And companies have turned to privateers to protect their claims and ability to function in the past - the East India Trading Company had quite the military arm...

It doesn't matter that they aren't a Chinese corporation, they have a presence in China that can be held to Chinese law and jurisdiction.

That's entirely what's happening in this case with Microsoft - the US administration is not simply saying "all US corporations must adhere to US law, regardless of where the data is actually stored", they have actually gone as far as to say "if you have operations in the US, you are subject to US jurisdiction even if you are a foreign corporation and even if the data is not in the US."

So the grand parents situation is entirely valid - what happens when China says to Apple "give us all your data, wherever it is held"?

The US court does not care about the rules of another jurisdiction (as they should not) - they will make it quite plain that they still expect the court order to be fulfilled and its up to the party that is subject to the court order to fulfil it. The fact that the party would do something illegal in a foreign jurisdiction is something the court should not have to take into consideration because the party is in the courts jurisdiction.

Its up to the party involved to not put themselves in such a conflicting situation in the first place.

Its actually very relevant to the discussion at hand because it shows that there is already precedence set for data in a foreign country being accessible by US courts if there is a US presence of the company holding the data.

A company is as fictitious as the property deeds for your home or car...

Its worth noting that the politician that announced it comes from a Scottish constituency...

The F-35 program started with the VSTOL requirement and had the conventional and navy variants added on.

If I am hit by your acquaintance while they are giving you that free lift, their private insurance will cover my medical bills for as long as needed.

If I am hit by a taxi from a regulated company, their business insurance will cover my medical needs for as long as needed. The fact that they have adequate insurance is something that is checked by the taxi licensing people.

If I am hit by an Uber driver, well who knows how much insurance they have - Uber covers them for $1Million but that doesn't necessarily cover even a year in medical expenses or long term care, so I am left recouping the cost of my care from the Uber driver themselves. Uber drivers are not regulated or inspected (yet - wait for that shitstorm to hit Slashdot when it happens) so there is no guarantee that when you get into that Uber car you are actually insured at all.

No they dont, aircraft hand on zero visibility all the time - heavy fog, torrential rain etc etc. If the conditions are right, you can be non-visual right up to the point where your main gear touches down - you can do that either manually or you can do that on autoland and have the autopilot put it down for you.

It depends entirely on how you expose the crime - posting the blackmail material into the public eye while exposing the blackmailer hasn't done the victim any good, nor would publishing a sexual predators photographs or videos help the victim.

SpaceX do not "already have" a Falcon 9 heavy, its still in development and won't have its first launch until next year at the earliest.

I guess you are forgetting the multitude of Flash and Java applet vulnerabilities that have come to light over the past few years, most of them cross platform in nature.

I think the main issue I have is that this EC spokesman is expecting Google to make decisions regarding the public interest rather than erring on the side of caution and removing everything - the moment they do make decisions regarding the public interest, you can bet your arse they will be hauled back into court and have to justify themselves.

So by going to the extreme and implementing the ruling across the board (barring obvious requests that can be rejected), Google is protecting themselves and showing what a stupid ruling it is in the first place. There is no alternative approach that Google can take that doesn't open them up to further legal action.

SMS is a service they provide you, they can charge what they want for that service - and you can choose whether or not to use that service.

If you have ever had to debug a webforms page with multiple controls, masterpages and an extremely convoluted page lifecycle, then there is no fucking way you would call MVC more complicated.

Webforms needs to die.