I wouldn't worry so much about the security of data on the device as much as once it's paired with your other devices you have a security hole inside your network that is trusted by your phone, laptop, whatever. Printers and security cameras have already been exploited to attack networks from the inside, this is yet another opportunity waiting to be exploited.

Yeah, but the processes to refine the stuff out is horrendous. They make oil refineries look like unspoiled wilderness in comparison.

One of my favorite quotes came when Farley Mowat interviewed a Soviet general who said, "The difference between American propaganda and Soviet propaganda is that we don't believe ours."

And still, it's better than any of the fossil fuels.

If you want no risk then it needs to be glassified and buried at the base of a subduction zone where it will get sucked into Earth's mantle.

Publicly run stuff doesn't have to be 'shitty', and in fact there are many of us old enough to remember when the city/county power company and other utilities were far and away better and cheaper than the for-profit utilities. The problem is that in order to make people think that government doesn't work and justify privatizing all the public infrastructure the conservatives (mostly Republicans but some Democrats) have spent the last three decades breaking as much of the government as they have been able to.

In three decades of watching privatization efforts all over the world I have yet to see a single one that ended up with better service at a lower price than the previous public system. None. Anywhere. Ever. Can you point at an example of a successful privatization project?

I thought that it took multiple generations of supernovas to produce enough heavy elements to accumulate into a rocky planet.

Well, since it's pretty much impossible to have a "secret network" when you're using wi-fi I'm going with the SlashDot headline for accuracy. Especially since an "internet" is any network of smaller networks (there isn't just one behemoth named The Internet).

Oh, you mean the upper class folks like Gloria Estafan's family (she once told an interviewer that "Before Castro everyone had their own car") and the hacendados? Yeah, I've talked to them. I've also talked to people who were of the vast majority who lived in poverty and (in rural areas) virtual slavery. Go look them up, you'll hear a different story about before/after.

There's a reason Cubans are more likely to expatriate

Yeah, Radio Marti tells them that if they come to the US they're guaranteed a free apartment, a good job, and a new car. They arrive, live 6-8 in a two-bedroom tenement, wash dishes for a living, and walk to work because they can't afford bus fare, but write home to their families that they're living the good life because they're too embarrassed to admit the reality. This is the reality of pretty much every rural migrant in Latin America to their country's capital city as well.

Well, not really. Cuba was a totalitarian hell-hole **before** Castro, and the communist government has been considerably less repressive and violent than any of the pseudo-democratic or crypto-democratic countries that the US set up in Central America. The El Salvadoran government just in the 1980s killed more people out of its smaller population in the 1980s than the Cuban government has killed in all the decades since the overthrow of Batista combined. The Cuban government has improved the lives of the entire population of the island in the past half century, unlike the population of every other country in Central America and the Caribbean, and their literacy rates and infant mortality numbers are superior to even the US. Good luck finding anyone on the island old enough to remember pre-Castro Cuba who wants to go back to the "good old days".

They also targeted progressive groups, in fact more progressive groups than conservatives. Of course since the congresscritters specifically ordered the IRS to **ONLY** report on actions against conservative (well, really, radical right-wing rather than actual conservative) groups that's the only news that you saw on Glen Beck's show so you may not be aware of the reality.

You do realize that they also admit to targeting openly liberal groups as well, don't you? They also gave extra attention to any group with the word 'progressive', 'occupy', 'rights' and several other key words in its title. The paper they presented to Congress only mentions Tea Party groups because Congress specifically told them to ONLY report on attention that they gave groups with 'tea party' in the name.

The teabaggers could have easily avoided the entire issue by choosing one of the other non-profit statuses that **do** allow political activities (which they were openly engaged in before even filing the paperwork), but those statuses wouldn't allow them to hide their donors, and the fact that that they're Astroturf groups rather than grass roots.

Good rant. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

Right, the hospital that spent a gazillion dollars on an MRI machine should just throw it away because the control software runs on XP and Win7's security model breaks it. Get out in the real world and see what end users have to work with.