One place I've worked ran the chiller plant year round for the benefit of the server room. However, when pumping heat with the grade, that's a fairly efficient operation. However, they were basically pumping the waste heat outdoors instead of using it to heat the building. At my own home, I have an electric dryer and during the winter, I pump the exhaust into the heating ducts to warm and humidify my house and save a little $. Do not try this with a gas dryer unless you like breathing a little extra CO and CO2.
I think you've hit the issue right on the head. Your average data-center manager could not care less about whether his server farm is environmentally friendly or not. On the other hand, electricity is a major expense. A dozen racks of 1U servers pulling 100-200 watts each will probably run you upwards of $80k/year. And that doesn't even include the cost of cooling your server room (which will add another $20k or so). Server consolidations and energy efficient servers save money. And that will always be your driving force. If company A says they have a "green" server room, it's just marketing. Their first concern and only concern is the bottom line.
On the other hand, I live in Minnesota, and 5 months of the year, we can use that server energy to heat the rest of the building.:)
It's trival to invent a simple low-grade hash and then show a way to spoof it. I doubt they're spoofing any sort of high end hash. Conicievably, you could create a one-bit hash using the parity of a file. This would be trivial to spoof. That's proof of concept. Doing this in a useful context is not so simple, but it is sufficient for a patent.
In any event, this is the sort of patent one ought to cheer for as it would have the effect of reducing the number of companies doing enforcement on P2P networks.
the only truly "independent" division of government is the Judicial Branch, and that is quickly eroding into yet another "political plum" for the current regime in power.
What centruy do you live in pal? Judges have been political appointments since at least the early 1800s. It was president Andrew Jackson, I believe, who is generally credited for the phrase "the spoils system".
At the current rate of Executive Branch dominance over all branches of the US government, by the time 2008 rolls around, national elections could get cancelled (like the FEC's "trial balloon" in 2004), and the USA will have King George I, and a very British looking (albeit more subserviant) Parliment to contend with.
Ah, finally something good to come about because of Adolf Hitler. FDR's long reign, coupled with Hitler's legacy over in Germany is why we have term limits today. Just make sure the Republican's don't get a supermajority (67%) in the Senate in the next election or that might get rolled back too.
Correction, sir. Evolution is theory, creationism is doctrine. The key difference is that evolution provides us a framework upon which we can make predictions and conduct experiments. Evolution provides a means to explain phenomena such as antibiotic resistant bacteria. The problem, as I see it, is that the creationists are hung up on the idea of the origin of species. That is as narrow minded as suggesting that history is the study of what happened. To truly benefit from the study of history, we must examine why stuff happened. The actual details are little more than entertaining stories. Understanding the intrcacies of the politics the led to World War 2 for example gives us insight into our own decisions about who we elect to public office. In the same sense, evolution is the study of biological history in an attempt to understand where the future may lie. The enlightened theologian may argue that evolution is the mechanisim by which God has developed the earth. Only the most narrow-minded literalist fundamentalist interpretations of any major religious text would preclude such an interpretation.
The parent post suggests that the are "huge missing factors and gaps in logic" with respect to evolution. I heartily dispute that. The problem here is that the essential research tool of evolution is the earth itself. Many changes that we would like to observe only happen on a geological timescale. How do you conduct an experiment that takes 100,000 years to complete? Sure, bacteria and fruit flies make pretty good research subjects but we also want to study higher order life forms as well. And let's not leave good ol' Heisenberg out of this either. Does the study change the outcome? We may never know.:) And so, I leave you with the wisdom of Futureama: "And it's a quantum photo finish..."... "No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it"
What it means is that there is real competition in the desktop market, which is sort've a mixed blessing. Intel made an inefficient processor that ran at a higher MHZ, but AMD made a 64 bit processor that most people have no use for (but they're still selling it to a desktop segment that can't take advantage of it.) Now it's all about the dual core, which is little more than SMP on a chip. It seems to me that the marketing department is running the chip makers. And, as usual, IBM is off in a world of their own.
Really, I think nothing could be more fitting. The bureaucracy of getting a movie made (from a major studio with a large budget) is much like getting legislation passed. In that context at least, some of what's in the movie is simply Disney validating everything in the books, making the movie one large piece of concept art. Turning the prose of Mr. Adams into an American blockbuster of a movie is at best, awkward. On the whole, the movie works reasonably well, even if the ending has been horribly Disneyified. The biggest problem is that Disney is trying to sell tickets to people who have not read the books. Take what you can get sometimes. I give it a lukewarm thumbs up. It could have been much much worse.
