For that matter, what do having pictures of your kids on the internet have to do with anything? It's certainly distasteful to think there might be a slimy person looking at pictures of our loved ones and touching themselves, but it causes us no harm. It's just yucky, and avoiding the astronomically remote possibility of such a thing is not a good reason to inconvenience the other 99.99999% of the world.

Um, FRANCESVAVEITCH, your intel on the Eastern Market location seems to be a little bit dated.

I think the conservation methods Cory and some others should adopt are "don't feed the trolls."

My fiance's friend somehow convinced her toddler daughter that ice cubes were 'treats,' presumably because she enjoyed the sensation. Maybe it was a teething leftover, who knows? But her little one would ask for treats and mom would give her fun-shaped ice cubes from some of those novelty silicone ice trays you can buy in most department stores.

This jibes well with Malcolm Gladwell's writings in BLINK, where he discussed the fact that in some studies the accuracy of a doctor's diagnosis DECREASED as more information (via tests) was provided.

Of course a competent analysis also has to look at the difference in consequences of diagnosis failures, or in a case like this the consequence of not having that information gathering.

Which will never happen in our OMG MUST TAPE EVERYTHING culture, because looking into that would require confronting the fact that (a) CCTV shows no indicating of decreasing crime, merely moving it and (2) we'd have to look into how rarely it is helpful considering the equipment and labor costs. That doesn't even confront the lower quality of life (privacy) and opportunity costs of having law enforcement watching crime on the tube rather than in person, where they might do some good.

I think it's a happy change. Their "golly shucks, you don't HAVE to show ID if you don't want to" claim in the Gilmore trial was so obviously disingenuous that this is an improvement. Maybe now we can actually have a discussion on the merits rather than this stupid dodge.

Charles Stross rants a bit about this here, while also commenting on the number of public officials who have taken money from Scientology - surely just a coincidence, yes?

So it's a game really. Although Andy was in the wrong in this instance because he set up a tripod on private property without getting permission first.

(1) Union Station is not by any means private property. It's a public building that happens to be managed under contract by a private organization. That doesn't give them the right to redefine personal freedoms.

You can see in the US Code that the station is in the posession of the Secretary of Transportation.

The Secretary of Transportation has the right, title, and interest in and to the Union Station complex, including all agreements and leases made under sections 101-110 of the National Visitors Center Facilities Act of 1968 (Public Law 90-264, 82 Stat. 43). To the extent the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of the Interior agree, the Secretary of the Interior may lease space for visitor services.

In fact, we had this exact battle here in the area last year, and the Montgomery County attorney stated unequivocally that the private management firm was in the wrong.

(2) Suggesting that a tripod was the problem here completely ignores everything Andy Carvin wrote about the incident. Nobody told him their placement was an issue or the tripod, they blamed taking pictures entirely.

(3) That aside, the suggestion that a single tripod is necessarily an issue anywhere is just silly. Union Station is filled with dawdlers and gawkers and people on the phone standing around in places that maybe you wish they weren't. We don't harass these people unless they're legitimately causing a problem, why does putting a tripod into the mix make the slightest bit of difference?

Maxoid - the funny thing about those people who reject Pollan because of those assumptions about him is that they make it clear they have never read him. There were sections of The Omnivore's Dilemma where I just wanted to jump up and down and scream... and Pollan's tone was so amazingly casual and non-judgmental that often times it was HIM I wanted to scream at!

Pollan reveals his even-handedness and journalistic background in almost every paragraph.

The cat's not Dutch. You can faintly hear someone chastising someone in that video saying, in clear English, "okay, let the poor cat out." Must be a video from elsewhere used in a Dutch tv show.

As recently as a few years ago Gerber did a limited series called HARD TIME, which was followed up with an ongoing series that was canceled in short order, forcing him to wrap it up in a hurry.

I picked it up on the strength of Steve's name and almost didn't make it past the opening conceit - it starts with two kids in the middle of a Columbine-type event. However it had great depth, with characters that are neither innocent or evil, and avoids the "wrongly convicted innocent" character that so much of comics (and other fiction) thinks we require in order to have a sympathetic character.

The first 6 are out in a trade paperback, maybe Steve's death will goad DC into collecting the subsequent 7.

Amazon lists the Howard the Duck omnibus as coming out next month, by the way.

That's not actually "the candy expo" (actually called the All Candy Expo) run by the National Confectioner's Association every year in Chicago. What Joel was at was a product showcase that was put together by the same organization for the media.

The ACE is primarily a buyer & seller show where buyers from Walmart down to mom&pop shows interact to make deals. The media is there but it's first and foremost a commerce show. The product showcase, on the other hand, was purely a for-media event.

A lot of ranges won't let you use human-image targets, actually, so the licensing opportunities aren't that fantastic. The NRA range attached to their HQ here in Northern Virginia forbids pictorial representations, even.

While I normally rail against indicators like this (beware the pizza shop employee who I catch sticking flyers on my doorknob) this one seems pretty minor. The whole point of the ticket is to say "I can easily see something in your car," something the thief could see for him or herself just as easily.

So at best this lets a thief know there's something in the car from 10 feet away rather than 2. Since someone isn't going to scope for a smash-and-grab if there's anyone to see their behavior anyway I don't think this is much of a risk. The potential reward, however, seems pretty decent.

Then again, I once stuck a note under someone's wiper that said "if I can see the laptop in your backseat then a crook who is willing to smash your window can too." So maybe I'm biased.

This amounts up to complaining that the deck chairs on the Titanic keep sliding off to one side of the deck. The problem here is that they enforce this arbitrary limit, not that they warn you that you're coming up on it.

Shortfatsteve beat me to it, so I'll just observe that he really needs a second one with short black hair helping him as well, or at least chain-smoking and cursing nearby.

Why does this bozo's organization still get to be tax exempt? Their website says they're "part of Bill Keller Ministries, a 501(c)(3) organization" [http://www.liveprayer.com/bdy_about.cfm] but the IRS is very clear : if you want to be a tax exempt 501c3 organization you "may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates." [http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=96099,00.html]

Why do we as a nation keep letting these bozos get away with this crap? I don't care if they want to be involved in politics - stump to your heart's content! But pay your taxes like everyone else, then.

Actually I'd bet a bra and panties would be enough to qualify as 'dressed' if you weren't running up against people uptight about skin... which I am thinking people working in VS wouldn't be.

I realize IE is an entertainment-oriented organization, not a political/issues one, but I'd like to see 111 people who are overly tall, short, fat or thin go into an A&F and try to buy something.

Okay, you probably can't be too thin to find something to fit in Abercrombie...

If I'm going to get indignant over anything it's not that she was "detained" but that she wrote this article and dedicated paragraphs to describing the genesis of her mistakes but didn't spend one second talking about what her actual rights were.

She could have linked to material from Flex Your Rights or another organization who advice you how to deal with being stopped and who can hold you. She could have discussed exactly why she handed her license and credit card to a private citizen such they they COULD be kept from her.

Instead she gave no useful information to consumers about how they could deal with this problem or how she could have better dealt with it. That's the reason to get wound up.

The puritanism angle doesn't wash in this case - the comic that ran in its stead (I live in Washington Post country, which is looking more yellow than it used to) made multiple references to marital infidelity. If anything, the comic that it replaced was LESS salacious.