The USPS doesn't offer many hackable interfaces for information thieves worldwide to view mailed articles. Use of certified mail provides a degree of accountability for its handling.

There is no perfectly confidential way to get a document, whether paper or bits, from one's fingers to somebody else's eyes. You're free to judge the risks differently and make the decision that best suits you. I'm still mailing my returns the old-fashioned way.

This self-respecting slashdotter doesn't e-file for two reasons.

First, there is no technical need for an intermediary to receive and forward my data to the IRS. Nobody seems to acknowledge that involvement of intermediaries means there are more interfaces that might be hacked to reach my data. No thanks.

Second, the reason that there are even intermediaries is that (and I wish I could cite a source for this but it's too long ago, mid-1990's) when the IRS originally proposed that taxpayers file directly, the software lobby successfully argued that removing the intermediaries would result in the loss of jobs. The government didn't want to cause job loss, so it caved and now requires those intermediaries.

My tax filings are on paper to protest the idiocy.

My county was flooded and has been given until May 11 to file and pay taxes. I will file for an automatic extension and procrastinate to the fullest extent of the law!

The magnifying glass is scorching only the Western Hemisphere because it's been placed in a geosynchronous orbit. NASA is rumored to be preparing to reposition it to LaGrangian Point L1 to provide a greater degree of stability, provided that they can account for positional oscillation resulting from the moon revolving around the Earth. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum is preparing to return the Hubble Space Telescope's COSTAR lens to NASA for refurbishing and redeployment to correct LENS' focal length for its new location.

Aside from being able to put away our asbestos suits, another direct benefit of placement at L1 is a smaller footprint in the sky, letting more of the sun's light reach Earth.

I haven't wtfv (watched the video), but 4-D can be represented in 3- and 2-D using projections, just like we regularly watch 3-D images projected into 2 dimensions (TV, video games).

Think of a cone, a 3 dimension shape. In the 3-to-2 dimension projection, that cone can look like a triangle, a circle, an ellipse, or an ellipse with a point, all depending on how you rotate it.

Now imagine that there's a 4-D shape whose projection changes appearance as the shape is rotated about its fourth-dimensional axis. There's no reason you can't have one projection of it that shows a cube, and another of the same object that shows a sphere.

It's tough to conceive of what this shape looks like since we can't see or experience it in four dimensions. But it's still possible to develop enough of a concept of the shape to recognize its various projections, learn how they're connected, and eventually be able to navigate it.

Projecting a shape from 4 to the 2 dimensions of a screen will lose an awful lot of information, but we seem to be good at developing a 3-D concept based on motion and visual cues.

Interesting stuff.

Not an issue. We'll hit the Mayan calendar 2012 bug first.

There are always going to be churn and minor movements of users among services, but I think people who have a lot invested in a network, e.g. home pages, relevant postings, active participation in groups, many photos, lots of friends they actually do interact with, etc., probably aren't going to pick up and leave en masse unless there's some grossly distasteful change in the policies or terms of service. If you're providing the service, you don't make those grossly distasteful changes at once, you progress toward them in increments that each fall below users' overall threshold of discomfort.

On the whole, we're still in the middle of a huge transition in the ways we communicate with each other, and the degrees to which we trust third parties with information that rightfully belongs to us. Facebook is no more accountable to its users than any other service; and no matter how much we might bitch and moan about changes in their privacy policies, the fact is that they are going to use our information in as many ways as they can to make money. Sharing information directly with third parties is the most obvious, but there are plenty of indirect means.

Now that we can't hide ourselves, we're bound to attract more friends. Every one of those relationships is a potential revenue stream, either directly or indirectly. Folks at MIT recently demonstrated that they can determine to a high probability who on Facebook is gay without knowing anything about them except their friends. I'm sure the same technique applies to religion, various types of hobbies, and a number of other things we don't always give as much thought to, like criminals, terrorists and the like. These affiliations and attributes have to be a gold mine for someone, and the policy changes are a new mother lode.

I'm glad that EPIC, FTC, etc., are interested in our privacy, as they can exert pressure to change things in ways that we as users cannot. What I'd really like to see out of all this might be some kind of formal privacy impact review before changes to social networking policies are made. Any change that degrades privacy would need to be identified by third parties, justified or mitigated by the social network, then reviewed again until it's clear that users will be better off after the change than they were before. I think that expecting users to flee a service following troublesome changes is unrealistic. The users are caught between a rock and a hard place, and Facebook will continue twisting their arms as long as the users are paying more attention to their friends and apps than they are to their privacy.

It will be sad, yet very interesting at the same time, to see what happens when lost privacy demonstrably results in crimes of various sorts. Facebook may find that its greed has a higher human price than it might ever have realized.

Look for science gifts in areas that you know well. This way you can extend the teaching far beyond the instructions by showing the kids all the other things the gift can do. This means that you'll have fun too, and the kids will think you're really smart! You can also toss instructions you happen not to like for some reason.

Happy order of magnitude! May you see many more!