And I'd be pretty insecure if mine had a hole in them.

Not even considering how my image would suffer.

Reminds me of the story about the bigshot who was sitting in his office, shooting the bull with a client. Figuring he'd impress this guy, he reached over and hit the button for the intercom to his secretary in he outer office. "Get my broker on the line, hon'." She replied, "Which one is that, sir? Stock or pawn?"

It's more difficult to spoof voicemail than e-mail or text messages. Particularly if you know the sender. And generated spam robo calls aren't very convincing. So I'm going to trust voicemail a bit more than a text based message.

Local OTA programming doesn't have that large an audience. And yet they seem to produce their own content.

That's more a chacteristic of nationally syndicated programming. You can't sustain viewership across the country by doing pieces on the best places to shop in Seattle.

Local broadcasters who are down on their luck financially seem to jettison their own produced programming and replace it with national shows. This leads me to believe that the fees (if any) that the nationals charge OTA broadcasters for content is pretty low. They want the eyeballs for their ads. But repeat the programming on cable and all of a sudden the content owners see another income stream and (thanks to Congress) they want to grab a piece of the pie.

Instead of having the CIA/NSA/State Department file charges, they find someone to file charges on behalf of the American public. It would seem that these agencies have the duty of protecting the public and would be expected to file a lawsuit if justified. But then members of the agencies could be called in cross examination to testify as to the exact nature of the harm done. And that's the sort of thing TLAs hate to do on the record.

So, call up a buddy. Have him file suit. But he can't "spill the beans" on any internal processes or documents, since he has been retired for some time and not privy to current events.

Research published in lesser read journals gets fewer citations than elite ones. If you are writing your own paper, you might want to drop a few big names rather than some obscure ones to gain credibility. The initial reason for the elite journals' editors rejection may have little to do with an in-depth analysis of the research. So it goes on to some lesser publication.

From TFA:

That could be bad logic. The initial rejection by the editor of an elite journal may have little bearing on the quality of the research. But it does influence its subsequent exposure to the scientific community. That factor alone may cause it to be less cited.

I would expect that the study done on this topic does make some attempt to correct for this. But I can't be bothered to follow up on it as a new paper by Bennett Haselton on the distribution of ice has come across my desk and requires my immediate attention.

Four hours of H.P. Lovecraft will keep anyone awake.

I'm guessing that the gov't is leaning on ISPs to get an explicit buy in/out of filtering per customer. So that later on, when someone in the household stumbles upon that midget porn site, no one can claim shock and offense.

The down side (as others have pointed out) is that little Timmy might be the first one onto the family Internet connection one morning. And the "Do you want to watch porn?" might not get the response intended.

Not such a bad idea... just look at what Lee Kwan Yew did for Singapore -- turned it from a backwards island state into one of the world's most sophisticated, modern countries with low tax rates and enviable prosperity.

Benevolent dictators are sometimes a whole lot better than corrupt (faux) democracies controlled by the movie and defense industries behind the scenes... don't you think?

Who gives a damn if you get caned for chewing gum anyway :-)

On the other hand, if I only had 6 months to live, the first thing I'd do is to get back together with my ex-wife.

That would be the longest 6 months ever.

Did they try turning North Korea off and then back on again?

Or give him a football scholarship.

Is this the USA's response to the claims that N.Korea hacked Sony?

Why am I reminded of petulant children squabbling over who gets to pat the new puppy?

Imagine how much closer we (as a race) would be if we could eliminate all the stupid waste that politics and warmongering produces. Hell, I'd have my jetpack, my flying car and my holiday on the moon all lined up for Christmas!

Instead, unbelievable amounts of money, time and effort are wasted on silly games and squabbles -- while huge swathes of our population suffer at the hands of disease, war, religious zealots and political gaming.

Hard to believe it's Christmas eh?

... for my upcoming book, "Programming with Brainfuck".

And yet, my local OTA TV station seems to make a go of it. With a much smaller market available to spread the costs of their news anchors or local personality talking heads.

I think what you are hearing is the lobbying PR of the pay TV channels trying to protect one source of income that they had Congress write into law years ago.