After 9/11 the federal government offered up a TON of money to police departments for the war on terror, and to get them new equipment. Like everything else the federal government does, and generally any payer does - the money came with strings. The strings involved were that the places that took the money would lose a large chunk of local control (and in the event of an emergency -- ALL -- of their local control).

These cameras are a part of that that package, and the package which followed. They are all over any area near an airport (reasonable enough), but they are also along tons of our highways, and in many suburban jurisdictions; with a similar lack of privacy policy in place.

Its impossible for me to drive from my folks place in St Louis County to my home in St Charles County without seeing at least a dozen of these type of cameras. This issue isn't isolated to MN.

I have NO idea where the cameras feed to, who watches them, and what else they do with them. It does, however, creep me out.

I want Facebook amps not to be a completely privacy invading tool that puts anything I might send or say privately out into the world at large for sale to even a modest bidder.

On second thought...I think I want Facebook to die too. Their only viable business model is to put our stuff out in the street for profit. I've gotten to where I am hesitant to use it for anything important, and my contacts there are mostly "here is my new phone #, secure IM, and my email -- lets talk there". Facebook's privacy policy, and implementation of it leaves a LOT to be desired especially where apps are concerned.

You don't need to be in an accident to have issues with hearing. Hearing loss can occur from: occupational issues, a simple consequence of aging, at least 400 different medical conditions (including rare ones like neurosarcoidosis that I suffer from), and users with hearing loss are not the only beneficiaries of closed captioning; anyone with young & loud kids or barky dogs can tell you closed captioning can often save the day when trying to watch a show.

The market for closed captioning is nowhere near as small as you imagine. More than 22 million American's have significant hearing impairment, 43% of them are over the age of 65. When you add that to all of the parents with young kids that use CC, and those that just prefer to have it on -- it is not that small of a market that benefits. Its enough of a difference that it truly IS in Netflix's interest to add CC. Why not add a boost of 10-12% more customers? Is 3 million more customers adding 288 million USD from their US subscriber base alone not enough to justify doing the right thing that they should have done from the very beginning?

Most of the movies on their site already have the closed captioning done -- Netflix just didn't add it. Of those that remain, free sites for captioning have done about 90% of the work for them. However, unlike a movie I download off a torrent -- I can't use free captioning with Netflix due to their player.

There is a certain amount of truth to that. My grandmother had a plot that grew beans, pumpkin, watermelon, and okra; all of which had to be hand picked. Even with a free ride from town, and paying $10/hr (which the late 1970's, and early 1980's was pretty good money) it was hard to get people to show up for that work for an entire harvest. Not many people wanted to spend a 10-12 hour day, in 100F heat, 90% humidity, under the Missouri sun. However, we didn't have any illegals and somehow the stuff still got harvested.

Somehow the US construction industry still functioned too. People still showed up to be roofers (the worst, most miserable, and hot job I have ever done in my life was built up roofing!), driveway tampers, and HVAC repairmen. I'm not saying they don't churn through people in the beginning; they always have, and they always will. We don't need illegals for any of this.

This isn't a hardware issue, this is the issue of music fans thinking a CD is low quality if the volume doesn't red line their music player.

As an artist, if you make a recording and your CD/master is lower in volume than the typical commercial tripe people will assume it is of low quality. So you end up taking your CD/master to places like Music Masters where they apply the $50-60,000 compression units, and noise reducers to enhance its "red-line" potential.

This is the way the industry has been since at least 1993, and the only thing that has changed has been the introduction of lossy codecs. Lossy codecs have some interesting effects on their own where they tend to compress a sound, and ruin dynamics. Stuff that might only be a hidden layer on a CD can be very much front and center on an MP3/OGG.

Do we really want an Iran that funds terrorism around the globe to have the trump card of nuclear weapons? Right now Iran is mostly an annoyance, but an Iran with a capable nuclear weapons stockpile, and delivery platform is a serious, destabilizing problem that is more akin to lymphoma than to a bar brawl.

Israel can be a PITA, and I'm no fan of many of their actions over the past 40 years. However, once in awhile they are right. They were right about Iraq, and they are right about Iran. The problem is, they truly lack the capability to tackle the problem on their own. The United States is a little better off in that regard, but not a lot. We gave up the strategic position of being able to use Iraq as a spring board, and we don't have much capability in Afghanistan (the topography is very poor for any ground based invasion). The only weapons in our inventory capable of delivering the blows needed would be B2's, nuclear weapons, or a sustained ground invasion. Fighter-bombers just doesn't have the payloads necessary to truly destroy hardened facilities (meaning Israel really can't do a lot here on their own without a cooperative neighbor that shares a border). [I've seen some very interesting photos of facilities the United States targeted in Iraq -- one of them was hit with more than 60 cruise missiles, and bombed with more 20 1000lb bombs. The damage on the inside was rather unimpressive. If Iran has hardened its nuclear facilities -- cruise missiles, and non-nuclear weapons launched from fighter-bombers are not going to be enough to do the job.]