That is an excellent point. With the EGA/VGA I had to poll the card until it started a retrace. Given that I was only aiming for 30 fps with my code at the time, it wasn't a big deal. (old school top down RPG. Never finished it.)
That's a a bit of troll, wouldn't you say? In the EGA/VGA (I think CGA as well) spec, you can check to see if the card is in a vertical retrace and swap buffers then. It's rock steady as well. Compare this with the approach taken in the Commander Keen games where they achieved very smooth side scrolling by adjusting the offset of the video buffer on the card. One only had to draw a few percent of the screen and move some sprites.
The problem that the ID people face is that Intelligent Design is irrelevant to the study of the issue. In fact, the only real question is are seemingly random mutations truly random or the work of some higher power? And the answer is, it doesn't matter. In understanding the important lessons of evolution all we need to know is that natural selection occours and that seemingly random mutations occour.
So forget for a moment that extrapolation of evolution infers that humans are related to and share a common ancestry with monkeys. Intelligent Design is all about teaching religion. If you convince kids that an intelligent higher power exists, it naturally starts to put them on the path towards organized religion, and the hope of these people is that will mean Christianity. The point of posting this to/. is not so much for discussion as it is for the awareness of this foolishness and so that more enlightened individuals can get involved and put a stop to it.
I have an undying hatred for the FPS genera. I am rather fond of RTS, though I haven't found much there to keep me occupied lately either. The last one I brought home was WarCraft 3. I'm also fond of Adventure/RPGs (top down style), but they take up too much of my time, so I don't bring them home anymore. It's a shame, because NeverWinter Nights was excellent. However, I could go for a really good Ultima 4/5 style top down RPG. I miss those days.
Walmart is only objecting to the use of their logos, not the parody itself. This is a farily reasonable request. No one has actually been sued, WalMart simply had their lawyers send out a Cease and Desist letter. They probably send out several of them every day. WalMart is well within their rights to demand this. While the parody site was intending to make this look as much like an official WalMart site as possible, the can run afoul of trademark law. The right thing to do is to parody the WalMart graphics as well. Not a lawyer, but WalMart is probably in the right on this one.
Two key differences between IT workers and steel workers, ship builders, etc. IT work is generally high skill while auto work and coal mining is not. The IT industry is generally not burdend by shortsighted unions. Absent the unions, no assembly line worker would be making $25/hour with full benefits. And so, the jobs go somewhere else where there are no unions. IT jobs have wages that fluctuates wildly. Entry level is cheap. But there's also tremendous value in experiance; someone who knows the product or codebase is worth a lot more. It's amusing how outsorucing is playing out. Some stuff is being brought back to the US where they pay more, but they get the value of stability. On the other hand, India is starting to be undercut by China and other places where workers are willing to work for less.
And to put this in the context of the article and Mr. Gates' comments, we can either bring the workers here (and have the benifits of taxing them and having an educated population) or we can send the work there. Either way, it's a global marketplace for labor and we can compete, or become obsolete.
No, it's entirely about money. Money gives you prestige and credibility. It buys you access. A $30k campaign contribution may not be directly a bribe, but it buys you access. The senator will take your call. The representative will meet you for lunch so that you can pitch your bill. They may even introduce your legislation verbatim. Everyone rides the gravy train. High level politics beats the hell out of working for a living and large sums of money keep you in office. Being in office keeps people comming and trying to schmooze you. Sports tickets, dinners, favors, you name it. When it comes election time, most people don't vote on issues like copyright reform. They vote on things like Social Security and Defense of Marriage.
Can you please explain to me why Microsoft ought to care one way or another? They're a public company; their only obligation is to make money for their shareholders. They have absolutely no business getting involved in social issues. They should stick to making software.
First, one should RTFA. Having RTFA, I'm really only left with one question: WTF? No, really, WTF? I take a very keen interest in the law and the Supreme court in general, but WTF? I propose the Thunderdome method of judicial reform. Two men enter, one man leaves.
If you are truly buying a licensed copy of a copyrighted work then there must be a legally executed contract prior to the distribution of the item. Copyright merely gives the owner of a copyright the exclusive right to make copies of the work. You can slap any license you want on the side of a box, but absent a signed agreement, it doesn't mean a damn thing, no matter how often or loudly certain commercial interests may proclaim otherwise.
