If someone posits that a worker at the lab was sloppy, which resulted in an accidental exposure, then ended up spreading the virus to their close contacts outside the lab, how can that be classed as a "conspiracy theory"?

It doesn't require a group of people to conspire to result in that accidental release. It just requires one person to accidentally expose themselves to a harmful biological agent. That's not a conspiracy. So theorizing that may have happened, is not a "conspiracy theory".

The kernel maintainers always announce the expected EOL date when they announce a new LTS kernel. This wasn't randomly decided. It was known for years in advance by people who, unlike you, know what they're talking about.

I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.

if you value your privacy, but prefer google's search results to duck duck go's, then startpage will anonymise and encrypt your searches, send them to google, and return the results. Fsck the NSA!

Prepare for the onslaught of "In Soviet Russia ..." jokes.

Okay, this is perhaps stating the obvious, but recently, facebook seems to be making such a bewildering set of changes which trample your privacy, that it's impossible to keep track of what's going on. Take FB messages -- without any notification that I was aware of, it started telling people whether I'd read their messages or not. Then it stopped doing this (as far as I can tell), but kept doing it for group messages. Then it started telling me where people were located when they were messaging me. Incredible!

And the link between the murder, and bath-salts is.... The hysteria in the U.S. over recreational drug use is amazing. For example, all the news stories about Johnny Lewis mentioned police speculation that he was on the drug "smiles" when he went berserk, despite there being no evidence whatseover of this. e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/US/actor-johnny-lewis-suspected-taking-drug-smiles-killings/story?id=17346564 Time and time again, these speculative drug links make a big splash in the media, and then by the time they prove false, no one cares. I would have thought Slashdot was a bit more into looking at the evidence before making wild speculation, but apparently not.

At the same time as the arrest in this case, there is a trial going on against a guy for receiving a photo of consentual fisting: http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/porn-trial-this-time-its-extreme.html And we also had the trial against Paul Chambers for tweeting a bomb joke (he was found not guilty thankfully). The crown prosecution service are a joke.

What this means is that the drugs which are legal, are potentially more dangerous than the ones which are banned. Marijuana, mushrooms, LSD have been around long enough that they've been well studied, and we know the risks are minimal. But the latest synthesised version of them has not been studied, and might be dangerous. When will we learn that the war on drugs is just making things worse?

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!

Well, is the data that sensitive? Here is one they released: http://pdfcast.org/pdf/nato-1 Old and dull. And Sabu yesterday claimed they were about to release a bunch of Sun emails. Now they say they won't. There's a bit more smoke than fire.

Sorry I don't have any sympathy for LulzSec or whatever their name (Geeze at least get a cooler name or they are bunch of high school drop outs).

Nice thread title. Racist much?

I think it's a good idea