Ford Motor Company announced they will be marketing a car that runs on both steam *and* a giant key that you turn to wind it up.

Seriously - wtf?

...how can I help?

No, seriously - I tried to start discussion in a previous "The NSA is sniffing your dirty boxers" thread about the possibility of an easy-to-use browser / email plugin / app / etc. that would encourage Joe User to increase the amount of "noise traffic" he generated. E.g., something that would tack a bunch of Terror Words onto the end of every email, but more practical and less scary to use. Encourage people to automatically participate in conscientious objection to surveillance the way that they reflexively download mp3's or jaywalk.

I think the only response was "emacs spook mode", which is funny, but not really the discussion I was hoping for.

How many of self-employed (or non-self-employed) out there have to deal with "employers of record"? I'm not in IT, but I am in an industry where predatory third-party employers act as a means for companies to pass their payroll taxes, workers comp insurance, etc. on to their employees. My understanding is that this sort of thing is prevalent in IT as well, so I'm curious how many slashdotters who are in IT have to deal with this.

For those who are unfamiliar, the grift is this: Company A, rather than hiring worker W, instead contracts with Evil Employer of Record E. E "hires" W, and "loans" them out to A. Since W doesn't work for A, A doesn't pay payroll taxes, workers comp, etc. (A significant amount - something like 10-20% of salary.) This is where it gets fun: E, which is now responsible for those costs, passes them through to W by deducting them from W's pay. Often, they'll charge a 2% fee on top of this for the privilege.

All of the costs of being a 1099 contractor, with vastly diminished opportunity for tax deductions. Plus you pay the max % for unemployment tax and workers comp (those costs are on a scale, and self-incorporated person would generally come in at the bottom of that scale instead of the top).

In my industry, a lot of foreign visa workers and the less tax-savvy are caught in this scam. And the gov't (specifically, the state gov't) does nothing to stop it, because they're getting unemployment tax that they wouldn't get if the same workers were 1099.

...line.

In fact, I had the titular line in the film. I wonder if I'll be asked back for Episode VII?

Cthulhu 2012!

Screw official updates. I installed Cyanogenmod on my 2012 Fiesta, and now it goes ONE MILLION MILES AN HOUR.

Oh my God! Beardo - did they make you post that? Are you o.k.? Did they hurt you? Type "first post" if you want us to call the cops.

I'm using Windows Firefox v10, and this is not true for me. Open google tab, sign out, open youtube tab, sign in, refresh google tab = it's now signed in.

However, Chrome will allow you to open an "Incognito" window with Ctrl-Shift-N. The cookie-blocking feature of which seems to keep google signed out, even if opened from a signed-in window.

Because with the latency, by the time they get around to actually cutting you open, you'll already be healed, and won't have to do the surgery at all!

Legally... You mean like this?

Isn't this a symptom of autistic spectrum disorders? I know it's trendy for everyone in the geek world to claim Asperger's these days... But I know that I personally can have trouble filtering signal from noise in crowded environments, and that such environments make me particularly anxious.

I gotta say, with the exception of this (and of course all things fashion-related), Gaddafi and I don't agree on much.

I had great success with Google Desktop Search (on windoze) for a while. It would index my mail, files, and web history (if instructed to) - and the best part was hitting one key to get an instant, minimalist search box with auto-preview. From there, you could jump straight to what you were looking for, or open a further page to narrow the search.

Sadly, it doesn't work with Thunderbird 3.0, and Google doesn't appear to care, or even to be supporting it anymore. So now I'm on a hodgepodge of GDS, Windows built-in search, and the sucky T-bird search bar.

I honestly can't believe that nobody has duplicated this Spotlight-esque functionality yet. I realize there are other desktop search options, but none of the ones I've come across have that one-key mini search that goes away as easily as it is called up. For an operation that I'm performing dozens of times daily, that's pretty crucial. It even replaced the file browser for me - much easier to call up the GDS box & type a couple letters than to grab the mouse and drill down into some directory structure - even if I know exactly where I'm going.

No kidding. Back when he took all the site's content offline to "concentrate on fundraising" (can't find the relevant slashdot story right now), I visited the site to try & donate. Not knowing anything at all about what sort of stuff they'd leaked, I was hoping to get a quick sense of it to make sure it wasn't a scam or conspiracy nut-job site. But of course I couldn't, because all the content was offline. I wrote Assange to (politely) suggest that simply hiding everything was perhaps counter-productive to the goal of raising funds, and that he should at least post an explanation or fundraising goal, to let people know how much they needed to keep operating. His response:

"I understand you wish us to save the world, suffer assassinations, work for free and pay for everything out of our children's heritage,
forever, but it is just not possible. If we haven't proved our committment thus far we never will."

I still admire the concept, and the dedication. But the dude seems like a total dickcheese. As noted in other posts, that doesn't mean he's not bettering the world. But I think he'd be serving the purpose (of giving a voice to whistleblowers) a lot better by not trying to be a celebrity, and perhaps acting like less of a douche. For one thing, it diverts attention from the actual content, and funnels it towards "Is Julian Assange a Terrorist?" style fluff media. How many mainstream media reports did you see on the actual content of the recently leaked cables? Me neither.