Cisco IronPort. We use it and rely on it heavily for secure emails regarding pii for our pension fund.

Then I can't (won't) read any email you send me.

To read Cisco IronPort mail you must install software from Cisco.

To install the software from Cisco you must sign an EULA - which makes a BIG POINT of being a binding contract.

The EULA has anti-reverse-engineering terms that, were I to sign them, would (IMHO) make me unemployable in the computer security field.

Therefore I will not install the software.

Therefore I cannot decrypt "secure" email you send me.

Therefore I will not do business with your company.

Do you REALLY want to FORCE your clients to CONTRACT WITH A THIRD PARTY and SIGN AWAY THEIR RIGHTS in order to exchange important email with you?

These days, no ID = no vote.

Not in my state. They cannot legally ask for ID at a polling place (not that it'd do any good if they did as you don't even need to be in the country legally to get a DL in New Mexico).

And you have a lot of election fraud, don't you.

This is one of the reasons the Electoral College, rather than national popular vote, to elect the President is a good idea. It limits the fraction of the vote margin that cheaters in one state can achieve.

It also limits the scope of recounts. Remember the mess a couple years back in Florida? Imagine if they had to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY in a close election...

The social security database in use for many years already has names, dates of birth, etc.

Worse: The medicare I.D. is the social security number followed by one letter as a "check digit".

That means every medical provider (Including places like Costco if you get a flu shot there) have your name, address, birth date, and SS# in their database and the hands of the clerks. A genealogy site profvides the mother's maiden name and identity theft is a snap. Talk about a target-rich (and predator-rich) environment.

Oldsters are observed to have a substantially higher rate of identity theft. Researchers noticing that, of course, have blamed the oldsters for allegedly being less competent at guarding their identities.

Getting Medicare to assign you qa non-SS$ I.D. is not an option. Turning down Medicare coverage is an option only for the very rich: Private insurance deducts the amount Medicare WOULD have paid from their benefits for anyone eligible for Medicare, whether they have registered for Medicare or not.

Whitehouse online petition, anyone?

ITAR also says that exporting blueprints and technical data related to an item requires an export permit in the same way that exporting the item does.

And this puts the ITAR rules in direct conflict with the First Amendment. Guess which wins: The Constitution, or a law?

This government action has just brought the conflict into scope for litigation and created a person with the necessary standing to bring the suit.

He's a law student, too.

(Also a self-proclaimed "anarchist libertarian, which I think is a slap at some of the recent anti-libertarian mouth-foaming among the Lamestream Media).

There are several well-funded (mainly by millions of gunnies' individual contributions) organizations whose charter includes supporting such suits. They've had considerable success lately - such as DC v. Heller (confirming 2nd Amendment protects an individual right) and McDonald v. Chicago ("incorporating" it, i.e. applying it to the states and their subdivisions.)

I think the government just opened themselves up to another 2nd Amendment suit. B-)

+ 3rd amendment = right to print arms... in your home.

That's incomplete. Make it:

+ 3rd amendment = right to print arms... in your home... unobserved by resident government agents (or their spyware equivalent)

The third amendment was not just about the government using your home as a free bed-and-breakfast for their army, but about preventing such government-mandated parasites being positioned where they could continuously spy on your activities at home. "Quartering troops" is an end-run around the "man's home is his castle" doctrine of English Common Law - or the Fourth Amendment protections. It is one of the places the Supreme Court found an implied "right to privacy" in the (amended) Consitiution.

I'm waiting for a case where the Third Amendment is used as an argument against government spyware, which is the electronic equivalent of quartering troops.

Also: See the covers of the Hitchhiker's Guide books for examples of similar features.

Actually it's the mouth and those are the teeth. Mars is just a big orange PacMan.

Is it dead or did it just decide to hibernate until quarters were invented and sent into space? More Research Needed (tm).

My point is that I want to be sure any prior art that might be useful for a challenge to the patent is brought out of obsurity, so the challenger's lawyers don't lose when they could have won had they known about it.

The net comic The Gods of ArrKelann has used a page-turning interface for years.

I'm not sure whether it was from the start of the run or if it got converted somewhere along the way. But it's pretty clearly a page-turning interface.

This is real research. Rigorous, cleanly factorized, unbiased, work shown for others to check.

Real, yes. Open for checking, yes. Rigorous, maybe. Ceanly factorized, not so much. Unbiased, it is to laugh.

