Actually, the drug testing from hair is not at all the way you describe. Residue from the drugs end up in your hair, processed out of your body and the hair grows, and it will detect things months after use. Is it more expensive than a regular piss test? Yes. Is "...the cost to do so would be phenomenally prohibitive"? No, not at all. At least, not for the government.

Also, there are brilliant people who play by the rules to accomplish goals, even if they realize that things like polygraph tests are hoodoo hokum and can be easily gamed. In fact, in some ways, one might consider the polygraph an IQ test. Are you smart enough to pass it or dumb enough to think it's an actual impediment to achieving your goal?

Yes! A thousand times, yes!

I've tried some of the FOSS "replacements" for this, but they couldn't even port my data correctly from my Quicken backup. Also, along with this, TurboTax. These two programs are the *main* thing that keeps me on Windows in my personal life. I have other programs, too, but they could be replaced or I would be willing to use a virtual machine for the little I use them any more. Quicken and TruboTax, though, are a lot more important to me and simply have to work and be supported.

I don't make movies or TV or even serial art, but I used to write a lot and would always want to maintain internal consistency between stories set in the same, usually, science-fictional universe. I started using a private wiki to do that with, based on TiddlyWiki, which is self-contained, basically one page, and doesn't need a database behind it. I wrote about it on my blog here:A Personal Wiki.

As an example of what one might put into a wiki like that, I put a bunch of the Traveller RPG "Library Data" from the old rulebooks into a wiki for players. You can find it here: Traveller Library Data Wiki.

It's simple. By the time I call Support, I've already done everything they're going to ask of me and, most likely, a few things they haven't thought to ask me. So I just like and let them walk through the steps, give them the right answers to get to the next step on their flow-chart and eventually get kicked up to Second Tier or Third Tier support.

I used to be more impatient and blurt out to them everything I did, but that just confused them because it didn't follow their script. Now, I just call when it's convenient and lie my way through their process at my leisure. It's a little frustrating sometimes, but it eventually gets the results.

Also, if you read the entire article, you'd see that an "unnamed official" also said that there is no evidence that any agent was, in fact, harmed by any of the information allegedly decrypted.

Honestly, this is just the usual smoke and mirrors. As many have pointed out, spies, by the very nature of their work, cannot be trusted.

Hasn't anyone developing these weapons read any science-fiction? Is Fred Saberhagen so far out of vogue that no one has read *any* of the Berserker novels or stories?
How about Phillip K. Dick? He's been pretty popular with Hollywood recently, and his story Second Variety was not only about this very thing, but made into a movie starring Peter Weller called "Screamers". You can read it for free via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

That's what the railguns are for! Smoke and mirrors aren't going to stop a big lump of iron and enough kinetic energy to get that iron airborne. Also, science-fiction aside, what I've seen of the military application of lasers is more defensive than offensive, and against regular munitions.

Did any of you *read* the whole article?
"But the letter also points to more legal and diplomatic work that will have to be done to govern potential commercial development of the moon or other extraterrestrial bodies.

“It’s very much a wild west kind of mentality and approach right now,” said John Thornton, chief executive of private owned Astrobotic, a startup lunar transportation and services firm competing in a $30 million Google-backed moon exploration XPrize contest. "

They're basically saying that this might be a start at further international law to govern the issues of commercial development off the Earth, not the actual solution. And, frankly, I think it's a good thing to start doing. Off-Earth commercial development, not additional international law, that is. Of course, one will follow the other.

If you believe, God *always* answers prayer, because "No" is an answer, too. Not a popular answer, but it's still an answer.

TiddlyWiki is useful in all sorts of ways! But, there may be some difficulty editing it from his Android tablet. Unless things have changed since I tried it last, there weren't any great solutions to that. (However, if I'm wrong, please, school me! I LOVE TiddlyWiki and would be happy to be wrong about editing it via an Android device!)

I like the idea behind Instagram, but not the proprietary nature of it. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I don't like giving up my rights to work I create. I dislike, as Nicholas Carr termed it, "digital sharecropping" And, of course, now the ads have finally started on Instagram, solidifying my discomfort with it.

But, recently, there's a new program, Pressgram, that's a free iPhone app (with an Android app coming soon, hopefully), which allows an Instagram-like experience, but uploads the photos to my WordPress blog. You can upload them to your WordPress.com blog, or, as I do, to my self-hosted WordPress blog.

So, in my mind, it has all the "good stuff" in Instagram without the stuff I find objectionable.
Worth checking out, if you're bent that way.

I wish Orson Scott Card was right, that the equality issue was now "moot". It's far from that, but momentum is building in what I think is the correct direction. But, in spite of his homophobic and other offensive views. Why? Because, I agree with Stephen Brust about blacklisting him setting a dangerous precedent. Also, in spite of his other BS, I like the story. I find it engaging and interesting and the movie looks like it will be well done and worth seeing.

And, what "metro" is that? Also, can you be more specific on what you mean by "more" when you say that Drupal "...gives you the ability to do a lot more..." than WordPress?