While anything to prevent any intrusion into peoples private conversations is laudable, it's just treating a symptom of the greater problem. Just my opinion, but I would also like to see efforts made so governments and any other authorities don't spy on their people as well as these kinds of efforts which make it so they can't spy on their people.

RT, or Russia Today, is an admission ticket for Russia into the global competition of culture. Much akin to a game of Civilization (thank god for Sid Meier) where a civ goes for a cultural victory. Also, the comparison's to Fox News in the US are a bit off. Fox News' focus of 'us vs. them' is the intra-national infighting of the dis-United States while Russia Today's 'us vs. them' is clearly international.

I'm watching a pirated copy on a stream right now, but did see it over the weekend at a 3D theater. My opinion is that it's the most enjoyable summer action movie this year so far, at least in comparison to Star Trek: Into Darkness, which was also very good, Fast Furious 6, which delivered on action even though it made little sense, and much more enjoyable than the Tony Stark movie, Iron Man 3, which I didn't particularly enjoy as a whole, even if it had some entertaining parts. I don't get the general disdain on 'reboots' here, but I think people should be able to retell the stories they want. I'm happy to compare and opine on what I like and don't like afterwards.

I'd run 'nigger linux' on a vm to see if it were gangster enough to deserve the name.

Seems that Watson is on his way to passing the threshold to an oxymoron, a real artificial intellingence.

No wait. Greeted kindly and informed on procedure. Was given choice between paper ballot or machine. Accepted a paper one and filled in the boxes. Submitted into ballot box. Was thanked for voting and left. I sympathize for voters having problems. I am grateful to have it so nice.

Torchlight had everything that was fun in Diablo and Diablo 2 minus multiplayer. Torchlight 2 intends to remedy that issue and will not likely require always on, an authenticator, or a lot of the other nagging issues that are required to be endured when playing Diablo 3. Torchlight 2 is also 1/3 the price of Diablo 3 and if pre-purchased on Steam gives a copy of the original Torchlight game. By value and ease, my opinion is that Torchlight 2 is a better product. Still, I have no real hate for Diablo 3 if that is what other people choose to spend their money on and play. Hopefully everyone enjoys their click fests.

Some posts have already mentioned the more expensive Grado headphones, but I had not seen any mention the iGrado. The iGrado is priced right at the $50 mark the OP asked for and use the drivers from the slightly more expensive SR60i model. I personally own an SR80, before they came out with the i designation, and still think they sound better than anything else I have tried, as I prefer the greater bass they put out than the SR60 and iGrado models. The OP did want a flat sound level, and I think the iGrado model seems to hit the mark.

Perhaps the word resurgence should have been used instead of renaissance.

I am guessing GK2 refers to Gabriel Knight 2.

why not pull a hostile takeover on the somali pirates and make a real enterprise out of it? startup costs are not prohibitive assuming you can find some willing participants to join you in the endeavor. insurance and legal costs are minimal. the world is awash in small arms and un/underemployed. there is a lot of profit there for someone.

I see a lot of people claim things like this. The question I ask every one of them, especially if they run XP (an outdated OS missing a number of modern security features, like application sandboxing and ASLR), is whether they run as Administrator or not. 95% still say Yes (beats the approximately 99.9% otherwise, but... still too high). Running as Admin is a *terrible* idea - you might as well be running Windows ME, in terms of security - yet far too many people do so anyhow.

I'll grant you that running as a non-admin on XP or older is a pain - it was that pain which drove me to Linux in the first place. Now I dual-boot Win7 and Linux (Vista and Linux on my older machine) and things have worked out very well. I don't have any continuous monitoring AV running (I keep a copy of ClamAV for on-demand scans), I don't disable UAC or Protected Mode (in fact, I tweak the UAC settings and remove FlashPlayer's exemption regarding Protect Mode). A few UAC or sudo prompts a month is easily worth the extra protection that not running as Admin provides. Security is all about defense in depth, and relying solely on anti-intrusion methods is stupid.

Yes, there's still a lot of harm that can be done with standard user permissions. However, most malware authors, especially for Windows, assume that their code will run as Admin/root, and therefore it would fail on my system anyhow. Furthermore, without Admin, malware can't make itself un-removable. It might send spam or DDOS attempts, but it couldn't edit my firewall settings, hide itself from task manager, install kernel-mode code, or prevent me from deleting it.

Avira rates consistently high on the AV-Comparatives.org site and even with high heuristics set, the overhead on the system is far lower than AVG or Avast. I use Iobit 360 with Advanced System Care to take care of threats other than virii, Peerblock and Windows Firewall behind a NAT router to keep things away and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, a Kaspersky and Avira BootCD to clean anything if anything gets past the other layers. Just like when it gets cold outside, nothing protects better than layering.

Agreed. Yet another reason that the insurance model does not apply well to health care.

It isn't all it's cracked up to be. For instance, I have pet insurance to cover vet bills for my dog. Vet bills can get expensive, you know. The company I got the policy from publishes their benefit schedule online for the world to see.

I'm glad that they do it, but I have to say it wasn't very useful for comparison-shopping or even for determining if the policy was worth purchasing in the first place. For instance, the benefit for Arrhythmia is $95 for treatment, and $132 for diagnostic testing. I don't know about you, but I have no earthly clue if that is a reasonable payout for Arrhythmia--I don't even know what Arrhythmia is. I don't want to know, either. I'm not googling each and every thing that can go wrong with my dog (4 pages, 2 columns each, small print) just to get a feel for if the policy is worth it.

In the end, I bought the policy because it wasn't too much money, and I figured it would help a bit when my dog got sick, and it has. If she got cancer or something and I couldn't afford tens of thousands of dollars in treatments, I can always put her to sleep. I love her; but she is, in the end, just a dog. Obviously that's not an option with one of my kids, so I'd have to take a decision on human health insurance more seriously.

For me or a family member, I know I'm going to treat whatever they have, so I need a little more protection than "Well, you can have $95+132 for Arrhythmia". I need, "If your family member gets sick, you're not going to lose your house, your car, your savings."

It's a tough problem, but nobody in Washington is serious about solving it. They are only going to make it worse.

Wow. Did you really just champion Opera - king of bloat, with built-in email, web server, P2P, and quite possibly a kitchen sink - as a "lightweight alternative"?

Yes, it is. Opera might have more features, but it's still smaller and snappier than Firefox by far. It isn't bloat unless those features make it big and slow. They are in fact completely out of your way by default.