Police are given wide discretion by the courts. There is no reason to believe that anyone will be auditing them for failure to write up a citation.

This is more to prevent them from beating the ever-loving-crap out of a black guy for driving in the wrong neighborhood. *Ahem* Sorry: "resisting arrest".

It worked to keep cellphones jailbreakable. http://www.onthemedia.org/stor...

The deal came in the wake of a consumer rebellion over the policy of locking cellphones to a carrier. A petition that garnered more than 114,000 signatures landed at the White House, and the Obama administration sided with the petitioners.

We elect Presidents in the United States, not dictators. These are enforced by laws made by the individual States, not the Federal government, much less the President, who can only work within the limited leeway that previous Congresses have granted him via laws.

Presidents, not dictators. With a user id so low, you simply can't be that young. How could you possibly not know this?

Not only was this stuff going on in the mid-90s, it was worse in the 2000s than it is today. In 2008, the Democratic House under Pelosi reined the NSA in. Maybe not enough for some people, but still it was done.

The only reason this is a "scandal" is because scandal-addicts have been starved for one. How desperate are they? These days, they've got their panties in a knot about bringing a U.S. POW home.

This is what makes modern day slashdot worthless. Reading through 100+ comments of misinformed libertarian ranting screaming that "Obama betrayyyyyyyyyyyeeeeed ussss!!!!!" Except the EFF document says absolutely nothing about who was pressuring who to do what, much less tell the other side of the story, which also might be interesting to read.

Um, no. The Whiskey Rebellion had nothing to do with "shitting on veterans". Veterans rallied around George Washington to put down the rebels.

George Washington was a millionaire at the time because he owned some extremely popular Whiskey distilleries, so when he imposed the first taxes of the nation (largely to pay our war debts), the first thing he did was put on a tax that hit himself hardest. This was considered fair. Even in those days, it was well known that alcohol came with severe social consequences, so this Sin Tax was generally accepted as the best way to raise national funds.

So what drove the Whiskey Rebellion? Largely it was early Borderlander (Scott/Irish) culture, one of the american nations, which simply wanted all the benefits of living the United States without having to pay a dime for its upkeep. This attitude, by the way, still completely dominates in these regions 200 years later, driving much of our politics: right wingers who pretend to "speak for the veterans" while at the same time refusing to pay for their benefits. Clyde Bundy is a poster child for borderlander culture

Thinking about it, I suppose you could say that "shitting on veterans" was the point of the revolution - it was just the rebels who were trying to do the shitting.

Here's a crazy thought: How about you stop starting wars, being the unwanted world-police, and generally just conclude that the world doesn't need your dictation.

Every time the U.S. tries to stop being the world policeman and something bad happens (like the genocide in Rwanda), the world asks "where was the U.S.? Why didn't you stop it?"

I know this is a "hate on the US for having signal intelligence spies, like every other major nation has, and has always had" thread, but exactly like how everybody hates traffic cops, just try to live in a world without them.

This is a completely untrue myth. Much closer to the truth is that the government has massively slashed taxes on the mega-wealthy without dropping its spending nearly enough to pay for the overwhelming cut. If taxes on the wealthy simply returned to the levels we had in the 1960s, the deficit would go massively negative, and the debt would be paid off in approximately two decades.

Fat chance that will ever get through Congress though.

Before they can get a lawyer to represent them? This wasn't an arrest. It was a subpoena.There was plenty of time to lawyer-up.

Seriously guy, all you're doing is making stuff up.

Oh, and while we're on the topic, this is not "warrantless wiretapping". It was a narrowly tailored subpoena issued because the Federal prosecutors convinced the court that there was reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed. This is exactly the way the system is supposed to work. And if you think that people who commit fraud, engage in money laundering, and a host of other schemes that hurt people, should all have an absolute right to keep their crimes secret, well sorry - you live in a first world country.

Dark matter is not THEORETICAL. There is direct evidence for it. Quoting from the relevant wiki:

The most direct observational evidence to date for dark matter is in a system known as the Bullet Cluster. In most regions of the universe, dark matter and visible material are found together,[33] as expected because of their mutual gravitational attraction. In the Bullet Cluster, a collision between two galaxy clusters appears to have caused a separation of dark matter and baryonic matter. X-ray observations show that much of the baryonic matter (in the form of 107–108 Kelvin[34] gas, or plasma) in the system is concentrated in the center of the system. Electromagnetic interactions between passing gas particles caused them to slow down and settle near the point of impact. However, weak gravitational lensing observations of the same system show that much of the mass resides outside of the central region of baryonic gas.

In other words, gravitational lensing of light waves - which is 100% direct evidence of matter - shows a region where there is matter that is clearly non-baryonic (i.e. does not interact with the electromagnetic field, a.k.a. "dark"). This is not subject to dispute. The question of what, exactly, is dark matter - is indeed still a subject of scientific research. There are, however, a number of super-symmetric theories which posit super-partners for well known particles, the most stable of which turn out to have the exact characteristics we're noting observationally. It is important to note that these theories were not tailored to account for the dark matter, but seem to fit the observational evidence quite well so far. As with all science however, theories are subject to falsification at any times as soon as new evidence comes on the scene.

This entire thread is actually making me want to not come back to Slashdot.

Go slapfight somewhere else

Pen-register lists (a.k.a "metadata", a.k.a. "who you called, not what you said") have not been covered since the Supreme Court ruled they didn't require a warrant in 1967. Maybe that ruling was in error, but they're the Supreme Court. They get to decide such things.

It's in the Constitution.