Something like this would be a nice coating for:
  - Windshields
  - glasses
  - solar panels
Unless, of course, it attracts grease...

Plus, you'd scoop up a lot more oceanic plant and animal life trying to extract that plastic material.

Actually, the critters might be a better fuel source than the plastics...
=Smidge=

Do you really think the problem in 1984 was the telescreens?

Telescreens are "an enabling technology". I see no reason to leave them, and thus any hypothetical government-or-other spy, enabled in my personal space.

I think most of us geeks grew up terrified of the very idea of the Orwellian Telescreen. However, it's not the technology that's evil (many of us have plenty of devices with a camera integrated with a display), but the threat of its use without consent.

My latest laptop came with a built-in, user-facing camera.

I immediately put a piece of opaque electrica tape over it - even before swapping out the hard disk for a fresh one and installing Linux.

The tape isn't coming off until I have a removable shutter to take its place.

if you bring back the passenger pigeon in some sort of wildlife preserve and they outgrow their food supply, how are you going to get the flock out of there?

You DO know that they fly, don't you?

Like in flocks of millions over continental distances?

Back in ny early days as a lab techie I was running the optical processor that did the image-making post-processing for what I believe was the first "flyby" / "rotating target" synthetic aperture radar. (No significant intellectual contributions: I was running the machinery, rather than contributing to its design. Adjusting lenses, exposing and developing film, etc.)

Back in those days the computers weren't up to the amount of crunch needed. (This technique is essentially a two-dimensional fourrier transform with tweaks.) So we used laser light and lenses for the fourier transform, and photographic film for the input modulation and output capture. The original data was captured using a one-dimensional CRT with a solid row of fiber-optic light-pipes built into the faceplate. This was in actual contact with the recording film, transferrig the light from the phosphor inside the CRT without geometric distortions from lenses and such. The film was about four inches wide, and the servo capstain that advanced it was a critical component for accurate signal processing, as was the circuitry that linearized the sweep of the beam. The input plane of the optic processor held the film in a xylene solution between two optical flats, to eliminate phase distortion from roughness of the film's surface.

The nice thing about synthetic aperture radar is that the resolution is related to the radar frequencies and the relative motion of the antenna(s) and target, and is not dependent on the beam width of the antenna. (Well, wider beam width means you illuminate the target from a larger virtual antenna, sharpening the image.) Except for deltas, distance doesn't matter, either. You get the same resolution at tens of feet or interplanetary distances. Distance only comes into the pricture in terms of keeping the oscillators from drifting during the transit time of the beam, so you don't introduce varyimg phase errors when down-converting successive returned chirps.

Yes, that worked. Switching it to 2 brought the behavior to about the same as disabling "Load images automatically" - or close enough not to matter for this purpose.

THANK you once again.

In a perfect world, there would be no primaries at all because there would be no rigidly defined political parties as such... but I suppose it really is too much to ask that a candidate be considered on the weight of his individual ideas and actions rather than a postfix next to his name on a ballot.

But the next best thing would be to have each party solely responsible for nominating their own candidates, without outside influence. At least in that respect we could get someone who best represents their party, rather than the WORST representative.

Campaign financing is a whole other ball of wax...
=Smidge=

Not really, no. There is almost always more than two candidates for any particular office. The only exceptions I've personally encountered were lesser thought about elected officials like judges and public works.

But I think the parent's comment about "fewer choices" still applies: You are choosing the least bad instead of the best, so the real choice is diminished. Giant douche, or turd sandwich?
=Smidge=

It's a primary election, not a general election. Nobody is being elected into power here. The primary election is only to choose who the candidate will be that will run for office for that particular party.

If you want your political party to win, and you have open primaries, to group together to force the opponent party to select the LEAST desirable candidate, thus increasing your own candidate's chance of winning.

That's not democracy, that's gaming the system - and we all lose in the race to the bottom.
=Smidge=

Do you mean the "Load images automatically" setting?

Yes, that's it. (I couldn't remember the exact wording and with it gone I couldn't look it up. B-) )

The preference for that seems to still be in about:config. It's called "permissions.default.image" and the values are documented as: // 1-Accept, 2-Deny, 3-dontAcceptForeign

Geez! No WONDER I couldn't spot it. Didn't they ever hear of mneomincs?

Thank you. I'll give it a try.

I'm at my Nevada vacation/retirement place for the first time since migrating my laptop from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. This dragged in Firefox 29.0 ("... Canonical 1.0").

The place only has dialup Internat at about 38Kbps. (Somewhat higher speeds are available at substantial cost, which doesn't make sense untlil we're here for more than a couple weeks a year.)

Web browsing was barely usable at this speed by using a few tricks. The most effective one was to configure Firefox to not load images until/unless I wanted to look at them.

When I got out here last Friday I discovered that firefox 29.0 no longer has the radio button in the preferences/configuration menus. An hour or so looking at about:config didn't turn up anything likely-looking, either.

Without this feature, "surfing" the current image-heavy web pages is essentially impossible. Even trivial pages may take a couple minutes to a half-hour to load. PER PAGE.

Did the Firefox crew restore the feature for 30.0? (Or does anyone know where it was hidden, if it still exists on 29.0 and 30.0?)

Developers breaking important features (that THEY don't use) while "improving" products is a real problem.

The Anti-Corruption Act would go a long way towards helping. Lobbying is the major way that corporations influence legislation, and it needs to be completely stopped. It needs to be criminalized.

It will just get struck down, like every other anti-lobbying and campaign funding measure that has finally gotten to the courts.

This is because lobbying is a Constitutional Right. It is called "Free Speech" and "Petitioning the Government for redress of Greviances".

People do NOT lose their free speech and (especially) political activity rights when they are acting in a group, regardless of whether the group is a club, a political movement, or a business.

But such measures, once passed, can do enormous harm before they finally make it to court and being struck (after which another is passed and the cycle repeats). The rich and connected can hire lawyers to find their way through the latest maze of regulations, fill out the bales of forms correctly, defend themselves in court if challenged and bring suits to finally get the laws overturned. Meanwhile we little guys are hosed.

These laws may be well intentioned. Or they may be intended. from the start, to paralyze grass roots efforts while appearing to block undue influence by the rich. But they always give the advantage to big-money and big-connections and always penalize us little guys.

but changing MAC is like filing serial# off a car! At least according to the prosecutors...

Not any more. The Bluetooth Sig just spent four years in heavy sessions to plug the privacy leak from the MAC address tagging every packet with a device "serial number". This was rolled out in Bluetooth 4.0, especially in the Bluetooth Low energy addition.

If the option is turned on, the "MAC address" that labels the packets is pseudo-randomly chosen and constantly mutating. If the other device trying to communicate has a special relation it can access the true MAC address and/or share the secret so it can predict the pattern of mutation.

Apple went one further, though. Even when the remote device has the option turned off and is using the real MAC address for the link label, their stack doesn't export this info to apps over the API. The apps have to have to negotiate with the far end of the link to get it (or find a way to work around the stack, and risk Apple deliberatly breaking it, or removing them from the app store, if they find out), even though it was already "in the air".

I think Apple is sensitive to accusations of privacy violations and is making it hard for independent developers to put them in legal hot water.

Why not? You benefit from that partial ownership, you should share in the responsibility proportionally.

Having thousands of owners screaming at you, as well as being financially culpable, would be good cause for the people in charge to actually be careful about what they do.
=Smidge=