Your argument is basically: We should give up the idea of nuclear containment because the world is a lot safer, and less likely to blow itself up if everyone has a bomb -- including the truly crazies of the world.

My argument: Iran has funded all kinds of terrorism in the world, and has a track record of being a persistent thorn in the side of the United States, and much of the civilized world. An Iran with a nuclear trump card is far more likely to act even more poorly, and to spread nuclear weapons all over the region, and beyond. They might also spread chemical, biological, and other types of weapons all over the world since they would be beyond the reach of the United States to deal with barring an extremely costly exchange of weapons I would prefer don't come out of storage.

We can deal with a little bit of pain now with some air strikes, or even a full scale invasion (though I would hope it doesn't come to this) --- or we can deal with a world where every single conflict has the potential to go nuclear, and the next set of terrorists may be wielding nuclear materials.

I'm sorry the Iranians have poor leaders. I'm sorry the United States has an incompetent president. I'm sorry the Palestinians got a raw deal, and I'm sorry that Israel has some poor leadership as well. I have anguish for the Iranians that will have to die to fix the problems their leaders are creating. However, I'll take a world without a nuclear, chemical, and biological threat on every street corner over one that has it. Its a lot cheaper to deal with the problem now than to try to deal with it later; not just for us, but for every citizen of the globe.

Sometimes playing "world police" IS in our national interests, and in the interests of the world at large.

I don't watch any anime, but the picture quality in VLC v2.0 has improved quite a bit over v1.1. VLC is still not offloading as many things as I might like to my graphics processor *(HD 6870), but its CPU utilization is not high on my Core i5 based system. I forgot which settings I used before to make some content end up forced to decode on the graphics card; I went ahead & axed the old settings in case they would break things in the new version.

The big positives I noticed right away: The technique VLC uses for dealing with interlaced content improved in terms of output quality in v2.0. I still don't have a solution for the 24 frames issue that causes some HD to stutter a bit, but I imagine that has to do more with how things are encoded than the player.

I've only played around with a few videos with it so far, but I do like the improvements that I can see. I also like the improvements that I can hear!

Its nice when a new version is actually an improvement, and not just more pure bloat that gives the same level of performance at many times the original install size.

I'm actually inclined to agree with the anonymous "troll". My beloved is a counselor, and simply taking people off of caffeine for 8 weeks is enough to eliminate many cases of: severe anxiety & panic disorders, psychotic episodes, memory problems, some cases of depression, and sometimes even symptoms that mimic personality disorders. High caffeine intake also tends to make chronic pain worse as the user feels tense, stressed out, and high doses often lower the ability to cope with stress.

The character "Tweak" from South Park isn't too far from the truth in a great many cases. Caffeine does not do kind things to the brain, or for your blood pressure with high dose chronic use.

I still love having a couple cups of tea, but since I started abstaining from coffee I am a ton less stressed out than when I was consuming 1-2 16oz QuikTrip coffees a day. The little bit of lift caffeine gives tends to largely disappear with chronic use, but the negative aspects of high caffeine intake remain.

I don't know, but MicroCenter seems to be able to do it. I haven't looked at their books, but on price, they compete against the Newegg's, Amazon, and everyone else on the major items that matter. You pay a slight convenience fee for some items (1-2% above to have it today), but most things it works out in your favor even with the tax.

Now they could be bleeding money left, and right ... However, I don't think so. I think they are just making slightly less money on each sale.

After a horrible delivery fiasco, I was forced recently to buy a textbook via an adobe DRM type encryption method. I will never do it again. What I expected was something closer to a PDF file. What I actually got was a broken PDF-like document, only viewable in a horrible viewer with the lack of a decent zoom feature, the inability to *print* pages that I need (it will let you print some of them, but not others, and it doesn't tell you before you try it), an incomplete product (compared to the physical book) filled with broken links to the publishers website, and a 2 hour headache finding the links to the prior version of the book to make it work in a cumbersome wrapper. I'm annoyed enough that I'm trying to get a refund on it, and may push it as far as going for a charge back from my credit card company under the defective goods clause. If anyone from Bedford/St Martins is reading this: You need to step up, and deliver what you promise.

