If they're sentient enough to be fun to date, they're also sentient enough to be allowed the agency to say "no" just like a real person would...leaving you right where you were before.

This. There have been a number of articles written about why the mantra to "do what you love" can be a bad one, and this is one of the reasons. If you're passionate about what you do, many employers will exploit this fact. You'll end up being one of these chumps who works 80+ hours a week, sleeps on the couch in the office, and subsists on leftover Chinese takeout reheated in the office microwave, cold pizza, and Mountain Dew.

Once people get older, they also develop other priorities: a spouse, kids, aging parents, health problems of their own caused by a couple of decades of lack of sleep and eating crap food and not exercising. They realize that no one ever dies wishing they'd spent more time in the office. They start to establish boundaries around their working life so that they can engage in better self-care, and having meaningful relationships with the other people in their lives. It doesn't mean that they're not passionate about what they do any more; it's a sign that they're no longer willing to allow someone else to exploit that passion to another person's profit rather than their own.

It is *technically* legal, but it is an abuse of the law. Asset forfeitures were originally intended to prevent drug kingpins from using their ill-gotten gains to hire high-priced lawyers, and to thwart money-laundering, but it's become a form of legalized highway robbery against people who do all manner of legitimate business in cash for whatever reason.

From what I've been reading, some of the models were under 18 when the photos were taken, which makes those photos child pornography. Hosting, linking to, uploading, distributing, possessing, or downloading those particular pics is illegal. "Child pornography" is a whole other level of illegality to "stolen pics," with much heavier penalties.

As far as the argument that "Nobody cares until it happens to a celebrity," sometimes a famous case that happens to a celebrity is what people need to get them to start caring about an issue. A lot of people started caring more about AIDS once Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury died. Nobody really knew what ALS was until Lou Gehrig got it, and it ended his baseball career and then his life. While the events themselves are regrettable, I think it's great that this has started a dialog about stolen pics and revenge porn. Look, there are plenty of people who willingly place themselves on display. Why fap/shlik it to stuff that was posted nonconsensually?

It seems like the US and UK governments have been using various works of dystopian fiction as how-to manuals for some time now. Blatantly, since 9/11, and probably for quite some while before.

I remember reading about this a while ago, so my memory on this may be somewhat fuzzy.

As I understand it, there's a fairly large database of checksums (MD5, SHA1, whatever) derived from known CP images that's maintained by law enforcement agencies and supplied to large email and hosting providers like Google, MS, Yahoo, etc., for use in detecting such content. If they get a checksum match, they take action. Apparently there's a small enough pool of commonly-circulated images that that approach works fairly well.

I think some news agency some years ago interviewed someone at Google whose job it was to review images to see if they were CP or not. People don't last long because they find the work so traumatizing.

Annoyatrons to nag the user to disable AdBlock.

Eventually, tech workers are going to have to demand pay like sports stars, and for the same reason: you only get an extremely abbreviated career, in your youth, that lasts maybe ten years, and by the time you hit your mid 30s, you're done. During that time, you need to make enough money to last the rest of your life. The only difference is that a tech worker doesn't face the risk of a work-related, career-ending injury in the same way that a pro athlete does.

I started Comcast service about a year ago, and supplied my own modem and router. They have not done anything like forcing me to use their internet hardware.

I was there. The term "corporate rock" was invented in the 1980s for a reason.

Yup, and magnetometers and x-raying carry-ons pretty much put a stop to those guys, because then they couldn't bring guns on board any more. That was the level of security that was in place from the early 70s up through the 9/11 attacks. Most people seemed to consider it minimally invasive, and security lines generally moved pretty quickly unless it was the day before Thanksgiving or something.

John Walker Lindh.

Where "Filthy Criminals" = "Commercial Infringers". "Commercial infringers" are the guys who make copies of CDs, or who bootleg concerts, and sell copies out of their car trunks to all and sundry for profit. Sometimes the counterfeit goods are even sold in legitimate stores. The statutory damages are fixed at an amount intended to be punitive, so that commercial infringers cannot figure lawsuit payouts into the cost of doing business. Statutory damages were also intended in part to cover lost sales from all the copies that were sold that the cops *didn't* confiscate as evidence when they busted the crooks. A single commercial infringer could represent hundreds or even thousands of lost sales. If the goal is to deter commercial infringers by making the potential profits not worth the risk of potential lawsuit payouts, then the sort of extreme statutory damages contemplated in the law are reasonable.

When these laws were passed, nobody considered legions of small-time, non-commercial copyright infringers infringing from their homes, with no greater benefit to them than a free movie or free music CD, and receiving no commercial profit therefrom. Each user represents at most one lost sale of a music CD or movie retailing for roughly $10-$25. The statutory damages provided for in the law are, therefore, way beyond what is reasonable.

Disclaimer: I live about a mile from the cordoned-off search area.

I think the response was warranted given the threat level. These guys had an obvious willingness to use IEDs to kill innocent bystanders and there was a firefight with over 200 rounds of ammo expended. Honestly, given that threat level, and the fact that there were legions of nervous, heavily armed cops walking around looking for a cop-killer, I wouldn't have wanted to be out and about yesterday either unless it was a matter of life and death. It's a testament to the professionalism of our local law enforcement people that there were no additional tragedies that went with this, like someone getting shot in a case of mistaken identity.

But now that we've done it once, a precedent has been set, and it will be that much easier to do it the next time. It's also scary how efficiently we turned a medium-density suburban neighborhood into a war zone, how efficiently the authorities were able to put a stop to civilian movement *just by asking*. I don't want to be all "ZOMG THIS WAS A DRY RUN FOR MARSHUL LAW!!!1!!!one!!1!!" like some people but we *have* created a dangerous precedent, and I'd at least like to see some kind of public discussion as to what threat level warrants that sort of lockdown and "How bad do things have to get for us to do this again?"

• Trackpads suck. They're much too easy to actuate inadvertently with the heel of your hand, and I also often inadvertently end up actuating "tap to click" while trying to position the pointer. I much prefer the "pencil eraser" type pointer that used to be common.
• Proper install media in the form of a plain-vanilla Windows install CD instead of a "Recovery partition", please.
• No more goddam bloatware. I don't need your remote diagnosis software, trial versions of antivirus software, and whatever other junk the laptop comes bundled with. Fortunately there's PC Decrapifier, but it's still annoying.
• *TALLER* screen, please. I don't watch movies on my laptop but the number of lines I can fit onscreen in an ssh session really matters to me.