In my opinion the US skaters are just looking for a scapegoat. The truth is much simpler, us Dutchies are completely and utterly dominating the speed-skating competition at the Olympics.

A good suit is vs a bad suit just gives you a very very marginal advantage, the rest is training and professionalism. It's not just the US that is being squashed right now, each and every country competing in speedskating is getting a good ass-kicking. ;-)

Reminds me of an old saying:

Every person you meet is always better at something then you are...

I think this is the second or third accusation from the US to Iran about something or the other this week.

This pastern of preparing people for another war again is getting a bit obvious by now,

That, and I also imagine there are separate systems for the rovers main controls and for the "work"-tasks it has to do over there.
Since they issue about a 1000 commands *each day!* it seems to me that those commands go to a sort of sandboxed environment on the rover to ensure that a relatively "simple" command like "focus camera C on that rock to the right" can never cause major malfunctions to the main system on the rover itself.

Sending a probe to Mars without any electricity, damn..... We're really lagging behind in terms of innovation :)

From Mark Zuckerberg's post:

As a matter of fact, privacy is so deeply embedded in all of the development we do that .....
....These privacy principles are written very deeply into our code.

You've gotta admit, the guy does have a good sense of humor ;P

Remembrance my ass. It became a another national day to make more money and get extra exposure for politicians. The way 9/11 is commercialized is shocking

Floating houses were already designed 1000's of years ago, they're called boats.

But on topic, 'floating' houses are nothing new, we've had them for decades already here in the Netherlands

One report I read about the data seizure spoke of hundreds of dvds, cds, usb-sticks, memorycards and harddrives that were captured during the raid.

While I am sure OBL and his organization took security *very* seriously I however doubt that such a pile of data is all encrypted in equal thorough fashion.
As some posters already mentioned, it takes only one good fuck-up to compromise everything. I'm willing to bet that in such an a huge volume of data/media there is a fuck-up somewhere.

Also, while I'm also sure his organization had some good it-experts on it's payroll the majority of the people surrounding him, including OBL himself, were probably not very skilled in the use of computers and other modern media/information techniques.
A 54 year old man who spent the better part of his life fighting and hiding in hills and caves.. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he actually *did* write down his password(s) somewhere. Especially considering the fact he lived in the same compound for several years and must have felt relatively safe.

His form of security came in physical form, guns blazing, relocating often (though he fucked up on that one) and trust in the people surrounding him. He understood guns and bullets, not bits and bytes.

Excuses in advance for my ignorance but as far as I understand this guy claims to have found evidence of bacteria that did not originate from earth.
As a layman I interpreted that as extraterrestrial life.

Life that has started and evolved somewhere else in the Universe instead of earth. Wouldn't that make it by far the most important discovery ever?
Of course I could have understand it completely wrong and got exited about nothing ;-)

Same here, I have no need to hide anything in my personal situation. Our porn dir is shared across the home network for convenience matters actually.

For professional situations I use a spare laptop that I never use for anything personal.

This is the part that always gets me..... the "nothing"

I understand that "nothing" is a concept that is very hard to grasp for a human being, but still...

As far as I understand the big bang is a series of events that led to the creation of our current universe. The part I can't get my head around is how "nothing" can turn into "something".
It seems to me that an event like the big bang had to be triggered by at least ''something". And that that "something" must have had some form of physic laws in order to trigger the event.

This is kinda what I mean.
In my (surely overly simplified) logic for "anything" to happen there must be "something" to begin with in the first place. But all I keep reading is that that is not the case.. And *that* boggles my mind almost to explosive levels ;)

Disclaimer: I'm just a layman who tries to get his head around theories like this purely out of interested (and is failing horribly most of the time)

Agree, iDeal may not be the end all, be all, solution for online transactions but it's pretty solid, safe and simple.

Currently I only do payments via iDeal or paypall only. My paypall accounts is empty most of the times. If I want to buy something via paypall I transfer the amount of money needed first and then make the transaction.