The gadget doesn't look like it should be limited to passing as a tattoo. We should see this as an opportunity to accessorize! But the models in TFA aren't into it. Catwalks! Sell it, baby!

You will be banked into facial recognition database and find Peperoni ads on your Facebook ads page. This is about facial recognition software, it's going into store cameras everywhere, and they are starting to package it as a "consumer advantage". Physical browsing is now, today, being tracked the same as web browsing. Minority Report has your pizza ready.

Eyeballs are attracted to bad news. Good news does not sell papers or attract viewers. This has been documented for a century, and modern psychology actually studies the "fear", "bad news", and "schadenfreude" centers in the brain. Perceived risks that you avoid releases dopamine. Talk radio manufactures doomsday stories every hour, on the hour.

The saddest thing is when CBS 60 Minutes gets it completely wrong - and wins a journalism Award. Ask CBS 60 Minutes anchor, Scott Pelley, about the state of journalism. http://www.mediabistro.com/tvn...

"Our house is on fire. Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.” - Scott Pelley

He should know. Pelley's won an journalism award for misreporting the "trail" of "e-waste" in 2008. But reporting that a past story was exaggerated doesn't sell many ads.

Allvoices.com

There are issues to resolve, but they aren't that difficult to resolve. There are 9 exemptions police departments can claim, including #6 below. http://www.foiadvocates.com/ex...

6. Documents which are "personnel and medical and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(6).

Also exempt is anything mentioned by statute, so Washington could just pass a law liminting FOIA access to the police cams. And #7 probably works as well. :

"7 Documents which are "records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes," but only if one or more of six specified types of harm would result. 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(7)."

Or if you are on the police cam, you can start to reveal secrets related to oil well data, or banking. Big Oil and Banking have their own exemtions, 8 and 9.

If no one pays taxes, I live in a lousy infrastructure.

If everyone pays taxes, I live in a nice infrastructure, but had to pay taxes.

If I admit not paying taxes, no one else wants to pay taxes either.

If I make everyone believe in paying taxes, while I secretly do not pay taxes, I benefit from the infrastructure for free.

Dang. Didn't realize this was a Ph.D thesis material!

That's all this is, it's balancing the laws protecting citizens against credible threats vs. the free speech rights of the person making the threat. Whether it rhymes, is set to music, or is in iambic pentameter is irrelevant. Threatening speech is like pornography, judges have to know it when they hear it.

Could we robotize the baggage handling system first? Driverless luggage carriers and robots won't need background checks, won't pilfer, and don't interact with third parties out in the tarmac (less likely to encounter ambulance chasing lawyers out to sue Google for fender bending).

Surviving the estimated 1000 degree centigrade reentry temperature is impressive. The rest of the test - a suborbital flight of 780 seconds - is less so. But I would have expected the seconds of heat to be more deadly to the DNA than light years of cold, so it's still interesting.

There's actually a fairly cool and intelligent discussion that could be had about volcanic activity's role in the history of world climate, and how forecasting of volcanic activity can play a role in climate modelling. Too bad I can't anticipate actually having that discussion without an eruption of troll commentary. Merely discussing it amounts to flamebait due to the polarizing of opinions on the issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Besides the effect on lawmaking (or failure to pass laws under gridlock), gerrymandering gives people on both sides of issues a sense of majority. "I won in a landslide, I must be right", combined with polarized news programming, has been demonstrated to make people dumber. Harvard Business Review has an interesting article this week on opinion reinforcement and groupthink this week [ https://hbr.org/2014/11/making... ], which compares focus groups from liberal Boulder CO USA and conservative Colorado Springs USA. The researchers documented the negative effects of grouping like-minded people in political discussions. I think gerrymandering has the same effect on political intelligence. Their own conservatism or liberalism appears validated by landslide elections in their districts.

This is the big thing. Not just NSA, but retailer cameras selling stuff you literally "browse" by foot in the aisle. According to this article, Google and Facebook have the biggest "face banks" for the facial recognition software. Can they be told to forget that, too? If not, you aren't really "forgotten" just because you don't appear in a search engine. I don't think Europe could pass a law making Google delete the information. http://www.fastcocreate.com/30...