BBC's also on point on the legal analysis side: [http://www.newsy.com/videos/electronic_pirates_at_bay/] The quoted analogy to building a car that can exceed the speed limit and marketing it as "fast" is facile but effectively grounds and familiarizes a technology that IS unfamiliar to most people over 30. I'm uncertain as to the court system in Sweden, but if there are jurors, and they are over 30, that's going to help the defense immensely - especially since most people in that demographic aren't going to 'get' the humor in a group self-labeled as "Pirates" fighting what are essentially piracy charges. If these guys want to beat the corporations, they should get haircuts, buy some suits, and play the part of innovators in communication. They are just that, arguably, but they need to be recognized as such. This is a test case, but not really a legal one, it's more inter-generational values being brought into close proximity.

According to some dude on Fox, there's a "1 in 300" risk of catastrophic collision on every orbiter flight! That doesn't sound right. http://www.newsy.com/videos/russia_and_u_s_collide_in_space/

DEA + X-COM2* = drug sniffing dolphins * see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-COM:_Terror_from_the_Deep

encryption's been the issue since this thing was announced - http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/30/189212 I think the real issue isn't so much the spider mining, but the potential for data so stored to be considered "less private" by government and the courts until society and its norms catches up with technological innovation. People who wouldn't think to peek through a slot in a bathroom stall might not feel the same instinctual aversion to paging through someone's private photos or diaries if they're stored in some "newfangled" online virtual drive. It should be encumbent upon Google to provide obvious privacy-seeking options for its users to differentiate data stored in something like GDrive from other data posted to semi-public storage systems like megaupload. Then, the case that people had a "reasonable expectationt of privacy" would be more robust. Social acceptance of snooping and hacking online must be countered with industry policies designed to cultivate a sense of security based in reality that, if broken by government or private actor, cause immediate recognition of personal violation. Then the potential for online personal space becomes real.

Yipes! That's so much worse! That's probably why Reserve US Army personnel are directed to hide affiliation when utilizing civilian air transport internationally - as opposed to active duty personnel flying domestically to and from leave. That freaking sucks! Those kids should be able to get free beer, not dodge bullets.

Military personnel are also favored targets for petty thefts while on leave. In many European countries, the Army provides unmarked, but so obviously government vans (read: plain white 'child molestor' type) for use by service members there on training rotations when they want to take in the sights. Thefts and break-ins are rampant as a result, esp. in parking lots near popular tourist sites.

Instead of just wading through a billion "OMG Kid FAILS at Suzuki ghost-ride in front of hott!!!" videos mismarked as news, people can actually get to the most representative and informative feeds on emerging issues. Like a public newsroom.

Re (specifically): Palin's use of Hotmail. Wasn't so much a major scandal, more it fed into the snowbilly caricature that was forming about her, and it wouldn't have been an issue beyond being sort of goofy, if she hadn't been using it to exert some pretty official pressure regarding getting that dude fired. So, yeah, Obama using a blackberry is different.

Kerry would've probably offered him an internship as well, as long as it made everyone really uncomfortable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRB5DIYRfa0&eurl=http://wonkette.com/page/2

Bloggers should be aware that some of the free-est speech (for better or worse) occurs not in their blog posts, but in the comments those posts generate... See, for example, Glenn Harlan Reynolds. "Libel in the Blogosphere: Some Preliminary Thoughts" [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=898013#] where he writes: "...the blog operator is immunized from liability by the Communications Decency Act. 47 U.S.C. Â230(c)(1) provides that âoeNo provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.â As a result, libelous matter contained in comments posted on blogs by their readers, or emailed to blog publishers and subsequently reprinted, cannot give rise to a libel action against the blogger â" though of course the original source enjoys no such immunity." [internal citations omitted, DR]

She completely got me with those freaking cats.