Hello. Please do not be blaming Co-Ops for a problem that is fundamentally associated with monopolies. You are correct that competition is good. Governments are supposed to be "for the people and by the people" but they're usually pretty evil as well. The important difference between a co-op and a local government is that the co-op generally can't write new laws or levy taxes. For the purposes of something such as municipal wireless internet service, I would say this is a very good thing. So even if the city provides the seed money to start such a project, I would certainly argue that it should exist as its own separate entity and should be able to survive without subsidies. And, as you say, competition is good, but how do you compete with a taxpayer subsidized industry?
The problem is that say Personality A says a bunch of disagreeable things about group B, but doesn't explicitly advocate violence against group B. Person C infers from Peronsality A's commentary that something should be done to "fix" the problem with group B and causes bodily harm, harasses, etc a member of group B.
Now we're getting somewhere. Suppose Personality A also includes a slew of personally identifiable information about group B (like names, addressses, social security numbers, and the like) Should Personality A have a liability for the misuse of that information? Should Personality A have a defense if they can show a legitimate reason for posting that information? I would argure 'Yes' to both of those questions. Posting people personal information just because you can is irresponsible and distantly akin to yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater. While I can think of plenty of good reasons for posting someone's address, I can't think of any for posting a SSN.
If.com were all that's needed, why not do away with it entirely? That would open up the entire top level domains, now wouldn't it? Let's take this a step further. How about we completely open up the TLDs. How about we also make them expensive enough to discourage the average guy from registering one. Lets say, $100,000/year. This money can be used to fund the root servers. This would also take a lot of pressure off the root servers since they no longer need to host the entire.COM namespace, they only need to know a couple thousand TLDs. Each TLD would be responsible for maintaining their own root for that domain. Sure, we'd see things like.IBM and.Microsoft. We'd probably also see things like.beer and.pr0n. Probably even a few cases of.IHaveLotsOfMoneyAndAintAfridToSpendIt. We'd probably also see things like.SafeForKids and.Jewish and even.RepublicanParty. And I'm fine with that. We'll have every TLD that's worth $100k/year, but since this might actually work and make sense, it'll never happen.
Dude, you're a jackass. Just give her the damn domain and get on with your life. If it was a gift, which you admit, then you're just the technical administrator and she's in the right. As to your broader point, that's what courts and arbitrators (and apparently/.) exist for. Threatening to take someone to court is not extortion. It's presumed (whether true or not) that the courts will fairly and correctly determine who is right and wrong and issue a judgement accordingly. It's also common in the US for the courts to award legal fees in cases that are frivilous and without merit, as well as cases where someone has acted with malice and disregard for the law. Now, go back to your ex, appologize for being a jerk and do the right thing.
Ok, let me make this simple, 'cuz there's really only 2 issues here.
1) If someone discloses trade secrets to you, can you be subpoenaed? The answer here, is obviously yes, though I would argue that you also have a fifth amendment right to remain silent (as some over zealous prosecutor might make an arguement for conspiracy to commit fraud). In the context of this question, whether someone is a journalist or not is irrelevant.
2) Does a journalist have a right to protect their sources, and what is the definition of a journalist. For the context of this question, it is irrelevant wether the disclosed material relates to ship dates for a product or government fraud. The supreme court has repeatedly ruled that any rules pertaining to free speech must be content neutral. Secondly, what is the definition of a journalist. Most shield laws give examples of journalists (ie, magazine, newspaper, periodical, etc.) but are somewhat open ended. In this day and age, I think virtually anyone could claim this status such that shield laws have become deprecated.
There's also a third aspect in that some shield laws only prevent the government from calling journalists to testify (if the information in question can reasonable be obtained elsewhere). In any event, I favor option #1.
At my last job, standard secure disposal proceedure for defective drives was to walk over to the machine shop and use a drill press to make 1/4 inch holes through the platters in at least 3 locations (in varying distances from the center). Anyone capable of recovering that data I'm sure could easily hack our system. You could use a handheld drill, but the press had a vice attached to the table and was just plain easier to operate. We'd just eat the cost of defective drives. For operable drives, we'd use either DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke). I just had a regular PC with a bootable CD in the drive for running this.
DDR is fun if you've never done it before. After a while, kids lose interest. You need a whole long series of excercise oriented video games. Yeah, you could send the kid down to the nearest park to play soccer with his friends or something. On the other hand, if it were that easy, the kid wouldn't be a lardass to begin with. The video games provide an interactiveness and conveniance that might not otherwise be available. But like I said earlier, you need to have the next great thing ready for when DDR loses its appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
One place I've worked ran the chiller plant year round for the benefit of the server room. However, when pumping heat with the grade, that's a fairly efficient operation. However, they were basically pumping the waste heat outdoors instead of using it to heat the building. At my own home, I have an electric dryer and during the winter, I pump the exhaust into the heating ducts to warm and humidify my house and save a little $. Do not try this with a gas dryer unless you like breathing a little extra CO and CO2.
