However, I would add that I endorse Mr. Hyppone's action and I hope that it starts a trend. Just because the government has a need and obligation to spy on people doesn't mean the citizens and corporations are under any obligation to help them to the extent that they mislead and lie to their customers.

Actually, I do consider it normal, though acceptable is much more debatable. Lost in all the noise about NSA and GCHQ is how many other governments have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Global_surveillance_disclosure shows that several countries including Germany, Israel, Italy and the Netherlands either have their own data-gathering operations, or have participated in data-sharing arrangements with the USA to circumvent domestic limits on spying on their own citizens, and vice versa.

I've considered the whole outrage that NSA is spying on allied heads of state and government officials to be nothing more than diplomatic game-playing, because given the opportunity, every government does the exact same thing. Spying on citizens is a bit more problematical, but it's not like there isn't a legitimate need for some level of this type of spying. The whole point of the NSA and similar organizations is to intercept the communications of foreign agents, terrorists, etc. "We've already determined what you are, now we're just negotiating a price."

Most folks call those edited change logs "release notes" in my experience. The list of changes, defect fixes, etc. should at least be a section in overall release notes, but they don't usually have to go into gory detail the way that the OP describes. The change or defect number being fixed is always useful, because then you can lookup the original bug report online for more details if you think it might impact your environment,.

Those are called release notes.

Unless it's an extremely specialized application that requires the customer to have expertise in a specialized field, most customers will be perfectly happy with release notes. The gritty details about changes are mostly needed for things like changes to an API, changes to an algorithm that affect calculations, etc.

Good point, except that the reduction in costs for the uninsured would be accompanied by a (smaller) increase in payments from the insurance companies and a corresponding increase in premiums. You're right that the whole "negotiated rate" thing from the insurance companies is code for "if you don't give us this low-ball rate, we won't put you in our network and our customers won't come to your office."

There's a difference between "The administration f-ed up the website and they deserve legitimate criticism." vs. "See, this proves that Obamacare sucks." There's also a difference between criticizing Fox when it really goes right-wing wack0, and just generic bashing because you don't like their slant.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may now remove your blinders. Yes, ALL of you.

In fact, this happened to my wife before we got married. She had "student insurance" at her college, but when she actually needed to use it for surgery, she found out she'd be on the hook for half the bill -about $10k almost 20 years ago. Fortunately she found out before actually scheduling the surgery. Since she's from Germany she was able to head home and get it done under the German "socialist" program. Bottom line under the old market was that you'd pay $800/month (at least in FL) for full/platinum-style insurance that actually provides the same level of coverage as a good employer plan. In most cases, if you were under private insurance, only a major medical/catastrophic policy makes sense -- true insurance rather than health-care funding.

Yeah, retrofitting underground cables in urban areas is a nightmare, and probably not worth it. Especially in an area where the main natural disaster is earthquakes. The phone and power lines that stay down for weeks at a time tend to be in suburbia or rural areas. In those areas, right of way negotiations, work rules and routing around existing infrastructure don't get so complicated -- plus the benefits to service reliability are greater.

I stopped using C-Net when they started pulling this little trick and thought Sourceforge had more respect for open software. I can understand why they need to do this, but why didn't they reach out to the community to discuss new revenue streams rather than pull this stunt and then "reach out to the community" after the fact? Maybe they actually want to kill the project hosting service?

Sorry, guys. SF needs to back down from this before I D/L there again. I'll probably continue to use Freecode and D/L direct from the developers where possible, but even that seems like it won't last for long.

A lot of times you don't use information you have because it would reveal your methods and sources. But now that a lot of NSA methods and sources are known, they can use the information out in the open like this. Assuming the court accepts it as admissible under rules of evidence.

Considering how Minecraft physics are almost laughable even in the Newtonian realm (for example, you can compress/store 27x64 cubic meters of cobblestone into a 1m cube/chest) nitpicking on the implementation of quantum concepts is a waste of time. This isn't intended as a rigorous treatment, it's an introduction to the concepts and how they would impact if they were visible at the macro scale. Personally, I think the implementation of superposition is reasonable - the block is in an undetermined state when it's not being observed and has it's state frozen by observation. Switching states after being observed isn't quite kosher without some other interaction, but I'll live with that for the sake of gaemeplay. Maybe a redstone signal could be required to destabilize the state of the block after being observed. The Observer dependency is a bit more problematic with its directional dependencies, but I can't think of a good way to implement that in a game. In theory we could use redstone as an activator again and selecting the state of the block probabilistically based on available observers and their distance from the block, but that's a fairly complex algorithm to run in realtime, updating every 1/20th of a second (the Minecraft tick/sampling rate) in Java.

The entanglement doesn't seem to properly describe the quantum phenomenon at all. Action at a distance != teleportation. The trouble is a realistic implementation would probably be exploitable in game terms. For example if you have 2 of those entanglement altars (or whatever they are called) and you place a block in one, I would expect to see the same block appear in the other one. Now how do you prevent people from using this to clone valuable blocks like diamond in game? In multiplayer, with 1 player at each "altar" you would have a very tight time sync requirement if both players tried to mine a block in their respective altars simultaneously.

An alternative mod spotlight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HI-keffxmA

More likely explanations:
1) Someone in the family downloaded something that installed an open BitTorrent client/tracker, and your network is being used to host pirate files, porn, and/or documents from a terrorist cell. Most likely just Miley Cyrus MP3s though.
2) You have uPnP open to the internet or one of your uPnP devices opened itself the internet.
3) Your kid publicized your minecraft server's IP address on YouTube.
4) You're being probed by random botnets.

The only way you'd be getting DDoS'ed is if someone paid a botnet. If you haven't pissed anyone that shady off lately, that's not it. Meanwhile, run WIreshark as described above.

Considering I had posted this conclusion several times in comments here already, I think I qualify. The production times on these studies of theirs must take months.

A recent sample from 2012.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3317435&cid=42303767

There will be a substantial part of the population that simply isn't smart or creative enough to hold a job in the face of automated competition. The only refuge for the average worker will be in situations where customers expect and require a human interface (for example in many service/hospitality industries). The tipping point will probably be around the time that most taxi services and some bus lines use driverless vehicles for at least some of their pickups.

I think a lot of this is more a personal statement about the rule of law and constitutional protections in the US in general, rather than any specific risk to Groklaw itself. PJ has always been careful to emphasize that the rule of law is a process designed to ensure justice is achieved as much as humanly possible. It must be incredibly disillusioning to her to see this process break down so dramatically as it has in the case of the NSA and FISA. If the rule of law means nothing anymore, Groklaw serves no purpose, regardless of whether there is any direct impact to the site from the NSA monitoring.

Although I think this is a slight over-reaction to how government security monitoring actually affects Groklaw itself, as a statement of objection against the security apparatus monitoring the internet in general, it is entirely valid. We in the US (and UK) who truly value freedom are slowly being reduced to the behaviors of cold-war Soviet dissidents, forced to smuggle our communications around by hand, to a limited number of people we know and trust personally.