As pointed out in other posts, your statement, "not DNA from the rape itself", is completely incorrect. As the article says, "The decision to launch the DNA appeal came after De Vries in May broadcast information about a Playboy cigarette lighter found in Vaatstra's bag which contains DNA traces that match the traces found on the schoolgirl's body. " The DNA WAS found on the girl's raped body. Because it was ALSO found on a cigarette lighter sold locally, that is why they suspected a local person. So his DNA matches exactly that on the raped girl's body! At least, their approach was logical. Just to be clear.

Pale Moon ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) is a long-standing fork of Firefox produced by Moonchild Productions, which is distinguished by being optimized for efficiency and speed in 64 bit Vista and Windows 7. There are 32 bit versions as well. Firefox does not provide a 64 bit version at this time. If you've never heard of Pale Moon, check it out. It is now my main browser of choice. Here is a review: http://www.softwarecrew.com/2012/08/pale-moon-15-building-a-better-browser/.

Perhaps this browser will give you your "Firefox" experience without the upgrade "bugging" that Mozilla is introducing.

There are two ways companies can take advantage of their inventiveness if patents were abolished. First is to ramp up company security and keep the inner workings of the patent a complete secret. This method is even available today, if a company were to elect to keep a patentable item secret instead of patenting it. This method will certainly work in the short run.

The second way to take advantage of their inventiveness is to be recognized as the most competent implementer of the patent. Say an inventor creates a "wave engine". It is a difficult engineering feat, and if the inventor works hard to stay ahead of the competition, then they will do well enough by being recognized as the world experts on the "wave engine". If they don't work hard enough, then competitors will take business away from them.

By keeping trade secrets and by becoming highly competent, all inventors will do well. They might not do quite as well as they would have if they had a "monopoly" on the idea for 17 years, but nevertheless, they would do well enough!

Society is the winner here. If there were no patents, then all competitors could jump on the idea, and innovation would be vastly accelerated, and costs would plummet. It would be harder for companies to make a dollar, but the industries as a whole would accelerate rapidly. There are numerous serious studies that support the abolition of patents. They examine cases where patents were granted and cases where patents weren't available. In all cases, in the long run, having a patent system slowed innovation, enriched some rent-seekers unjustly, and society always suffered. This is an idea whose time has come.

The real threat, that the ACLU knows very clearly, is that the clearest path to government oppression of its citizens is to follow the path of China and other totalitarian regimes, and put together a massive dossier on every citizen. Then, anytime the government wants to crack down on a citizen, it has all the information it needs to put the citizen away. As any police officer will tell you, with over 5,000 federal laws, and countless local state and municipal laws, every citizen breaks laws without even knowing it, and if they follow you in a cruiser, then eventually can legally pull you over. What protects us is that most miniscule violations are not on the books. But if the government can collect 100% of all the information technology increasingly permits, they will begin to get 100% information. This will not harm you until the government decides to focus its laser power on YOU. There is little in this world as powerful as government, which can bring down the powerful, the wealthy, even the lawmakers. The ACLU has this one right - our government needs to be limited in the information it gathers on us.

I know of an 85-year old retired engineer who FELL for this scam two years ago. I got into assisting him after he had lost $500,000, his life savings (which he had wired to a Swiss bank account). The scammers contacted him after he had lost his money, pretending to be attorneys in London who could help him "recover" a part of the money for an additional $40,000. He was to fly to Amsterdam with the money, and give it to them. I got involved after he came back, when he requested that I assist him in finding the "London attorneys". Turns out he actually had flown to Amsterdam with $40,000 in a money belt, and saw the men outside the terminal holding up a card with his name on it. But the Amsterdam police found his money belt, and deported him back to America. Those police saved his last dime! It took me two weeks of intense persuasion to get through to him that he had truly lost his money, and all he could do was turn in a futile report to the FBI. He finally got it, and is truly a sadder but wiser man now. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been a part of it. With that kind of return on their investment of scamming time, I see why they put so much energy into it!!!!

