Hell, I'd be surprised if Texas legislators don't respond by going to five parents.

"At least the..."

Many companies challenge the warrants, subpoenas and NSLs. (At the sort of the companies with Warrant Canaries.) If a TLA starts to issue frivolous ones, eventually a judge (yes, even an American judge) will see it as an abuse of process. That ruling then sets the precedent for the rest to be challenged.

NSL-DOSing may actually be a good thing for EFF/ACLU and the companies that object to these secret orders, since the agencies issuing them will inevitably make a mistake.

Then you do something else that isn't specifically excluded by the letter of the gag warrant.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for attending this press conference which is being streamed live. We, CompanyName, would like to announce that we are not removing our so-called Warrant Canary notice. We do not expect that our company will remove this notice, which claims [text of notice], at any point in the foreseeable future. Further, we reiterate that we have not received a [specific name of warrant/NSL/etc] under [specific law] from [agency/agencies listed on the warrant], and do not expect to announce receiving such a [warrant/NSL] for the foreseeable future. We will not be answering questions on this matter for the foreseeable future, except to reiterate these points. Thank you."

And when that gets listed, you do the next thing and the next and the next. The whole point of Warrant Canaries is that even if you can be compelled to lie, you cannot be compelled to lie well.

The enemy without is not the only enemy.

Constitutions are designed to get in governments' way. That is their sole purpose. If they didn't get in the way, they wouldn't be "Constitutions", they'd be guidelines. Voluntary codes. Best Practice advisories. It's the getting in the way that makes them Constitutions.

If a Constitution gets in a government's way excessively, then there are usually mechanisms within those Constitutions to change them. The US Constitution has such a mechanism. If the First and Fourth Amendments (and Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and eventually the Second) so harm the government's abilities to fight teh terrists that it endangers the Republic, then they should make the appropriate changes to the Constitution.

Changing a Constitution is usually difficult.

That is also by design.

The only purpose of a Democrat President, and the reason to vote Democrat, is to prevent Republican Presidents from appointing Supreme Court Justices. The biggest anti-democracy cases and other anti-Constitutional rulings have typically been split 5/4. The five are the appointees of previous Republican Presidents, the four are two appointees each of Clinton and Obama. Even when "we" won 5/4, it's the four Democrat appointees and a single odd-duck Republican appointee versus the other four Republican appointees.

You need at least one more term to guarantee four Democrat appointees (RBG will retire/die soon), and at least another two terms to swing the majority away from Republican appointees. Then, and only then, can you hope to undo some of the damage that's been done by that Republican-appointed majority.

OTOH, if the Republicans get another President and control the next appointment (RBG's replacement), the court will be 6/3 and under their control for at least 20 years. By then... who knows how much damage they'll have done.

No. The Native Americans/American Indians may own the land of North America, under first-come-first-served, but that doesn't mean they own the political entity called the US nor the subsequent claims of the US. Since the US hasn't sworn fealty to Native Americans, none of their own claims of external territory belong the Native Americans, even if the US is falsely or illegally or unnaturally (or whatever standard you are using) squatting on NA soil while making those claims.

If a squatter illegally occupies in a property owned by you, you don't get to keep their stuff even when you get them kicked out. (Unless you get a judgement for damages, and the judge rules the property be held as surety. But that requires a sovereignty that you are both subject to.)

Speaking of slashdot committing suicide, is anyone else having the polls threads displayed only on the left-half of their monitor? (Also happens with direct links to any comment.) It's been happening for a couple of months.

It's not any of the beta bullshit (or at least "?nobeta=1" doesn't stop it) and it only affects polls (and direct links to cid's), not the home page or any other articles.

When you have no online presence, creating a nonsense word makes it easier for you to quickly reach the top listed search result.

For example, "Listener" is a band, a magazine, a TV show, and a Javascript function. You have to rise above all of them before you "exist". Simply drop a couple of E's (untz untz untz) and suddenly you become the top result. I believe it's also harder to protect your trademark if it's a generic word.

However, if you change the spelling of your company too far (eg, "Listiner") and people may either mispronounce it (hard T, for example, List-inner or Listeen-er), or subconsciously "correct" the spelling before typing it in. Dropping the E's still retains an obvious phonetic spelling.

Of course, now it's just trendy. Which is the real answer to your question.

I mean look at the device itself, why is it the size of a fucking brick? It's a microphone with some DSP, my Bluetooth dongle has more hardware and is smaller than my thumb. They want it to be the most obvious thing on your desk "Ooo shiny glowy thing, tell me about that." (And it's iOS only, which explains even more.)

Oh, and speaking of specific searches for nonsense words, why can't Google filter out the "no such word on this list" dictionary/directory results? Fuck those guys, how is that any better than scraper sites? And fuck Google, it's a hundredth as hard as some of the other filtering they do. And autoplay videos, I mean just fuck off. I can understand flash video doing it, those guys are cunts, but how can the html5 video/audio spec not have browser triggered behaviour overrides (or at least notifications for the browser to use for tab-highlighting). It's an official web specification! Fuck you W3C.

It's amazing that this hasn't been stopped. I understand having an "idiot tax" on late renewals, you screwed up so you should pay a late fee, but allowing an entire business model based around hijacking lapsed domains is crazy.

Imagine if that happened with other areas of our lives. You're a day late paying your rent, someone can jump in and pay it first and take your office. Late renewing your business licence and someone can pay the fee and take your business name out from under you. One day late paying your phone bill and every number for your business is redirected to squatter. It's nuts.

The government funded SETI program was terminated 20 years ago (1995). Since then it's been a private research program.

--

For the AC who replied to you,

So he thinks it should have been funded for ten years longer than it was?

It's their job.

"102(c) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms through space;
..."
- National Aeronautics and Space Act (1958)

It's the very first job they are given.

Sword and shield?

I'm not sure they're going to be much of a threat to us.

The analogy doesn't work. In the song, the Devil accepted when he'd lost.

Even that isn't enough. Any system that gives aid and comfort to the extortionists is, by definition, corrupt. An appropriate response would be to create a centralised, universal licensing system to replace existing individual rights-holding licensing. Ends exclusive licenses, therefore prevents region blocking (by allowing other companies to exploit the absence), allows competition and model-differentiation in the distribution marketplace, allows artists to register directly and easily, letting them bypass the Big Four. And sends a clear message that if you don't play nicely with other children, we will take your toys away.