Trapper, please take a one way trip back to 1980.

@ thsas: this kind of shortsightedness is exactly what politicians are made of.

"Leong said he did not think the department has made a decision yet on sharing footage with other agencies." That's worth reading twice. In 10-20 years it won't make any difference whether it is corporations or the government that collects data about you. The data will be collected. Moving the info around will be a matter of paperwork. Unless there are laws in place preventing the state and corporations from combining certain kinds of data, then corporate data and government data will form a cohesive whole. What's scary about that you ask? Long after the current leaders are gone, the cameras remain, but our laws are subject to change. The real question in this situations is: what would Karl Rove do? It's how the data is USED that really matters. I, for one support the ACLU in this matter. I'm not against safety, I'm against unchecked power combined with limitless access to data.

These are truly stunning shots. The use of a painting as a headboard is a little odd.

I find it to be at least somewhat hypocritical and against the spirit of the site that when signing up to contribute, a person must fully disclose her identity; however, giving thumbs up or down on a comment or article remains completely anonymous. If these activities are to be treated as contributions to the site in the context of an open community in which ideas and opinions are to be transacted and transparent, any reader should be able to see who gives thumbs up or down. To prove my point, let's assume the opposite were true. I publish a highly controversial article and get my 10 closest friends to give it a thumbs up, but their identities remain protected. This creates a conflict of interest whereby the opinions of the community are not necessarily reflected by the perceived popularity of my article. The same could be said about any given comment on this site. In the case of many articles written on this site, I question whether or not the staff (or a writer's PR agency, for instance) intentionally give thumbs down to opinions while equally valid, are dissenting or unpopular. This is as much a cowardly act as is my own decision to remain completely anonymous as I post this comment. But, if this site were to remain true to its own standard of journalism, people who give thumbs up or down should as accountable for their own actions as I should be accountable for my own words above. Maybe I would choose to be more public if the site owners would hold their own writers accountable for rating an item up or down. Or are the owners too cowardly to hold their own staff accountable for their opinions? Either way, this site will remain in its infancy until it can truly escape from its own hypocrisy and double standards to become any form of "journalism" with a capital J. Why don't you just give me thumbs down already, cowards? How about we have an actual debate of the facts? The fact is that it shouldn't be so damn hard for people to write on this site... don't you want more people to write?