If your security consists of
a) A poorly maintained barb-wire fence
b) A gate manned by a 75-year-old semi-dead/blind security guard named fred

And records are stored in a big box just inside an unlocked door easily accessible to anyone, then yes... they would be responsible.

It's not that they weren't a "victim" of hacking, it's that their terrible data retention and security practises put customer-data at risk and enabled the hacking.

A common (generally mild) side effect is dry eyes, especially recently after the surgery, but often for longer time periods as well. I have enough issues with dry eyes due to allergy/hayfever, so I'd really hate to aggravate the situation. Of course, I'm lucky enough to only need glasses for driving in the later hours, so I'm not wearing them constantly anyhow.

The second would be that it would screw up my near-vision for reading in the future, meaning I'd need reading glasses (probably more often than I need driving glasses). One solution would be to only laze one eye , but that takes longer to adjust too and I'm not sure it's worth it.

One of the reasons these would be awesome on Linux:
* PXE boot game environments

There are a surprising number of people who enjoy playing nostalgia games. I have a PXE server which - through some custom scripts - loads the appropriate fglrx/nvidia driver and the loads a custom GUI with various games. There are some native linux games but most are loaded through wine and do a lot of trickery involving COW filesystems and a remote DB to get a unique (legit) serial key loaded on individual machines for net-play.
The linux-native games tend to be a lot easier to get up and running, and have less issues than the wine games. Thus far I've got BF1942, C&C3, UT4, DN3D, iWAR and various other "classics."
I'd love to see these games with native Linux support so I can avoid all the complications and bugs with wine. It would make "classic game night" so much more fun...

Yeah. Emulators for disc-based systems will often read original disks (although to be fair, they often do tend to work better with ISO's).
For a GB hack, it would cool to see this with something like a USB/serial interface to the original cart slot.

Agent Smith, we need to be on the watch for these pathogens entering our soil. Here, open this bottle and take a sniff. Note the scene. If you detect any of these while on shift, please inform your superior immediately.

Now, please report to quarantine room C for the next 36 hours....

I don't get it. Samsung, Sony, etc have Blu-ray players, they've got Android phones, why not combine both technologies into one awesome media box?

So I got to thinking... "surely somebody has thought of/tried this somewhere by now"

I've found this thus far. It says it supports 3d blu-ray and menus... though I don't see where you would insert the discs (hopefully it's not just for rips)

That used to be the advantage of cheap DVD players too.
The bigger brand names respected region encoding, un-skippable previews/warnings, etc. The cheaper ones were sometimes a bit noisy (parts movement) but generally they didn't bother to implement "features" such as region-lock or unskippable sections, which actually made them more useful.

There don't seem to be as many off-brand Blu-ray players, especially if you want one with Netflix etc. I'd love to see an android-based system which combines something like a Minix X8 or Asus Cube and a Blu-ray. Bonus points if somebody could come up with a blu-ray "shell" which basically includes the drive, power, and infrared remote but allows an upgradable android core for the advanced OS features. It shouldn't be hard to have something which just plugs into the base for power and connects to the drive via a OTG interface. The biggest issue is probably stuff like the Java and copy protection/licensing crap.

Also, how much of said "private data" is actually harvested the phone itself, other than perhaps location data?
Gmail: That goes to Goog's servers before your phone
Talk: Same thing
Contacts: Can be kept on just the phone without sync (for that matter, sync can be toggled on/off for most things)
Browsing history: Do they get anything if you use firefox instead of chrome, and/or don't sync bookmarks?
Maps/Latitude: Location stuff can be turned off

Most of the ways they can get information *from* the phone seem inherent in the functionality being used: i.e. use of gmail, maps, etc

It would be interesting to learn what data is being "sync'ed" beyond that needed to get the functionality out of the given apps.

Or just turn off all location services. On every phone I've got, it's usually a question during the initial installation process.

Yeah. I don't find the implication (that I'm black, gay, whatever) offensive so much as the terms themselves, which are particularly vile as their basic connotation is that somebody of whatever group is less valuable as a human than others.

Erm, read my comment. I'm certainly not saying this is acceptable, what I am saying is that all bad behaviour gets "reported" under some fairly narrow categories. Having a better way of report - and dealing with - such behaviour would be beneficial to all.

For example, if you're reporting personal threats, a report could also scan the chat log for key-words and escalate. Racial/sexist could scan stuff like the N word or b**ch. As there are probably quite a lot of reports, this should help push stuff that's more serious and beyond the typical "noob, loser" etc up the chain.

There's no reason an improvement to such a system couldn't benefit not only women, but everyone.

The difference here as usual is that women expect to be treated differently

The difference is that people pay more attention when it's not a random white male complaining. Seriously, I could do without that shit too, but when I complain about it, I'm a whiner. When a woman complains about it, it's a potential gender-discrimination issue. Ya know what though, if women can clean that shit up - at the very least so that 20+ men aren't acting like 12-yr-old boys - hopefully it will improve things for everybody. That sounds fine to me.

I'm fine with the occasional noob or "you suck", but some people really seem to take being offensive as their goal in life, to the point where the only thing they seem to want is to make everyone else have a shitty time.

So for (b), if Linda is consistenly a serious issue, then Fred reports it. If he reports it multiple times and it isn't dealt with, then he sues the company for harassment.
Literally telling Linda to go f*** herself isn't really a winning response in any situation.

I represent that remark. The fact is that men are expected to want sex, so unless it's guy-on-guy or somebody twice your age, it's not taken seriously.
That said, I'd imagine that penetrative rape - the type commonly suffered by females - is a lot more traumatic.