Set, Spot It, Rummy, Carcassonne, LotR Confrontation, and many other board games and card games. Electronic games? She has found those on her own without any encouragement from me.

Baloney. We've been changing the length of lights, and drivers know it, which is why they run them all the time. We should make them standard based on length of the intersection, lanes, and speed limits throughout the US. Add in the RLC when the light length is well known, and it will help keep intersections safer.

Ahem. Trackball. No need to look down to see where the mouse has gotten to on my desk. Big fat ball that's always where I expected. Like all the balls in my life.

Quick, update the Drake Equation results to 100%!

Star Trek was "serious scifi"? Since when?

The original series had hot babes in filmy, barely-there outfits and paper-thin allegories about the cold war, but very little science. The next generation had morality plays, and tried (and failed) to do science by changing of the polarization of the deflector dish (or whatever "insert sciency bit here" they did that week). The others I didn't bother to watch (though I hear there's an episode where a character is "evolved" into a lizard and then back again.....really?).

Star Trek has always been terrible at the "serious" sci-fi. It's just terrible at serious scifi in a very different way than Star Wars is.

If you run an ISP and still don't understand that you're not the interesting part of the internet, then you have never understood your place on the 'net. ISPs exist for one reason, and one reason only: to allow people to access content. Period. The "Economic Balance" isn't "tipping towards content companies"...the content companies *are* *the* *things* *your* *customers* *want*. The only thing they want from you is to get to those companies (or each other). You are a conduit, a tube, even. Nothing more.

The regulations prohibit ISPs from charging more when content providers waste bandwidth

If your users want the traffic, then the content providers aren't "wasting" it...your customers (who are already paying you for those bits, I should point out) are using what they've paid for. Saying that content providers are wasting bandwidth is basically complaining that your users are actually *using* what you sold them...which is really not a winning argument.

Spam was and still is an enormous economic incentive to replace SMTP....and yet, after a decade of avalanches of spam, we haven't replaced SMTP with something that addresses any of the aspects of SMTP that permit spam to happen. This situation isn't even on the same order of magnitude of economic burden as spam is every single day. So, yes, the current situation *economically* is exactly like it was the last decade: we're paying for the design decisions of SMTP, and will continue to do so until something shinier comes along that people move to. That migration will happen slowly, over years, and SMTP will slowly wither away as the migration happens.

There have been "rumors" and "proposals" to replace SMTP for almost a decade. It'll never happen. SMTP will die slowly, the same way NNTP is slowly dying. And that will only happen when there's a way to communicate that surpasses it. Web discussion boards basically killed NNTP. I don't think there's anything out there yet to kill SMTP.

Also, encrypting your mail misses the point. Groups like the NSA can still do traffic analysis on the SMTP envelope to know who you're talking with even without reading the contents of the email. The fact that you're in regular communication with a "target" is enough to make you interesting. If the "target" is subject to an full-on investigation (not the browsing that they appear to be doing), then being in regular contact with that target, would be sufficient grounds to apply for (and probably get) a court order to put a keylogger put on your machine.

There won't be much public wailing...they've got the laws they need. Just like what happened with Lavabit, they don't need to ban anything anymore, they'll just show up at any provider & say "give us all of the data you have on person . If you don't have any, start collecting it. Now."

Also, moving data out of the US (to Germany, for example), just means that the NSA has to ask the local spy agency (like the BND in germany) for the information. The Western governmental spy agencies seem to have no problem providing it. In fact, the NSA spying on data overseas would be *less* unconstitutional than what they're doing now....they'd love that.

Face it, the only way forward is something like freenet. The problem is, freenet withered on the vine.

While I find the idea interesting, I'm annoyed at the fact that it's useless without WigWam's cloud service. I've been burned too many times already, so I'm not particularly willing to build a complex home automation setup just to have the whole thing turned to a set of bricks because WigWam got bought by Yahoo (who seem to shut down every startup they buy), or just ran out of money.

One presumes because he knew (working for a spy agency and all) that they'd find him eventually, and going *very* public first makes it harder to quietly arrest & try him.

criminal:

n
1. (Law) a person charged with and convicted of crime
2. a person who commits crimes for a living

Until he's charged and convicted, he's not a criminal.

Even if it works, in short order we'll have vitamin C resistant tuberculosis. Next up, miracle cure X, and cure X resistant tuberculosis. I'm all for miracle cures, but let's keep in mind that all viruses and parasites mutate to deal with our cures.

I think both stats could be right: people are buying them, and then wiping them to install something useful. It's not the chromebook that's failing...it's chromeOS that people don't want.

Thirded...installing chrUbuntu takes it from a google-leashed mostly-useless toy into a really reasonable, cheap minilaptop. I'm quite happy with mine...as long as it's running linux, not chromeOS.