Austria is metric, so it's only 60mph.

The UK one which inspired the US one is actually mentioned in the summary, but if you're assuming that 90% of /.ers won't even RTFS you're probably right.

Vulcan definitely has "religious connotations".

But he's not charged with money laundering. He's charged with conspiracy to launder money. If dirty money comes in and clean money comes out then money laundering has occurred, whether or not some of the intermediate steps involved the exchange of non-monetary assets. So "I was only involved in transactions involving the exchange of non-monetary assets" is irrelevant: what matters is a) whether they were part of a larger chain of transactions to launder money; b) whether he was aware of that larger chain.

Probably not, but they don't make $50 billion annually either.

"A new law that has a fairly vague scope"? It's a law which dates back to 1995, and its scope is fairly clear. See the ECJ's Factsheet.

Google shouldn't have to make intelligent decisions as to what needs to be removed.

Why not? Every other company which does business in the EU has to make intelligent decisions about how it implements the law, including those aspects which allow for a data subject to request deletion of personal data which was collected, stored, and processed without consent or legal necessity.

There were rifles in the US War of Independence, and both sides had them. But they weren't the main infantry weapon because of the slow reloading time.

Spain's fences surround two cities. That's not quite the same as cutting a continent in half.

We are talking about US citizens, right?

What on Earth does that have to do with it? It's perfectly reasonable for the law to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in matters like residence. I'll even grant that it's not unreasonable for it to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in the question of who can vote - although that flies in the face of the professed reason for the US War of Independence; and as someone who lives and pays taxes in a country where I'm not a citizen it sometimes irritates me that I can't be fully involved in politics. But in basic matters of human rights like the right to the presumption of innocence, which is what this is about, nationality should be completely irrelevant.

The courts decide what the law means, as well. That sometimes ends up in effect changing it, although from a strict legal point of view it isn't.

I'm not a real physicist, but by coincidence I happen to be reading a good book about the LHC and the Higgs field at the moment. (The Particle at the End of the Universe, by Sean Carroll: highly recommended). The explanation given, as I understand it, is that what really matters isn't particles but fields: particles are what we perceive when a field has a concentration of energy in one* place. (* Except that we're talking quantum mechanics here, so the Gabor-Heisenberg-Weyl uncertainty principle applies).

FWIW, the mass of the Higgs is less than that of the top quark, but considerably more than that of the other quarks.

When I wrote that line, what I really had in mind was a specific platformer-creation tool which was responsible for a rash of crappy games on Kongregate a few years ago, but I couldn't (and still can't) remember the name.

It really dawned on me that game programming just does not mean what I think it means.

Do you think it means AAA FPGs and RPSes? The vast majority of games are much smaller scale than that.

It's possible that the game programming camp is setting the children up with a point-and-click game dev engine (although I hope not); but it might well be giving them a framework like PyGame and a lot of help to get a couple of simple 2D games running. If it fosters the kind of experiences that my generation had growing up in the early days of home computers, it's a good thing.

Weekend hackathons, on the other hand, allow far more time than is necessary to get an alpha version of a simple game running. When I worked in the industry, I once put together an alpha for a word game in 2 hours. It wasn't optimised, it had one bug in the UI, it had placeholder graphics, and as we play-tested it we made major changes to the scoring system, but it was playable and enough fun to get the green light for further development.