Seriously, $6 million to watch ONE building (or compound, I don't know how extensive the embassy is) for a year?

WTF?

Let's say you put 4 cops on the job (one to watch each corner).
3 shifts = 24 hours. Call it 14 cops, so you have relief, weekend coverage, and overlap.

London cops get paid $400,000+/year?
I'm in the wrong business. I'll sit and watch a building for a single guy for a year for $400k.

Oh wait, see, I forgot that this is absurdly inflated so that every department/administrator can justify his/her 'piece' of the largesse. Good thing taxpayers apparently don't give a shit how their money is wasted.

Deny it all you want, but anyone with a brain (and not an eco-nut zealot themselves) recognizes EXACTLY who I was talking about. In fact, one might say thou protesteth a bit too much.

There are people who are working intelligently to help our environment such as the Nature Conservancy. There are eco-nutters like PETA and Greenpeace who do almost as much damage as good, by their ludicrous publicity stunt-style activism marking them as unreasonable (and in some cases downright insane) people with whom one can not expect any sort of reasonable compromise.

And if you think that we can have a planet of 7 billion and the route to ecologically-positive results doesn't lie squarely through 'compromise' territory then you yourself are a zealot, worthy only of disregard.

Also, I have the balls to post under an ID and not AC. Just sayin'.

Great example.
You DO know that the entire rationale behind 'Silent Spring' and Rachel Carson's screed against DDT has been debunked?

The thinning eggshells were a result of the lab feeding the birds a low-calcium diet not representative of their wild diet. When the same researchers that did the experiment repeated the test with a proper diet, there was no eggshell thinning (and in fact the DDT-fed birds were arguably more healthy, although not statistically significantly so).

So what were you saying again?

There's a great flight for them.

Seriously, those ideas are about what I'd expect from people breathing low-pressure oxygen on a long flight.

These are the WINNING concepts, folks:
Advisher (an online community to help foster women in STEM) - How about we just give them a decent education, and discourage the modern-media role-modeling of women as only whores and skanks?

INIT ('nutritional labels' to disclose products' 'STEM ingredients') - what? /facepalm.

DGTL (rewards young women with fashionable clothes for completing coding challenges) - sigh. So much for abandoning stereotypes.

Beacons in a Backpack (solar powered backpacks pre-loaded with videos, multimedia content, and game-powered educational tools that also serve as mobile hotspots for rural/remote areas) - right, because I can't think of anything more common than kids gathering in a cow pasture to view some "multimedia content" (the 1980s called, they'd like their vocabulary back).

Tech21 (STEM education program aimed at 21-years-and-older post-college grads in the workforce) - if they're already 21+ and not already interested in STEM, they're lost to you.

Certify.me (allows STEM talent from across the globe to audition for potential employers via standardized-quality assessments): that's actually probably useful benchmarking to make it easier to evaluate and hire STEM students. Sort of a STEM-focused SAT/ACT. Good idea.

STEAM Truck (a mobile dance lab where STEM art installations teach kids that science is fun and valuable): Jesus Christ, this is why we don't let DANCE instructors in on STEM discussions. A mobile DANCE lab to teach science is fun? /facepalm. Didn't Disney's Ludwig von Drake do that better 40 years ago?

'This has the feel of Southby [SXSW],' gushed a Google Ventures general partner. - And I have no doubt that the person genuinely "gushed", parenthetically mentioned the hipster abbreviation, and refers to themselves as a "game changer".

Honestly, if this superficial crap is the best that these "game changers" can come up with to improve/motivate kids to go into STEM, we're fucked.

(FWIW here's my example of the impact of the STEM educational initiative in my local high school:
Suburban MN school. Prides itself for participation in STEM initiative, such that our Senator even visited last spring. Shortly after, my 10th-grade daughter was picking classes for her Junior year. She's been in their accelerated math program since 4th grade, and loves it. However she was told "sorry, no calculus for you as a junior. Just skip math your junior year and take it as a senior." Seriously. After some investigation, we discovered that NO juniors were being allowed to take calc (which is a year ahead of normal) as they only planned for 2 sections of calculus...about 50-60 kids. This is in a school where each grade is 300 kids.
After a pointed discussion with the superintendant, they 'managed' to find a spot for her, but I'm sure none of the students who DIDN'T complain/fight got in, as she said there's only about 4 juniors in calculus this year.

i.e. "STEM initiative!" = really nothing.)

