Here's another article I read today
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/27/obamas-nsa-reform-package-may-hamstring-privacy-lawsuits

The request for past damages means that his lawsuit can't be mooted by legislative changes.
All the other lawsuits are only asking for injuctions, and Congress can make them go away.

Not all science is done in one groundbreaking leap.
This is their second study, which confirms the results of their first study.
"Results confirm our previous study, more research required" is not a surprise conclusion for any scientist.

Sometimes you have to do these small scale experiments in order to gather funding/attention for the bigger study.

Ever hear of the Tennessee Valley Authority?
It was a Depression era project by the New Deal coalition. And it worked.
It brought power, flood control, and investment funds to a desperately poor area of the country.
To this day, their power is cheaper and their communities are richer because of it.

As a matter of fact, it's been so wildly successful for the last 80 years... that, of course, they want to privatize it.

The pdf seems to completely ignore that in the past, security researchers have written patches for Microsoft operating systems as a stopgap until MS could get its shit together and issue their own security updates.

I also take issue with the comparison to cars.
If you want to drive a car on the road, it requires a safety inspection, no matter how old it is.
WinXP, even patched, is the equivalent of driving around a rust bucket with bad wiring and bald tires.
It's an accident waiting to happen.

About the only thing I really agreed with was this:

The problem is definitely a failure to internalize the costs of running out of date software.
That's why the police fine people for having broken tail lights or other obvious safety issues.
There's no internet equivalent, but I don't see why this is Microsoft's problem.

Sometimes you can't convince end users there's a problem that needs fixing unless it causes them pain.
MS needs to pull the plug and the chaos that follows will sort itself out fairly quickly.

For corporations, copyright lasts 110 years.
That strikes me as unreasonable.

Yes, both the length of the copyright and requiring someone to provide support for that long.

It shouldn't matter if you knock out the control channel.
Remote control [anything] should always be set up to fail in a "safe" manner, for various definitions of safe.

Here's a picture of the aftermath, with someone picking up the hexacopter and its pieces.
The triathlete is on the ground with blood, if you're squeamish about that kind of thing.

By mass, I'm currently ~70% water, ~29.5% matter, and 0.5% cookie dough

Disclaimer: Do not eat raw cookie dough made with unpasteurized eggs.

He had ~10 days to repudiate his former position and didn't.
In that time, he's made statements, but all his statements were non-apologies and evasions.

https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-refuses-to-quit

"Tolerate my intolerance" was never really a good place to be starting from, but nowadays it's a completely unviable position to take.

There are still culture warriors out there bemoaning this trend as the end of free speech, but all that really means is they don't understand how free speech works.

Our legal tradition didn't start with the Constitution and you understanding of it can't start there either.

This is really important: The Constitution was not written in a vacuum.
I'll say it again: The Constitution was not written in a vacuum.

Long before the Constitution and its Amendments were conceived, there was this thing called "common law."
Slander, libel, and threatening immediate bodily harm were already illegal.
The 1st Amendment was never intended to legalize such behavior.

We know this, because the guys who authored and debated the Amendments had voluminous written correspondences on the matter.

Your approach to the Constitution is like a layman reading the Bible,
without any historical context and proclaiming "I understand the word of God."
You don't. Your interpretation is unequivocally wrong. Please don't misinform others.

20,000 per day? That happens to be the rough estimate of the "Super Orion" carrying capacity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

With modern materials, we could build lighter and possibly fit more people using the same weight constraint.
/There is the small issue of nuclear fallout being scattered throughout the atmosphere.

I know we grow a lot of corn, but why not insert the gene into kudzu or some other fast growing weed that thrives on marginal land with low fertilizer inputs?
It's not like we don't already have a use for every part of the corn plant.

In-game and in real life, anyone with a *long name can easily find it shortened by the people around them.
It's not so easy for me to imagine that "very complex gamertags might get lost in the mass of names."

Even someone as not-complex as "Nightmare" would easily get shortened to "Night" or even "N" during team activities.

*more than a syllable

These particular idiots are members of Senate/House Committees responsible for Science.
Of all the people in the Congress, they should have some basic understanding of how science works.

Because depression presents in all kinds of weird ways.
In this case "started to get dizzy and feel sick" could have been anything.
Once blood work ruled out physical problems, that's when you start looking for psychological ones.

Many laptop motherboards come with an internal mSATA port.
This can be used for SSDs as either a standalone drive or a cache drive for your spinning disk.

As a combination, SSD cache + spinning disk is almost as fast in all the ways that matters.