You can follow a suspect in plain clothes. You can photograph someone from a distance even if he's on his own personal property. You can follow someone in an unmarked car. You can observe someone from a helicopter or via satellite photo.

You can even send people moving traffic violation tickets based on photos taken via automatic cameras.

All of which you can do without a warrant because the subject is publicly visible.

So how is drone surveillance any different from a legal/ethical/moral standpoint?

And Fox News, of course, pushed a story that only referenced the part of the study that found that climate change "skeptics" scored higher (by one point, 51 to 50) on a test of general scientific literacy, proving once (and for Fox) that the "skeptics" know more about science than climate change "alarmists" and are therefore right to doubt anything related to climate change.

Fox News: the experts at picking the one cherry on the entire tree that satisfies them since 1993.

I don't always prefer a robust business solution.

But when I do, I prefer it without bullshit.

...because I do not prefer to listen to recorded music at all. I prefer my music live and in person. The audio processing system doesn't matter. They all sound crappy on earbuds.

No, I wouldn't want to demean the memory of Frank Zappa by associating him with Newton G.

A cheesy '70s sci-fi TV show derivative seems more appropriate.

Newt Gingrich's new Secret Service code name:

          MOONBAT ALPHA

"What!?! Comment my code? You question my honor! I'll kill you where you stand!"
-- Mukluk, Klingon Programmer

Where's the, "I have no money, you insensitive clod!" option?

"Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"

It is to the people who sell electronic voting systems. And they apparently have better lobbyists than the average voter.

Let's not forget the two-way video wristwatch invented in the comic "Dick Tracy" by tech support guy Diet Smith in 1964. Many of us grew up dreaming of the day when we'd get to wear one of those things.

We already have Web organizations that do a pretty good job of cutting through BS -- Snopes.com and Factchecker.org to name two. The problem is not that we don't have objective arbiters of the truth, but that many people don't want anything other than confirmation of their existing biases and will label any group that doesn't do that as "biased" against their "truth."

Having the government sponsor the Truth Police will not give it any more credibility and may just make it less credible depending on who does the appointing.

Best example: the Supreme Court, which is supposedly the ultimate arbiter of justice. Justices used to get confirmed by huge bipartisan majorities until someone decided that controlling a majority of the Supremes was a way to achieve political control. The Web Truth Board would likely suffer a similar fate, only much faster..

It's a pretty much a catch-all area that, due to its nature, will also expose most corporate malfeasance and tax/banking fraud because the Big Players with $$$ spend it buying Congress-critters to support their schemes.

It will also expose a fair amount of military issues, though mostly in the contracting and acquisition area as DoD tries to do its job despite lots of Congressional meddling. And, frankly, most of the big problems in the military are as a result of political meddling more than military leadership. Generals and admirals go through a rigorous gauntlet to get where they are; Congressmen just need to sell a lot of used cars (or car alarms) and then froth at the mouth a bit over some wedge issue to cajole people into voting for them.

My favorite Windows alternative back in the early 1990's was Wayfarer, a freeware replacement for the Windows v3.x Program Manager. Long before Microsoft figured out how to do tabbed and nested windowing, Wayfarer did both.

My favorite trick as to post a screenshot of the Windows Program Manager as the screen background and then turn off Progam Manager completely and replace it with Wayfarer, which would minimize to a single desktop icon. People would click on what looked like Program Manager icons with no result.

(Including the tech support guy who showed up unannounced at my desk one day to install software while I was out and was five minutes away from wiping and reinstalling my entire PC because he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. I told him the next time he wanted to hijack my PC during the work day he needed to schedule an appointment so he didn't interfere with my work day.)

Ah, those were the days when we could still have some fun with customization. Now it's all "safe choices" or lock-downs, depending on how you look at it.