Pardon me, the empire that keeps trade routes open prospers; the empire that turns to lording over its own people falters.

All roads lead to Rome. Er, uhh, Spain. Er, uhhh, London. Err, uhhh, New York. Errr, uhhhhhh, Beijing.

The Panama Canal is being expanded to handle larger, "Superpanamax" ships. This Nicaraguan one will handle larger still.

The US has raised the value-judgement on environmental issues so high, there are literally several harbors in the US that have been fighting legal battles to merely deepen them by 5 feet to handle Superpanamax (and not even the even larger Nicaraguan ones) for longer than it took to build the original Panama Canal.

I will be modded down by censors, but it needs to be said again and again: environmentalism has taken over from good old fashioned corruption of officials (get in the way to be paid to get back out of the way) as the grinding drag on modern society.

The economy does not care why government chooses to get in the way of anything that moves, only that it does.

I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords. The nation that keeps trade routes open prospers; the nation that turns to lording over its own people falters.

Kind of like PEBKAC, but PENBBSWAS Problem exists not being between steering wheel and seat.

Lawyers: We want people to carry their rights with them, even when operating as a group of people Congress defined as a "corporation" because Congress cannot force them to give up their First Amendment rights.

Scotus (in the voice of Nomad): Logic correct. Opposing lawyers are in error. Must sterilize.

A lot of online storage knows people store music and movies. So they check if it's a copy of a file they have already, and if so, don't really store your copy but just a pointer to a master copy.

Google knows lots of child porn (and violent images e.g. accidents) because they pay people to scan their crawler's found images precisely so they can hide them in returned searches. They probably don't keep child porn copies for legal reasons, but would keep some kind of electronic signature of them so they can be auto-recognized by their crawler software. Their humans would hence only need to check "new" pictures.

MS probably has similar for Bing. Running all their email or cloud picures (for space reduction as described) would trivially let them scan for known child porn. Easy forwarding.

This does make me nervous because such a system could be easily abused in the future to track political issues, pictures, text blocks people forward around. Of course the NSA probably does this already via normal internet server passthrouh nodes. :(

Bloatware on my Verizn phone means when a phone call comes in, or a page, and I view it, the browser is killed off due to lack of RAM. When I switch back, the browser re-downloads the page.

Verizon is pathetic. There's a "kill off unnecessary running programs" feature under task manager that they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to use, and it kills off just one thing, too. Which increases used RAM by 2 mb instead of decreasing, and that program shortly auto-restarts anyway.

Religious people were against stem cells from aborted fetuses because they considered it murder. There is nothing hard to understand about this.

Therefore, a way to do this with adult (or any non-abortion-based cells) would be hailed by the religious.

You should learn what people claim before drawing conclusions. As with the Hobby Lobby argument, stopping implantation might not technically be an "abortion", but it is killing a viable embryo nevertheless, "ensouled", so to speak. People stop being facetious.

Contracts that you voluntarily enter into to keep your yapper shit meet Supreme Court approval. Normally it would be "don't badmouth our mutual financial endeavor", not over a product purchase.

The wisdom of such in a situation like this is something else. Other uses of free speech to lambaste them seem to be working fine.

Wow. Do you have your judgements bass-ackwards. Whether figuring out if they should be trying to sell you Pampers or Depends is perhaps a little embarrasing, it's not evil. Evil is government tracking who you call, and when, which can be massively abused to sculpt the political landscape of opponents.

This ignores that it's trivial to listen in on convetsations without a warrant and not get caught. It's the 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation. All it takes is one G. Gordon Liddy type, and presto! All communications of opponents are easily monitored.

No, EVUL CORPORATION is a distractionary meme.

He's just making the government pay for the costs of environmental studies and other paperwork they ladel on businesses to begin with.

They've had automated check in in Europe for some hotels for 25 years. The locked entrance has an ATM-like machine in the little foyer. Put in your credit card, pick a room type, and it printed a slip with codes for the front door and your room.

And yes, they had a live person on site -- it ate my card and the call button got her out of bed at 3 am to get it. :)

Someone at Cray loves them some corn nuts.

Du jour, and I was not anon. Peeze no retributtys.

I am in sympathy, but overuse of the class warfare meme-du-jure "privilege" makes me wanna pee on a puppy.

Anonymity of speech is a core aspect of freedom of speech, and is needed to prevent retribution against speakers.

Believe it or not, this includes retribution by cliques of folks who speak "check your privilege" every other paragraph. They want to expose, say, petition signers to get things on a ballot for the expressed (literally) purpose of harassing them, which the Supreme Court found "troubling", even as it approved the FOI request.

Anonymity protects everyone from all would-be centers of power.

Modded down, nice. There's a special place in Hell for people who mod down humor.