The laws against child pornography should be aimed at protecting children from exploitation, not in making morality statements. Cartoon drawings of children engaging in sex acts certainly indicate people with pretty sick imaginations, but no children are hurt in their creation or consumption. I have seen worse on walls in public washrooms.

I cannot find much detail on this, but it sounds suspiciously like well known techniques for avoiding congestion in complex systems that I learned in queuing theory over 40 years ago.

I guess the website's testing process failed to catch the edge case where someone wanted to navigate past the home page.

Since the source is completely unclear, most posters will blindly assume it is the fault of whichever group is their bête noire. Some favorites will likely be China, North Korea and Russia, but use your imagination folks. There is just as much evidence that it is caused by evil bankers, genetically modified foods, pedophiles or US militarism.

Presumably, someone has been using the infinite improbability drive.

Considering the request to rewrite the record also required the falsification to be secret, how would we know how many times this has been done in the past. We only know that this is the first time such a request has been rejected. I personally suspect it might only have been rejected because of the large number of witnesses of the original hearing.

The knee jerk reaction, of course, is to look for a catch in anything Homeland Security is doing. However, this seems like a really good idea. Finally, they are contributing in a positive way to public safety.

arguments are in the next article

No they're not!

Believe it or not, using 2260 terminals connected to an IBM 360 mainframe running MVT/ASP, I was able to rerun commands anywhere on the screen back in 1973!

A lot of what is in the example reminds me of a 4GL I worked with in the 1980s that had a feature called "computed fields". The idea is extremely nice conceptually, and seems to nest nicely, as well as be easily integrated with other functionality. The main problem is performance. Some pretty smart people worked on the tools, but (with the complexity of real life systems) you tend to end up with the same values being continually recalculated. It turns out that (because of the generality of the functionality, and the inability to predict when values will be updated or queried) it is extremely difficult to suppress these duplicate calculations. A typical application developer will create code that results in values being recalculated thousands of times in a single transaction. The problem is both worse and more intractable than is experienced with computed columns in spreadsheets.

Next they will start to shoot journalists

They need plausible deniability, so I doubt it. There have probably been some staged accidents, and it is worth remembering that the US did bomb the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad. The considered attack on the Al Jazeera world headquarters in Qatar was probably only rejected because there was no good way to make it look like an accident.

There is an assumption here that due process will be followed against those "guilty" of talking to journalists. That is naive. In US government agencies (whatever the written regulations or law might specify) only those specifically cleared to speak with the media are allowed to do so. Once it is known by the heads of those agencies that someone has broken this unwritten rule, they will get him, legal niceties be damned.

Democracy only works if those in power are committed to its preservation. Important policies and actions need to be discussed and public opinion allowed to influence final decisions. There is ample evidence that the U.S. and some other older democracies no longer really want their people involved in important decision making. They need to pay lip service to the concept. However, a combination of lies, secrecy and manipulation (partly by politicians themselves and partly by well funded PACs) ensure informed participation from the general population is next to impossible.

"Democracy" and "human rights" in these countries will no doubt remain for a long time as key justifications for very undemocratic foreign policies, but are well on the way to being dead in any meaningful sense.

... the police will now be allowed to examine the material to investigate whether a crime of 'communication of material to an enemy' has been committed

Miranda is clearly guilty, then, as he certainly communicated embarrassing information to dirty red commie journalists.

Sadly, many Western governments are unable to carry out some actions they want to if the general public knows about them, simply because most people consider them immoral and unacceptable. They are, then, presented with a dilemma. They can stop doing things their electorate would find objectionable, they can try to eliminate the ability of the electorate to influence government, or they can lie about what they are doing and try to keep it secret. The third is impossible if people like Snowden are allowed to tell people what their government is doing on their behalf.

Over the last 30 years or so, I have spent lesser or greater periods in over 50 countries. However, the last ten years have been mainly in South East Asia. I use Bangkok Thailand as my base and travel around from there.