If 9/11 changed the rules as you say, then why have there been several successful (read: control of the plane was taken) hijackings since then?

IIRC there have been no successful hijackings of American airplanes since 9/11. Perhaps passengers on foreign airliners didn't learn the lesson of 9/11 quite so well.

There is this little guy, it doesn't seem to be vaporware but they are still in their beta phase, which means what you would get right now will not be as good as whatever they release next year. They seem to be on top of orders right now, but again it's not a completely polished product.

It sure looks slick though, I've been thinking of getting one myself.

Disclaimer, I am an atheist.

That out of the way, one might be able to say that, for any religion where we are inferior to God, animals are to us as we are to God. From that, one might be able to make the argument that being given dominion over the animals might be a sort of "test" and that we should practice restraint on some activities.

When you are charged with a crime, that is generally a matter of public record, and is often published in the newspaper. If the person is later found not guilty, there is no compensation for the information having been published in the newspaper. Why should there be compensation if the information is tweeted?

Interesting, I was hoping for a comment like that.

I'm considering doing something like Systems Biology (MSc + PhD). I don't think I want to spend my life doing programming jobs, but I do enjoy it. ...and looking at the deadlines for applications, I need to hurry up and decide unless I want to do another year-and-a-half of work.

What do you mean "stuck in a small cube"? I've got tons of space. My employer has reduced our local development team from 7 people down to just me and now I've got the entire area to myself.

Philosophers! Artists! Legislators! Gather round! The age old debate of art versus porn has finally been solved:

Nobody in their right mind has any difficulty distinguishing between depictions of nudity and pornography - the fundamental problem with porn is not that it depicts naked people engaged in the natural activity of copulation, but that it is so obviously false and artificial.

So if two people film themselves shagging all night long, and then post it on YouTube, everyone would agree it's not porn? Porn is only when it's pretend, but if you do it for real, it stops being porn?

Porn, in my view, does not make people obsessed with sex - it turns you off from it; especially if you imagine this is the way it should be.

If only the legislators agreed...

Quoting TFA again:

"Krak" is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix "-oo": "krak-oo" seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context -- when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.

The "boom-boom" call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" is the monkey's version of "Timber!" -- it warns of falling trees.

Another way of expressing the problem I see with these examples: the researchers are looking at the individual calls "boom," "krak" and "-oo" as analogues of human language words or morphemes. However, if you look at them as analogues of syllables instead, then the argument looks much more flimsier. The English word disco shares a syllable with both disfluency and psycho, but that is not evidence of syntax or morphology; the meaning of disco is not a function of the meanings of dis and co.

I made you a link to An interesting graph.

Do you understand why we have questions now?

True, but I'd expect it to help: almost all muscles operate in pairs, to flex a joint one way or the other. By keeping strong muscles operating in pairs, I'd expect that to produce stress that improves bone strength.

No, they stop calling when you tell them "My rate is $300 per hour with a $3,000 deposit up front." I had to tell a former employer this when they kept calling me with questions, and didn't take no for an answer. They later had a recruiter call me offering almost $40K more to come back. Sorry, you burned a bridge when you fucked me and others over to hire cheap Indian labor - and it ended up being $23 million they threw into the dumpster because the product they ended up with was a pile of shit that ran slower than the legacy code they never gave us the go-ahead to rearchitect and rewrite from scratch. The product has long since been shitcanned (they spend two weeks a year on maintenance on it - That's IT) and the company has since been bought and the original CEO fired. I guess the VC firms finally had enough after they burned through about $100mil.

Believe it or not, there are some embedded devices which don't have the CPU juice for WPA2, so they were given a BIOS update so they can run something better than WEP as some form of security. WPA has its issues, but it sure beats WEP.

The best wireless setup is to have two wireless SSIDs. Your internal one that runs off of WPA2-Enterprise, RADIUS server, and smart cards. Then an external one that has a stern packet filter and throttling mechanism. This way, people can log on your open wireless to check E-mail, but Limewire and other P2P apps will be stopped. Of course, someone can jump that, but if they do that, its not your problem anymore.

I do see one use for MAC address security, and its more of a legal thing than computer protection. If a security breach criminal case winds up in court, and you can prove a potential intruder was bypassing your MAC security, it might land a conviction. Otherwise, someone can make up a story of you allowing people to have your WPA2 passwords, etc.

Here's a few good reasons that "nothing to hide" is a crock of crap:

1. The government is run by humans, which almost by the definition of the word are inherently fallible.
2. The government, also by definition, has the power to disrupt your life/put you in jail/confiscate your goods,
3. The above two combine to form a chilling effect upon your rights being exercised as you see fit.
4. Just as with quantum mechanics, the government cannot snoop without causing side effects in what they're snooping on.

So plenty of people have a darn good reason to not want government nosiness even IF they are not breaking the law.

"A college professor at Texas A&M, Dr. Salih Yurtas told us that he believed comments were useless. His argument was that people rarely pay enough attention to code comments and that since developers often add them at the last minute after the program is finished, they are often incomplete."

Right, and seatbelts are useless because people often don't use them, or they fail to buckle them properly.

It's more than that. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, wrote that he'd delete the data before he'd turn it over to "skeptics". Then they claim that they "lost" the data some time in the 80's. That seems to imply that he deleted the data far more recently than the 80's, say in the last couple of years. That would be a crime, not merely "not properly responding to an FOIA request".

5) They arranged to have certain research excluded from IPCC's survey of climate science literature. The influence of the CRU on the IPCC process (which in turn provides the primary political justification for carbon emission reduction) was significant.
6) The code comments indicate that much of the data was poor quality, further that much of the "improperly calibrated" data wasn't afterwards "properly calibrated" (at least to the knowledge of the programmer).