Because anything that doesn't work out the way we expected couldn't possibly represent a free market.

Thank you, kind Sir/Ma'am/Fido. That's the funniest thing I've read all morning.

Nice way to miss the point, which is: Paul hasn't done diddley-squat with any of the power already entrusted to him.

According to TFA, the fat lady has finished singing, the umpire has determined that RP was guilty of knowingly making false squatting accusations.

Panama:
Have you considered that Hary Alderson in Vermont would be a fool to legally entangle his personal assets (such as his house) with his very public political advocacy sites?

Have you considered that registering a company (or two) in Panama might be the cheapest way to avoid the very real possibility of personal bankruptcy should the web sites be sued out of existence for some reason?

Have you considered that separating the sites into two different legal entities means that one can continue if the other goes belly up? It also means one can be a business and the other a tax deductible charity.

Have you considered that your affection for RP may be clouding your judgement?

Have you considered RTFA?

A comprehensive mailing list for RP fanatics, and a revenue stream from advertising.

While we are on the subject of "fairness" according to TFA the umpire found RP to be engaging in "reverse domain name hijacking" (knowingly making a false accusation of squatting).

Coward! Windows Movie Maker actually interprets(some) standard formats, and has an interface that feels like having a pro editing studio at your back compared to the horrors of Sony Movieshaker!(Even better, Movieshaker is exciting and mandatory if you were... questionably sensible... enough to purchase one of Sony's pricey 'MicroMV' cameras, which were vaguely DV-like, except totally incompatible.)

Right. It's part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Retired Physicists. Nobody in the US has built a nuclear weapon in decades, and everybody who knew how is dying off. DoD/DoE is trying to hang onto the expertise and recruit some new people to at least maintain the ones already built. So they have to have something for them to do.

With jpeg(and I think at least some of the mpeg flavors), quantization matrices can be your friend.

Different hardware and software uses different matrices. This isn't a slam-dunk(if somebody just lightened the image a bit to bring out the detail, the quantization matrix would scream "Photoshop!", despite that being pretty innocuous); but it makes it rather harder for a clueless faker to simulate a 'right off the camcorder' "authentic" video if the last compression was almost certainly performed with editing software.

Depending on the details of the format, there are likely to be a variety of other things that are optional or implementation-specific(at least within certain ranges) that can be examined to try to source a given file. If implementation(or quality level/encode settings)-specific details vary between sections of the video, or between parts of individual frames, that's probably a bad sign.

If you have enough footage, and ideally access to the alleged source hardware, you can also attempt to characterize physical defects in the sensor. All digital image sensors, to one degree or another, exhibit imperfect linearity. Some pixels are 'hot', some are abnormally insensitive, this is especially visible on long exposures, or in very dark scenes, where the hot pixels tend to stand out. Onboard image processors have gotten increasingly good at squelching minor sensor noise, so this isn't easy; but a given CCD or CMOS sensor will have a noise pattern that is extremely difficult to replicate. It's just an open question whether you'll actually be able to see enough noise to identify it.

Mod parent up. Bear in mind how this thing works. There's a resistance heater inside, and it is never completely off for long periods. The claim is that the heat given off by the device is greater than that being pumped in by the resistance heater. The heater is fed with a "proprietary waveform" from a control box the watchers were not allowed to examine. All they could do was put clamp-around current sensors on the leads to the device, voltage probes on the inputs, and feed those to a current meter. I strongly suspect problems with the current measurement.

No, the teacher did not know about the experiment. The girl mixed the chemicals on the advice of "a friend." The administration overreacted, but she probably did deserve some form of punishment. Mixing chemicals in closed containers without knowing exactly what they do (she said she thought it would just produce some smoke), and without supervision, on school property? Extremely bad idea.

Dealers, of course, aren't individuals with rights.

This is a clear case of The People versus regular old people, and the capitalization makes all the difference.

I know the episode your talking about and remember the message. It's probably no coincidence that Nixon split his guts to David Frost in 1977. The FBI under J.E. Hoover had been spying on US citizens for decades, they routinely infiltrated and sabotaged non violent groups such as anti-war protesters, as an example of how absurd it became they had a huge dossier on John Lennon. I'm not an American but I was 17 at the time and watergate was a huge affair, it was clear that the kind of thing that happened at the Watergate hotel was routine, the scandal was followed by some significant legislation on what data government could collect, and under what circumstances domestic groups could be infiltrated. It doesn't seem to have worked, I would not be at all surprised if someone found a similar dossier on the "Dixie Chicks" buried somewhere in Homeland security's basement.

As an Aussie I would like to give Letterman a pat on the back for what he's been doing with his "stooge of the day" segment, regardless of your views on gun control, the point he keeps hammering home is that all the stooges voted in direct opposition to the expressed wishes of an overwhelming majority of their constituents. Every single stooge on Letterman's show is a specific example of an individual politician doing their bit to "steal your liberty". Sure politicians should lead rather than follow the opinion polls, but when they are so out of kilter with them (in some cases taking a position opposed by over 90% of voters), they have some 'splaining to do.

I do hope that none of your interests would be worth more to your insurer, potential employer, or other interested parties than they would be to doubleclick...

I'd argue that the behavior described can't (without doing serious violence to the details) be usefully dismissed as 'making bad decisions'.

Yes, unfortunately, Kids Today show no more signs of being Valiant Defenders of Privacy than did people yesterday. Outside of a principled-but-largely-ineffective minority, nobody ever has. Unshockingly enough, they've largely succumbed to the nigh-inevitable when it comes to advertisers and analytics creeps watching everything they do.

On the other hand, they do appear to be taking some degree of protective action against authority figures who are overt enough to be obviously worth evading(parents, principles, coaches, etc.) and dumb enough to be evadable(If you plan on using the internet in a remotely ordinary fashion without Google, Lexis-Nexis, your friendly local telco, and possibly a three-letter-agency or two, good luck with that. If you are trying to communicate with your friends without your parents catching on to what exactly you are drinking, that's still possible).

I'm sure that they'd love to(though TB is kind of a lousy disease as ROI potential goes. Virtually all the cases are in poor or marginal populations, so the customers tend to have only enough money to sporadically take drugs and develop resistant strains, and the first-world high rollers are negligible. Also, because the morbidity and mortality are so significant in poor countries, and the public health concern over drug resistance so great, a new TB drug would be an attractive target for generic production under the authorization of various uppity countries who don't understand that obeying American IP law is more important than their citizens' lives*shakes head*), I'm just not sure that they'd achieve much traction in a case like this. Unless therapeutic use does require some genuinely novel tweaks, the fact that synthesized vitamin C was big news in the early 1930s, and research on dietary sources was largely nailed down in the days when keeping the sailors on your man-o'-war from dying was important national security stuff, will probably mount a fairly stiff prior-art challenge.