breakage on Android when accessing WebDAV shares. Switching photo uploads from FolderSync to the ownCloud Android client fixed that, but Keepass2Android still won't open my password archive directly. I can get to it over WebDAV with ES File Explorer and open it read-only in Keepass2Android, but that's a kludge I didn't need with the previous version. I'd downgrade, but the previous version is only available as source and the downloaded .deb for the previous version is gone from /var/cache/apt/archives. Hopefully they'll undo this breakage in 7.0.4.

Not to mention it being legal to rip cds you own for your own personal use.

Not to mention that iTunes itself provides this feature. "Rip. Mix. Burn," anyone? This whole story sounds like ambulance-chaser bullshit.

Here we go again.... WTF is "video chat" a core feature instead of an addon? It really doesn't even have anything to do with web browsing. And I can't imagine the code is small, either. Ug.

Make threats to intimidate and milk them for money (extortion) and not actually go to court. I know the lawyers have a legal term for this kind of bad faith, but I've no idea what it is right now.

IANAL, but I think the word you're looking for here is "barratry."

Root:

Yep, and then some possibly important apps no longer work due to them being locked down. Example: the TiVo streaming video app. And no "masking root" type app works, which sucks.

Deep vein scan (typically of the palm) is the only biometric that I would find acceptable from a privacy standpoint. It can't be "stolen" or "lifted", it is not visible from a reasonable distance, it can't be easily scanned without the user's consent. It requires being "alive". It is reliable and simple to acquire. I have used it and seen it in action... very impressive.

Fingerprints are horribly abused and left everywhere and can't be read through gloves. Easily copied and fooled.

DNA is extremely expensive, extremely slow, has severe privacy implications, and is left everywhere.

Facial recognition is not extremely accurate, is often slow, and is the WORST biometric from a privacy standpoint.

Retina scan is complex and probably the most expensive besides DNA.

Finger spread biometric is inaccurate and insecure (can be obtained from a distance via

Shouldn't this article be tagged "MS-Windows"? The download is an .exe file (which is exactly what I expected)

>"Republicans Block Latest Attempt At Curbing NSA Power"

Really? But let's see how it did in the House:

R yes: 179 D yes: 124
R no: 51 D no: 70

So in the house, a lot more Republicans voted yes than Democrats. And a lot less Republicans voted no than Democrats. So it seems like if there were a powerful Republication partisanship agenda on this, how does one explain the vote in the House?

In matters such as these (government spying, civil liberties, etc), I have noticed that things are rarely clearly partisan.

While in the US there is a generally accepted right to self defense, the legal theory in the UK is that fighting crime is the police's job.

This brings up a question. It's well established in the US that the police have no responsibility to protect your life; if you call 911 when the Bad Guys show up and get killed before the police arrive, your next of kin don't get to sue the cops. (Look up Warren v. District of Columbia for an example.) It's not that much of a problem here as you have the right to defend yourself, with deadly force if necessary. In a legal environment where that right to self-defense isn't guaranteed, as it isn't in the UK, does that then imply a potential liability if their police don't do what has been decided is their job? (I suspect it doesn't, but I could be wrong.)

A move to multi-process in Firefox can be bad news for anyone using multiuser thin client environments (uncommon but still used). On a shared system, you generally want to have control over which applications can use multiple processes, lest they can go runaway and eat up all cores and resources on a system. Traditional tools such as "nice" don't scale well with single applications that can throw off dozens of threads. As an example- JAVA is *extremely* hostile in a a thin client environment (not just CPU, but RAM too). Just one person starting it can "pause" a 24 core Xeon server for dozens or hundreds of users due to improper assumptions about resource availability.

So I really do hope that Mozilla makes the number of processes allowed ADJUSTABLE in the settings....

12 Power Cycle Count is relevant on the EZRXs (greens); that keeps increasing unless you do certain things to prevent it, and I think (this is murky) I saw a weak correlation between this going into way up, and the drives failing sooner.

I've not done anything special with the two that I have in a media server at home. This stat is at 5 on the older drive and 4 on the newer drive. By comparison, a Seagate Barracuda LP in the same box is at 128 (it's quite a bit older than the WD drives), and the boot drive, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 I grabbed out of the unused-drive box when whatever drive it replaced failed, has 365 spinups logged.

(Looking at the stats for all of my drives, the outlook for that 7200.11 isn't so good. :-P )

Please send me the full names, addresses, photos and dates of birth of all strippers in my state.

P.S.
If you'd like to conserve paper you can just send the photos.

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