Google Glass is visible, right there up on the wearer's face. What about all those cell phones that can do video recording, and can do that video recording right there from your shirt pocket, with no visible indication? Cameras are getting pretty small these days. Someone up to something nefarious, the camera lens is going to be one of his shirt buttons.

Or, for a source that doesn't blank the whole screen with a meta refresh and demand you enable javascript before it will let you read the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/us-judge-in-ore-dismisses-movie-pirating-lawsuit-calling-it-unfair-reverse-class-action/2013/05/14/74ca6946-bcde-11e2-b537-ab47f0325f7c_story.html

Where do you draw the line? What constitutes a contribution? If someone wants to independently speak up in favor of a candidate, is that a contribution? If a newspaper or other media outlet wants to endorse a candidate, is that a contribution? If a labor union wants to rally its members to walk precincts and campaign for a candidate, is that a contribution? If you personally pay to create a web page to support one candidate or attack another, is that a contribution? Does the rule change if you happen to be a business owner? If so, why? If you and some friends and other like-minded people get together to pool resources to get the word out for or against particular candidates, is that a contribution? If that's OK... congratulations. You've just re-invented the PAC.

It's a general rule that when people start drawing these lines, the line is quite clearly drawn between "People likely to agree with me can do whatever they want; people likely to disagree with me must be shut down.

Where do you draw the line?

Seriously? Give me a break

If you post a https url in a chat window with login credentials in the url, you might as well be writing it on bathroom walls in bus stations, preceeded by "For a good time, browse to..."

Whether Microsoft should be doing this or not is entirely beside the point.

This is an important point. Any report like this that talks about Hanford and pretends that it applies as an argument against civilian nuclear power is "No nukes" agenda driven propaganda.

Scientific American used to be a respectable publication. Now... not so much. Every couple of years or so, I pick up a copy, and find it's (at best) the same lowest common denominator pop-sci crap that caused me to drop my subscription ages ago.

Scientific American simultaneously beats the "No Nukes" drum and the "No Carbon" drum. (Don't misunderstand me here; I have been arguing for phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for decades. I don't want us burning any more fossil fuels than we have to, and I want us to reduce the "have to" amount as much as possible.) Anyone who is both "No Nukes" and "No Carbon" is someone who, knowingly or not, is arguing for the anihilation of technological civilization. They're Arithmetic Deniers.

http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=67496

We've got an animal liberationist in our lab,
In a cage behind the storage shelves in room one-seventeen.
He helps with our experiments, although he'd rather not,
But think of all the rodents that he's saving from those shots.
His cause was true, his heart was pure. He'd better hope we find the cure.

It seems pretty darn clear to me that Sinclair was originally supposed to be the one who married Delenn; that was getting nicely set up from near the very beginning, at least as early as the episode with the various religious festivals. Unfortunately, O'hare left the series, so that plot line had to be transferred to Sheridan, and had to be sped up.

I would really like to read a novel with the original plot, Sinclair staying around as long as originally planned, and the Babylon 4 station being taken back by Sinclair and Delenn as the finale in "Sleeping in Light". (I pretty strongly suspect that was the original plan, anyway.) And Ivanova staying around; her "telepath" arc getting developed according to the original plan.

I see where he's coming from. Big Bang Theory is the sort of show I really really want to like. I've tried several times. I've bounced off of it ... hard ... after about five minutes each time.

I can't say I loathe it, because I haven't watched enough of it to develop a loathing. Many people whose opinions I greatly respect love it. I just find it way too annoying -- too much of the "geeks" in the show come across to me as "what the jocks and 'in crowd' think geeks are like".

Fuel reprocesssing != breeder reactors. Though, of course, breeder reactors will also need reprocessing infrastructure.

That TED debate has a quote from Stuart Brand that stries me as very insightful, going straight to the heart of the matter:

"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."

The "sunny days when the wind is blowing energy" folks just won't do the arithmetic.

So, I've started calling them "Arithmetic Deniers".

Let's be reasonable -- this is a report by a group of people who have a bug up their rear about religion to the extent they want their shoes to be atheist. (Puns aside, what's religious about shoes, anyway, for Hitchens' sake?) I'm not particularly interested in reports like this from someone pushing an agenda that hard.

Likewise, I wouldn't be interested in hearing from the Phelps cult about packages festooned with their "God hates fags" crap getting lost in the mail, either.

If IE 10+ is actually standards complient, what will break if it's "Firefox impersonation" causes web sites to treat it as if were standards complient?

I really don't see the problem here. Those antique versions of IE from the last century will still identify the same way, so the web sites designed to cater to crufty old browsers from the previous century won't treat them any differently than they do now.

The obvious potential problem would be that if Microsoft went back to do their old trick of making up their own standards incompatible with everyone else, then web pages wouldn't work with the new browser. But I think the web environment has changed enough that if they were to do that, the rest of the world wouldn't go along with it. I suspect the folks at Microsoft are aware that such a move would accelerate the switch to Firefox, Chrome, etc.

This.

At a previous employer, I got an email "from" the HR department that hit every "phish/scam" warning. There was nothing in the Received: header IP addresses or the actual domains in the links that had anything to do with the company. The HREFs in the email were of the classic "fraudulent link" form <a href="12horses.com/long-serial-number-path"> hr.companydomain.com </a>. I had never heard of, "12 Horses", which name (before I knew who they were) just screams "Fly-by-night randomly generated domain."

At first glance, obvious phish. After careful examination of the email, I concluded it was obvious phish. Carefully crafted spear-phishing, but definitely phish. Everybody in the email security group said it looked like phish. So, I sounded the alarm, that we were under attack. Then HR admitted it really was theirs. (Actually, indignantly declared it was legit, and why would anyone ever question it?)

In that kind of environment, how is the average user, who doesn't examine Received headers or HTML source code, going to cope?

Too many of these ideas are tossed out by people who don't really understand the issues, and it shows.

But hey, since when did that ever stop anyone, me included?

My thought on the subject: The government doesn't get to decide that a company is "too big to fail" and step in -- until it does fail. At that point, part of the rules of the bailout are: (1) the company gets split up into parts that are not too big to fail, (2) none of the current officers of the company are permitted to have any position as an officer or board member of any of the pieces, and (3) none of the pieces are permitted to merge with or aquire each other for (x) years.

The "7 round limit" bans just about every sidearm used by every law enforcement officer in the entire country. Few LEOs still use revolvers or the 1911 .45. Most other pistols used by law enforcement hold at least 10 rounds.