Thank you for reminding me of "federal preemption". But the federal statutory exceptions for law enforcement in FISA and EPCA enforcement are far from absolute. A prosecutor woou'd have to work around them, to prosecute for acts that are not _specifically_ allowed by the statute. The facts from Edward Snowden's published documents that the NSA is in clear violation of even those statuses would allow prosecution even under FISA and ECPA.

> Please reviee the FISA and Patriot act laws which specifically allow violations of those laws which supersede the felonies you suggest.

Neither act protects against prosecution for state laws against wiretapping, which can still apply although they're difficult to enforce against a federal agency. And I'm afraid that the NSA, according to Snowden's leaks and according to the Stratfor documents available at Wikileaks, is in egregious violation of both sets of laws.

As many will point out, getting rid of heat is one of your larger concerns. When you say "'-5 Centigrade", do you mean it will be sitting turned off and then activated and then enabled at that temperature? If there's a chance of getting freezing and thawing ice into exposed components, there are a _lot_ of mechanical and electronic devices that do not behave well when abused this way. Simply repackaging an untested design may fail at startling moments.

It sounds like you should talk to your local meteorologists or marine biologists. I'd asume that your local Coast Guard or equivalent will have a great more hands-on experience than most Slashdot readers working from theory.

> They wouldn't be committing felonies as that would require a violation of law

Please review the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and your state's wiretapping statutes. Completely unrestricted wiretapping is a federation under numerous statutes.

His supervisors at the NSA certainly did. I think we can be reasonable that the head of the NSA, and the upper levels of management, knew the extent of this monitoring, even if they didn't know the day to day details. They're the ones who should be facing prosecution in this case.

Thank you for catching that, but no. My RSI is acting up a bit, I'm afraid I'll need to edit more carefully.

Evolution does not require "genes". Any biological or physical or even behavioral feature that allows information to be transferred to other members of the species, especially to new members of the species, can support evolutionary pressures. We can see it in social and cultural evolution as well as biological evolution, and they also in co-dependent ways. A great deal of child-rearing is learned behavior in more neurologically complex species.

> can use quite small amounts of fuel to "junk" in their trajectory

Please excuse my typo. The word I meant to use is "jink".

> This self feeds where the vast majority internally still are riding on skills from 20yrs ago

Like UNIX, lightweight code, C, consistent API's, and documentation? I'm afraid that while you may run into stodginess problems, a large part of my income right now comes from cleaning up after entrepreneurial spirits who ignore some of our hard-won lessons. And I'm afraid I've now seen several generations of newer developers take on new fads and be forced to re-learn, and re-invent from scratch, the procedures we learned 20 years ago.

I'm not insisting that IBM engineers are currently doing this, but don't underestimate the usefulness of these old skills.

There were reasons to pursue such programs, although at least one fortunately never worked. There was a US "Star Wars" missile defense program involving fission bomb triggered X-Ray lasers. I'm afraid the design was quite useless for defense, the tracking system would have had to be much better than anything currently available. The design would also be completely useless as defense technologies, since they can't reach lower trajectory weapons such as drones or cruise missiles, and the larger missiles can use quite small amounts of fuel to "junk" in their trajectory and modern missile guidance systems can do course corrections for such jinking at the last moment. The X-ray lasers were a terrifying _offensive_ weapon, an unstoppable satellite killer against orbitally stable targets.

The overall program was fascinating. The "Star Wars" missile defense program helped bankrupt the Soviet Union trying to pursue the same technologies. So in an economic sense, it was an extremely effective Trojan Horse.

The Surface has turned out to be both very fragile, and very difficult to repair. The result is that when there is any damage, and with the constantly droppping fire sale prices, the only personnel I know who've bought them have each replaced them twice, within the 2 years that the devices have been available. The result would look like "new sales" because the price of the extended warranty to cover such repairs, along with the time it takes to navigate the repair and replacement system, is better spent earning the money to buy a new one if you insist on continuing with such a fragile device.

> f Google locks the information up and refuses to share,

They don't "refuse to share". They sell it in various ways, it's absolutely critical to their income.

> Laws and customs are irrelevant, as I criticize those frequently

This is precisely what I referred to. If they were irrelevant, there'd be nothing for you to criticize.

If you want to draw legal or political conclusions based on your personal utopic ideal, please make that clear. Because in the real legal and political world, it doesn't work. There is _no_ human society where those in power do not set boundaries on the use of recreational chemicals.

It used to be the House Committe on Un-American Activities hunting Communists. Before that, the Axis powers. Before that, rum-runners. Before that, the Anarchists.

There is always some group being pursued for political or criminal activity and innocent people crushed in the net used to catch them.

They certainly have the right when "in loco parentis" to make medical and lifestyle choices for children or for those incarcerated. There's also a great deal of long established political and legal right to prevent fraud. So please, do not throw around absolutes so carelessly when discussing law and custom.