With an election due later in the year, this guy is presumably up for re-election. Is there anyone here who can comment on how hard it would be to vote him out? Anyone know who his opponent is and what their position on net neutrality is?

The other possibility is that the last active developer no longer wanted to work on the project and rather than leave a release with unknown security issues, they decided to shutter the project.

The problem is not just that the NSA is spying on Americans but also that the NSA is spying on countries and individuals that are absolutely no threat to the USA. And its also that the NSA have made the digital world a lot less secure in the process.

I don't have an issue if the NSA or any other spy agency is spying on the Iranian nuclear program or the North Koreans or any other genuine threat to the USA. I DO have an issue if the NSA is intentionally weakening computer software, standards, protocols and cryptography in order to do it and I DO have an issue if the NSA is gaining (or attempting to gain) back door access to computers, systems and networks owned by innocent parties in order to make that happen. (instead of going in through the front door with a properly obtained warrant to get the information they need)

As someone who lives in prime cane toad territory here in QLD I can say that even if you could sell cane toads a $100 each, it wouldn't make a dent in the population, there are just too many of them.

The question is not "can we produce an alternative fuel that doesn't require fossil fuels in its production" but "which of the feed-stocks for alternatives to gasoline require the least fossil fuels to produce"

Corn ethanol requires MORE fossil fuels as input to produce it than it displaces as output.

Things like hemp and switchgrass on the other hand are much better, you dont need anywhere near as much fossil fuel inputs in order to produce ethanol from those plants which is why the US (if it was serious about reducing its dependance on foreign energy sources instead of just making the big agribusiness companies that support the corn industry even richer) should be growing these things for fuel instead of corn.

I would be willing to bet money that, for any field anywhere in the US where corn is being grown for ethanol, its possible to grow some other plant (hemp, switchgrass, whatever) on the same field and get more ethanol for less input gasoline required.

What I want to know is just how much money Monsanto is spending in order to keep these alternatives to corn for ethanol from being widely grown...

Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

The former head of the TSA has said publicly that when he became head of the TSA he wanted to end a lot of the post-9/11 security crap (liquid bans, shoe removal etc). But when he took up the position, he was shown examples of actual threats that those security measures were stopping (or could stop) and that removing them would increase the risks.

My guess is that Obama when he took up office was shown examples by the intelligence people of things that had been detected or identified thanks to the wholesale spying (and remember we aren't just talking about terrorists, we know from the leaks that the wholesale spying is being used to catch drug dealers and organized crime figures too) and as such realized that shutting it down WOULD make the world less safe.

I used to be an avid Diablo 2 player and LOVED that game.

The problem with Diablo 3 (in addition to the always-on DRM and various general bad things Activision Blizzard have done) was that they took too many of the good things out and kept too many of the bad things in (e.g. the way they changed how potions and healing and such worked so that you couldn't just go into town and buy 50 healing potions before tackling the next big monster)

I ended up switching to The Elder Scrolls and have found Oblivion to be a better game than anything Blizzard ever made.
Plus, Bethesda (even counting the Occulus Rift lawsuit) has a long way to go before they are as evil and bad as Activision Blizzard.

The issue here is that players who dont want to cheat and dont want to play against players who cheat should be allowed to do so. The cheats being produced by these guys are allowing someone to cheat in a way that the other players in the game don't know they are playing against a cheater and that is unfair.

Whats worse is people who smoke while waiting at train and bus stations and completly ignore the no smoking sign that's right in front of them.

I would employ guards/cops/whatever to police smoking at train and bus stations and hand out fines to people who smoke. As an added bonus, all those security people around would be able to stop the kind of idiots who nearly ran off with my bag (and wallet, phone etc) the other day at my local train station.

Of course then you get the geeks/programmers/hackers who prefer to get their caffeine in carbonated form (and become obese or diabetic as a side-effect thanks to all that HFCS they drink)

Its a standard Intel Core CPU and chip set with Intel GPU, all of which are things that have very good Linux support thanks to Intel and their Linux teams.

I see nothing in the specs that Linux doesn't support (and if there is hardware it doesn't e.g. the memory card slots, someone will no doubt write a driver for it)

Just pick a country that isn't friendly to the USA in the way the kiwis are. Someone who wont hand things over when the US government and its agencies come knocking.

The basic problem with VR is that your eyes (and your ears and any other senses the VR kit is acting on) are telling you you are moving in a certain way yet your balance organs are telling you something completly different.

Thats why it will give you motion sickness and cause other problems. And why, unless Occulus have come up with some brand new trick to tweak your balance organs (which I doubt they have), it will never really be able to work.

If the number of videos on YouTube dedicated to something is an indication of how well it has survived, the Rubik's Cube is most definatly a survivor.

Not to mention the many world records that exist related to the Rubik's Cube (I wonder what the record is for the largest Rubik's Cube ever made and for the smallest ever made)