Can we dispense with this false dichotomy between "authoritarian" and (I suppose) "democratic" governments. It is part of this great fantasy that this sort of thing will only happen in bad third-world countries whose leaders wear military uniforms and chomp on cigars. Our grand democratic leaders would never do such things, except they do all the time and want to do more of it.

Mod parent up. This isn't 1950, plastics have come a long way and are often the far superior choice for materials. (Coincidentally I was listening to the Kinks' "Plastic Man" on my way to work this morning.)

I've been enjoying my Galaxy Nexus in the U.S. for a week now on the T-Mobile network. I ordered it from the UK and got it in 48 hours. Tethering works without issues. So good to be contract-free. It's a great phone, big minus is the lack of SD card slot but everything else is pretty near perfect.

You make a good point. I believe they needed to know the exact weight of the various craft to calculate required thrust and fuel supply. If the camera weighed enough that could have thrown off their calculations.

Now, if he hadn't spent the last 2.5 years largely doing exactly the opposite of what he campaigned on, angering his base to no end, he might be able to make better use of all of that data management. No amount of carefully worded campaign e-mails are going to convince me to vote for a President who has normalized extra-judicial assassinations of American citizens by the CIA.

A follow up question would be, do they mean that the concepts of religion and science are in always in conflict, or do they mean that religious people and scientific people are always in conflict? I would say the former is true, in that the fundamental bases for religion and science are exactly opposite (faith versus evidence) while people can disagree with one another or hold contradictory ideas in their head and not try to rip each others throats out.

Well, buildings can be named after benefactors whereas the faculty members inconveniently have already been named by their parents.

Barnes and Noble's argument that the Borders customers whose data they bought will be protected by their own policy is specious. The very act of B&N purchasing the information is in and of itself a violation of the previous privacy agreement. That's like a bank robber saying, "Sure, I took the money, but don't worry, I won't share it with any other criminals."

I'm in the same boat. I actually attempted to replace the connector but the contacts are ridiculously tiny. That's the last Nokia phone I ever buy (for that reason and for their embrace of Microsoft).

Assange did what every newspaper does, publish leaked material. The NYTimes, Guardian, and others worked with him to do this. If you want to have Assange extra-judicially murdered you have to do the same to editors at these papers, for they did nothing more or less than he did.

Please do this as soon as you possibly can, the way things are going down here we don't have much time left.

About 2% of my cell phone usage is talking, the rest is web browsing and texting, neither of which make any noise. I don't think I'm that unusual of a cell phone user in that respect. Also, people who talk to other people on the train can be loud even when not on the phone. As a person who spends about 1 hour a day on subways and feel it would be nice if more of the major urban train systems in this supposedly first-world country had cell or even wi-fi access. I think we can survive the occasional loud caller.

Exactly. I would say most of the fundamental ideas have already been thought of in every field. I'm sure there's a lot more to know about life on earth but no one will ever come up with ideas as big as "natural selection with random mutation" or "DNA" ever again. Same in physics, the people working at CERN are going to find out new things but every other physics researcher is going to be tinkering around with what is already basically known.

Yeah, I'm sure there's more data than what is shown on that graph but the standard deviation from that linear fit looks huge to me.

Who even mentioned the 1st Amendment? Free speech as a principle is bigger than just the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Just because something isn't technically in violation of that particular clause doesn't mean it isn't undermining the freedom of speech. As a hypothetical example, if Comcast decided not to allow any discussion of FCC regulatory policies to flow through their network infrastructure it wouldn't technically be a violation of the 1st Amendment, but it would quite clearly be a blow to free speech.