My point is that warrants are flexible. If the cops have a warrant to search a room you can't get out of it by arguing technicalities. The legal system is run by humans, not computers, so the guy who thinks of a clever way to reclassify his data has only made it slightly more expensive for the government to take it, and then guaranteed he'll get fined.

Many, many computer geeks see that the legal system is basically a series of algorithms, conflate that with the algorithms running their non-human computers, and think they can figure out a way to hack the algorithm. That may be the case (see Mitt Romney's tax burden), nine times out of ten the humans running the Court system will see a clever hack like this as bullshit intended to keep them from doing their very important (and they think they are very very very important) jobs.

Microsoft is gonna be a case of this real soon now. There won;t be very many public examples, because generally to be a public example you'd have to a) publicly proclaim you were using some legal stratagem to keep your user's data safe, and then b) publicly admit it didn't work.

Part of the problem with Twitter's strategy is they publicly announced it. If you're a Judge who thinks you are all that stands between Civilization and Anarchy, with your Fair Rulings sending Bad People away; you are not gonna appreciate that a multi-billion company has tried to make your rulings harder to enforce. When the DEA asks for a warrant to search some guy's private messages on Twitter, and you think they're right, you are not gonna be in the mood to rule that the legal system has been successfully hacked by an MBA and a couple engineers at Twitter.

Twitter are really going to have to prove that they cannot access the Irish data, and you aren't going to be taking their word for it when they say that [insert database feature you never learned about in law school because law school doesn't teach database theory] prevents them from accessing their Irish database.

Whether his trades pushed the market down is trivial to prove. The market prices are determined by a fairly simple algorithm. You just create a computer program from the algorithm, then feed it two data sets of trades: one with his in it and the other without.

And if they did that, and his executed trades are designed to make the maximum amount of money when the market goes down; and he continues to use the strategy for five years; it's kinda difficult to believe he was not doing it on purpose.

To get that lock you need to be mighty close to the F-35. If the US squadron let's fly 75 miles from you, changes vector, and goes Mach 1.6 for 30 seconds you ain't gonna be close enough to see where they end up with IR, much less get weapons lock.

As for drones, you could say the same about all manned aircraft. But until the technology improves some, the Mach 4, 20G turning, drones of our dreams ain't happening. The computer network couldn't keep up with the drone so the pilot in Nevada would lose control.

Which is probably why it's a good idea for the Feds to fund it instead.

Where do you get this "by your own admission is not really suitable" crap?

I just said that if it works the way it should work then we'll be Gods of the Skies and the entire Russian Air Force will be roughly as useful as the Gloster Gladiator. They all want that.

And if you're gonna ignore my entire argument because you'd rather just flame me, why bother?

I didn't say that some nation of magical saints wouldn't have said had options beyond what we did in Afghanistan, I said that there were no options that were politically possible.

Which means your case has to be based on whether it would have been politically possible for let Bin laden chill in Kandahar for six months while we waited for Prosecutors to come up with evidence or you are setting upa straw man.

You missed the phrase "politically possible." Since you said nothing about the politics of America on S12 you failed to counter my point. At all. You aren't presenting a counter-argument, you're presenting a non sequitur.

How about a second try, only this time you bother to read the whole thing.

I didn't say F-35 would win a VFR dogfight. I said the entire point of the damn thing was to avoid VFR dogfights. I said it had rails for air-to-air missiles, and it would be very difficult to impossible for Su-35s (or even F-22s) to get a strong enough lock on it to engage outside of VFR.

As for our allies, approximately how much do you think we're paying Canada to buy F-35 rather then upgrade the FA-18 Superhornet into a CF-18 Hornet II of some sort? The answer is $0.

Campaign donations are one way to get a vote, but they're far from the only one. That's why all the pressure groups you've ever heard of have frequent "Days of Action" where their minions all call the local Congressman to demand something.

Even most campaign donations are not quid pro quos. Pressure groups find people who agree with them and would be good candidates. Then they get them to run. The donation is supporting the sincerely-held-view of the candidate, not bribing the candidate to change his mind. This is particularly true these days on issues that require spending money because DC is in austerity mode and the guy you whose on your side because you paid him off will almost certainly decide not to vote for your spending package because it includes cuts to some other program from somebody else who bribed him.

Dude,

The military wants the JSF. If the Military did not want the JSF they'd have kept funding the F-22, or they'd have their pet Congressman propose a new fighter competition. The idea is that a) it goes Mach 1.6, and b) it's virtually impossible to detect via RADR. If both a) and b) are true it's impossible to take out with missiles (which require a target of some sort before you can fire them), and it can sit back fire a load of missiles, and run away at 1.6 times the speed of sound before the enemy can get into visual flight range. This will, in theory, make every other combat aircraft anyone has ever designed obsolete. So fuck yes, the USAF is perfectly willing to spend a $Trillion on that shit even if it only has a 50% chance of working. And all of our Allies with actual defense budgets (ie: the Western Democracies) seem to agree because almost all of them are ordering the damn things too.

