A tip usually isn't enough for a search warrant. There's a spectrum of how much proof is required. A search requires less than an arrest, but there's still a significant threshold to pass.

...and that might be enough for a new search warrant to look for drug paraphernalia.

...which would require an arrest warrant, with an even higher burden of proof, and a prosecutor that thinks they can make a case on more than just a few pictures of you not even taken in your house.

That's not very Scottish, either.

Often, yes. You see, I actually understand the design of the US government. It's built to continually revise and improve, and it's been doing so for over 200 years. On the other hand, your opinions have been forming for less than a century, and since you're only a single person, you've undergone far fewer revision cycles, all of which have been from a very limited perspective.

For example:

Is that just, though? It may appeal to your sense of privacy, but would it appeal to your sense of justice to know that any criminal could effectively conceal evidence by simply putting it in a large enough box? How would your neighbors feel about it, knowing that you could be seen kidnapping their children, and the police could do nothing because they wouldn't know what room they're being held in?

Sure, the examples are hypothetical, but the underlying issue of deciding what is right predates your consideration by quite a long while. The best we have so far is a system where certain activities are absolutely permitted, and certain activities are absolutely forbidden, and deciding which category a given situation fits into falls to a judge whose primary interest is to bring the legal precedent closer to a state that everyone considers to be fair. It's not perfect, and likely will never be perfect, but it's closer than having Random Internet Guy simply decide that privacy trumps justice, because he says so.

The investigation is for money laundering. It's not hard to imagine setting up a laundering channel months or years in advance, by conspiring with someone to accept a transfer of money and forward it on to some other conspirator.

Specific place to search: the email account (or the house, in my example). Specific items to be searched for: evidence of money laundering (or a murder weapon).

Could be. If several witnesses see an assailant bludgeon someone on the sidewalk with an obscured object, then run into a house, the police may not be able to ascertain exactly what the weapon is, but they'd certainly have enough evidence for a search, and they could keep a record of any potential weapons seen in the house in case forensics can later get them a better description of the weapon used. As in this case, they'd have to get as narrow a warrant as possible, specifying that they're searching for the weapon and not, say, evidence of tax fraud. Of course, if they found readily-visible evidence of such fraud during the course of the authorized search, they are not required to ignore it.

The police are that neutral third party. Clearly they are not you, and they are also not the people who accuse you (or the prosecutor representing the people).

A large part of our justice system is focused on keeping them neutral. The fact that the investigators did not erase their copy, but rather retained it, is why the appeals court in that case reversed the judgement.

No. The point of the fourth amendment is to prevent investigators from harassing people looking for reasons to prosecute and persecute.

What seems to be happening here is that there is already evidence enough to justify a search, but the details are not specific enough to be able to ask someone else to execute it. As a physical analogue, there's enough evidence to search a house for a murder weapon, but the investigators don't know it's taped to the bottom of the third dresser drawer. In the case of email, I'd expect the investigators don't know all aliases that might have been used, or in what timeframe the relevant emails might have been sent.

It took 8 years from Kennedy's speech in 1961 to a human on the moon in 1969. Not only did NASA get a moon rocket designed, tested, and launched in that time, it also got an intermediate rocket program (Gemini) designed, tested, and launched prior to the moon program.

From scratch.

Other than the part about Gemini... you're completely wrong. Development of the F1 engine started in 1956. The J-2 got started in 1959. Engineering studies and development of what would become the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn V booster were well underway by 1960. There was also a ton of other R&D projects and nascent technologies from NASA and DoD programs then under way. (Apollo relied on chips developed for the DoD and a guidance system borrowed from a SLBM.) That's part of why Kennedy chose the moon landing as a goal over his other options we already had many of the pieces under development.
 
And you can't discount another critical factor - during the crucial startup period Apollo had a massive budget.
 

Now we're looking at (maybe) 11 years to develop a working rocket to go to an asteroid.

Space programs are like women, when you compare a fantasy (your massively romanticized and largely factually incorrect version of Apollo) to reality... it's unsurprising that reality doesn't measure up.
 

But the call of space comes from the same place the call of the sea arose from in the past. To Terra Incognita, where "Here Be Dragons." Sorry, there be no dragons around the space rock.

