You can specify senders whose mail is to not be opened. Basically, it's $5 a month to have someone throw your junk mail away for you.

Yeah, phone is really the only noun that fits in that hypothesis, so their point for a special case is totally justified

The police are allowed to search your phone, your papers, your home, anything, once they go to a judge, present their case, and receive authorization. The person whose property is being searched has no voice in this case, and in fact isn't even necessarily aware it is being made until they are presented with the warrant. It's literally the most trivial of checks and balances, provided you actually do have a need to search that single individual's property. The goal of these warrantless search rules is to allow dragnet searches of EVERYONE's property.

Think of a warrant as similar to those "hash cash" anti-spam concepts: It's really easy to do if you have a single email that you want to send, but if you're looking to send 100k indiscriminate spam messages, it's going to slow you down.

People get into high positions by rising as those above are destroyed in the public eye. Those above are destroyed in the public eye when they fail to respond to every absurd panic with equal panic and alarm. A rational leader is soon removed from power.

I don't think that allowing parents to select their child's traits will ever lead to "clones"; things like Down's syndrome get weeded out in 90% of cases because it's a horribly debilitating condition ensuring that parent nor offspring will never live a normal life. Physical traits, though, are in the eye of the beholder: one person making a designer baby to their idea of beauty will result in a totally different set of traits than another.

Generally when municipalities go after micro-rental users (particularly en masse), it's not to enforce the main tenants' leases, but to enforce hotel taxes. A reasonable analysis would say it's a typical case of a private citizen unwittingly crossing the line into small business, a cynical one would say that real hotels lobby for these taxes and push for their enforcement to inflate hotel rates.

When I first saw that video, I assumed due to the crummy resolution that some joker had voiced it over. I checked the congressional record, though, and that man actually asked those questions in front of the committee where the stenographer could hear him. Page 27: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/C... Props to Admiral Willard for maintaining a straight face?

I actually was able to direct all user home folders to their own partition for the first time with my last Windows install. It turns out that there's a key combo you can hit on a certain page of the install wizard that will drop you to the desktop for the preboot environment the installer is running in, where you can run regedit (which will at that exact tab of the wizard see the registry of the newly installed system) and move the default user folder location (this is before any users have been created, again the magical tab of the wizard). There was some other voodoo to basically "reseal" the install a get back to the wizard. Pretty much the polar opposite of every Linux installer I've ever used, where they (gasp) ask which partition to use for /home. Great to know that it's actually possible though, since even if you know the registry keys to change when moving a user, the account will never work quite right afterward (I assume some user attributes get cached by various services or something).

The other thing with SSDs is that within a given generation, speed correlates to capacity. The 512GB model doesn't use chips with twice the capacity, it uses twice as many chips. Sequential write speed close to doubles because twice as many chips can be writing at any given time (random writes, and the latency of sequential writes, obviously doesn't benefit)

The only company I've ever had to contact for authorization from "installing too much" was Apple to activate iTunes. Microsoft hypothetically has a limit, but given the number of times I've reinstalled I'm pretty sure they only keep records going back a certain amount of time.

BB did have a patent on the angled keys that they sued Palm over back in the late 90's. It actually is a fairly innovative design that optimizes the direction of the bevel on each key based on the kinematics of your thumbs so that the keys act much larger than they are (if they actually cloned it correctly). It has also become sort of a mark of BB (both because of the exclusivity and the general unpopularity of portrait QWERTY layouts), so I guess that might even be grounds after the patent expires (which has to be coming up soon ...).

I think you missed the point ... the language was formed out of references to a common body of knowledge. The universal translator was doing just fine figuring out what the individual words meant, but without the common story to refer to they made to sense. It's essentially as if an entire culture communicated only in pop culture references. For example, someone might say "You're such a Samantha", but if you haven't watched many hours of Sex and the City, you would have no idea what they meant despite knowing all of those words.

The GMA500 driver might be doing fine, but for some reason they keep licensing third party graphics for the integrated solution on Atom processors, or at least the ones making it into industrialized products. Getting OpenGL up under Linux on PC/104 or other embedded board is a royal pain in my experience.

As Truman famously said, The Buck Stops Here. The president is the head of the executive branch and the commander in chief of the armed forces. He absolutely has authority over his personal security. My opinion? Take a queue from the Queen and take public transit. Or from the Pope and walk. Even heads of states who have boots on the ground in Afghanistan fly commercial. Nothing supports a culture of fear more than a leader who doesn't have enough faith in his people to travel among them.

Does anyone do verification on the "airplane mode" setting of phones? The FCC and FAA seem to have come to the conclusion that there's no way you can detect active radios via undesired behavior of an aircraft, and are down to sorting out the social ramifications of phone use on planes. I'd like to see an independent (and preferably paranoid) lab check to make sure that "all radios off" means that the radios are off, and not just that they stop passing traffic from the PDA OS.