Companies should not be permitted to profit from the sale of addictive substances for recreational purposes.

Is coffee recreational or a building block of life? Either way, why do you hate coffee so much?

Hmmm. Have you checked for system updates on your humor chip? Show me one cowboy who hollers "bing!"

States with greater privacy protections written into their constitutions outlaw DUI checkpoints. Those more closely aligned with the Feds' "guilty until proven innocent" mentality, use DUI checkpoints.

By accepting the propriety of a search without any articulable suspicion that you may be engaged in illegal activity, DUI checkpoint states, and the people who support such laws, are steepening the slope we're on as we glide toward police state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Once loaded, do a text search for "ten states" to get the list of those on a higher moral level with regard to this issue.

If you aren't a member of the government, the same or less will get you a decade or more. What I meant without being clear enough, was that the special treatment is shocking given the special access government officials have. If the government cared about people's privacy, those in a position of trust who fail to safeguard that privacy would be subject to the same or more punishment as any random person who did the same thing.

Actually he _was_ convicted of misusing the DB (max sentence 12 months). He's been in jail for more than 18 months so at this point, he has served more than enough to satisfy the highest possible sentence.

As a side note, the most disturbing part of this case to me, was Valle's illegal use of the DB to find out information about people for purely personal reasons. I'm sort of shocked that such a crime carries a max 12 month sentence. What that says to me is that law enforcement agencies and the governments that set them up, don't really care how their own misuse government power. Nor does the media for the most part as demonstrated by the thousands of words spent on the prurient charms of this case, but in any article, there is at most a single sentence about the DB issue.

Here's an example:

Tabloid same as NY Times, you'll have to search the page for "database" to find that single sentence.:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...

Does a "dumb phone" exist? Wouldn't it be more accurate to call them weak computing devices with few _user_ accessible features?

the only person who would see it immediately would be perhaps NSA employees entering and egressing

You seem to have forgotten that as modern Americans we have:

1) Cameras.
2) The ability to transmit photos worldwide.
3) Access to the work of reporters who can add textual context to those photos.

Even if the protest was seen by 50k people, what actually matters, is if it gets play on the internet, news papers, and/or television.

When is that brain cancer you have finally going to impede your ability to type? Not soon enough.

You are one of the people who comes to mind when I think of this quote: "I've never killed a man, but I've read many an obituary with great satisfaction."

That was beautifully written. Replying so I can find it in the future more easily.

For that to happen, Obama would have to be involved.

Politicians are slimy evil scum, but they aren't stupid. They saw what happened to Nixon, so now they do all the same stuff he did, just through levels of insulation. GOP and DNC alike -- fetid pukes the lot of them.

Why do you own a smartphone that doesn't have an internet connection? You might as well just get a landline.

Just how broad is the radius of this location? If a person living in New York City buys something online from a store in Seattle while he and his phone are in NY, where does the credit card transaction occur? If the answer is Seattle, the definition of what is a reasonable proximity between transaction and phone has to be quite loose, otherwise a lot of legit transactions will be botched. I don't actually know anything about CC processing however, so I would be interested in hearing from people who do.

Isn't sort of insane to cross a border with one's primary phone? I have my old retired android phone which I "fillup" with a prepaid card (and absolutely nothing else on it all), for crossing the border. I'm surprised more people don't do this.

point well taken

Not to mention the fact that the Government is free to jail or kill you whenever it wants based on what you think and say.