The practical problems that critics raise are based on two points:
1) This shit is costing a whole ass-ton of money and there's no end in sight.
2) F-35 may be more easily detectable then alternatives, particularly due to the fact it has a ridiculously large (and nont Stealth-friendly) fan in the middle to appease the Marine desire for VTOL capability in their version.

The military is not blind to the risk, but as with the risk of the new Abrams tank in the 80s (which used an Aircraft engine that was so hot they could theoretically be detected from miles away, and whose gas mileage at the time was measured in gallons per mile rather then the other way around), has decided they'd rather rather risk wasting a whole shitload of cash then risk having their pilots out-gunned by the Chinese when those fuckers figure this shit out.

If you recall what actually happened, as opposed to what your dad claims to remember from that decade he was on SO MUCH POT, you'll recall that the primary justification for involving US Ground Troops in 'Nam were a pair of attacks on one of our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Legally speaking, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the only justification for their presence. Only it turned out that the second attack was the artifact of having a bunch of first-year Naval conscripts try to read 60s-era RADAR and SONAR displays in the middle of a fucking storm two fucking days after the North Vietnamese tried to kill them*. A major reason people thought the Vietnam War was pointless was that the justification turned out to be made up.

OTOH, our reason for being in Afghanistan was that one of their best buddies leveled a couple office buildings and they wouldn't turn him over to face the music.

It's very easy to poke holes in our Afghanistan policy. What I have yet to see, from anyone, is an alternative plan that would have a) been politically possible on S12, and b) would have worked a tenth as well as what we actually did.

*In North Vietnam's defense, two days before that incident their ship supported several South Vietnamese raids on Northern territory.

So let's say Microsoft had some idea to reduce Social Engineering. How will they figure out whether it's Security Theater without trying it out on people?

How is that not behavioral science?

Have you ever lived in America? Because it is really fucking hard for an idea to become law here. Particularly an idea that actually spends money.

To get funded a government program had to a) convince the chair of the relevent House Subcommittee it was important enough to bring up for a vote, b) win the vote, c) convince the chair of the Full Committee it was important enough for a vote, c) win that vote, d) convince the Speaker it was important enough to bring to the Rules Committee, d) convince the members of the Rules Committee to craft a Rule for a general House Vote, e) win that vote, f-j) repeat the process in the Senate, k) convince the House to appoint a delegation to the Reconciliation Committee to hash out differences between the House and Senate version, l) win the same from the Senate, m) convince said Committee to report a bill to their respective House, n) and o) convince both Houses to vote on said bill, p) and q) win both votes, and finally r) convince the President to sign rather then Veto (a Veto would trigger s) and t), votes to over-riude in both Houses).

It's true bad ideas get through. What is absolutely, totally, completely 100% false is that any idea with enough support to get through that 20-odd-step process I just mentioned is on so many people's "This idea sucks and it should be done away with" list that a proposal to change the damn thing is easy. Especially since such proposals would need to go threough the 20-odd-step-process themselves.

BTW, this has nothing to do with ease of use. It has to do with researching Social Engineering.

We're talking about America, so it's a lot less ambiguous then you're implying. State-side the politicians who run the shebang are either "Congressional leadership, or "the Administration" depending on which branch they get their power from. "Government" as a term for those Administration/Leadership schmucks is a not-Americanism.

State-side "government" is the term used for the Federal employees who enforce their will. During the Convention this apparatus did not exist. The only Federal employees were the First American Regiment of about 1000 men, who were led by a Lieutenant Colonel (breveted to Brigadier General -- every County in the country had an elected Militia leader with the rank of full Colonel). The feds had significant theoretical powers, but since the check on those powers was a state had to actually enforce Federal rulings in practice Congress was useless.

I wasn't talking about kiting checks to do trades.

I was talking about it as a financial crime that's proven almost entirely by circumstantial evidence. The government doesn't prove a guy who kited 30 checks for groceries by proving that they know 100% that he actually intended for each individual check to bounce, it proves it by showing a very consistent pattern of bouncing checks, with the guy who bounced them not doing anything to prevent future bounces, etc.

The same applies to this case. If this guy's technique to manipulate the market price actually results in manipulating the price (which is illegal), rather then timing the market (which is what day-traders try to do, and HFT guys actually do), and he didx it repeatedly for five years, his defense can;t be "well that was just an accident," because five years of behavior without changing are enough to get a conviction.