I think you've hit the issue right on the head. Your average data-center manager could not care less about whether his server farm is environmentally friendly or not. On the other hand, electricity is a major expense. A dozen racks of 1U servers pulling 100-200 watts each will probably run you upwards of $80k/year. And that doesn't even include the cost of cooling your server room (which will add another $20k or so). Server consolidations and energy efficient servers save money. And that will always be your driving force. If company A says they have a "green" server room, it's just marketing. Their first concern and only concern is the bottom line.
:)
On the other hand, I live in Minnesota, and 5 months of the year, we can use that server energy to heat the rest of the building.
It's trival to invent a simple low-grade hash and then show a way to spoof it. I doubt they're spoofing any sort of high end hash. Conicievably, you could create a one-bit hash using the parity of a file. This would be trivial to spoof. That's proof of concept. Doing this in a useful context is not so simple, but it is sufficient for a patent.
In any event, this is the sort of patent one ought to cheer for as it would have the effect of reducing the number of companies doing enforcement on P2P networks.
the only truly "independent" division of government is the Judicial Branch, and that is quickly eroding into yet another "political plum" for the current regime in power.
What centruy do you live in pal? Judges have been political appointments since at least the early 1800s. It was president Andrew Jackson, I believe, who is generally credited for the phrase "the spoils system".
At the current rate of Executive Branch dominance over all branches of the US government, by the time 2008 rolls around, national elections could get cancelled (like the FEC's "trial balloon" in 2004), and the USA will have King George I, and a very British looking (albeit more subserviant) Parliment to contend with.
Ah, finally something good to come about because of Adolf Hitler. FDR's long reign, coupled with Hitler's legacy over in Germany is why we have term limits today. Just make sure the Republican's don't get a supermajority (67%) in the Senate in the next election or that might get rolled back too.
Correction, sir. Evolution is theory, creationism is doctrine. The key difference is that evolution provides us a framework upon which we can make predictions and conduct experiments. Evolution provides a means to explain phenomena such as antibiotic resistant bacteria. The problem, as I see it, is that the creationists are hung up on the idea of the origin of species. That is as narrow minded as suggesting that history is the study of what happened. To truly benefit from the study of history, we must examine why stuff happened. The actual details are little more than entertaining stories. Understanding the intrcacies of the politics the led to World War 2 for example gives us insight into our own decisions about who we elect to public office. In the same sense, evolution is the study of biological history in an attempt to understand where the future may lie. The enlightened theologian may argue that evolution is the mechanisim by which God has developed the earth. Only the most narrow-minded literalist fundamentalist interpretations of any major religious text would preclude such an interpretation.
:) And so, I leave you with the wisdom of Futureama: "And it's a quantum photo finish..." ... "No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it"
The parent post suggests that the are "huge missing factors and gaps in logic" with respect to evolution. I heartily dispute that. The problem here is that the essential research tool of evolution is the earth itself. Many changes that we would like to observe only happen on a geological timescale. How do you conduct an experiment that takes 100,000 years to complete? Sure, bacteria and fruit flies make pretty good research subjects but we also want to study higher order life forms as well. And let's not leave good ol' Heisenberg out of this either. Does the study change the outcome? We may never know.
What it means is that there is real competition in the desktop market, which is sort've a mixed blessing. Intel made an inefficient processor that ran at a higher MHZ, but AMD made a 64 bit processor that most people have no use for (but they're still selling it to a desktop segment that can't take advantage of it.) Now it's all about the dual core, which is little more than SMP on a chip. It seems to me that the marketing department is running the chip makers. And, as usual, IBM is off in a world of their own.
Really, I think nothing could be more fitting. The bureaucracy of getting a movie made (from a major studio with a large budget) is much like getting legislation passed. In that context at least, some of what's in the movie is simply Disney validating everything in the books, making the movie one large piece of concept art. Turning the prose of Mr. Adams into an American blockbuster of a movie is at best, awkward. On the whole, the movie works reasonably well, even if the ending has been horribly Disneyified. The biggest problem is that Disney is trying to sell tickets to people who have not read the books. Take what you can get sometimes. I give it a lukewarm thumbs up. It could have been much much worse.