Nope. The call of the sea was "here there be PROFIT".

a stunning achievement. from that effort came chips, medical telemetry, Lord only knows what.

In general, we got damm little back from the Apollo project. (Though NASA's PR department has spent decades telling us different.) Take chips for example - the only reason chips were available for Apollo is because someone had already built the fabs. (To sell chips to the DoD. But they got their timing wrong and the DoD wasn't buying big right then... leaving capacity available for Apollo.)

After necessities like food, rent, electricity, phone, transportation, clothing, and so on, it's going to take some wicked budgeting skills to have any disposable income at all.

So? It sucks to be poor. It's *always* sucked to be poor. It always *will* suck to be poor. You can't legislate that away.

Lack of living wage jobs is a problem. But so are the excessive expectations, created in part by our material culture and in part by the belief (created from whole cloth) that nobody should ever suffer because life is unfair nor have a life that sucks.

According to a more informative article, this won't be nearly as bad, then.

Ah, yes, I remember those days well. Those were the days when DoubleClick had tracking cookies on most of the major media sites, and the major sites that hadn't partnered with DoubleClick usually had their own advertising departments, so often their banners were placeholders advertising their advertising ability.

Of course, with decentralized management, all of those major players thought it was a new and innovative idea when X10 started their pop-under ad campaign using the new-fangled Flash thing, so it could be animated, too! Surely that would catch the eye, and they could finally make some steady income from those ads, right?

Then Google came along with its ad program. Simple text ads, tailored to the viewer, and all managed by an upstart company who seemed to be pretty good at managing such things. They didn't do pop-ups (or -unders), and they didn't do sound or video. They did volume. Sure, there are now ads everywhere, but they're not as bad as what we had before. I call it a net improvement.

Ah, yes, there was the content of the adolescent World Wide Web, hosted in large part by ad-supported GeoCities (and the like) and grant-supported universities, and consisting of low-bandwidth servers run as an afterthought to a business whose primary business wasn't dependent on having five-nines availability through DDoS attacks and peering disputes. I guess most of those "service unavailable" messages counted as some form of content.

...Like Slashdot, which offers a subscription that you don't appear to have?

Not quite. Ignorant people like me know that different companies are free to pick whatever business model they like, and I am free to use their service if and only if I agree with it. I find that Hulu Plus still offers me more value than they charge (including my time watching ads), so I'm inclined to subscribe to their service.

If only we were all as enlightened as you are, knowing that advertising is all Google's fault, and that all business must be conducted in the BitZtream-approved way.

I used the Internet, quite happily and successfully, for more than a decade, before HTTP (curse you, Tim Berners-Lee) began to intrude on the experience. I would be very happy to go back to those days. Throw in an IRC/FTP/RTP+RTSP "subscription" for content, and there's nothing I would miss.

Yet... here you are. And looking at your posting history, pretty regularly too.
 

The old adage about TV ("99 channels and nothing on") applies to the web, but with several orders more magnitude of noise to signal.

If there's "nothing on TV", then what exactly are you doing here? And seriously, In a day where there's practically nothing that's not got a web page and a user community somewhere... I suspect you're blowing smoke for the karma.

The gaming community really doesn't need this old stereotype of gamers as uptight nerds who are scared to step outside the bounds of adult-imposed propriety. I played D&D in high school in the 1980s, but I found plenty of time for illin' like any other teenager.

Pretty much this. The same guys I played D&D with on Saturday afternoons in '80/'81 were the same guys I cruised the Stratford Strip with on Friday night and went (underage) drinking with on Saturday night. And the same guys who drove their cars waaay too fast on the back roads around Rural Hall. And went shooting the appliances folks had dropped in the woods off of Payne Road with. (And occasionally took a pot-shot at the old Payne place, which was rumored to be haunted.) In fact, the only real difference between semi-redneck gamers and the semi-rednecks non gamers around us was that we played D&D (and Traveller, and Boot Hill, and Gamma World, and... a whole bunch of other games vanished into the mists of time). The only time I recall one of us getting beat up was when one (not me) made an ill-chosen remark about someone's sister.
 
D&D and other fantasy and war games were also quite popular when I was in the Navy - and the submarine service is hardly a bastion of conformist nerds.