Good points, though I felt it necessary to comment on the wireless mouse issue: RF-related laws do differ from country to country and there can be serious consequences (not just legal consequences) to breaking them.

While there's wide international agreement on certain bands, like the 2.4GHz ISM band, not everything is so unified. I'm an American living in Switzerland. One of my fellow Americans here in Switzerland had brought a Skype-capable cordless phone from the US and had used it for a few weeks. Eventually, some Swiss government officials with direction-finding equipment showed up at his house and requested entrance to his home. He allowed them in and they homed in on the phone. It turns out the frequencies used in the US for certain types of cordless phones are used, in Switzerland, by the Swiss military and his phone was causing interference. They gave him a ticket saying that there was no penalty this time, but if he continued to use the phone he would be fined 10,000 Swiss francs (about $10,000 USD/8,000 Euro).

While the use of a wireless mouse isn't likely to cause enough interference to bother anyone, it's still a good thing to check first to ensure it is appropriate to use.

There's no such thing as an AK-47 permit in Texas or elsewhere in the US, assuming you're referring to the semi-auto variant.

Assuming that one is not otherwise prohibited from possessing firearms (e.g. not a criminal), it's perfectly legal to make any otherwise-legal firearm for personal use in the US. For example, if one wished to build a semi-auto AK-47, that's fine (here's a guy making one from a shovel he bent into the appropriate shape, while here are the stamped/punched flats that you'd need to bend, drill, and heat-treat to make your own semi-auto AK receiver, the only regulated part). If you wanted to build a full-auto one, that's forbidden. You can make silencers, short-barreled rifles/shotguns, etc., but ONLY after getting the appropriate tax stamp from the ATF.

Basically, yeah.

A lot of the networks have expanded where there's people: early networks grew up around universities and government facilities (often located in or near major population centers), companies later grew up (or migrated to) where the tech people were, and things more or less grew organically from there.

Take a look at Level3's network map for the US: there's a lot of facilities in areas where there's a lot of population: SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New England, etc. Florida has more than I would otherwise expect, but it's not too surprising. There's basically nothing in the Dakotas and very little in other sparesely-populated areas.

One may well be able to get some network connections in remote areas, but it'll likely be expensive, inconvenient, and from a considerably less-diverse group of network providers than one might get in, say, Ashburn VA or the Bay Area.

Ok, but what information does that give Facebook? They already know people's social connections due to people "friending" each other.

My point was more "Leaving aside the privacy issues related to the use of Facebook and its specific implementation, in general people should choose diverse 'trusted contacts' from separate social groups so the odds of multiple friends colluding to get enough codes to gain access to one's account is minimized."

While I'd hope that people would trust their friends to not abuse a privileged position in order to gain access to one's account, it's probably a good idea to pick friends from different, non-overlapping social circles to make it difficult for them to know who other "trusted" people for one's account are.

s/websit/website

That's because their website isn't http://www.piratebay.sx/

Their websit is http://thepiratebay.sx/ -- note the presence of "the" in the name.

That doesn't make any sense: Spamhaus only charges money to services that subscribe to their lists (that is, actual customers). They don't charge anything for de-listing.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the AC you're replying to said: you can manufacture Title I firearms (that is, non-NFA-regulated items like the AR-15) for personal use with no paperwork.

If you wish to manufacture Title II firearms (NFA-regulated items) like SBRs, SBSs, suppressors, AOWs, etc. that's fine, but you need the relevant ATF forms and tax stamp though no manufacturer's license is required. Manufacturing machine guns, however, requires that one possess the appropriate manufacturer's license.

UPC Cablecom --> aorta.net (UPC's backbone) --> Level3 --> Savvis --> Slashdot.

That used to be the case. Since the time of 10.10 of the "mainline" Ubuntu, I've found it to be considerably less intuitive than expected. I much prefer Mint+MATE over any of the mainline Ubuntu releases. That and Xubuntu.

Why?

For calculations that involve lots of matrices, it's quite good.

I wouldn't really say that most people were *hiding* -- that is, I don't think they were staying inside due to fear of the bad guy -- but rather trying to let the professionals (the police and federal agents) who were searching for this very dangerous bad guy to do their job with the least interference and confusion possible.

This has nothing to do with directly using Google, this has to do with non-Google users being blocked from sending presence invites to Google users.

Even if you run your own server, there's a lot of people who use Google and it makes sense to be able to communicate properly with them if needed.

According to the wikipedia, the population density of NYC is 10,640 per square kilometer (26,939 per square kilometer for Manhattan alone). Los Angeles is 3,124 per square kilometer, and Tokyo is 6,810 per square kilometer.

There's really no excuse for NYC or other US metro areas to not have better internet service even if they do end up having a smaller population in the metro area.