That is an excellent point. With the EGA/VGA I had to poll the card until it started a retrace. Given that I was only aiming for 30 fps with my code at the time, it wasn't a big deal. (old school top down RPG. Never finished it.)
That's a a bit of troll, wouldn't you say? In the EGA/VGA (I think CGA as well) spec, you can check to see if the card is in a vertical retrace and swap buffers then. It's rock steady as well. Compare this with the approach taken in the Commander Keen games where they achieved very smooth side scrolling by adjusting the offset of the video buffer on the card. One only had to draw a few percent of the screen and move some sprites.
The problem that the ID people face is that Intelligent Design is irrelevant to the study of the issue. In fact, the only real question is are seemingly random mutations truly random or the work of some higher power? And the answer is, it doesn't matter. In understanding the important lessons of evolution all we need to know is that natural selection occours and that seemingly random mutations occour.
/. is not so much for discussion as it is for the awareness of this foolishness and so that more enlightened individuals can get involved and put a stop to it.
So forget for a moment that extrapolation of evolution infers that humans are related to and share a common ancestry with monkeys. Intelligent Design is all about teaching religion. If you convince kids that an intelligent higher power exists, it naturally starts to put them on the path towards organized religion, and the hope of these people is that will mean Christianity. The point of posting this to
I have an undying hatred for the FPS genera. I am rather fond of RTS, though I haven't found much there to keep me occupied lately either. The last one I brought home was WarCraft 3. I'm also fond of Adventure/RPGs (top down style), but they take up too much of my time, so I don't bring them home anymore. It's a shame, because NeverWinter Nights was excellent. However, I could go for a really good Ultima 4/5 style top down RPG. I miss those days.
Walmart is only objecting to the use of their logos, not the parody itself. This is a farily reasonable request. No one has actually been sued, WalMart simply had their lawyers send out a Cease and Desist letter. They probably send out several of them every day. WalMart is well within their rights to demand this. While the parody site was intending to make this look as much like an official WalMart site as possible, the can run afoul of trademark law. The right thing to do is to parody the WalMart graphics as well. Not a lawyer, but WalMart is probably in the right on this one.
Two key differences between IT workers and steel workers, ship builders, etc. IT work is generally high skill while auto work and coal mining is not. The IT industry is generally not burdend by shortsighted unions. Absent the unions, no assembly line worker would be making $25/hour with full benefits. And so, the jobs go somewhere else where there are no unions. IT jobs have wages that fluctuates wildly. Entry level is cheap. But there's also tremendous value in experiance; someone who knows the product or codebase is worth a lot more. It's amusing how outsorucing is playing out. Some stuff is being brought back to the US where they pay more, but they get the value of stability. On the other hand, India is starting to be undercut by China and other places where workers are willing to work for less.
And to put this in the context of the article and Mr. Gates' comments, we can either bring the workers here (and have the benifits of taxing them and having an educated population) or we can send the work there. Either way, it's a global marketplace for labor and we can compete, or become obsolete.
No, it's entirely about money. Money gives you prestige and credibility. It buys you access. A $30k campaign contribution may not be directly a bribe, but it buys you access. The senator will take your call. The representative will meet you for lunch so that you can pitch your bill. They may even introduce your legislation verbatim. Everyone rides the gravy train. High level politics beats the hell out of working for a living and large sums of money keep you in office. Being in office keeps people comming and trying to schmooze you. Sports tickets, dinners, favors, you name it. When it comes election time, most people don't vote on issues like copyright reform. They vote on things like Social Security and Defense of Marriage.
You probably put mayo on those numbers too, served up on white bread, eh?
Can you please explain to me why Microsoft ought to care one way or another? They're a public company; their only obligation is to make money for their shareholders. They have absolutely no business getting involved in social issues. They should stick to making software.
First, one should RTFA. Having RTFA, I'm really only left with one question: WTF? No, really, WTF? I take a very keen interest in the law and the Supreme court in general, but WTF? I propose the Thunderdome method of judicial reform. Two men enter, one man leaves.
If you are truly buying a licensed copy of a copyrighted work then there must be a legally executed contract prior to the distribution of the item. Copyright merely gives the owner of a copyright the exclusive right to make copies of the work. You can slap any license you want on the side of a box, but absent a signed agreement, it doesn't mean a damn thing, no matter how often or loudly certain commercial interests may proclaim otherwise.
