Boris looks like he was former KGB, then went through some rough times, then found me. Oddly, he also tends to wag his tail, like he grew up with dogs.

Is your cat waking you up to get fed?

My cats used to do that and I got tired of it, so I set my phone to ring a particular ring tone at feeding time. It took them three meals at most to connect the breakfast/dinner bell to breakfast/dinner, and now they never hound me for food at all. They will gather around when the time nears, but they don't start clawing at my legs or batting my face while I sleep. They wait patiently, hear the bell, and run to the kitchen.

Also, one thing that keeps them happy, is to play with them for about 15 or 20 minutes before dinner -- cats are wired to hunt, kill, eat, groom, sleep. This works really good at keeping down fights between cats because they're all so satisfied.

wish I'd saved a mod point for you. Very funny.

1. land that is used to grow corn for ethanol is necessarily not used to grow other types of food for people and livestock.

It isn't just that other food can't be grown on farmland, unused land perviously set aside for conservation is being tilled to plant corn, which releases stored CO2 from the soil. Massive amounts of additional fertilizer are being applied -- fertilizer is made from natural gas. This fertilizer is increasing the size of the Gulf Dead Zone.

source: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/11/5902607/the-secret-dirty-cost-of-obamas.html

Corn is not sugar cane. Brazil can get away with ethanol because sugar cane is 6x more productive than corn: favorable corn estimates have an energy return about 1.3x energy expended while cane returns about 8x energy expended. If we were to have a rational ethanol policy, we'd make friends with Cuba and buy rum for our cars.

Yes. There is an unwritten exception for Federal Employees of course. For example, see James Clapper lying to Congress about scooping up phone data. Lying to Congress is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Clapper hasn't even lost his job, let alone faced prosecution.

Yeah whatever. How about the State Secrets Doctrine which really took hold after the widows of some RCA engineers sued the USAF after the plane their husbands were on crashed (they were testing some equipment). The widows wanted the crash report, the USAF said it contained secrets. No judge, not even any on the Supreme Court, ever checked to see if the USAF was flat out lying. Which they were as it turns out. 40 years later when the accident report was declassified, it contained no national security level secrets. It did contain information that the USAF neglected to maintain the plane properly and neglected to install heat shields in the engines -- a manufacturer recommended modification to prevent engine fires. The plane that killed the geeks on board suffered engine fires exactly like those the modification was designed to prevent.

So yeah, the Feds have waived SI to some extent, but that won't stop them from lying to everyone and anyone, even the Supreme Court, in order to cover up malfeasance and negligence.

http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/resources/publications/washington_lawyer/october_2008/books.cfm

The State Secrets Doctrine has been used by the Feds to get away with all kinds of crap, most recently of course, with a focus telecommunications masspionage, preventing people who were innocent and tortured from seeking redress, and so forth. As for the 4th Amendment -- it's a joke because of the Third Party Doctrine which equates "reasonable expectation of privacy" to "complete and total secrecy." Anything that is not absolutely secret has no 4th Amendment protection, and if you think about, barely anything in modern life does not include third parties in some way. The whole fucking post 9/11 debacle has the Feds using the State Secrets Doctrine and the Third Party Doctrine as a bulldozer to burry every American ideal we've pretended to revere for centuries.

So again, whatever. If a Fed. agent dings your bumper, the Feds will pay out, but the sovereign immunity waiver is only for such trivial things. If it matters, the Feds will fuck you over till Christmas, and then kick you in the teeth before taking a crap on you.

Yes, but with a replaceable battery, you can carry a spare.

I don't know what the deal is with thin -- beyond a certain point it just doesn't matter and in fact, makes the phone harder to hold really. But I don't think people will be happy till phones are as thin as a razor -- who cares about the gashes and gushes of blood so long as the phone is thin thin thin!

The particular android phone I wanted to get was the HTC One (I have an HTC Amaze and it's a great phone, removable battery too). The One however, has an embedded battery. So I haven't bought it.

http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one/#specs

Point taken.

Either the police and weev should be in jail, or both should be free. This is a good example of the double legal standard applied to pleebs and those in power.

There is a distinction between this and the situation in weev. It doesn't seem like a big distinction to people who are even vaguely familiar with URLs but to many legal professionals, a large percentage of whom are technically incompetent (the number of law offices I've seen running open access points or WEP encrypted wireless networks in my office building is pretty astounding). This isn't true for all in the legal community, and I'm sure it is getting less common as time goes by, but there are still a lot of people in the legal community who basically think of their computers as glorified typewriters their assistants use.

Anyway, Weev had to manipulate a URL to get the information. He even wrote a script to do this. We know that this is trivial, but to many in the legal community, that is high order hacking because if they can't just click it, it doesn't exist. The markup making the page is just gibberesh outside being interpreted in a browser and if you curl, awk, grep, and/or sed the text that makes up that page to extract info, you are obviously an elite hacker.

In contrast, the files offered up on a public P2P network can be obtained by clicking on them. You don't need to brush of your bash scripting skills to get them. So it is the difference between getting something with a click, and getting something by manual manipulation of a URL.

All that said, I agree with the poster above who quite insightfully wrote "silly peasant, aristocracy has its own set of laws and courts." http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4437999&cid=45404191 In either case, if you make information available on a public web service of one sort or another, it really seems ridiculous to argue that people who use that public info should be punished (in this case, the police used the public info, in Weev's, Weev used the public info -- I think Weev, as much of an asshole as he is, shouldn't be in jail for that, and that here, the police weren't in the wrong).

First Spoof.

Though this is no laughing matter.

if those were options, I'd use them. But they aren't.

I think I'm at best an average driver. Whole stretches of the road seem to disappear and all I can recall is the story I was listening to or the thing I was thinking about. Anyway, I hate driving and would jump at the chance to be a passenger.

Blame Bush Blame Bush Blame Bush Blah Blah Fucking Neocon Blah.

The expansion of Executive power under GWB was considered radical at the time.

The consolidation of that Executive coup by the Obama Administration is even worse, because what was once considered radical, is now the new normal.

It seems it has become the job of the GOP to advance the authoritarian goal line, and the job of the Democrats to get everyone to accept it.

So yeah, Obama is a terrible odious fuckhead of president. Just like GWB.