You have your view of the law and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner has hers - I know which one I believe is the more sound. The mere fact that you write of "suing" in your inappropriate analogy shows how little you understand of how the legislation works.

Neither Canada nor the EU are responsible for the ridiculous situation where the US alone among industrialised nations lacks proper privacy legislation. Being ignorant of these matters is no excuse, for either you or google.

Actually, where I live, the collection of personal information is regulated by law, and Google is/was in flagrant violation of that law. It doesn't matter that the data was available in the clear, over the air : personal data is protected by law, and hand-waving excuses about technical errors or artifacts of collection process are irrelevant. I realise that the US has no proper privacy laws, but many other places (and all other industrialised nations) do have such legislation. Google simply ignored those laws, which is why they were called to task by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and EU data regulators.

I wonder whether Microsoft's 'kin phones will be any better than their 'kin operating systems or 'kin applications. Un 'kin likely.

Skyscrapers may be vastly more affordable if built from interlocking modules on the ground that could be airlifted into place

Unlikely, I would think : how could using airlift ever be cheaper than a temporary crane on the top of the structure?

The lift capacity of this VapourTech is 150 tonnes. That's not a very big building.

this franchise will never willfully disrespect, intentionally or otherwise, your memory and service

Like, by making a game out of it, for example...

If i do a lookup on www.slashdot.org then this query should newer hit any dns server controlled by Google.

The very first sentence of TA "...a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal..." It's a way for providers of content and providers of DNS service to collude.

only the first 3 octects of the IP address are transmitted...could not be used to expose you

Combining this with the information from the already quite pervasive tracking google does, I can't imagine that identifying your one-of-256-addresses is anything other than trivial.

In fact, the challenge list is defunct, the challenge having been canceled by RSA. The challenges are still scientifically interesting, so to call them obsolete is factually inaccurate.

You need to address this to the authors of the paper itself, since dtmos didn't "write" a "summary" so much as directly cut & paste from the paper's first paragraph. Yeah, yeah I did RTFA, what was I thinking...

The owner of the copyright has the *exclusive* right to make derivative works...I realize the slashdot crowd doesn't agree with all that, but it is the existing law.

Apart from the first statement being simply untrue (there are a number of uses permitted without the copyright holder's permisssion), it is also completely irrelevant - this case is not about copyright, it's about trademarks. I know the fudmongers want us all to be seduced into the "information is property" paradigm, but copyrights and trademarks (and for that matter, patents and trade secrets) are not the same thing at all, and blurring the distinctions between them does nobody any good. Before you go berating us all in your role as AC law expert you might want to get a better understanding of the law yourself.

B0 should be 0.75 m^2 right?

It depends on whether it's a French or a Japanese B series

A metric pizza would have a circumference of 1 meter

More likely metric would follow the pattern of paper sizing, so an A0 pizza would have an area of 1 square meter (for a diameter of ~ 113cm), an A1 pizza would be 0.5 square meters (diameter 80cm), A2 would have half that area and so on. A typical pizza would be A4 : an area of one sixteenth of a square meter, so a diameter of close to 30 cm.

Then there's the B series, which works in the same way, but starting from B0 having an area of 0.5 square meters, and with the inclusion of anchovys.

The same can be said of The Times in the UK. One of Britain's longest running papers and holder of all sorts of semi-official roles (newspaper of record, for example) it was bought by Murdoch in the '80s. Many of it's best editors were replaced or quit (highly respected Robert Fisk, for example, resigned because of political censorship), and it's focus shifted onto more popular subjects (celebrities, sport, etc).

It has also always backed Murdoch's candidate-of-choice in elections; during his support for New Labour it made many attacks on the Tories, and since Murdoch started backing the Tories again their focus has swung back the other way (although they're more natural Tory supporters anyway, so at least we're back where we started).

And let's not even get started on The Sun...