Obama has had at least two American citizens assassinated, one of whom the 16-year-old son of the other in a separate incident, and neither of them had been convicted of treason nor sentenced to death by a US court. So your trust is highly misplaced.

The decision-making authority isn't just in the hands of ONE man - the Justice Department's memo says that it has to be a "high-level official", with no footnotes about the definition of "high-level", so presumably it needs to be at least a FIRST lieutenant.... And while you're quite right about the "no checks and balances" part, there's no guarantee that Obama has always been involved, though he does officially have first dibs.

The Constitution's fairly clear about it. "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." That's quite different from "decided by a high-level official".

On the other hand, if making war against Americans is treason, and you're using the US military to send drone strikes to kill specific American citizens who aren't convicted traitors, that's making war against Americans.

Most of the PDFs I read are documents that are formatted for printing on dead trees, and PDF's job is to reproduce ink marks precisely. Some of them, like the 2000+ page hardware manuals, are relatively readable on a laptop screen at the appropriate resolution, but journal articles etc. are formatted in 2-column 8.5x11 or A4 paper, which is entirely the wrong shape to read on anything other than dead trees or maybe a retina-quality iPad turned portrait-mode, which I don't have. So if I'm at work, I'll print them out on the laser printer, in 2-up double-sided mode, and they're usually relatively readable.

Ok, the parent article on Print-to-PDF was off topic if you think the topic is "3-D printing". If you think the topic is "Other obvious printing types the poll left out", then it's perfectly cromulent.

Mersenne primes have a structure that makes it possible to test primality for very large numbers; there's no way to test whether unrestricted numbers of that size are prime (it's theoretically possible, but there aren't enough computing resources on the planet.)

I used to run the GIMPS search application back in the 90s; you really really don't want to run it on a laptop on batteries, especially with the battery technology of the time, and eventually I decided that my laptop didn't have enough horsepower to bother, compared to desktops that could run GPU-based calculations.

The Onion, America's Finest News Source, recently posted an article saying they'd also given all their passwords to the Chinese.

The Onion, America's Finest News Source, reports that it's cooperating with the Chinese government by giving them its employees' passwords. So it's not just the NYT and WSJ.

There's a large ecosystem that provides most of the pieces - call centers that accept calls, equipment and service providers for making calls, workers willing to listen to abuse for low pay, credit card companies that will pay merchants. Long distance telephone calls cost next to nothing even before VOIP made them cheaper, and the Caller ID system wasn't designed to prevent spoofing (in fact, spoofing is a feature, because it lets your office PBX output your phone number instead of the main number for the office, etc.) You can pretty much outsource the whole scam, and do the potentially-getting-arrested parts from outside the US.

And since "Cardholder Services" isn't already a fake scam business, there's no reason that another scammer can't take advantage of Rachel's reputation and run their own scam.

On their last few calls, I've been offering "Rachel"'s minions opportunity to make $50,000 for ratting out their boss to the FTC. I've gotten some really amusing profanity in return.

Sure, there's all this political correctness about how it's rude to run over people and crash into cars because you were texting while you should have been driving. But that's not the real reason I don't do that...

The #$#$* HTC Android 2.1-update1 text application uses too small a font size, and doesn't let the user change the font, so I have to put on my reading glasses if I want to read texts, and I have to take them off if I want to see past the dashboard. Yes, Android has a little microphone widget on its keyboard so you can theoretically create text message bodies by voice, but the rest of the user interface still requires you to read it, so you can tell it you want to create a text, push the little icon, figure out if the words it guessed were even vaguely correct, tell it who you want to send the text to, etc., so it's really no help.

A decent text application would give the user a choice of font sizes, and would at least have the option of reading text-messages using text-to-speech. An insanely great text application would let you use it entirely under voice control.