Always? I bet you don't recall that Bush II was actually elected on the premise of downsizing the post-cold war military?

Rumsfeld was brought into the DoD SPECIFICALLY because he was a budget-chopper. Crappy wartime SecDef that he may have been, his reason for sitting in that chair was because he was going to reduce the military.

FYI Defense is less than 1/5 of the budget. (19%)
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and safety nets: 55% of the budget...or roughly 3x defense.

And FWIW, personally, I'd be DELIGHTED if the president sat down and gave the Joint Chiefs the mandate of reducing our post-Afghan military by 33%, bases by 50%, and development budget by 20%. Flat cuts, and if it's recommended to go, no senator or congressman can gainsay it in their pork-defense effort.

"While the microbes could speed the plastic's decay, they might also cause their own ecological problems, the researchers say"

And if anyone needed a reason that people don't take eco-nuts seriously, here it is.

Here we have a nice sign that some crappy thing we're doing to the environment might be mitigated in some small way by Mother Nature, and the response is what? Not "great! let's spend time working on other problems!" it's "oh noes, we think there are just other problems we haven't discovered yet".

Just be happy, once, that something is a good thing without always trying to find the lining of doom and gloom and people might not just treat you like the gloomy harbingers you are.

Because it's TRUE.

Yes, they can apply for an exemption.
Yes they will PROBABLY get it....but not certainly.

The fact is, if a person/corporation/dog digs up something on their property that someone else thinks is important, why should that property owner pay for it EVER unless they can expect reasonable compensation to at least offset those costs?

Seriously?

The law as written is stupid. If I dig up inuit bones, it's meaningless to me. If the inuit (or more realistically, some caucasian anthropologists, right?) feel what I find is valuable, THEY can flippin' pay for it. If it's not worth them sinking $5000 into the 'site evaluation' plus whatever I want to charge for the inconvenience of delaying my project, then screw them and grind it to dust.

For all of you who agree that this reveals that government is untrustworthy, do you START to understand why some people have wanted to LIMIT the power of the federal (and by extension, all) government to the absolute minimum necessary to fulfill its absolute minimum necessary functions?

As shocked as you may have been at the idea your personal info has been Hoovered by the government for decades, does it give you an inkling of how angry and betrayed the founding fathers - loyal British subjects all - must have been, and at least a taste of the rage they felt at their betrayal by the Crown in 1776, such that they were prompted to design a new government in which the key principle was CONSTRAINING the power of that government? ..Yet, in post after post here for years I've seen the majority cheerfully willing to give that government more & more & more power over everything from education to healthcare.

Personally, it sounds like you have a lot of rage.

Nobody on the internet knows you're a dog, so any sort if personal information you provide is entirely your choice, yet from your comment we know that you are:
female
Jewish
"geek" whatever that means, specifically
lesbian
Australian
(there may be more, but honestly once I got the flavor of your screed, I skimmed since it seemed pretty much all the same).

So I ask myself, why does this individual who is in so much pain at their 'victimization' by society then proceed to identify every possible characteristic that might then (if society is as biased as they claim) cause the rest of us 'normal people' to disregard her/his/its* voice?
*please pardon me if my application of pronoun in your case is justifiably tentative

I'm honestly curious?
If 'nobody is listening' to these marginalized categories of people, if you're actually working for change, why

Or, is it perhaps just a giant cry for attention?

The fact is that ANYONE who doesn't fit the 'norm' of a group will stand out to some degree. Male nurses for decades weren't (and in some places, still aren't) taken seriously. Male teachers are still often regarded in some districts as inappropriate for younger children. Show me a stay-at-home-dad that hasn't felt excluded from the social circle of playground parents?

One can make the best of it, and try to slowly change the norm. It's not something that's going to happen in a year, or a decade, or even in one lifetime, as frustrating as that may be to people who WANT THAT RIGHT NOW (ie 99.9% of the population today).

