US unions are gaining public approval and strength. Now they need government agencies to enforce workers' legal rights.

The US government sent personal data to Facebook for every college student that applied for US government student aid. It justified this as being for a "campaign".

The data included name, phone number and email address. This shows the agency didn't even make a hand waving attempt to anonymize the student. Not that anonymization usually does much good — but the failure to even try shows that the agency was completely blind to the issue of respecting students' privacy,

Facebook did this with a tracking pixel. The article explains carefully what that implies.

Federal agencies should not be allowed to send Javascript code in their web pages; on the contrary, they should be required to take care that none of their pages sends any JavaScript whatsoever.

Martin Rees suggests leaving human space travel to private centibillionaires.

The advantages he suggests make sense, but I see a danger also: that the centibillionaire might organize a space settlement as per own personal demesne. If only 50 people can go, it won't be hard to find 50 people who want it badly enough to yield to that.

I think Rees's equanimity about the prospect of human descendants so drastically different from us is misguided. Unless it is so different that conflict is impossible, I think that difference would lead to war, or else complete subjugation of our kind.

*Kellogg's Executive Described Union as "Terrorists" Emboldened by Social Media.*

I expect that the executive and the consultants really believe that. I would guess that they are Republicans and believe other forms of lunacy too.

US citizens: call on your senators to reject the TRUST Act, designed to cut Social Security and Medicare, each time Senator Romney tries to sneak it in.