LeeHunter

These laws are designed to deter adults from preying on children (i.e. exploiting their relative inexperience, immaturity, financial dependence etc.) This is a good thing.

If the Monty Python sketch you're thinking of is the one where everyone is called 'Bruce' the accent is Australian, not American.

Yes indeed. And even the pin number can be longer than 4 digits (contrary to the article)

Still no low latency audio? I wonder if Android will ever be a useful device for serious musicians.

I don't think anyone was suggesting that there are no crooks in other professions. I was responding to YOUR comment that you couldn't imagine a crooked lawyer. As to why lawyers are singled out it may be partly due to their unique position in society that allows them to harass and bully. For example http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/lawyer-threaten... or the recent case of Oatmeal vs dickhead lawyer.

In my limited dealings with lawyers I have seen several instances where the lawyer appeared to be recommending a course of action that seemed geared towards extending their billings rather than serving their client's interests with a speedy resolution. This seems to be a common practice with a small but significant minority of lawyers.

Long article about the invention of DDT and it'sssubsequent use and misuse. http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_02_a_ddt.htm

Cloud storage should, first of all, be OS agnostic, secondly it should be content agnostic (meaning the provider doesn't review the content for compliance to its policies). Skydrive fails on both counts.

Which scientists are you referring to? There are thousands and thousands out there and I find your sweeping generalisation a little unlikely to say the least. I don't usually see hard short term predictions, it's more often presented as ranges of temperature averaged over significant periods of time.

I spent a year living in a third world country but somehow it failed to make me an expert on international aid and development.

Anecdotes are not data.

"The unfortunate truth is that most money that goes into charities that operate in 3rd world countries gets spent on logistics, bureaucracy, and gets siphoned off by corrupt governments or stolen by thieves. He'll save someone from malaria one day, and they'll die from another cause later."

Self-serving selfish unsupported claptrap.

I especially like the line "He'll save someone from malaria one day, and they'll die from another cause later." Hard to argue with that point since we'll all die from some cause later.

As if, for example, funding the inexpensive operations to relieve the suffering of women with untreated obstetric fistulas (http://www.fistulafoundation.org/whatisfistula/faqs.html) is just a waste of time and money. Sheesh.

The New Yorker had a great article about this some years ago. Unfortunately its behind a paywall, but one thing that I remember is that guys would deliberately provoke a police chase and then call their buddies who were watching the helicopter footage live on cable news. Sometimes young men will do damn near anything to be "heroes".

Oh really? http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/wordpress-org-possibly-hack...

Maybe now that they've dealt with the "important" stuff like reminders they can finally deliver the long overdue 2fa.

I would have thought that if the I in ISS is about international cooperation, it would be important to emphasize, where it's not obvious, that the people in the station actually do come from different countries.

Since none of the US media outlets seem to mention it, I'm wondering if most people know that Hadfield is a Canadian.

But surely it is very different when you can post an endless river of vicious comments in thousands of different places, have those comments searchable by anyone, and then have the world's most trusted search engines compile those comments in a way that suggests that they are the most relevant for a persons name.

And I don't think that anyone could ever have posted an "anonymous editorial" in a paper. Newspaper content is written by staff (or wire services) and letters to the editor are curated.

It's a little late for me as I've just worked my way through the 1500 most common characters using Skritter but I do love this highly graphical approach. Reminds me a bit of the Heisig system (which I haven't actually done myself).

Some of the statements in the text are a little dubious. For example, that you only need 1,000 characters for basic literacy and that with the top 200 characters you can read forty percent of Chinese popular literature.

I've read elsewhere that 1,500 characters is considered the minimum for basic literacy (a university graduate will usually know 3,000 or more). Even if 40 percent of the words in a given book make use of the top 200 characters, that only means you might occasionally recognize the odd character here and there. The meaning of the text will certainly still be utterly incomprehensible.

Nothing so far on Snopes.

Worst. Petition. Ever.

Rather than a hysterical (and frankly, ridiculous) demand for an explanation, why not simply ask that the US follow the lead of the UK government which has mandated a preference for open source software.

According to her website her education consisted of one year at Chapman University (possibly it was more than one year but her About isn't clear). Chapman does have a food science program but not a medical school (according to Wikipedia)

http://stellametsovas.com/about/

Two thirds of all gun-related deaths in the US are suicides, domestic violence is another huge chunk.

Bull. Taking out Drug War deaths doesn't change the picture much. Two thirds of all gun-related deaths in the US are suicides.

When I was in government, I was amazed at the way a relatively minor initiative could become an all-consuming journey involving year after year of heartbreak, despair and triumph. And that would be just to get the damn thing greenlighted. God help you if you had to put it out for contract.

"Gun crime is so miniscule in this country compared to other types of crime ..."

30,000 gun deaths a year is minuscule? Wow.

I find it fascinating that when the subject of gun control arises, the opponents of gun control talk exclusively about gangbangers and muggers when the real problem with guns is unhinged and suicidal people with no previous criminal record (except maybe for assaulting/stalking a spouse).

Who would care? People who want to disrupt the US economy with minimal effort and resources. The terrorist 'incubators' around the world are certainly buzzing right now.

Here's one that uses Selenium for recording the tour steps with Drupal used for managing the tour content (the site being 'toured' doesn't have to be running Drupal). http://walkthrough.it/

As the original article points out, these two kids achieved something that the worst of the World War Two bombing of London was not able to do, which is to shut down a major city for a day.

Rightly or wrongly, terrorists will view this as a spectacular success, in some ways greater than 9/11 since it only took a couple of kids to pull off.

I don't know if that kid feels victorious but you can be darn sure that his peers are throwing high fives all around.