Agree, data mining is about finding relationships you didn't know existed but the Obama campaign is not a great example of that. I have .au at the end of my email address because...well...I live in Oz. Somehow Obama's super computer got hold of my address, miss-identified me as an American voter and started trying to sell me tickets to their convention, at first they were signed by various mayors and governors, then Michell. and finally Barrack in a last ditch attempt to extract $5 from me. Not spotting the .au makes me think their last effort was not a great deal more sophisticated than simply spamming commercially available email lists.

Someone else who doesn't recognize the significance of developments such as IBM's Watson.

why would the terrorists solicit money from jewish organizations?

[SIGH] OK, in small words, with low counts of syllables (is "syllables" too long for you? or even "terrorist"?) ... the terrorists are radical PRO-Israelis who want to kill, maim and terrorise non-Jews in general and Muslims in particular. They don't have the moral courage of the suicide bombers etc because the they don't have the balls to either die for their beliefs, or get caught and go to jail. (The damage caused by the X-rays would take days to weeks to show up, by which time they'd be off on their travels to "zap another brownie, who's not wearing a skull-cap". They'd be quite unlikely to get caught unless they were spectacularly [sorry, syllable count ; try "really, really"] stupid, which they clearly were.)

When caught they'd go out in a blaze of x-rays, then piss themselves and spend the next 200-to-life being raped nightly by Big Mohammed in their cell. "Pour encourager les autres."

also, doesn't the TSA have similar vans already?

[more SIGH] I'm not 100% sure of the TSA, but for certain the UK Border Force have a number of fixed and mobile x-ray units for examining lorries and shipping containers coming into the country, in pursuit of illegal immigrants. Modifying such to produce a harmful beam would probably be difficult (vacuum physics can get difficult at high power) and need a fairly un-subtle power source, but it's probably doable. You'd need dose rates thousands or tens of thousands of times higher than medical X-ray machines, and probably hundreds of times higher than (say) weld inspection X-ray machines.

Whoever runs this Twitter account has better grammar and spelling than 98% of Americans

FTFY

Exactly. When I read this: "a merchant of death & a satanic force of evil, has a long inglorious record of spreading nothing but poverty, dependency & disbelief", for a moment I thought they were talking about their brand of $INSERT_RELIGION_OF_PARENT'S_CHOICE$.

FTFY

Some religions may be worse than others, but very few of them rise to the level of being almost acceptable as moral bases. It's the "I can blame it on $DEITY$" option that makes religions generally culpable.

I mean, we could go for a bigger slab of concrete with a bigger nuclear-powered winch, but after a while it's just more work than fun.

Spoilsports! We'd got our new carbon-nanotube diamond double-helix anchoring ropes into production and now you pull out on us. Wimps!

Guess we'll just have to junk the cable now, unless these people wanting to build a space elevator are serious about wanting 30,000 km of the stuff.

Because the average driver can barely remember to indicate, let alone decipher complex instructions like "Change the oil now, dipstick".

"... and don't forget to put the dipstick back in, dipstick!"

Had a friend do it ; then we went up to the hills for a weekend, slowly losing oil by spray from the crankcase/ sump. Coming back home ... runs out of oil, miles from anywhere. We hitch-hiked home ; he had about a 5 mile walk to a petrol station, then 5 miles back, as the snow started falling. Sympathy didn't ooze.

at least one [insurance companies] already offer it as a service that can lower your bill

Same in this country - at least one company does it. I'll be looking closely at that to cut my premiums on the next insurance cycle.

As for DVRs, I want that info to go to Nielsen! I want broadcasters, and in a strange twist, advertisers, to know what I'm watching!! Why? I want to make sure my shows don't get cancelled.

Actually, yes ; that is a reasonable point of view. Particularly if you're in an advertising-funded TV model (which I'm not). But you'd also need to make it clear to the advertisers when adverts are being fast-forwarded through. I watch very, very little "live" TV - only the news really, which doesn't have adverts - precisely so that if adverts do occur, I can fast-forward over them. I also participate in for-pay surveys and focus groups (i.e. I get paid for expressing my opinions), precisely so that I can influence the availability of future products. But I'll be fucked if I am going to accidentally support the mind-benders and manipulators of the applied psychological sciences (i.e. advertising departments) by watching their shit without being paid for it.

OH NOES! I recorded a whole day of footage, even at 1080p resolution that won't hardly fill even lower end HDDs.

