How was it screwed up before the TSA? I wasn't a fan of airport security at the time, but once they instituted the TSA approved cancer porno groping system I now have to have a give and take discussion with my family every 6 months to find out which of us is going to be forced to go through that stuff in order to visit. My dad actually pays me money so that I do the flying instead of him. If I could avoid flying entirely I would do it in a heartbeat, but the various members of my family are spread hither and yon.

I wish someone would set up a separate flying system where plane tickets were 50% higher, but none of the TSA sexual cancer stuff goes on. I'd take that path anytime.

Tim Cook is 50 years old. He's only 6 years younger than Steve Jobs. I don't think age is the thing here.

It's my understanding that the energy required to put something into orbit is much higher than the energy required to just reach a certain location in space. Rather than orbiting anything why not just slowly pulse it over to the moon and land it there? Launch several rockets full of fuel and attach them to the station's boosters and run them very slowly over the course of 10 years (or whatever) and get the thing onto the moon.

It's so expensive to get things out of the atmosphere that it seems crazy to deorbit anything once we get it there. Toss it over to the moon so that once we get there one day we can make use of it.

Define "frequently". It's my understanding that adoption is incredibly expensive and actually adopting a newborn baby is very difficult to do. People who don't have $30k to burn may well turn to this avenue with nothing but good intentions. I would be astounded if more than a tiny percentage of baby buyers were intending anything other than raising a child that they couldn't have themselves.

If that was their goal they could have done their thing in a harmless way just to prove it could be done. Stealing info and publishing it to the world (without a white hat political goal like exposing corruption to back it up) is just throwing gas on the flames for fun.

In any case, what were the DDoS attacks supposed to prove? You can have perfect security on a site, but that doesn't help prevent DDoS attacks against it. They didn't do it for white hat reasons. They did it because they are jerks.

Any positive effects of their attacks are secondary to their primary goal of being dicks.

Simple code reviews can find SQL injections quite easily. Just search for the method names for executing queries then make sure that there are NEVER string concatenations which include user input.

It's all really quite simple. Use parameters for every query and you'll never have a problem with SQL injection unless the DB library itself has a hole (much less likely than the possibility that your home grown validation code has a hole in it).

Where I work I do this regularly. Every now and then I find crap like "foo="+ someParam in the code. When I do I call them on it loudly and publicly (in a reasonably nice way). I make sure all the developers in my group hear my criticisms. It's the only way to staunch this sort of dangerous behavior.

I don't care if you think you've validated it. I'm not going to waste time triple checking every place that parameter is used. It's very simple to just use parameters and be almost 100% safe from SQL injection.

I know that the IRS has strange rules these days for stock options, but is there really a rule that you have to pay for UN-exercised stock options that you have been granted? I know that exercising your options and then holding them is incredibly dangerous, but it sounds like you didn't even have the option of exercising them.

If you never exercised them is it possible for you to get your money back from the IRS now that you've sold them for much less than the taxes you paid?

If they were going to sell Oracle again they'd need to make it public domain (or something similar) to prevent the next buyer from taking control of it again. I suppose an alternative would be to buy Oracle, sell Java to Google for $1, then sell Oracle.

You had me until you talked about the broken window fallacy as if it is somehow wrong. In your example you are 1 coin poorer and all you got was the status quo before the window was broken. The glassier is now one beer richer, but the time they spent on that window could have been spent making a new window for a new house. If you had simply paid for a beer the economy would be 3 coins plus whatever the glassier got for making someone else's window. The final result is better than your original example because you got to have a beer and everyone else got the same thing.

The broken window fallacy shows that the system is not really improved even if some numbers are higher than they otherwise would have been.

When I read something like "confirms Einstein's theory" AGAIN I just get annoyed. In my opinion, the mission would only be a success if it found a flaw in Einstein's theories. Those theories are many decades old and I'm hungry for some totally new physics.

I get so disappointed when I hear that the Pioneer mystery (or whichever one was curving unexpectedly) is solved using perfectly well known physics. Where are the new unknown rules that we can use to create new breakthrough technologies?

All the speculation I see in those articles seems far fetched to me. A price between $350 and $400? They're going to court hard core gamers? The controller will have an HD screen?

If they're doing any of those things they're basically doing exactly opposite of what they've done so successfully with the Wii. I assume the console will be able to do HD video, but putting an HD screen on the remote is unlikely given that every portable game system they've ever made has had screens with a lower resolution than TVs.

It's not small, but it's 1/5 the size of a 9.0 earthquake (10^9 / 10^8.3).

So they'll gather DNA from all arrestees, but will they give people the right to have further DNA tests done when the evidence might exonerate them? I keep hearing stories of innocent people in jail for years because the police labs screw up (or don't do tests at all) and they weren't given the right to do DNA tests at an external lab even if they paid for it themselves. It seems to me that laws are generally slanted towards increasing the number of people in prison regardless of whether or not they are guilty.

If MSN Search was first it's too bad they didn't transfer some of that search knowledge to other products. In my experience searching in sharepoint is utterly unreliable when it comes to actually finding things because it often just reports back that it found nothing rather than indicate that it limited the scope of the search because you happened to be on some particular page. I have always needed to navigate out to the root and then search from there to make sure I'm searching everything.

In outlook the search is ridiculous. At home I can search years of email in seconds using Thunderbird. In outlook it takes many minutes to just search the last year worth of email.

Windows search is not decent (although I haven't used Windows 7 yet). Nothing is indexed, so searching millions of files takes forever.

Microsoft is so big that it is impossible for it to transfer any useful knowledge from one part of the company to another.

My understanding is that their proposed budget didn't push for cuts in military, social security, medicare, or medicaid. As such, any cuts they mention are just posturing. Those 4 make up nearly all money spent, so anything else is just screwing around at the edges messing with programs that they don't like.

If they did propose to cut any of the big 4 then I'm impressed. If they chop the military budget in half (chop it in half and we'd still have way more than enough military power to defend ourselves if it was ever necessary), raise SS age to 70, and reduce eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid to only those who need the money then that would truly fix the budget crisis.

You're drinking the kool-aid. I'm sorry, but I will not give a chance to someone who just mouths words. Ron Paul is the only representative that I trust to do what he says because he truly has done exactly what he said for decades. Everyone else just says what they need to in order to get elected. Ron Paul has an internal drive to do what he says which is shared by precious few humans. I still disagree with him on a variety of things, but I do trust him to vote like he says. I'm not stupid enough to feel the same about any other politician.

Seriously, Palin is a hero to the Tea Party. What else needs to be said? She's the queen of saying one thing while doing another.