Just from the summary I see two classic issues: Selection bias and confusing generational samples with age effects.

Selection bias is cascaded. First, it's sampling only people who joined facebook. Second, it's only sampling the subset who both heard about and chose to download and use the tool and let it watch their activity. I see close to a dozen classes of selection bias here.

Confusing generational samples with aging effects is a classic flaw. Of course when you're first doing a study looking for age effects, about all you CAN do is use generational cohort as a proxy for aging. But people from different generations have a host of differences besides age: Nutrition, nurturing fads, stress from wars and other disasters, disesae exposure, educational variations, and the list goes on.

One of the classic errors that arose from this is the belief among psychologists that intelligence ramps up nearly linearly until early adulthood, knees over, and then slowly drops with age. That lasted until standardized tests had been administered to the same groups over several decades, so the trajectories of the scores from particular individuals and groups could be tracked. It turns out that intelligence does rise and knee-out as described, but the gradual slope with age is UPWARD (even before discounting the higher incidence of specific brain-damaging disease processes with advanced age). The effect had been masked by another: People educated in earlier decades did less well on the things the tests scored.

You can see that this work - or at least those attempting to interpret it - has the same problem:

... and even how peoples' postings tend to evolve as they get older â" as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics.

Are today's older people more interested in politics because they've aged and have more understanding of them and/or are more affected by them? Or are they more interested because they grew up during or in the aftermath of WW II, Korea, the Cold War, and the mass movements and political suppression surrounding Vietnam and the clampdown on "recreational" drugs.
Are they less interested in video games because they're older or because video games DIDN'T EXIST YET when they had time to practice enough to become skilled?

Conflating age with cohort membership can lead to problems when you try to use the results of such research to predict how people will change with age. For instance: If video game interest is a symptom of low age you can expect people to "grow out of it" and current users to fade out as they find other interests, but if it's a symptom of cohort membership they may become MORE active as they mature further. If political activity is a symptom of age you can expect the young to become more active as they age, but if it's a symptom of life experience you might see new generations becoming active young (as with the Antiwar movement in the '60s and '70s and the Liberty movement today) and people of all ages suddenly becoming politically active after being "radicalized" by the stress of political events.

Seems to me the two issues are poster children for massive instutionalized policies of attacks on a technology rather than the misuse of it.

Massive to the point of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars wasted and far more damage done that prevented.

Think you've seen massive overreaction to misuse of torrents? Compare it to "The War On Drugs" and you ain't seen nothing yet.

Punish the technology because of how it is used? I thought we grew past that notion already.

If we had you'd be able to buy any weapon or drug you want without government interference or oversight.

The NRA could go back to its original functions of training and research, and the FDA and DEA to could be replaced by Underwriters' Laboratories and Consumers' Reports.

As you can see we have a long way to go.

.do we ignore the first law of thermodynamics? If these batteries charge 1,000 times faster then they must put off 1,000 times the heat or so one would think under the law.

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy isn't created or destroyed. It has nothing to do with charging rates. With respect to charging it just tells you that the stored energy added plus the losses (mostly heat) add up to the energy you supplied. (Second law says you have to lose SOMETHING to make the charging happen - though it doesn't say how much.)

The key here is battery resistance. The heat produced is proportional to the SQUARE of the current. If you charged a battery with the same resistance a thousand times as fast, you'd generate a MILLION times the heat.

Charge is determined by current times time. Maximum charging rate is determined by the highest charging current you can drive while creating heat no faster than it can be dissipated with the battery almost at the maximum temperature it can stand. Resistance tells you how much heat you generate at a given current. Cut the resistance by a factor of a million and you can multiply your charging rate by a factor of a thousand and get the same heat generation.

The micro-geometry of the plates in this case (along with most of the recent ultra-fast-charge battery designs) results in drastically lowered resistance.

A pre-emptive strike of MREs and candy bars should distract the entire populace of NK thoroughly and destabilize the regime.

Unfortunately, South Korea has been bombarding the North with propaganda leaflets for decades. To mitigate this, the North Korean propaganda machine has claimed these are germ warfare weapons. Many of their people literally believe that even touching something dropped by the US or North Korea will cause their hands to rot off.

Remember the Squeaky Axis of Evil gets the Grease.

Or greased.

Or Greece

(Of course, with the current state of their economy, what Squeaky Axis of Evil would want them?)