They don't check the accuracy of the factoid. They're just attaching a timestamp and their digital signature to whatever factoid you give them. You can later use this to prove that the factoid was a particular byte string at a particular time. (Though I'm not sure the level of "proof" this is, unless they're willing to appear in court and testify that the timestamp is accurate.)

The language on their website is very misleading.

Bah, where's the "delete post" button? I completely misread the parent post and posted exactly the same observation. I'm a dumb-ass.

I'd love to see an interstellar probe launched, but that is far beyond our current technology. We just can't do it.

Technically, we already have. But yeah, unless we count on it coming back as V'Ger in a couple centuries, we're not going to get a lot of interstellar data back from it.

Male or female, makes no difference. Women's magazines sell with pictures of women. Men's magazines sell with pictures of women.

Actually, that's not the case in general. Look in the grocery store check-out lane, or on the magazine rack. Yes, the men's magazines predominantly feature pictures of sexy women. But the women's magazines predominantly feature pictures of... sexy women. I'm sure it makes some relevant point in the discussion of sexism, but I'm not exactly sure what that point is.

So, what's stopping you? I hear a hell of a lot of bitching about how Google Reader is going away and how all the replacements suck. So what's stopping you (or anyone else) from tapping this vast, unserved market? It's not like parsing a bunch of XML files and presenting them in an organized fashion is exactly rocket science. Sounds like Google's opening up a golden opportunity for someone.

So let's assume he's being truthful and he actually has "source code for older titles plus development kits for the PS4 and Xbox One consoles". Um... So what? How is that damaging to the companies involved? Source code for older titles? Who cares? Dev kits? They hand those things out like candy to development studios. Sure, under NDA, but it's not like their business plan is toast if the dev kit gets leaked.

It sounds like a small price to pay to pick off and make an example of some pissant little self-proclaimed l33t h4x0r. With blackmail that weak I'd nail him to the wall just because he sounds like a prick.

When the TSA finds that pat downs are not effective at forcing people into the scanners they'll let us walk through a metal detector and leave us alone.

More likely, they'll continue to make the pat-down more degrading, invasive, and time consuming to ensure that people go through the machines. Yes sir, you absolutely have the right to not be x-rayed. Just step into that queue over there for the full strip-search. You do have your regulation 3 ounces of vaseline, yes? Current wait time is just under three hours, hope your flight doesn't leave before then. Have a nice day.

Or they'll just say to hell with the pretense and pass a law out-and-out requiring the use of the machines.

Agreed. JavaScript and HTML5 is the way to go. Lightweight, capable, and ubiquitous. And it's probably going to be the most generally useful language for what people want to do these days.

Unfortunately, JavaScript itself has some major warts. You might want to read Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts and avoid some of the worst of the language.

In my high school days I was fascinated by computers and bought myself a brand-spanking new Apple //e. I wanted to use it to write a paper for school but I had no money for software. So I cracked open the BASIC manuals and wrote myself a super-cheesy word processor. Okay, that's too generous. It collected typed characters into one long string, and I could even backspace to delete them. That's it. After entering about a page of text, garbage collection kicked in every couple of characters and froze the machine for seconds at a time. But hey, I got the paper turned in! (And got a decent grade, too, despite having spent far more time coding the program than actually writing the paper.)

I also wrote a database manager (before I'd ever even heard that term) to store information about my music collection. And I wrote a few little games.

My school offered a BASIC class my senior year, so I signed up. I already knew way more than the teacher and I blew through the entire textbook in a few weeks. He wanted me to start in on another textbook but I refused. I told him that if he had anything serious for me I'd gladly do it, but I wasn't about to plow through yet another remedial book. We eventually worked something out where a buddy and I did custom programming for other teachers in the district who wanted to try out this new "computer" thing in their classrooms but didn't know what to do with it.

Then I went to college and ended up learning assembly for the 6502 (my Apple), the 8080 (for a EE course) and the school's mainframe (for a CS course) all in the same term. Good times, good times...

So it sounds like she should have gotten drunk, disheveled and naked in a bathroom at a party. 'Cause then it would be porn and Facebook would take the report seriously.

That actually sounds like a pretty good precaution. Find yourself in a compromising position? Don't want pictures spread everywhere? Just take your clothes off to ensure that Facebook will remove any pictures that get posted! Problem solved! If nothing else, the Internet always needs more naked pics.

Meanwhile, those of us working for reputable companies have had no trouble getting the referral bonuses for people we've recommended.

Oh, wait... "inbound marketing company" Yeah, you may have a point.

Whatever you're smoking, I hope you brought enough to share!

So he's proven that it's possible to quickly bang out a half-assed pile of code that resembles an office suite, except for the difficult bits. Wow. Color me impressed. Back in my day we would have needed a fancy term for this, like "rapid prototyping" or something. Be he did it buzzword-free! I'd expect him to at least need to use "agile".

No, it's terrorism. Terrorism is the act of publicising your cause by making people afraid to go about their normal lives.

Okay, I'll accept your definition. You're right, it's terrorism.

But so what? Why should a murder committed in the name of scaring people be any different from a murder committed for any other reason? It's a murder. Yes, it's a particularly grisly one, with a ton of video evidence and a confession. So it should be easy to try the guy and lock him up... for murder.

I think we (society in general, not any particular country or government) do ourselves a great disservice when we label some crimes as "terrorism". Doing so sets these crimes apart from others, glorifies them, spreads the terror. I agree that the goal of terrorism is to spread fear. So fight back. Deny them that victory! Treat any and all terror attacks as ordinary crime. Report on it as a crime, try it as a crime. Take away terrorism's leverage by responding to the act instead of the motivation.

Terrorism loses its power when we refuse to be terrified.

In other news, a majority of those polled responded that the barn door should be closed, despite the horses running free in the pasture.