The company rushed to point out that security certifications from TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton are worthless in this situation.

And congratulations!

True, but "a willing lawyer" isn't a tough standard to meet. :-)

Still - in all seriousness - it's hard to imagine a jury who wouldn't be on his side.

If his employer was tracking him, it must have been for work purposes, right? So since he was on the clock, he should at least be paid his contracted rate for all the time he was tracked.

It's a bipartisan problem. Check out Senator Ron Wyden D-OR. Sure, he's done some great things lately for sanity in copyright and civil liberties. But he's also majorly in the pocket of Wall Street.

Plenty of circlers mentioned it. I saw posts on multiply, fb, g+...

This means that guy I used to work with (known as "Hank the Blank") was just stupid, not chemically impaired. It's slightly depressing that big an idiot could exist naturally.

We can still get Texas a seventh flag by this time next year!

That's beautiful.

Or encircled, or something like that.

LOL! I can't believe I missed that connection when I first read this.

"That sounds like a reasoned response. Got any research to back it up? Of course, for suitable research to actually be meaningful, it would probably require recognised experts in commerce and education. Might want a quick trip down to your local university to see if you can find some.

Oh, wait. You don't believe in them. Well, you just go ahead spouting unsupported statements."

Most amusing.

To treat your post seriously for a moment, you're overlooking a very substantial truth: Good science is arrived at by an open process, not by a university's stamp of certification. Recognized experts are entirely optional to good science.

I'll freely admit that I've done no studies; although salted with fact, what I wrote above is opinion not science. But there's nothing stopping someone from doing science on these questions, inside academia or out.

Hee-hee. That was just to build credibility with the academic crowd. :-p

Don't confuse anti-academicism with anti-intellectualism. People are just as interested in learning as they ever were, but the monopoly on higher education held by the university system for the last couple centuries is crumbling in the face of the freer exchange of ideas offered by the internet.

Universities are in the content delivery and certification business. They're suffering the same internet-related issues as other content delivery systems as other options become viable. (Khan Academy, anyone?) But worse for them, they've allowed their certification standards to steadily be weakened, while at the same time raising their prices far faster than inflation. Faced with paying ridiculous prices for weak degrees when free options abound, it's hardy surprising that many choose to opt out.

Ford.