Majel Barrett was the voice of the computer, you heathen! :)

Marina Sirtis was Counselor Troy.

I do recall seeing a story about one of the earlier pinball machines with voice synthesis (called "Xenon" or something like that) and one of the things they mentioned was that they could compress a female voice better and fit more vocalizations into the machine.

I remember it would give a suggestive sigh when you put a quarter into it.

As a U.S.A.ian, I can confidently say that we are just waiting to see which of our politicians are mentioned in those documents so we can start calling for indictments against them. We generally love watching them fall on their asses.

Clinton seems like a slam-dunk. Sanders, kinda' doubtful. Obama, maybe. I'd give at least one Bush a high likelihood of being in there.

And you will give your consent or you will simply not get internet service.

The Zombie Apocalypse occurs?

So there was an attempt in Amsterdam, mugged in Marseilles, took a bullet in Bogota, and a robbery in Rio.

Sounds like you got the start of a good country song there.

You mean you weren't the first in line to buy a phone with the Clipper chip in it?

I guess I didn't completely understand the case. I thought the judge had only said that they intended to issue the order, but gave Apple a chance to respond. Apple was never even told that the FBI had asked for the AWA order. They found out about it from the FBI's press release.

That said, when Apple was actually allowed to respond to a AWA order in New York, the FBI got sent packing. That sounds like a much stronger precedent than this case. This case was decided by a judge only hearing one side of an argument with the other party not even present.

A lot of people expected this one to go the same way as New York, once the hearing started. It was pretty obvious the FBI was getting nervous about it.

In other news, I just beat the New England Patriots in a football game, single handed! The final score was 210 to 0. The fact that I didn't tell them I was planning to play against them today, and they weren't even in California at the time, in no way detracts from my historic victory.

"Mr. President, we must not allow a burner phone gap!"
- General Turgidson

Apple didn't start this case. The FBI did.

The FBI didn't even serve papers to Apple telling them. Apple found out about it from the FBI's news release.

Also, just imagine the damage it would do to Apple when the source code and the keys were leaked into the wild. That's "when", not "if".

From what I read, the government had already paid for the management software for the phone. They just never bothered to install it.

It's interesting, perhaps, that it hasn't been mentioned whether Apple was actually asked to just unlock the phone. It's possible that they were, and they answered, "We can't. Not without a strong risk of wiping and bricking the phone."

The FBI is going one better and demanding that Apple create and then give them a cracking tool that they can use to bypass the security on the phone. The FBI has at least 14 other court cases against Apple to provide access to a phone. They'll certainly use this tool to get into those, if possible. The city of New York has 175 iPhones that they want to get into and plan on using any precedent set by this case to do it.

Why bother with the police station?

The car just starts dumping it's fuel tank, lowers the suspension so low that the car is dragging on the ground, and then grinds along the ground until the whole thing bursts into flames. It also turbo charges the vent system so as much smoke and fuel as possible is sucked into the car quickly.

Imagine an update going out with a programmer's little cut-and-paste "oopsie" that now causes your self driving car to deliberately target people pushing strollers.