I'd steer clear of any smartphone that FB had a hand in making. I have a FB account, but I also have my PC setup in such a way that when I log out, FB gets NOTHING from me. With a FacePhone(tm), I'm sure there would be all kinds of things embedded into it that track everything you do so they can get better information for the market trolls (their real customers).

Google is at least transparent with the information the stock flavors of Android have access to, and make it (relatively) easy to keep your information as exactly that - your information. The FB version I'm sure would be full of trackers that you can't turn off or uninstall, because that would make it "just another phone" and not a FacePhone(tm).

Come to think of it, it will probably sell like crazy to the idiots who get a kick out of broadcasting every excruciatingly annoying detail of their empty lives to everyone on the Internet...

Free Speech protections mean the government can't surpress what you say. Slashdot, being a private company, is not bound by the First Amendment in that way. And you'd be surprised how many forums/boards require you to prove you're not a shill or spambot before turning you loose on the site's population as a whole.

The problem is that your question makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. "We can't use Dropbox, so why doesn't our company use Linux"? Banning cloud services has nothing to do with what OS you prefer. It's all about restricting ways users can get potentially confidential data offsite to places the employer can't control. That's it. End of story. Turning this into a Linux vs Windows debate not only strains logic, but hurts your cause. You're feeding the stereotype that Linux users are nothing but unruly zealots who try to cram their ideology into any conversation, regardless of wether or not it's invited or warranted.

Not to mention the submission is flat out absurd from a logical standpoint. "My employer doesn't allow cameras in the building. So why don't more companies have an on-site cafeteria?" makes about as much sense. Seriously, timothy...were you asleep at the wheel and just blindly posting whatever came across your screen? How about you may me to sit there and look at submissions instead. I'd at least put some actual effort into it.

The electors can technically vote any way they want, but they generally follow their states. It doesn't really happen the way you think it does. What happens is each state has a certain number of electoral votes. On election day, the people vote for their chosen candidate, and whoever gets the most votes in a state, gets all of that state's electoral votes. However, some states have far more electoral votes than others. This causes situations where you can have the popular vote in your favor, but because your opponent won more of the "big states", you lose. And with it being essentially a two-party system, the electoral vote is done on a "first past the post" basis, so whoever gets to 270 electoral votes first is the new President.

So it's not really a conspiracy by electors to ignore the will of the people. It's a horribly designed numbers game that allows candidates to pretty much ignore smaller states or ones that aren't "swing states". Either way, the result is the people get screwed again and again. :(

...is to drop the client. Seriously.

He wants Orwellian monitoring over his network that is not only unfeasible but would eventually prove completely ineffective. If he's this paranoid, what's going to happen when your kludge of a system inevitably misses a message or two and he decides that caused someone to fall victim to a scam? He's going to come after you with some shark lawyer and make your life incredibly annoying, that's what. In the end, his idea will not prevent scams and the like. It's only going to further a "big brother knows best and sees all" mentality. On top of that, it shows a frightening lack of trust in his family - both in their ability to "do the right thing" and in their general intelligence. Your best solution is to drop the client and not feed his totalitarian ego.

On the other hand, if this is really you wanting such a solution, the trust issues apply even moreso. Learn to EDUCATE instead of spy. You will have much better results.

And finally, if you're an ISP too clueless to do something on your own, GTFO Slashdot with your asking us how to spy on your customers. You should be ashamed of yourself.

tl;dr - Your plan is a bad idea all around...

I guess the shared chemicals aren't what makes rat poison harmful then, given the amount of people who drink coffee like their lives depend on it. Also, FTFY.

Sounds like the trick they used in 2010. While I don't have any figures to spout off as to why it wouldn't work, it does still strike me as being a bad idea. But unfortunately I'm at a loss as to why I think that. My guess is that at the velocities involved, the stresses on the craft would be rather obscene.

It all comes down to available fuel. Spacecraft burn most of their fuel getting into orbit, meaning that they usually have just enough left to drop their orbit into the atmosphere, where aerodynamic drag takes over. To descend gradually, you would need to have just as much (if not more) fuel as required to get into orbit in the first place, since you would have to slow down a LOT more than currently feasible. And after that you would need even more fuel to control your descent rate, since even if you stopped on a dime, gravity is going to accelerate you back to the point where thermal protection is required.

For reference, Joe Kittinger jumped from a balloon somewhere in the 100,000 foot (18.9 mile) range. The air is pretty thin up there, but he was into the thicker part before his velocity got too high. A spacecraft coming from, say, 190 miles has 10x farther to accelerate before the air becomes thick enough to act upon it. 190 miles is a long way, and even discounting the 19 miles from the balloon, that's still another 172 miles. By the time you get to where drag is a factor, you would be travelling upwards of 5,200mph (just under mach 16 at sea level). And that's just your vertical velocity assuming you managed to somehow bleed off ALL of your orbital velocity. So you would still need either thermal protection, or a lot more fuel to keep your descent rate below suicidal velocities.

Not necessarily. It just means that while they're confident in their code, they believe that it's always a good idea to have things vetted in the real world. The reasoning behind this is that the developers are often so close to the code that they can't possibly see EVERY conceivable bug or vulnerability. Inviting others to poke your products with a stick on a constant basis is a good thing. It lets Google get some good press, and also a MUCH more thorough real-world trial than they could do in house.

In a way, it's somewhat remniscent of the developers who worked on the flight software for the Space Shuttle computers. Teams would actually compete to see who could find more bugs in the other team's code. This lead to some of the most robust and bug-free software ever written.

To paraphrase: