Ooh, Comcast collection stories. I might have you beat:

I went to university at an interesting place that did three months internship, three months classes, repeat until you graduate or declare bankruptcy. During the work term I had my own place instead of my campus place, so I had to get my own services. Not knowing better at the time (mid 2004) I got Comcast. All was well and good, actually, and I realized that I had paid for one month too many and called them about it. I recall the lady being nice and saying they would happily refund a pro-rated amount and I gave them my forwarding address.

I quickly forgot about it. Then, in Oct 2005, I got a collections notice (I didn't actually receive it until Christmas 2006 because they sent it to my school address while I was on work term) that stated I owed Comcast that exact same amount they actually owed me (about $35.) To Comcast's credit, I was able to get someone on the phone on Christmas Day who saw the error and cleared the collection amount. (I didn't dare try to actually get the money owed me, as that would risk repeating the whole thing. )

Never again will I give Comcast a red cent. I will invent a way to do TCP/IP over two cans and a string before I get any of their services. If anyone asks me I will yell at them until I am blue in the face for them to avoid Comcast. I haven't dealt with the company personally since that holiday phone call, but I haven't seen a single good thing about them in the news since then; this could be selection bias, but I'm not worried about being wrong in this case.

Why even bother spoofing the IP? Hack the account of the bot, or set up your own for potential future targets, and inject apparent changes. While this will eventually be found out (far easier than to figure out IP spoofing), if done with a trusted account in the right circumstances I could see an immediate backlash being disproportionate and causing things to escalate quickly.

Basically, wait for the hay pile to build up on the camel, and play that final straw at the right moment...

I didn't mean that my description was the entirety of legalization, just that it was a part of it why I believe that use would drop after legalization (as others have pointed out, Portugal (I think) has shown this as realistic.) Sorry for the confusion.

I never really had the answer for how to counter that.

I don't think you have to. Legalization means you can walk into a hospital/pharmacy/police station and ask where a good place for addiction assistance is without worrying that they'll call the cops or arrest you on the spot. We should be promoting that kind of behavior anyway ("Get yourself some help and we will help you get that help without arresting you"), but legalization will make that a far more reliable scenario.

While I've no numbers to back up my speculation, I would think that many users/addicts consider getting clean at some point but decide against it due to the threat of, at best, an arrest record and so are driven back to the drugs.

I thought of the keystroke listening, too, when I read the summary, but something just struck me: Couldn't you ruin that listening by having a duplicate typewriter set up right next to the one someone is working on, hooked to a machine that will randomly press keys? It would be annoying as hell for the actual typist, but if it can somehow match the typing rate of the human, wouldn't that destroy the ability to analyze the sound?

Both of those people are dead, their legacies set. You are correct that Musk doesn't have as vast a philanthropic footprint as either of those two at the moment, but he's also very much alive (43 yo, no serious health issues I am aware of) and has plenty of time to make billions of dollars and then donate that to whatever.

For reference, both Carnegie and Franklin were approx 84 when they died. Assuming we don't go all Mad Max, 40 years is a lot of time for Musk to play catch up.

PayPal, rockets, electric cars, solar panels, paying $1 million for oatmeal or something in the name of a Tesla museum. While he doesn't have absolute control of any one of those industries, he's sounding more and more like a modern Andrew Carnegie, maybe with some Benjamin Franklin mixed in.

Absolutely nothing bad will be done to them; if anything, they'll get commendation medals for bravely charging at a potential terrorist machine. If they were in California, they'd probably be hailed as heroes and had a statue put up in their honor, compared to six cops beating a guy to death, on tape, with audio of them saying things like "Now see these fists? They're going to (expletive) you up" with the two actually brought to trial being acquitted by a jury. (A third was scheduled, but after this trial his charges were dropped.)

The jury part is what sickens me the most; there are all sorts of examples of police abuse, but rarely do the police in question actually get taken to court over it. It finally happens, and 6-12 of my "peers" think they were just doing their damn job. People will rationalize their stances, often going into convoluted and twisted reasoning; I have no hope for humanity, but it doesn't seem I have to make such leaps to maintain that stance...

(And in case anyone was wondering, the Fox News link is intentional; it's basically the AP article, and if Fox News isn't willing/able to put a spin to make the cops seem like heroes then any cop supporters should have a hard time as well.)

100 miles from the international border itself

And airports. I'm not sure if it's just the airports or also 100 miles around them, but in this case it doesn't matter.

