He's objecting to the Government asking Google for the bulk data they collect. They can do it three ways:

* Just ask for it, and say "due to the third-party doctrine you have no legal reason to refuse"

* Show up with a National Security Letter, take the data, and say "this is OK due to FISA oversight. BTW, you can't tell anyone about this."

* Copy the data as it passes through the thoroughly suborned telecom infrastructure, without even asking.

Bulk data collection by Google is potentially bad. Bulk data collection by the Government is worse - Google can't arrest me.

US: Patent trolling is legal, but it ought to be harder and less profitable. runs off to legislate

EU: Patent trolling is legal, but we urge companies not to do anything we might interpret as anti-trustish. wags finger at Nokia

I'd say that the US is trying to do something about trolls, and the EU is just talking, judging from the article.

Could you please send a note to the company in question, specifically telling them why you cancelled your service?

If this happens enough times, eventually US companies will start to poke the government about it.

Obama, like all high-level politicians in the US, gave up his personal privacy as the entry fee for his chosen profession.

The difference between him and the rest of us is:

* He chose his privacy level. We can't.

* He has the power to make the government back off when they find something questionable. We don't.

They could sell the Chinese XP rights to a company in cahoots with the government (and once you get above a minimum size in China, you're with the government or out of business).

The government company would have the incentive and the government backing to get everyone in China on "legit" XP.

MS gets money now. They get to transfer blame for XP support to someone else. They could encourage the Chinese to essentially fork XP, so the supported Chinese version wouldn't compete with recent Windows.

Sounds win-win to me.

seems to be the most generic statement of it. From Wikipedia.

US phone plans typically have no roaming charges over the 48 states - it's easy to spend six hours in the air with no cost increase for cell phone use, and thus no deterrent to yacking.

In Europe, it's hard to take a flight over an hour without crossing an international border.

Casual web search just turns up articles about the new stations in the US.

If we don't already have equivalent stations in Russia, we could offer them a trade. They get theirs when we get ours.

If Dylan isn't good enough for you, your problem isn't non-S-expression syntax.

1. Wolfram is a notorious Lisp disser, and Mathematica is arguably a shining example of Greenspun's tenth rule.

2. Lisp has a long history of trying to help programmers, with mixed results. The term DWIM was coined by Warren Teitelman in 1966 as part of a project based on BBN Lisp, the main predecessor of Interlisp; this project of his sounds like DWIM writ large.

... they're doing it on everything.

It is arguably more dangerous to cut corners on, say, a natural gas pipeline than anything at a nuclear plant, because nuclear facilities have a lot more redundancy in their safety systems.

Consider that it is debatable whether the events at Fukushima nuclear plants killed anyone at all, whereas natural gas explosions kill and injure people on a regular basis - Google-searching for "natural gas explosion" turns up three distinct events in the US on the first page, one of which killed an 11-year old girl in West Virginia.

... were former physicists. Granted, we're mainly a NASA/NOAA contractor so the domain knowledge is very useful.

The Post glories in pun-based headlines. Witness today:

Rebooting the reputation of computer legend who helped defeat Hitler

For a story on a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing.

I bought three years of prepaid tuition for my son and daughter in the early 2000's, about four years before the first one went to college. I liquidated investments in an UGMA fund to do so, reasoning that the prepaid plan would appreciate at the rate of tuition inflation.

Tuition was frozen in Maryland that year, and didn't increase at all until the first child graduated.

And to make things worse, the UGMA was mostly stock, and partially stock in ... Apple.

1998 - iMac
1999 - iBook
2001 - iPod
2005 - iPod shuffle/mini/nano
2007 - iPhone
2008 - MacBook Air
2010 - iPad

When Apple releases a category killer, typically it takes a year or two before it is recognized as such (the iPad is the exception above), then they turn the crank and improve it year over year, making serious money for a decade or so total.

Note that they only have to do that about every three to four years - note the 2001 - 2005 gap (which could be extended to 2007 if you lump all the iPods together).

We should worry if Apple hasn't had a New Shiny Thing by, say, 2015, giving them some slack due to Steve's departure.