Gosh, I hope it does fail to be renewed. Any bit of our rights we can claw back, after the mess of the post 9-11 years, is a benefit. Maybe we can dissolve the TSA with similar levels of vigor and/or apathy.

On the face of it, I agree with what you relate and I think you are correct. However, the value of the data isn't so much what is said, or who said it, but the relationships between the people that do the communications and learning how they know each other. So, none of the data needs to be especially meaningful in and of itself. Bad things will happen, but these records are (more likely than not) most valuable in sketching out who knows who, and who they have in common.

On balance, I think this president has been okay -- not great, but okay. This is one of a handful of disappointing positions that I'll never understand.

Here in Colorado, there's a bunch of crime centered around grow facilities (robbing them) and robberies and burglaries for the cash being transported. It's one of the main reasons why the state is lobbying very hard for banking regulation reform at the fed level, for example.

I'd prefer that we just let the Afghans sell their poppy-scrapings to drug companies and keep it above-board.
Just my $.02.

... for Lollipop. It only got it this past weekend.
I have to lay the blame with T-mo. I had no other easy option to get it.

I live close to Denver and we had a 4.5 about 4 years ago. My house is about 110 years old and it cracked the plaster. About six months later, we started seeing the "learn about fracking" ads on TV -- sponsored by some petroleum institute mouthpiece. The ads are still running. Your nose for BS is very keen, and I have no doubt that you are right.

:) I live in Colorado, and we have our own water problems. (Though less of them, of late, but it's always been really dry out here.) Our snowpack fills a bunch of rivers. At the same time, our glaciers and year-round snowpack are fading, and that takes a lot of elasticity out of the supply. It'll be dry times up here, too, before long (again?), and there's nobody around to pump water to us.

There's a lot of agriculture out here, too, but it's nowhere near the scale or variety of California. I suspect that this is why New York isn't, for example, a big producer of almonds. It's dead last, in fact. So yeah, you can grow "food crops" in the northeast, but not nearly as many different ones, and not nearly as productively/cheaply.

... and he's kind of a jerk. It doesn't surprise me that he's thinking about simplistic, over-costly "solutions" to the problem. Note that he's going to give the money as political campaign donations to whatever politician says that they'll build it (if he doesn't hit the mark, which he has no hope of hitting). Politicians all tell the truth, too, right?
All we see here is a pretty obvious play that Shatner is making to aggrandize himself and magnify his political influence... with other people's money. It's all about him making himself a bigger celebrity in political circles. Free dinners of chicken and peas, and easy, casual podium gigs he can write off.

I don't know about crappy land, but the climate is more temperate and the growing season is much longer (provided water, of course). If you're a farmer, those are excellent attributes to exploit.

... back sweat. I'm not kidding. I travel frequently out of DIA. I wear a backpack over a light jacket, and the middle of my back (right between my shoulder blades) always gets identified as a pat-down area for investigation. My shirt is inevitably damp in that area. The nice TSA people gently rub my back as I wait for my bag to roll out of the X-ray machine. If it wasn't such a stupid process in its entirety, I might think it was actually kind of nice... like a spa or something, only with blue rubber gloves and more ick.

... I'm self-taught. This means that I mostly know how to learn how to code in different languages (java, perl, scripting, some proprietary odds & ends thus far), but it also means that I probably don't know best practices very well and am prone to hacks. This would make me a novice, but I gave myself an aspirational "intermediate". I suspect that I'm not entirely alone in this, but it's hard to see around all the boxes of stuff mom keeps down here in the basement, so I'm not sure.

... and yet I do have a LinedIn account... and I still have a few active circles in Google+

I ended up at LinedIn just because it was the easiest and simplest way to keep tabs on people I used to work for and with. It's handy for that.

As for Facebook, I just don't have any reason to use it. I like my current active circle of friends and we call and email each other directly when we want to be in touch. I'm not interested in the time-sink that it is for so many people. I keep hearing tales from friends about the politics of "friendship" and all the goofy crap they get from people they really don't know, or don't want to know anymore.

I also don't want to share a whole lot of stuff with the wide-wide world. I don't want to read what other people are sharing. I just don't care about that crap.

This notion that Facebook is a kind of adjunct to a resume is a little disquieting. I mean, if someone wants to know more about me, all they have to do is suggest that we go out for a long lunch or maybe a beer after work and I'm happy to talk about just about anything. No window dressing, nothing in print. If someone wants to get to know me, they can do exactly that, with me, in real life.

Fortunately, I am also old enough that not having a Facebook page isn't so unusual in my age group. So at least I have that.

Maybe I'm the only one, but I read TFA and I don't see any hacking going on, here. What I saw instead was a pretty sound approach to health and wellness through dietary changes and continued moderate exercise. I don't see what's been "hacked", here. The "eat less and exercise" approach, wonder of wonders, seems to have worked again!

Honestly, I like hearing about experiences like this, because it gives me hope that I can make my own similar lifestyle changes, but there was no "hack" involved here -- no shortcut, no fast-track, no way to get it done without the work and self discipline. When I get a good checkup at the dentist, am I "hacking" dental hygiene? I think not.

At the ATL airport. Pretty whizzy. I think it may have actually sped up the process. The only strange part was you basically move through a set of various stations and checks, like 4 or 5 before you finally talk with an agent about declarations at the end. It was pretty streamlined and pretty easy to use the devices.