People hear this and think "Oh, well, border protection of a small area, no biggie". Except that this "zone" fully encompasses nine states! From https://www.aclu.org/know-your...: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii, and Massachusetts. Nine Constitution-Free States. Maryland, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware come very close to being included in this list.

I wonder if we'll ever see a Corporate Mutiny. A situation wherein the employees want to do good work and make a good product/service, many can do decent work, but the CxOs and managers are hellbent are running it into the ground either through stupidity or expecting that golden parachute. Some combination of poor job market, location, and just being mad as hell causes the employees to essentially come to work and agree to completely disregard certain people/levels of management and continue about work in the way they see best, led by a small group who may or may not have been in leadership positions before.

It might not be smooth, and it probably wouldn't work, but it would make for a hell of a story.

If such a thing was attempted: Sure, the higher ups probably have the access to completely cut off their paychecks, but if all the non-managers left who would do the work? The company would quickly fold, turning it into an odd MAD situation.

I originally went to Netvibes, which tries to offer RSS as some sort of secondary service to some business analytics aggregation or something (I never fully understood.) But sometime around the beginning of the year they did a moderate layout change and then completely ignored the vast number of user complaints (a help thread, with almost 200 comments when most had 3, was marked "completed" with no change or solid comment from staff). It introduced a ton of useless whitespace and, most importantly for me, broke their Mosaic view, which was great for images and the primary reason I chose them after Reader's shut down.

Once they proved they didn't care about user interaction and had to have their vision, I jumped ship along with a ton of others (HINT HINT BETA). I now use NewsBlur and am fairly happy with it. Their free service is pretty limited, but I found it useful enough to be worth the $2/mo for a subscription once I changed the settings to get rid of all their Web 2.0 stuff. I miss having "pages" to allow for larger grouping and any kind of image-oriented feed option, but I have a lot more flexibility in how I view things (and I can sort by time descending, something NetVibes was never able to do!)

I don't think she's competitive, but one of the regulars on the TF2 server I usually go to is female and usually plays Medic; this doesn't sound too odd for TF2, until you go against her and find out that she is absolutely lethal with the Ubersaw (melee weapon, for non-TF2 players). If she gets the jump on someone (usually when her heal target loses uber and about to die, she'll split off and dive into the enemy team) she can easily take out two or three people with just that, and I've seen her clear half the team by a combination of luck (they had already taken moderate damage and were regrouping) and surprise.

She also likes to mock people by hiding around the corner and using a death taunt (for non-TF2 players, that's a taunt that can OKO an opposing player if it connects properly) if she knows someone is chasing her. Pretty good success rate there, too.

There are a few other players known to be female on the server who are really good, but I have no idea if they're comp or not.

he wrote about child pornography

Glad you're already +5, because my mod points expired yesterday. The judge wouldn't have given him a second look if it was pedophilic(?) fiction, despite falling under the same kind of fantasy. (Of course, as others have mentioned, him being a cop probably landed him on the good side of the judge and a common citizen wouldn't have been freed.)

Disgusting though it is, disgust should not be used as the main criteria for laws.

If true, that leaves me a bit disappointed. I switched to their pay-as-you-go plan in October and have been happy enough with it: while their cell service is pretty crap compared to Verizon, they also didn't do anything super-evil like Verizon (that I was aware of)... until now. Even if true, I still prefer them over any of the other three major providers, so I don't plan on switching to anything else.

the pervasive pressure that's exerted against people who aren't like you [...] But we can get even better than that and be pretty good and inclusive.

So why must the pendulum swing the other way? Why can't Google offer free coding lessons to anyone and try their best to employ processes to make sure that they are advertising so as diverse a population as possible and nothing is in place that might favor one group over another? (Bonus points for transparency in that.) And if, despite their best efforts to be inclusive, the turnout is vastly white male it would be useful to find out why. Are the minorities/women threatened by the prospect of being around so many white males? Are they disinterested in coding in general? In how Google was presenting it?

Do Asians get to take part in this? Or are they not allowed because their quota has been met? At least here in America, they're still a minority (Wiki says 6% in 2010.)

I guarantee you if the headline read "Google is Offering Free Coding Lessons to White Males" the same "equal rights" people who view their current action as a Very Good Thing would rage with the power of a thousand suns. I'm not against equality, but I'm for equal equality. I wouldn't try to stop Google from doing this (I don't see it as a bad thing, I just think it's misguided, and it's a private initiative), but I await the day when elementary schools and nursing programs having hiring/teaching days targeting males.