Hello. Please do not be blaming Co-Ops for a problem that is fundamentally associated with monopolies. You are correct that competition is good. Governments are supposed to be "for the people and by the people" but they're usually pretty evil as well. The important difference between a co-op and a local government is that the co-op generally can't write new laws or levy taxes. For the purposes of something such as municipal wireless internet service, I would say this is a very good thing. So even if the city provides the seed money to start such a project, I would certainly argue that it should exist as its own separate entity and should be able to survive without subsidies. And, as you say, competition is good, but how do you compete with a taxpayer subsidized industry?
The problem is that say Personality A says a bunch of disagreeable things about group B, but doesn't explicitly advocate violence against group B. Person C infers from Peronsality A's commentary that something should be done to "fix" the problem with group B and causes bodily harm, harasses, etc a member of group B.
Now we're getting somewhere. Suppose Personality A also includes a slew of personally identifiable information about group B (like names, addressses, social security numbers, and the like) Should Personality A have a liability for the misuse of that information? Should Personality A have a defense if they can show a legitimate reason for posting that information? I would argure 'Yes' to both of those questions. Posting people personal information just because you can is irresponsible and distantly akin to yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater. While I can think of plenty of good reasons for posting someone's address, I can't think of any for posting a SSN.
If .com were all that's needed, why not do away with it entirely? That would open up the entire top level domains, now wouldn't it? Let's take this a step further. How about we completely open up the TLDs. How about we also make them expensive enough to discourage the average guy from registering one. Lets say, $100,000/year. This money can be used to fund the root servers. This would also take a lot of pressure off the root servers since they no longer need to host the entire .COM namespace, they only need to know a couple thousand TLDs. Each TLD would be responsible for maintaining their own root for that domain. Sure, we'd see things like .IBM and .Microsoft. We'd probably also see things like .beer and .pr0n. Probably even a few cases of .IHaveLotsOfMoneyAndAintAfridToSpendIt. We'd probably also see things like .SafeForKids and .Jewish and even .RepublicanParty. And I'm fine with that. We'll have every TLD that's worth $100k/year, but since this might actually work and make sense, it'll never happen.
Dude, you're a jackass. Just give her the damn domain and get on with your life. If it was a gift, which you admit, then you're just the technical administrator and she's in the right. As to your broader point, that's what courts and arbitrators (and apparently /.) exist for. Threatening to take someone to court is not extortion. It's presumed (whether true or not) that the courts will fairly and correctly determine who is right and wrong and issue a judgement accordingly. It's also common in the US for the courts to award legal fees in cases that are frivilous and without merit, as well as cases where someone has acted with malice and disregard for the law. Now, go back to your ex, appologize for being a jerk and do the right thing.
Ok, let me make this simple, 'cuz there's really only 2 issues here.
1) If someone discloses trade secrets to you, can you be subpoenaed? The answer here, is obviously yes, though I would argue that you also have a fifth amendment right to remain silent (as some over zealous prosecutor might make an arguement for conspiracy to commit fraud). In the context of this question, whether someone is a journalist or not is irrelevant.
2) Does a journalist have a right to protect their sources, and what is the definition of a journalist. For the context of this question, it is irrelevant wether the disclosed material relates to ship dates for a product or government fraud. The supreme court has repeatedly ruled that any rules pertaining to free speech must be content neutral. Secondly, what is the definition of a journalist. Most shield laws give examples of journalists (ie, magazine, newspaper, periodical, etc.) but are somewhat open ended. In this day and age, I think virtually anyone could claim this status such that shield laws have become deprecated.
There's also a third aspect in that some shield laws only prevent the government from calling journalists to testify (if the information in question can reasonable be obtained elsewhere). In any event, I favor option #1.
At my last job, standard secure disposal proceedure for defective drives was to walk over to the machine shop and use a drill press to make 1/4 inch holes through the platters in at least 3 locations (in varying distances from the center). Anyone capable of recovering that data I'm sure could easily hack our system. You could use a handheld drill, but the press had a vice attached to the table and was just plain easier to operate. We'd just eat the cost of defective drives. For operable drives, we'd use either DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke). I just had a regular PC with a bootable CD in the drive for running this.
DDR is fun if you've never done it before. After a while, kids lose interest. You need a whole long series of excercise oriented video games. Yeah, you could send the kid down to the nearest park to play soccer with his friends or something. On the other hand, if it were that easy, the kid wouldn't be a lardass to begin with. The video games provide an interactiveness and conveniance that might not otherwise be available. But like I said earlier, you need to have the next great thing ready for when DDR loses its appeal.