The Mormon handcart pioneers had it even worse: Brigham Young's brilliant idea to save money by outfitting poor European immigrants converted to the LDS Church by Mormon missionaries (only white Europeans, naturally) with a handcart to pull themselves instead of a wagon train pulled by oxen like sensible pioneers.

Congratulations! You have made it to Oregon! Let's see how long it takes for your new neighbors to realize you're not a white person. :(

Yeah, I think I speak for most mid-30-somethings in that our first excursions into porn watching and owning a credit card corresponded with the peak of the first wave of "child exploitation on the Internet" busts.

I linked to an article in the last post that explains most likely what site Grisham's friend was visiting, given the timeline of when he got caught. The darkest net

This, exactly. I have no need for TOR because I'm never out looking for anything that forbidden that it wouldn't be on the regular Internet, but the Daily Dot did a fascinating set of articles interviewing the child porn collector underground and putting together a history of child porn on computers here.

Actually, I'm pretty sure he meant the ten o's in the colorful "Goooooooooogle" at the bottom of the search results page numbered 1 - 10 underneath, which let you jump to other pages if you click the numbers, or the o's above them.

I think "teen girls" is code for 18 to 40 year old women with small breasts.

Well, there was the fiasco with Microsoft losing all of the T-Mobile Sidekick users' data from their Oracle database back in 2009, after Microsoft had acquired Danger and most of the talent had quit for less insane opportunities.

The Apple watch was announced with a sapphire crystal instead of glass.

Now that I think about it, the only place I shop regularly where I wanted to try using Google Wallet with NFC on my Nexus 5 was Walgreens, and the one time I tried, they said the NFC reader wasn't active. Interesting that you tried recently and it's the same story.

Here's the permission list required now by the original Facebook app (pasted from the play store web page):

I was going to say that maybe FB removed a bunch of permission requirements from the original Facebook app itself, but at least from the play store website:

Yeah, I hear you. I had to go cuddle my dog for a while after reading your reply yesterday. Fortunately I didn't read the Dr. Dobson story until I was an adult, and already disliking him. I couldn't imagine getting that book from my mom as wisdom from a Christian leader. He sounds like a complete sociopath by his own…

Most Americans want to be brainwashed by news and TV to be painted as the heroes and the good guys. That's why FOX News has so much higher ratings than Democracy Now, and why Ronald Reagan got elected President, twice.

The trick is to click the Formatting options button, then click the HTML button on the toolbar, then paste in the script code for the tweet. You can click the HTML button again to go back to regular editing mode.

I think a lot of religious fundamentalists would tell you that children don't have any civil rights, because they're property of their parents, like a car or a house plant. If the parents abuse their kids, that's a private matter between the parents and God. James Dobson famously told a story about viciously beating…

I thought Joseph Smith got pretty inventive with his whole three-tiered afterlife for Mormons, called degrees of glory.

The question I replied to seemed to be conflating FGM with male circumcision (is there some other body parts that people are unnecessarily cutting off of others without their full consent?) and I was trying to point out that not only is it a false equivalence, but that ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists approve of…

I don't think anyone opposes Ayaan Hirsi Ali because they want to enable FGM in the US. That's absurd. Rather, it's because she's really good at scaring reactionary conservatives with the boogieman of Islam, and she's currently on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute, presumably to further their own…

Yeah, see my reply to the other passive-aggressive comment about "how about we agree to stop mutilating *all* babies". Male circumcision is already routinely practiced in the Middle East, so ISIS isn't going on about it because they're assuming that the men have already had it done, and they really want to terrify and…