There's been a lot of debate lately about the failed War on Drugs. Some say that legalizing drugs would take most of the income from murderous cartels, while others believe that the cartels would simple move into new markets. I have a win-win solution. Two of the core competencies of the cartels are: anonymously collecting money, and assassinating people. Let's legalize dope and pay the cartels to whack patent trolls. We free up a lot of prison space, increase tax revenues, cut spending, unfetter the economy, encourage actual innovation and product development, and scare some of the scu^W lawyers into hiding. Huge win all around. We'll have this deficit thing licked in about 3 years.

They were hoping electrons were shaped like Pac-man. This would where the antimatter went.

This is according to a friend of mine who used to tend bar at a Reno casino. I don't know how much has changed since then; maybe a local can tell us more. Slot machines in Nevada are regulated and required to pay out a certain percentage over time. This means that the longer one type of slot at a casino doesn't pay out, the higher the odds are that they will soon. Once a casino got to the point where a payoff was probable, a bus would pull up full of compulsive gamblers, all wearing the same windbreakers. They'd sit at every machine in the casino and play until someone hit the jackpot. These people were not allowed to keep their winnings (or not much of them), but their habit was paid for.

Since they never tipped, the bartenders hated them. Whenever they saw the bus pull up, they'd place drinks at the slots to reserve the spots.

Anyway, wherever there is money you will find corruption. Rule of law (applied equably), transparency, and cultural values are all that mitigate this. The only reason this doesn't happen in American for-profit prisons is that the money isn't good enough, yet. But the dollar continue to drop. Your kids might gold-farm for the Chinese.

...is that God did that freehand.

I can't believe I'm praising Iowa politics, but here goes: Iowa uses a simple grid and a computer to determine the maps. It's not perfect (the legislature can vote up/down on changes), but it's more fair than any other state. Also, we should get rid of the two-party system and use preference voting...

Here's a guy who calls a spate a spade.

Yep. The monitor industry apparently just quit about 4 years ago. No significant improvements since then; prices are up and resolutions are lower. Part of that is due to the focus on mobile, and part of it is due to the media industry (the LAST people you want defining tech specs) taking over. 1080p ought to be good enough for anybody-- nobody will notice, especially with the horribly lossy compression your "HD" signal from Comcrap will use. So going from 1920x1080 to 19200x1200 will run you about $200. Ridiculous. As for those of us who want to do actual work... well, there are fewer of us all the time anyway. The media/ISP industry and the usual leader in new technologies, Apple, is making every effort to turn people into consumers, not builders.

Right now I have scripts to list the current ruleset, figure out the deltas between the new ruleset and old, add or remove rules as appropriate, and save that config to disk for reboots. It works well enough, better than restarting iptables, but it should be more efficient with these changes. I wondered why there wasn't a method (that I found; correct me if I'm wrong) for running batch changes without invoking the iptables command for each change.

Like Fon?

Thunderbolt looks like a very useful technology. Unfortunately it will add several dollars to the cost of the PC, so probably only Macs will support it, so it'll be hard to find good, cheap monitors etc., and ultimately it will fail. Unless the PC manufacturers decide to grow a pair and do something useful for a change. The PC industry seems committed to the worst possible technologies that people will buy.

Nope, he flipped a 180 on FISA before he was elected. Nobody who might inconvenience the wiretap community will make it anywhere near the levers of power. Which is why a handful of us opposed these power grabs from day one, and were told we were being silly, that there were sunset clauses, there would be oversight, it was just a slight expansion....

Yep, funny how often those innocent people shoot at cops. Also google "drop gun."

I guess he means there won't be any scripting capabilities at all? And things that crash programs or OS are not malware, only things that execute valid code.

Learn something new every day.

Now the TSA will demand to inspect, copy, or seize removable media crossing such vulnerable public infrastructure as airports, train and bus stations, and sidewalks. Schumer and Lieberman will introduce legislation to require 3G transmitters in all thumb drives.

Yep. A modern client should have collapsible threading, notifications (via various methods-- SMS, email, facebook, IM, controlled by user per site/domain). It shouldn't be tied into Facebook just because FB has a half-way competent implementation; it should be an open standard that does *not* require a single, real, trackable ID. But it *should* involve a computational cost to generate accounts, to mitigate spam. And killfiles, reputation services (think adblock lists) should all be in the spec (so you can subscribe to lists for spammers, trolls, shills, and "people who for all intensive purposes dont know how to use your apostrophe's").