They are not named parties in the suit. Since this specific case was brought by EPIC and only names the FISA court, it is not proper.

If an ambassador, consul, or foreign minister sought review then yes, it would likely be proper for the SCOTUS to hear the case directly.

Your understanding is correct. That is why the 9th and 10th amendments were part of the initial round of amendments called the bill of rights.

The 9th tends to limit expansion of government (yet it still grows). The 10th was a restatement of the fact that anything not expressly granted is not part of their power; on its face it is redundant and therefore has often been called unnecessary, but in recent years it has been leveraged as a reminder that the government cannot claim all powers.

It isn't a matter of tradition. The US Constitution only allows two types of cases to start at the supreme court:

"In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction"

This case did not involve the specified people, nor did it involve a state. Therefore it cannot originate in the supreme court.

You are correct that it was doomed from the beginning, as any court observer would see.

The Constitution is very clear on the matter, so much that even non-lawyers can understand it:

"In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction"

There are only two kinds of cases that can start at the supreme court: those affecting ambassadors and other specific people, and those cases brought by a state. Everything else must be an appeal of a lower court that has been brought to the supreme court.

Since they were bringing it up as an original complaint, but it doesn't affect one of those people or have a state as a party, there is no constitutional way the SCOTUS could accept the case. The original case must be heard at a lower level, then the supreme court could hear the appeal.

That must seriously suck.

Any plans to get out of the country before the collapse? Or are you one of the majority of the people who are stuck watching the nation collapse around them?

No, it has been in a death spiral for a while now.

The country is spending money like crazy while keeping their money printing presses running around the clock. Read the line in the article, "Venezuela's central bank said the country's money supply grew 70% in the past year." The currency is collapsing due to stupidity and power-grabs in government.

Many countries have seen this sort of thing happen, and it is not pretty. Wheelbarrows of money to buy bread, only accepting payment in foreign currency, and financial collapse are common with this scenario that is playing right now.

Zimbabwe did this about a decade ago as the currency collapsed. Collectors picked up the trillion dollar notes that were printed at the end of the collapse and worth practically nothing. I hope it doesn't happen but part of me thinks it would be fun to collect a billion bolivar note from the country if/when the collapse happens.

Probably because all of those vegetables can be grown in a similar climate as each other, all of them have very similar growing techniques where the plant can be placed in a wire cage or mesh that supports vertical growth.

Each of those plants have broad leaves, can be cultivated to thrive in lower water, and can be cultivated to require a relatively small footprint.

When you are going to grow a bunch of water-loving plants in the desert, you are going to want tall self-shading structures. If you look at their greenhouses in the article you can see that vertical space is available but horizontal space is a premium.

I happen to live in a desert and have grown three of those four plants for decades. They grow well together.

Yes, mental health is covered by the government-run health system.

On one hand, as a country Sweden has solved a great many social woes by implementing broad social care and welfare programs.

On the other hand, they have the highest tax rate in the world in order to sustain all the social services. National taxes alone account for nearly 50% of an individual's income, with regional and local taxes potentially adding another 30%.

In recent years the social services have rapidly been switching to private for-profit models and the costs have started to skyrocket. So there is that side to consider.

Like most of us on /., we have a group of brilliant individuals. Occasionally we come up with some excellent but immoral or illegal ideas that would very easily separate people from their money. These are different from our typical ideas that manage to separate people from their money, as we are all paid well for the work we do.

Sometimes we will flesh these immoral or illegal business plans out a little bit, realize just what is involved in the process, and then sigh, "I could be rich if I didn't have any ethics."

Many people make the news every day. Most often these include major scams and crimes or immoral behavior.

Yes, there is work to be had and money to be found in those activities, and you can make global news from them. If you don't have any ethics.

In the article the police agencies from several nations are mentioned, asking the group to stop their work and let the police do it all.

They should be partnering with the group, giving them guidance at how to report the crimes of attempted sex crimes to the right agencies and getting iron-clad evidence to the courts. The group could work wonders in avoiding child sexual exploitation globally, or at least making predators think twice.

Instead the cops are telling them, "Let us do our job, go away." They are throwing away a gem just because they didn't do it all themselves.

I read it the same way.

They probably cut the mirror and polished the glass, and then the edge chipped.

A chip in the glass could be a fatal injury for a spy satellite as the article suggests was the intended use. Such telescopes use active optics to improve image quality; they apply pressure over the glass to bend it slightly. A chip could have micro-cracks and other damage that would easily spread across the surface. Without the actuators deforming the glass the image won't be as clear, but it would be good enough for a hobby telescope.

Once the glass chipped they likely just stopped the process, so the new owner would need to add the mirror surface on his own.

Nope, still a contract.

You are right in that most contracts are bilateral; that is, everybody agrees with them up front.

Reward contracts ("lost my object, return for reward") are called unilateral contracts, the person making the statement agrees with it. Other people are not bound to the terms, but if they complete the terms they can collect on the contract.

Courts around the globe routinely find that these unilateral contracts are binding, usually when someone posts that they will pay a large reward for safe return of an object, then fails to pay the reward on delivery, and the finder takes the person to court to get the reward. If you post that you have a large reward for the safe return of your pet, you better be able to pay -- the unilateral reward contract is legally binding.

The kernel's bug database shows almost 2500 open bugs right now.

All projects slowly accumulate those hard-to-fix bugs, or the "maybe later" bugs, or the "not interesting right now", bugs. Periodically every project needs to have that cruft cleaned up.

Spending two months fixing those bugs might be a minor annoyance to some of the kernel maintainers but would be a godsend to people who have been waiting a very long time for low priority and low interest kernel bug fixes.

Agreed, since the original comment specifies "a site I own" then colo is really the only one that meets that requirement.

If he were to relax the requirements a bit, there are many good cloud backup services out there that probably meet everything except the ownership requirement.

Most cloud backup companies will be happy to dump a copy to disk and send the package through overnight shipping, or 2nd day, or whatever shipment method you are willing to pay for. You will need to pay for the disk and the shipping and a small fee, but it is much faster than trying to recover via download.

You would need to do the same thing with a colo backup, the only real difference is you are trusting a third party to do all the work. It generally works better that way because they specialize in backup and you are just a single client, so they can do it much cheaper than you could with colo.

Contact your potential online backup company. Ask about the costs to get a copy of the backed-up data shipped to you. The good companies do that kind of recovery disk shipments all the time.

I hate replying to my own post but since I cannot update it...

Those billions of dollars in the 1960s, remember that was 1960s dollars and not 2013 dollars. The amount in the fund was huge.

I have read that if those funds were not raided and pulled into the general fund, but instead had been invested under the same plan in place in the early years of 1960, the fund would have reached quadrillions of dollars today. Instead of a quadrillion-dollar social security fund, we have an empty account that currently has an IOU totaling 2.6 trillion dollars.

Most don' t think of it as paying back a debt to the fund, instead most see it as a mandatory payment that is crippling the budget.

I still don't know if that money was better invested in the wars and space race. Somehow it seems that politicians would never have let the fund live; sooner or later the pot would reach critical mass and some politician or another would raid it like Johnson did. At least he generally tried to help people, with medicaid and medicare and healthcare reforms, much like today. Perhaps it is best that it went to those too rather than surviving a few decades and funding today's problems. Probably better that it funded the space race than funding the NSA.