The Arduino Esplora is an interesting starting point. It's a slightly bigger board, shaped like a game controller, with buttons, joystick, potentiometer, accelerometer, temperature sensor, light sensor, buzzer, microphone, RGB LED, a few other LEDs, LCD connector, and some 3-pin I/O connectors. So if has a lot of the sensors and toys you might want to play with already built in. You can program it with the Arduino software (though a few pins already have stuff attached to them, so if you want to run an existing Arduino application you may need to change what pins to use for what devices.) It doesn't accepts Arduino shields, so there are times you'd be better off with other models, but you've got lots of cool stuff to start with. I think the list price is about $50-55 from Arduino, and I saw one for about $65 in Radio Shack.

The Esplora and the new Leonardo have some other differences from the standard Uno - they use small surface-mount ATmega32u4 chips instead of the bigger socketed through-hole ATmega328 that the Uno has, so you can't just pop the chip in and out. The 32u4 has a few more pins, and has built-in USB support, so it has more flexibility for doing USB applications and doesn't need a dedicated chip for the USB interface the way the earlier Arduinos have.

Arduino has a really short friendly learning curve - the system is designed so a random not-very-technical artist can pick it up, start doing blinky lights and sensors, find lots of interesting community support and demonstrations and applications. All the pieces you need to get started are right there - hardware, software, IDE, sensors, output devices, documentation. The Arduino hardware is fancier than a bare-bones AVR chip on a breadboard (and building one of them is a good second project), but it's still pretty cheap. The software may hold your hand a bit too aggressively, but once you've learned what you're doing you can get deeper (think of it as a mostly-C scripting language.) If you'd rather use gcc to write your programs at the bare-metal level and avrdude to download them, you can, but Arduino lets you do your work at higher levels until you need that. You could buy an ISP programming tool for $20-50 to program raw AVR chips with, but you can also use a ~$30 Arduino to do that job, so just go buy one.

Once you've used the Arduino a bit, you might want to branch out to a TI or STM development board, or something like Propeller with a lot more CPU horsepower if you need that, or PIC (if you want to know what people used to learn on before Arduino.)

Stuff you're going to have to buy - whatever prototyping board you want (I'd recommend Arduino), a solderless breadboard or two, solid-core wire in a couple of colors, some LEDs, assorted resistors and capacitors, probably several different types of sensors and output devices, maybe a power supply (USB gives you 5v, which is just fine if you're doing everything tethered to your laptop or have a USB phone charger around.) If you don't have electronics stuff around home already, you'll probably end up spending $100 or so, typically for a kit from Sparkfun or Adafruit or MakerShed, plus some random shiny-looking parts from their catalogs, plus you'll start to find Radio Shack very useful when you need to stop in and get some more LEDs or various connectors (and get yourself a bag of assorted resistors and a bag of assorted capacitors if you didn't have enough from a kit.) If you're going to solder boards, you'll also need a soldering iron, solder, and some breadboard to work with.

RC4 stream cyphers get broken all the time. The problem isn't the RC4 - it's using the stream cypher carelessly, for instance restarting a stream from a known point with different data. (That's one of the half-dozen things that killed PPTP, for instance.)

Santa Ana's first offer in the peace negotiations after he lost the US-Mexican war would have also given the US Chihuahua and Sonora, and the US turned him down. It was debatable whether Mexico really could say they controlled those two states; they were mostly unconquered Indians at the time, and I'm not sure if they'd yet found silver there.

In this posting, below, Animats points to an article that says it's really a peering fight between Orange and Cogent, an ISP that Google uses for transit. More detail in techdirt. At least 90% of the time, if you see an article about "ISP Peering Fight", Cogent is one of the players. They're really big, they're really cheap, and they sell lots of bandwidth to content providers. They're pretty much the bottom of Tier 1 - they'd like to get free peering from all the other Tier 1 providers, but that doesn't always happen, and occasionally somebody decides not to peer with them.

Content providers and Eyeball providers each think that the other side should pay them money. After all, content's worthless if nobody can see it. But consumer eyeballs only buy your broadband service if there's something to see. And the transport-oriented networks get squeezed by both sides, which is one reason they usually end up buying or being bought by consumer broadband networks.

No, no, Obama's not going to kick Texas out of the Union just because all those Confederates signed that petition. They don't want to be in the US any more, so he's going to give it back to Mexico.