As I said above, "OTOH, there are very legitimate grounds for not storing what you don't want to sub-poena-ed for." ; there are two very different sides to this coin. (Maybe more.)

You want recording of the context of your crash, to prove that it was the other driver's fault. Do you also want to have the contents of your car's camera records sub-poena-ed by a passing driver to prove that someone they hit had braked suddenly to turn to his passenger-side (that's left here, but may not be in your jurisdiction), even though in such cases it is, by definition, the rear driver who is at-fault.

What you don't store, you can't be required to hand over. Regardless of your storage capacity.

Yes you record everything on a 10 minute loop, you stop the recording 30 s after an accident occurs.

... and so your recorder system misses the part where the other two drivers involved start fighting with each other (just picking an example where your privacy isn't involved, but your testimony might well be needed).

It's not so easy once you start looking at exactly what you might credibly want to store. OTOH, there are very legitimate grounds for not storing what you don't want to sub-poenae'd for.

it's a must!

Not if you want me to watch it.

Woah slow down there, I am a "boomer" (but not of the US variety), today's government is staffed by boomer's but until very recently it WAS staffed by WW2' war babies and before that WW2 veterns. Mandatory superannuation contributions (paid directly to the fund by your employer) started here in Oz in the late 80's, the funds are invested in approved managed funds and basically ride along with the ups and downs of the economy, however the funds offer all sorts of options as to where to invest your money (eg: gold, stocks, green tech, bricks and mortar, etc) you can even set up your own fund if you are into that sort of thing. The government doesn't owe me a penny, but it has forced me to save for my retirement in a way that I can't get at it until I'm 55 and penalizes me with double the tax for taking a lump sum and blowing it all before I'm 60. I just turned 54, mine is staying where it is for at least another 10yrs, then I probably sell up and move to the country closer to my three grandkids (where I can buy a house outright with the equity I have in my current home). Another good feature is that you can't lose an account due to job hoping, homelessness, ect. The government tracks inactive accounts via tax file numbers and "parks" them in a default (low yield, high security) fund until they are reclaimed/returned.

At the end of the day this sort of enforced saving regime makes my own 80yr old parents a lot less expensive for society to maintain in a humane manner, they faithfully invested in super every month without being forced to by the government and currently receive a pension of $0.00 from the government and have just returned from a holiday to the grand canyon. The reason that we have things like taxpayer funded pensions is that humans don't want to see grandma (or her friends) tossed on the scrap heap after doing their bit to build and maintain our civilization. It's also key to reducing the number of offspring a society produces to ensure they are looked after in their old age, and finally the funds themselves play an important role in building the infrastructure that keeps us all from starving to death.

Anyway, believe me when I say it really won't be long before you are thinking to yourself where did the last 30yrs go and how the hell am I going to afford to enjoy retirement.

At some point the popular uprising in Syria morphed to a civil war, then Israel dropped some bombs on it and it started to look like it was morphing into an old fashioned proxy war between East and West. If I'm not mistaken Obama has yet to send arms to anyone, but he recently signed a UN backed agreement with Putin to work together toward creating a "caretaker" government formed by the waring parties themselves. However before any of that can happen they need to negotiate a cease fire on the ground which is much easier said than done. Secondary goals are distributing aid, and sending in UN inspectors to investigate the reported use of nerve gas. They have also agreed that the day to day public service should not be dismantled (which was what threw Iraq into an orgy of looting on the 3rd day of the war).

If stopping the bloodshed and restoring order is your aim then you should be applauding an agreement that aims to stop the violence and reboot the politics, while at the same time asking WTF did it take them 2yrs to publicly agree (through gritted teeth)?

We Aussies took that route and the end result was pretty much the same. The closest we came to a revolution was a handful of gold miners getting shot at by some cops. The evolution of society is far more complex than portrayed in HS history class, the Boston Tea Party is seen as a significant event but it would have been futile if the existing society was not already intellectually primed for it. These singular momentous events are often more symbolic than anything else and are nearly always selected in hindsight. Australia's Eureka stockade is a fine example of a small group of revolutionaries with a valid (and popular) complaint against the crown who failed miserably to inspire those around them to join in, a more modern example would be the OWS crowd.

Umm, East Germany wanted the wall to come down, W Germany, France and the UK all tried to stop it from happening by (quietly) pleading with the E Germans to do something to stop it. As to Rome, Roman citizens were entitled to 1kg of grain per day from the emperor via their local bakery, needless to say many Europeans didn't require conquering, they simply chose to be roman and started demanding their "bread and circuses".