I could see how this might be an issue in the future as wireless becomes more widely available in municipalities, but part of the reason the remote takeover malware is so popular is that it allows control from far away, bounced through proxy servers and poorly monitored networks, making it difficult to track and catch the people using it. Somehow, I don't see the threat over such a proximity-limited area being very great, even if the launcher/trojan is set up in such a way as to not require physical access.

They are constantly screwing around with everything else, breaking this, fixing that, changing this, etc. I don't find it surprising that Facebook would look at this as a social experiment and neglect to consider the human emotion manipulation element. However, it is telling that this sort of thing goes on, and if anyone is shocked or offended by this, then they might want to invest their time and energy in another form of social media. I hear G+ is nice.

Nearly all of the Linux live boot setups I've seen, if they automatically mount windows drives, they mount them read only. That said, I often lean toward forensic recovery distributions so YMMV.

Unfortunately, as performance is typically measured in conviction rates, this is true. Many people who vote or can appoint judges look at this above all else, not trying to take into account the nature of the cases - maybe they take hard cases but lose some, or maybe they have a 100% rate with "slam-dunk" cases that may provide little in the way of benefit to the communities in which they occur to provide convictions.

This is spot on. Leniency is typically reserved for CIs/snitches, who don't get much leniency after the police (often) leak their names to the people they used them to help capture.

Nice SNL reference.

I might just vote for that, given the poor competition in most elections.

Statists gonna state.

While I agree that consistent penetration and reach is best via AM radio overall, the listener count is not what it once was. SMS messages have the bonus of trickling in during very brief periods of cellular connectivity, even when electrical systems and land lines are down due to damage or overloading, and they go to what I would suggest is the single most ubiquitous means of communicating with the folks who are harder to reach - the ones not in crowds or sitting by a TV or radio. Of course, the EAS folks have been working to consolidate broadcast commercial radio, television, SMS, cable, and other methods and the methods should improve with time. I honestly think that twitter for a general EAS carrier medium is adding an unnecessary level of complexity (this is based on my experiences from both sides of the SS7 switches that carry SMS, their overall reliability and general impenetrability of viruses, the Slashdot effect, etc.) to a good idea. However, as a general purpose, user-configurable carrier for the most desired flashes of specific information and emergency sources, this idea has some solid potential.

In the mid to late 90s I would completely agree with you - but there are many, many ways to handle this on Linux or nearly any modern Unix-style OS. It is still true that many base distributions, particularly those that are designed for the home or hobbyist user, default to allowing a user with UID 0 to wreak havoc by installing unusual packages or those with package dependency/library issues, but most mature distributions do a good job of handling this. If you need to install something without an acceptable, tested distro-native version, there are both methods (like chroot jails or separate hierarchies owned by non-admin groups) and packages (many default packaging systems backup all changes by default, many others have simple options or metapackages for such, also there is SELinux, RCS, etc. etc.) - because you know and trust Windows but do not know or trust Linux enough to feel confident in handling package/system installation and upgrading does not mean that over 40 years of Unix admins cannot do this. I would go into more methods and applications but this post might never end. If you care to learn this stuff, Linux can be a far safer/more stable/more secure place to spend most of your computing time, as many here have noticed.

If any of these information gathering systems and/or the keeping of data for any length of time are legal, than surely the authorities won't mind if we know where each and every one of their vehicles and employees are, to whatever extent they can collect the same data from us. After all, they work for us, and if they aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about, right? ;)

Here's to hoping the kinks get worked out for some bugfixes to my TouchPad tablet.

I wish Abita would put out the Belgian Ale, S.O.S. and Andygator in cans. All 3 are awesome. Makes me miss living closer (in the Memphis area it's pretty easy to get the big beers - i occasionally find them here in NC but I haven't tried the Amber or Purple Haze partially because I'm fond of good hi-grav beers when possible).

Milk (the organic variety as well as the door-to-door delivery of old) is often in 2L/QT glass bottle. It's much heavier empty, but the difference is not so bad when you're talking about up to ~4 lbs of milk in them.

A friend of mine who is a fireman in Chicago got a visit from these guys. Apparently he hooked the whole firehouse up, using a sizable chunk of said bacon - but probably made a few fans in the process.