Nope, alpha. Cheers.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, a small factory made glow-in-the-dark clock and watch faces across the street from the bakery and kitchens for my school district. They used a paint which released tritium as it dried, and their fume hoods vented out the roof (why not? plenty of air circulation!) and the prevailing breezes carried a nice dose of alpha particles across the street on most days to settle out on the food that we were served. When somebody somewhere was tipped off that this arrangement may not have been completely kosher, some local muckrakers and a couple of curious scientists showed up with a Geiger counter. One dish in particular, sunshine cake, was damn hot and legend has it that the name alludes to its brightness....I blame all my societal maladjustment on this lapse in food safety.

Kids, don't trust the food just because the lady with the hairnet says it's OK. Get it checked out by one of the guys in the hazmat suits.

Damn straight...I had been using Skype chat for at least a couple of years before trying FB chat. I don't think Skype's implementation is anything special, but it's pretty solid and utilitarian enough that in spite of our location at the end of one of the world's longest undersea tethers, the Southern Cross Cable, I take it for granted (my wife and I use it to hail one another across the floors of our house). FB's is abysmal by comparison.

And I hope the door hits him in the ass on the way out, too.

Saying "It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun" when they're talking about the interaction of the solar wind and the magnetosphere is more than a little disingenuous....

Back-to-school time here in the Southern Hemisphere is February....Hey, come on, ten percent of the earth's population lives south of the equator!

Cheers for that clear-eyed assessment...you said exactly what I was thinking.

The ability to spend does not deserve the status of protected expression. Money is not a message -- it is an amplifier, and one which increases the noise far out of proportion to the signal. Campaign finance limits exist to prevent oligarchy.

The defendant lived in Minnesota at the time the investigation took place. If the result of the investigation was to furnish evidence of an alleged activity which took place in the state of Minnesota, to be tried in a Minnesota court, then shouldn't there be a requirement for state oversight of the investigator? Or is the next Nigerian cottage industry going to involve a swarm of C&D letters? Whatever the answer, I sure as hell won't ever move to Minnesota if that's how individual rights are treated.

So is the judge saying that any old schmuck can skip being licensed as a P.I., then go out and collect evidence (possibly in bad faith) on private citizens, and have it be admissible in court?

Whoa. I smell a business opportunity writ large.

There are entire floors of NYC skyscrapers full of racks modeling the financial markets in real time, conducting transactions, and crunching numbers for human analysts.

Using flawed algorithms and crap assumptions as input. See where that got us.

Please. "Impact" is not a transitive verb unless the subject happens to be a tooth.

Ain't that the truth. What's even more disturbing is that Key's center-right National Party made a deal with the devil in allowing the wacko-radical right ACT to be a confidence and supply partner. Now many of the policies emanating from the Beehive of late appear to have been written or vetted by Rodney Hide and the country's most thoroughly discredited economic "thinker," Roger Douglas.

It seems the Kiwis got fed up with a somewhat arrogant and out-of-touch, but relatively able, Labour government. They voted themselves three years of reverse progress as a result. There's hope though: The Maori Party may wake up to the rogering they're getting as a coalition partner when the Foreshore and Seabed legislation is revisited, and trigger a vote of no confidence. I'm not betting the farm on it.

If you cared about it at all, it's backed up somewhere. Securely, of course. Tell your attorney to deposit the artifacts for safekeeping. Of course, this point dovetails nicely with their advice on retention and secure deletion.

EFF! That's who.

Nice site, has thorough and accessible explanations of things that the non-geek-yet-somewhat-paranoid digital populace really need to get clued up. The section on FISA, particularly the Beyond FISA page, is a must read. That Fourth Amendment sure was nice while it lasted....