Florida System for Normalizing Information on Terrorists, Criminals and Hazards.

Now if only I could come up with a good short name for that...

National ID is something pretty much every country has. Can someone please explain to me why is it such a bogieman for the libertarians?

Science doesn't necessarily mean "school sanctioned science". A kid experimenting is (starting to) doing science.

They would and they do lie, deal with it.

And don't call me Shirley.

Exactly. And that's the whole point so many people seem to be missing here: we nerds KNOW this "acquihire" was bogus and stupid, but the mainstream media and the 99% of non-geek population saw all the headlines about Yahoo! buying some hip startup (from a 17 year old genius no less!), said to themselves "that's cool" and MOVED ON to other issues.

IOW, Yahoo! bought "coolness" for 30 millions. I say it was a good deal.

I think you're right. What stops Litecoin, for example, to become an alternative currency similar in value to Bitcoin?

Because that's not true: it can and it is controlled, all the time.

"The Internet cannot be controlled" was certainly the belief in the late 90s, when it seemed that governments were just too stupid to grasp this whole Internet thing, and would always be several steps behind. Alas, the joy didn't last long, and it was precisely France who started fighting against this new "power" of the people.

Several people (Jonathan Zittrain, Tim Wu, Bruce Schneier, Yochai Benkler, among others) have written a lot about this. Actually, Schneier and Zittrain gave a talk about it, last week in Harvard.

Internet is definitely not what it used to be, or what it seemed like it would be.

AFAIK, there is no such a country.

Maybe Dr. Van Nostrum can help

I'm not sure "ignore the failed attempts" is the right thing to do here. It SHOULD BE, in an ideal world, but there's more than one case where persistent hackers get to reset an account, not by guessing the password, but by social engineering the support people from Apple, Amazon or whatnot.

It's a little unnerving, but I have no idea what exactly a user can do to prevent such things from happening to one.

-224 :-D

OK the guy is disabled, but you don't have the right to call him an indecent :-p

You made me _hate_ the underscore.

Not only is this a hoax, but a mutant one; a fake hoax!

The original tale was about Spanish speaking countries, where "no va" literally means "doesn't go". In Portuguese it would be "nao vai".

Not anymore: the Pope has just resigned. I say we close this post and start talking shit about pedophile priests and stuff.