From http://www.history.navy.mil/trivia/trivia03.htm:

The space between each pair of deck planks in a wooden ship was filled with a packing material called "oakum" and then sealed with a mixture of pitch and tar. The result, from afar, was a series of parallel lines a half-foot or so apart, running the length of the deck. Once a week, as a rule, usually on Sunday, a warship's crew was ordered to fall in at quarters - that is, each group of men into which the crew was divided would line up in formation in a given area of the deck. To insure a neat alignment of each row, the Sailors were directed to stand with their toes just touching a particular seam.

Both sides would have been stolen equally, since they would have been attached to each other.

Bo, obviously. He just can't spell.

It must be the Church of the Children of Atom equivalent of kosher/halal.

I think the point TFA is attempting to make is that engineers should be ethically prohibited from designing weapons at all.

(Or, perhaps more relevantly and/or reasonably, from designing technologies that enable the NSA's unconstitutional spying.)

Last time I called an ocean-going vessel a "barge" on Slashdot, I got crucified for it by people who believe that "barges" can only be flat-bottomed devices suitable only for calm water.

Interoperability is not a concern of copyright law and thus the court can't argue that this plays a role.

Sure it is; the DMCA even has an exception for it.

So, if you are visiting a country and want to go to church and unknowingly that church is a Right Wing AntiAmerican White supremacist group, you'd be put on the watch list. Or Muslim and go to a mosque near your hotel that has radical elements.

... Or even don't go to the church/mosque next door, but have an inaccuracy or error in your GPS.

Mod parent up, please, as this is the standard against which we ought to be evaluating infringements of the Bill of Rights.

(It works for the Second Amendment too: if any particular restriction on guns would have prevented the Founding Fathers from being able to revolt, then it is unconstitutional.)

No. They said in the past, that they would log the metadata of citizens doing foreign calls. They just didn't mention that they also log all the metadata of "all foreign countries", because per definition all they are doing are 'foreign calls'.

This expands beyond that in another way, too: according to TFA, they're not just getting a location reading when a call is actually made ("call metadata"), but monitoring the location the entire time the phone is turned on and connected to the network.

The possibility of this is not new, of course, but this is the first time (that I've heard of, at least) that it has been confirmed.

China has a centrally-planned command economy, so it has the bargaining power to say "it's our way or the highway." American consumers are free to make their own choices, but the tradeoff is that it weakens our bargaining position.

I'm not sure I buy that. I tried installing Linux on an old Thinkpad T50 and it ran the OS just fine, but was still useless because it was too slow to run any modern web browser. (I can use about 2 or 3 tabs in chromium before the disk starts thrashing.)

They toe the line. The idiom comes from the situation of people standing at attention along a line, with their toes touching it.

Used to that anything with the Microsoft (c) brand on it, no matter if it's the OS or mouse or keyboard or office suite, they are guaranteed to sell like hotcakes.

Microsoft hardware peripherals were about the only genuinely good products they made. I really liked my Intellimouse Explorer and my Sidewinder joystick.

Freeway driving is trivial: you don't hit what's in front of you, you don't hit what's beside you. Basic sensors can pull off both of these feats. You get bonus points if you can stay in a lane, but plenty of shitty human drivers manage to pull it off following those two basic rules.

Getting off the freeway is where it starts getting difficult. Even google maps sometimes misses the exit and tells me to turn right while I'm doing 60 over an overpass.