Building there was a zoning violation anyway. Think of it as random and overwhelming enforcement of municipal ordinances!

On a serious note, simply having the transmitting electronics powered by a coaxial beam from the receiver (that is itself initially powered by a low power pilot beam from the satellite) seems like it would be an effective interlock to prevent a wandering beam.

From what I've seen, though, it's difficult to make a very tightly focused beam that doesn't lose much of its power to the atmosphere. It's more efficient to use a diffuse downlink beam and a large collection array at the ground, so a wandering beam wouldn't really do much damage.

Unfortunately, most people (including geeks) still have an alarming lack of curiosity and will be perfectly content to say "WTF?" and never even attempt to discover what an unfamiliar term refers to.

It's a $6000-12000 tent that sleeps four and needs to be towed by a truck. For that cost, you could fill a similar sized trailer up with (non-rigid) tents and sleep hundreds of people.

Too bad the response isn't to just be a bit more reserved with the home invasions. The number of people who would shoot at a cop knocking on the door must be smaller than the number of people who would shoot at masked, often unannounced assailants storming their house.

Do the police in Europe regularly raid houses without any prior investigation?

Keep in mind that it's purely a monetary win, though. Even though you own the modem, they completely control it and can (and do) reflash its firmware. You should still treat it as a potentially hostile device on your network.

There are other limitations, too, like Comcast's refusal to sell you static IP addresses unless you rent a modem from them.

At least in the US, we'll see rioting and the very imminent threat of mass scale starvation before anything like UBI comes into play. I think Luddite-style robot smashing and a descent from an automated technological society will happen before our 'betters' part with a shiny penny of their hoard. (In typical idiot revolution fashion, the robots that could provide for us all will be targeted before the robot's masters who are keeping the productivity to themselves.)

Even that argument is pretty lame, though. They specifically wrote Portal into the Half-Life universe, so the new gimmicky physics thing for Episode 3 could have just been the portal gun. It was practically all laid out for them. They could still cash in on that today.

Even the ending (or the segue into HL3) doesn't have to be that great. The story behind HL has always been a bit cobbled together.

I wonder if Gabe is somehow misremembering HL as much more than it ever was and only wants to follow it with a masterpiece.

This failure to continue the series is pretty much the only source of hype surrounding Half-Life. The expectations are so low, it seems like the only reason to not make HL3 or HL2 ep3 is that they must be planning something amazing.

Episode 3 could have easily just been a continuation of episode 2 with the portal gun or HDR. Hell, they could release that right now and it would be very successful. The actual story in HL has always been pretty tepid anyway... so does the Combine take over Earth or not? No big deal either way. This isn't like Mass Effect, where the story was actually epic and central to the series. They could just lead up to another cliffhanger and they'd be fine. There are almost no expectations for a mind-blowing Episode 3.

SD card write switches don't physically interrupt the write circuit. They only provide an instruction to the card reader to not write (if that contact in the card slot is even present, which isn't always so). The implementation of write-protect is usually in software, too.

The SD card write switch is a bit like the write protect tabs on old cassette tapes: a polite request to a well behaved reader.

That's a fucked up way of amending a constitution anyway. A ballot to amend a constitution should contain the actual text that will be amended to the constitution. If the purported reasoning for the amendment (eg, to make Georgia more economically competitive) is going to be on the ballot, then different interpretations should be included from opposing groups.

That may be true, simplistic game theory wise, but there are secondary effects caused by voting for a candidate whose platform you disagree with. Voting for "lesser evil A" because you don't like "greater evil B" makes A think that he has popular support for his platform (and tacit support for the more nefarious parts of his platform). You've now given an "evil" candidate a mandate.

You're better off voting for "wingnut C" (who takes votes away from "greater evil B") than "lesser evil A". Voting for C deprives B of votes while still disapproving of A.

I'll just go ahead and blame my poor grammar above on old GI Joe commercials.

I've always been a little astounded at the general acceptance of marketing campaigns that are directed toward children. It's hard to see how the existence of teams of highly educated and extremely well funded adults who's job is to most effectively manipulate the minds of young children for profit is anything other than profoundly unethical and malevolent.

Targeting adults with marketing is pretty sleazy, but targeting little kids seems more than a little fucked up.

I'm in the same boat, heritage-wise. My nick here was supposed to be a jab at my tribe's early assimilation into European culture (it seemed way more clever when I was a kid), but ultimately it was assimilation that led my tribe to be much better off than many others, even if we are much more "white".

Efforts like the one in the article are less about preserving failing tribes and cultures and more about assimilating their individuals into our own. Hopefully, they bring the good aspects of their culture with them and we are all richer from the process. Part of the reason that they're still stuck in a failing culture is because their lack of education limits their mobility and independent growth.

That's the purpose of "two-factor authentication", but not the purpose of any single factor. Yahoo is replacing the single factor "something you know" with "something you have", which is possibly an upgrade in security.

The factors themselves aren't equivalent in terms of security. "Something you have" is much easier for a normal person to secure than "something you know". That's why houses and cars use keys and office buildings use keycards and not codes. People (on average) are pretty decent at holding onto their phone and horrible at keeping their password safe (even if they pick a good password, which they wont).