If people are having DRM experiences with games anything close to what I just had with a DRM protected textbook -- they indeed have every right to complaint, and need to do it loudly.

I try to set aside an hour a day just for conversation with my wife. Sometimes it has to be on the phone, but usually we can work it in for face to face time. Its a very good thing for us. The conversation lets her decompress, gives me a chance to reconnect with her, share a bit of my day (even if I do a lot more listening than talking), and because that time is almost always there she doesn't feel the need to interrupt every few seconds when I'm trying to say watch a hockey game, or get some bit of work done. She knows she is a priority, because its usually the second thing we do when we get home; the first thing is collie attack, and the dogs have less patience than even children (I rarely make it through the front hallway without at least one of them biting on my hand to demand attention). It makes for a much happier home if you can keep that face-to-face talk time going, and its usually scheduled around the same time of day!

Unfortunately, a lot of it now begins with the parents that buy their kids handhelds as a way to babysit them in the car because it makes their life easier. They also use them to babysit them in Church, because it makes the parents hour there a lot easier to not have squirrel-like children fighting, disrupting the service, drawing a scene, talking, and whatever else during. The same parents usually have a DVD player in the mini-van, a WII/XBox at home, a pair of DS's/DSi's for their kids, and tend to doll out the ipod/ipad's for Christmas. After the kids become hopelessly addicted to the little blue screen they also become somewhat easier to control by threatening to take their electronics away. It can make family trips a little less aggravating, and even I'll give in on a road trip to make the experience better. (I also wear ear plugs for those, and not just for the road noise!)

The downside of the electronics is that you can end up with tweens that have poor social skills, will bury their heads in the devices when company is over, and can't sit still without a handheld device to play on.

I'm not above this problem myself. Although I can take credit for not contributing to the problem; I didn't buy any of the handhelds for them. However, I did them let them in the house for two kids age 11, and 7 against my better judgment. Its a bit of torture, but all of the electronics (including the TV) will go bye bye for the duration of Lent. When we did this last year, the first week of it was pure torture, but by about the 2nd week the kids had adapted to doing other things. The effect does wear off quickly when the electronics are returned, but some of the benefits socially linger on for awhile.

Eharmony is pretty much a waste of time, even for the devout Christian looking for a partner.

I met my beloved through an ad I placed on Craigslist. Of course, she will never admit to using Craigslist for how we met. ha People DO actually use the site for something other than hookups; its just not known as well for that side of it.

PoF was a complete waste of my time. I talked to a couple people, but I never wanted to meet any of them. With Craigslist I got so many responses, so quickly that it became a process of weeding out the psychos, and other problems from the ones I wanted to meet. Despite having in bold letters that I did not want to hear from anyone that was married, or going through a divorce; I still got 4 responses from married women looking to hookup, and 3 more from those whom claimed to be "separated" or some other version of the same.

The ironic bit is that I almost didn't meet my beloved at all. Her email to me got sent to the spam folder. Roughly 99% of what I get from Yahoo is spam, so the filter flagged it. If I hadn't taken a second to look, I wouldn't have responded to her at all, and would have missed on the pass four years of a truly fantastic woman. Her email sat in my spam folder for over a week, and she thought I wasn't truly interested by the time I contacted her.

YMMV, but Craigslist has proven itself a lot more effective than the big dating sites for me.

Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I tend to think it was more divine design.

Apparently you haven't been in a family court lately. In Missouri as a case in point, you have *no right to appeal any contempt ruling*. Meaning, not only will you sit in jail indefinitely in a nasty county lockup facility, you will have no means to free yourself from a wrongful contempt charge. In addition to which, our wonderful Missouri law adds the extra kicker of "No other judge may remove, nor revoke the contempt order of another".

I used to really miss my 21" Iiyama displays. I had a heavily reinforced, and extremely large desk to accommodate 4 of them. Ever try to wall mount 4 100lb CRT's in a small area? It can be done, but you generally have to do some structural work, or at least install steel plates on both sides of the studs to handle it. I knew a few people that had 10-12 mounted that way. They didn't just have to work on the mounting issue, they had to improve the airflow to the room to make the room less of a sauna in the summer.

Wall mounting 4-6 LCD's (or 12 if you are a stock broker, and have taken your Ritalin), and still having room for 2 more on the desktop is trivial now. You also don't have to call in the HVAC guy to add more ducting to increase the airflow to deal with the heat.

VGA I can probably live without, although some of my displays have shown some surprising longevity, but DVI will be a bit painful not to have on the board.