The technology to abort a takeoff in the last 1/2 second is truly amazing, and because of high combustion pressure in an engine is a perfect catch. If the Boeing Delta II in 1997 had had the same type of status checking, it might have discovered the 17 foot crack in the booster, and aborted also, instead of blowing up on launch: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9701/17/rocket.explosion/index.html. And a Delta III had a rocket engine failure in 1999, which ruined the mission: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19990626&slug=2968601. So the ability to detect an engine problem and shutdown before liftoff is again an amazing feat, and shows advancing technology. SpaceX is doing this right!

Hotmail accounts have been hijacked at an increasing rate lately. I am a computer tech, and in the last two months, at least a dozen of my correspondents with hotmail/msn have had their accounts hijacked. I have got a smattering of AOL as well. That's it. No gmail accounts hijacked, no Cox/Comcast accounts hijacked, no Yahoo accounts hijacked. Something bad is happening in the hotmail/msn/AOL world. And I am not biased, I have a hotmail account and a gmail account, and use both.

I use the built in Windows "Robocopy.exe" feature via a CMD file to backup the files on my Windows computers. Robocopy used this way can be scheduled, and is extraordinarily fast. It pulls files seamlessly through my local area network, so I backup my desktop, my laptop and my partner's laptop all onto one large external hard drive via the network. I have it set to skip files that have the same timedate stamp, so after the first copy process, it runs in under a minute. The thing I like most about using robocopy is that I end up with the same exact set of files and folders on my external hard drive as on my working computers. This makes the backup or restore process very transparent and easy to use for even beginners, though I am fairly expert. I do have it set so that if I delete a file on my working computer, the backup remains on the external hard drive. I've used this since XP days, and was thrilled to find robocopy built into Vista and Windows 7. To learn how to use it, just search for "robocopy".

Two years from now, you won't be asking this question, and your children may ride on commercial space ships. Commercial space ships are a giant wave of the future (http://www.spacex.com/media.php), and that future starts when SpaceX resupplies the Space Station on April 30th, 2012. You remind me of this: "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value," -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre , France .

This is a serious Catch 22 situation. You can only report child porn if you are in possession of it or have knowledge of it. You are committing a crime if you are in possession of child porn, period. Even if you came into possession of it entirely innocently, the burden is going to be on you (probably for the rest of your life) to prove your innocence. This is one of the worst areas of the law to be on the wrong side of. The police will always err on the side of caution, which means, if you are in possession, you are a suspect. They will sort out the details later. If ever. And it appears this Catch 22 situation will only get worse for the foreseeable future. The best thing might be to zip your lip and burn the laptop, and move on. I hope this man is cleared soon, and can be a normal family man again. Very sad.

King County, the most populous county in Washington State with 1.1 million voters, has moved to all mail-in ballots. The ballots are mark-sense where you fill in the ovals. They are machine counted, and have the paper copy as a backup. Residents "sign" a form enclosed with the ballot, in order to provide for verifying signatures. They have been doing this for several years now, and the results seem to be good with fewer ballot recounts and "human error" issues. King County now even provides TRACKING of your mail-in ballot: http://info.kingcounty.gov/elections/mailballottracking.aspx. Here is more information, including that you can mail the ballot with a first class stamp, or drop in a "ballot drop box": http://www.kingcounty.gov/elections/voting/mailballots.aspx.

The "Evergreen" library system is free and open source, and was initiated by the Georgia Public Library System in 2006, and is currently in use by over 850 libraries, including a "parish" library. You can check it out here: http://open-ils.org/about.php. The site also has a link to a showcase of libraries already running, and on the Internet. The "client" runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. I think the server runs on Linux.

I completely agree with the "super-zoom" idea. You can get a good camera with a long zoom (I have 30x) which also does macro photography (4 inches) with the exact same lens. SLR's would cost you hundreds/thousands to get the same lens combos you can get with a single super-zoom. A regular zoom goes out to about 10x, which is also fine. But I have been really happy with the extra "zoom". I personally bought a Sony HX100V. I debated and coveted the higher quality of image from a DSLR, but the extra thousands to get there just aren't worth it for someone like me at the beginner level. Someday :).

I need one of these new cold fusion reactors for my flux capacitor. I’ll get that danged thing working yet! - Doc Brown