No, the role of the NSA is not just to gather SIGINT, the NSA iis also tasked with preventing unfriendly entities from gathering SIGINT which is why the NSA initiated and open sourced SE Linux just to cite one example. So the question here is should the NSA put every single American SSL using business at risk for years on end to protect a single source of SIGINT? After all, foreign intelligence services may not have to budget of the NSA but they are not stupid either, they can discover bugs like Heartbleed just as easily as the NSA can and might well use it sufficiently stealthily for the NSA not to notice that they aren't the only ones sitting on this vulnerability. When do the costs of spying outweigh the benefits?

he IRS isn't the only SNAFU out there by any stretch of the imagination. They are in good company along with many members of the much vaunted and ever efficient private sector when it comes to missing this particular deadline.

The people who made a killing on Google/Apple stocks were the ones who got in early and took a risk. Is it any different with renewables? The ones who get in early are the ones who reap the most benefits. Whoever invests in renewables research and development now, when it is painful and expensive, will be the one who comes out on top later when everybody else is forced to make that transition in a third of the time and with much more pain than you can do it now because these early adopters will be sitting on mature technology and the means to mass produce it and everybody else will either be doing lots of business with them or frantically playing catch-up.

Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Renewables also have a political dimension. If anybody in Germany thought the Energiewende was expensive (and a lot of people do), they have now had cause to reconsider as they watch Vlad Putin sitting in Moscow with his hand on the gas valve threatening to shut it off unless the NATO powers feed him the Ukraine on a plate.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a demonstration of what we science nerds like to call 'simple science for senators". The amazing thing about it is that you can actually get billions of dollars in funding using this simplified approach when brilliantly researched and written scientific papers fail miserably. Go figure!?!?

It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.

Is that a good idea? He was dangerous enough with a shotgun, he will be a walking disaster when he can shoot laser beams form his eyes.

It seems to me that the root of the Fukushima disaster was the decision to build a nuclear power plant in a place where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at Fukushima was 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a nuclear plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground" and keep in mind that this restriction does not account for earthquakes although the Fukushima plant survived a magnitude 7.7 quake rather well so at least in that regard it was better designed..

Generally I agree with you and I can see your point with corded headphones but cordless (Bluetooth) ones work fine for me. I used to go through a ton of corded headphones. Usually they'd wear out due to metal fatigue just above the plug to save money. For years I used to shorten the chord and solder it back to the plug like a true penny pinching geek. Then I finally gave up and spent an obscene amount of money on a set of Sennheiser MM 550-X Bluetooth headphones. So far they have, well .... just worked. I also have a couple of sets of Sennheiser MM200 earplugs phones, also Bluetooth. Same story here, they just work. The first set finally wore out after three years of daily use so I bought a second one on sale since this model is out of production now. The only complaint I have so far is that the audio quality suffers a bit because of the Bluetooth link but not so much that I'd forgo the comfort of being wireless.

Speaking of special purpose devices, what I'd really like for safety reasons is a __proper__ HUD for my car. There are after market ones but most of the suck, a HUD should be standard equipment in every car.

I don't care, this is a good idea. I installed a dash cam in my car. It's just a HD webcam hooked up to a board computer that runs a C++ daemon using the OpenCV libraries but I have already captured some rather spectacular footage. Including a car that had gone off the road in icy conditions, there was a light post which the car had sheared off it's mounting resting on the car's roof (I arrived at the scene post facto). A couple of days ago I captured another bit off scary footage when I had to drive onto the shoulder of the road to avoid a frontal collision with a guy who decided it was a good idea to overhaul three other cars on blind turn in the road. If this keeps up I'll set up a YouTube channel and a website that uses the footage as a library of examples for student drivers of how not to drive.

They can include a dash cam and side view cameras as well along with an interface that allows me to copy filmed material to an SD card or something... That would have saved me twice from getting stuck with being 50 percent at fault (both times the other driver ignored a red light).

Anybody who claims that has never been to Russia. There are other countries in Europe where corruption is rife but from talking with people who have done business there, Russia is like the wild west (along with Belarus and the Ukraine). One guy I talked to called Russia a "kleptocracy". Take a look at this map of perceived corruption around the world:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
High index is clean, a low one is corrupt. As you can see much of Eastern Europe (i.e. ex Warsaw pact) is at least two steps up from Russia. And the USA is perceived as being about as corrupt as Western Europe (i.e. W-Europe more or less as it is defied by Eurovoc).

Fox New: If it hurts big coal and oil, try to convince everybody it doesn't exist.

So it's OK to abuse monopolies in any way you want just as long as you don't use them to extort money from people? If there was real competition on the search market, if there were 5-10 different search providers that all more or less equally divided the market between them I'd be perfectly inclined to agree with you because then you could choose a provider that wasn't run by a bunch of reactionary morons. The whole problem is precisely that Google is a private company that has acquired the same position as a and role as public utility by virtue of their monopoly on internet searches. They have a stranglehold on what has become the primary communications platform of the 21st century and thus there are severe limitations on the political filters they are allowed to apply to their search result. We are bloody lucky Google is run by a couple of intellectuals who have for the most part not abused their position and made the concious choice not to push their political agenda with the same unrelenting and ruthless political partisanship as Fox News does. Both conservatives and liberals have benefited from that. Would you rather have the gatekeeper of internet search controlled and run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers?

I suspect that it depends on what your market share is, i.e. whether you are a "gatekeeper" or not. If you are just some two bit website that's one of a thousand others then the answer is that you can present whatever point of view you want and ignore others. If, however, you are Google, you handle 95% of all internet searches and you don't agree with, say the US Republican party's point of view so you start purging all links from your search results that represent a Republican point of view that you don't agree with then the game situations is a bit different and should be forced to be more neutral than you would like to be for the public good. I generally can't stand radical Republicans but I'll fight for their right to be heard, I don't have much use for communism either but I also think Commies have a right to be heard. This judge would seem to disagree with that which is IMHO quite amazing.

Let's just take a look at this deal. I just bought a 356 subscription and according to the in-app purchasing wizard in the Office 365 suite on my iPad the subscription is $156 per annum. For that you are getting:

1. Word, Excel, Powerpoint and change.
2. License to install on up to 5 PCs/Macs
3. Use on mobile devices.
4. 20 GB of additional OneDrive storage.
5. Skype world minutes (60 of them per mensem)

Which sounds like a pretty OK deal to me considering the volume of product I'm getting. As far as I can tell there are no temporal usage restrictions on the PC/Mac licenses in this this sub, according to the office 365 community forums multiple users can log into the same account and edit the same document. If that is true than this subscription will cover my office needs, my parents's, my sister's and her husband's and we can split the costs. As for corporate profits.... If Apple is taking 30% then Microsoft is getting $109,8 / 12 = $9,15 per month and they still have to deduct costs and taxes. Mind you, being a corporation, MS, like Apple, Google, IBM and the rest of that ilk probably enjoy considerably lower tax rates than what Joe Six-pack has to contend with. However, MS does have to pay developers, maintain their cloud service data-centers and pay the system administrators of their cloud service department out of that and pay for marketing and other such crap. I'm sure MS makes tons of money off of this stuff but it's not like the profit meter at Microsoft HQ goes Chi-chinggggg! and increments by $9,15 every time they sell an office subscription to an iPad followed by a spontaneous chorus of manic laughter from every MS manager in the known universe over how they are ripping off their customers.