Well, oh, well...

The USFG owes me a couple new desks. Sometimes they make me headdesk so hard it just... breaks my desk.

Two things that I can't get out of my mind right now:

• If this is the *director* of the bureau, what will a regular special agent be like?
• Has it ever occured to the director of the FBI to notify the congress that people may, for example, kill people? Or maybe he's better off warning them chemicals can be used as weapons. Or even warn them guns may be used to kill people!

Somehow I feel Jeane Dixon is in a better shape to be DFBI than this guy...

If you breath close to their console, they may claim you're using part (the air) of the lincensed (not owned!) property (the console) in a way it was not licensed for.

DNA sequences can be purpose built nowadays, and soon it will be cheap enough for everybody to buy.

So, soon not only the robbed people will be able to buy one of those markers - other people will be able to do it too.

This probably means, even if this now has some chance of being accepted in court, it will (I hope) be droped when they find anyone can be framed by the real burglar, if she gets the chance to build the same sequence with the same environmental markers.

A good question is, perhaps, whether it will be easy or hard to do so.

And I wonder what if the system detects it correctly, issues an alarm, but the driver doesn't wake up with the alarm? Maybe the environment is already noisy (for sound alarms), has lots of lights (light alarms) or the car is shaking a lot (vibration alarms). Or maybe the person is so tired that the alarm doesn't work at all.

I think someone should just not drive when tired. If a person is aware that may fall into sleep at any moment, then maybe it's just stupid to drive anything.

If it is killed at 37C, then any second effect could be avoided by warming the entire body.

But that will probably avoid the good desirable effect too — if it is killed, then it won't even create the defenses it is supposed to create. (Oh, and warming your body would also be bad for testicles, which defeats the main purpose of warming it.)

But that way your normally warmer parts would be actually at the same temperature as your outer parts. Wouldn't then the vaccine get spread along all of your body?

Anyway, a vaccine that might screw genitalia. That's a choice between the joy of being father (again, for some), or living longer. I wonder if the secondary effects will be that bad, maybe it's no worse than a soft kick.

The card reader display shows what the card reader should look like?

And if someone is able to compromise both the card and that image of "what it should look like"?

In this kind of situation it is better to have banks telling people — through another medium — what the terminals should look like. (But in some countries this might not be possible, if every bank/network has its own design)

The idea should work, the problem, as you point, is that you're relying on courts (actually the same courts which sometimes rule stuff like patenting ideas). And there is plenty of room for "ambiguity".

A DRM-breaker will always be useful to break DRM used in public-domain works (even if we wait 70 years (or more, if it is a Fantasia DVD)). But it can be used to break copyright protected works too. In a country where people go bankrupt because of the AA, that's too much uncertainty and risk.

But the problem is that not only should people be able to break DRM on PD and share tools to do so, restricting access to public domain should never happen. This proposal points the root of this evil.

Their president knows what free software is,

We had to choose: either we could go to the kitchen to prepare the dish that we wanted to eat with the flavors that we wanted to add and we could put a little Brazilian flavor into the food, or we could go eat what Microsoft wanted to sell us. Simply speaking, the idea of freedom won.

Lula, at FISL 10 (10th International Free Software Forum)

That might be a good pointer, but, IIRC, his term will end in some months.

Giving someone a computer doesn't make the user an expert in some area. On this specific case, the main question is whether a child knows how to study.

If she is already able to do lenghty searches for some information in a big encyclopedia, or to read different books in different ways until she understands a concept, then with a computer she might improve her study, by taking electronic notes, searching in electronic resources, using the web, ...

On the other extreme if we give a kid who hates studying a computer, she might just spend the whole day playing some game or refreshing her facebook/hi5/orkut/the-social-net-you-hate-here status.

It is important to give students better tools, but it is also important to teach students how to use those tools. Not doing so is like pretending a computing machine always gives the right result, even when given garbage.

Then *AA just need to found a new country and make it so every work is registered there and say copyright never expires on that country?