I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm going to venture that you're young, angry, probably have body art (piercings/tattoos/both), and often wear clothing or display bumper stickers that are confrontational about your personal choices.

I was at a fast food restaurant, and the young woman in front of me had purple- and pink-dyed hair. I thought she was rather striking, so I was probably staring. She rounded on me, confrontationally, and said "What the hell are you staring at?" My reply was "Um, because you have purple and pink hair?"
My point isn't to suggest that she SHOULDN'T have had colored hair. But to deny that she was an outlier (in this case, by her personal and demonstrative choice) would have been just silly. It's what she WANTED to be, and it seemed a little hypocritical, even in retrospect, that she should have felt entitled to 'not be noticed' when her clear choice was to BE notable.

My suggestion would be that if you spent a little less time jamming your personal life in people's faces, you'd probably find life a lot smoother and pleasant.

I know you (and a number of fellow travelers reading this) are probably in a rage now about my patriarchal tone, inferring that I'm making pejorative choices about your lifestyle. Not at all. But at a certain point you may discover that a lot of your happiness is in your own hands.

My suggestion wouldn't be to write an article about bigotry in the geek community (as you so desperately want to, but curiously phrase as a sort of 'asking for permission' thing?), spend a little less energy obsessing about how marginalized you are, and how unfair life is, and just live it. Love who you want, do what you want, be who you want and you'll be much happier.

"Embarrassed and furious"?

Really?

That's just a touch precious.

I mean, "sorry, but our software is written with the assumption that you're following the binary gender standards which are common to all but a few gender-switching eukaryotes; being that you represent this weird little aberrant population of humans, I'm "embarrassed and furious" that our choices only cover 99.99% of the likely choices".

We don't write our medical software for the possibility that someone will have two heads, yet, such is possible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_and_Brittany_Hensel). If that/those person/people comes/come up to your desk, would you be 'embarrassed and furious' that your standard software doesn't include that possibility?

And no, honestly, if it takes even 5% more resources to add that possibility into the system, IT'S NOT WORTH IT for the vanishingly tiny proportion of humanity that would thereby benefit.

"...Apparently "spy" computers have a small troll that leaps from the machine waving the constitution and wailing in disapproval if ever anyone tries to do something that's not "approved"...."

Well, not to defend them, but most senators probably actually believe this IS precisely how it works.

I don't stick my hand into freezing or boiling water really any more than I have to, but I go outside every day.

I'll cheerfully take my reference points being (broadly) the coldest/warmest people in temperate climes experience personally as far more useful than your particularly arbitrary references, thanks!

The summary paints a bleak picture, showing how the US has abrogated its role as 'neutral keeper of the internet' (well, the 'neutral' was IMO unjustly implied, but we'll roll with it).

So really, who would be better?
The EU? The UN? China? Some weaker "internet governance" NGO that's even more corrupt and liable to manipulation/blackmail/gaming by state-level actors?

It's not about better alternatives, it's always BEEN about "least worst" options.

And let's remember internet history, shall we?
The US makes a giant, redundant 'network of networks' for government data communication in case of Soviet attack.
They start connecting educational organizations on this 'inter-net'.
Over the span of the next couple of decades, it became broadly available to private users and commercial services but wasn't really exploited broadly until the 'web' made it really user friendly.

Think about that.

Really, what sort of staggering naivete does it take to see a network of communication webs (over which has ALWAYS squatted the US government from its very inception) and NOT assume the US is listening in?

This is in a world in which the US (and any government with the technical capability) has been recording phone conversations and reading telegrams for DECADES before the internet ever was invented.

This seems completely reasonable, but what else would I expect from James Bond?

Seriously, though, this is a completely rational point - you own the rights to the material, but since you produced it as an employee, they have permanent license to offer it to their customers.

So why do you let the academic unions make these sorts of statements (effectively) on your behalf? It wouldn't be the first time a union took a strident, conflict-inciting point far in excess of its members' actual desires.

Geez, if I can't print a shitty zip-gun, I guess I'll just have to take 5 mins to MAKE one out of some pipe, a rubber band, a tack, and if I'm feeling fancy, wood for a handle.

Certainly none of these is available at the local hardware store!
I feel safer already.

Fucking morons.