anybody have any objections sending Rob Ford as well?

Let's not push our luck.

Besides, I was thinking Ford should tag along with Rodman on his next jaunt to North Korea...

Considering there's a petition before the White House to have him deported back to the Canada anyway, I vote we offer this as an alternative.

As a Canadian, I second this proposal.

So from the other side, if an Afghani intelligence agency was recording every call in America, that's OK too because it's their job?

Under Afghani law, probably.

Granted, Afghan law has perhaps recently had a lot of outside fingers in it, so that might actually be illegal.

I don't doubt that it's legal for the NSA to be doing this under American law, seeing how foreign signals interception is largely their main function. With American troops in a foreign country with a history of militant extremist activity, it's pretty much a given that there's going to be signals interception, and with America being heavily involved in stuff like infrastructure rebuilding, there would have been plenty of opportunity to build in interception capabilities. I'd also assume Iraq is in a similar state.

Sure, all MHz are not created equal, but still, there's plenty of Windows software that was written in the 200MHz days that's still in use that I suspect would run just fine on my phone.

True, but you get into the x86-emulation-on-ARM problem. I'm sure you can build such an emulator, but I'm not sure what kind of speed.

That and I suspect a lot of the old software from that era that someone might want to run might be tied to hardware. Games targeting specific graphics cards, industrial software using parallel/serial ports, etc.

shrug I imagine it could work, but I don't see it driving enough sales to make it worth Microsoft's time.

It still amazes me that you can't just run normal Windows on the ARM-based surface.

I suspect it's doable, but performance wouldn't be good.

There's a definite horsepower difference between ARM and x86, and if the "normal Windows" config is tuned for x86, it'll (slowly) suck balls on ARM. They'd have to strip down services to make it work. Plus, people are going to expect x86 Windows apps to run (hence the marketing debacle of Windows RT), which isn't feasible on ARM.

It's not exactly scientific, but for comparison try out Android-x86 on older hardware. I have an old Acer AAO ZG5, and every time I've run Android on it, running off a USB key, the first thing I've noticed is that it smokes any ARM Android device I've ever tried. Keeping in mind that many of the apps I've been testing are native ARM builds being emulated.

Besides the privacy and safety concerns of these things, I was under the impression that a major flaw is that it's a bit too easy to sneak things through them.

Is it really a smart idea to move these things from a place where security is theatre to a place where the targets actually *are* sneaking weapons through security and using those to actually kill other people?

Anyone at NSA who is participating in this is committing an act of war against a sovereign nation without any declaration of war.

Actually, since it's interception of communications of a foreign country, this may be one of the few recently reported instances of the NSA actually doing their job.

... but that doesn't mean their lives should be ruined simply for some relatively minor past mistakes.

I agree, and that's essentially part of my point, but is this really the fault of the search engines, or is it the "no forgiveness" attitude of employers (and a whole host of others that are in a position to make major decisions that massively affect someone's life) that's the fundamental problem?

It's not just a criminal background problem, either. People are looking at stuff like Facebook photos of someone partying, or political affiliations, etc, and making decisions about employability.

This isn't anything really new, it's just easier to dig up dirt on someone, it's possible to do it on a wider scale, and the results tend to be more authoritative. But there's always been the concept of a "permanent record". That's where expressions like "reference checks", "background checks", "not burning your bridges", "skeletons in the closet", etc came from.

Having Google take down information isn't going to make that information go away; if anything it's creating a business case for a "reputation search engine" to set up shop in a jurisdiction which wouldn't allow this sort of thing.

It's a huge can of worms.

Credit reference agencies have millions of people on their files and a legal obligation to make sure that the information is accurate, and to purge it when it is no longer legally relevant.

Credit reference agencies have meta-data about when they were given the information, who they got it from, and specific dollar amounts, and there's a whole legal framework about how reports are made.

And they *still* routinely screw it up.

Google has an indexing date, a URL, and a blob of content. There's a lot of other stuff they can extract/infer from the content and response headers and they can perform an estimate of relevance (PageRank), but accuracy is obviously inconsistent even without things like SEO's messing with results, and the correctness of any content is governed by stuff like libel and copyright laws in balance with civil rights like freedom of speech.

There's a reason Google's search results have been, in court of law, identified as "opinion" rather than "fact".

Isn't the general principle that once you've done the time, you've paid for your crime?

That's a lovely general principle. That's why we, as a society, are perfectly okay with hiring convicted pedophiles to teach kids, or having convicted armed robbers manage the cash in our ATMs?

I'm generally against using a "one-off" crime to punish someone in perpetuity and deny them a decent quality of life, particularly if it was of the "I was young, stupid and desperate" sort of thing. Shit happens. But a criminal history with high recidivism rates or for particularly heinous crimes can arguably have some predictive aspects.

Why would a pardon be any more relevant of a criteria than the successful completion of a prison sentence?

Because a pardon is, getting back on topic, a formal analysis of whether a criminal conviction is still relevant and/or outdated.

In a magical world where completion of a prison sentence implied rehabilitation, then yes, it would be roughly equivalent to a pardon. In the world where we live, successful completion of a prison sentence just means someone hasn't fucked up so badly that they're still in prison.

Of course, even pardons aren't perfect. Depending on jurisdiction, they may be nothing more than a receipt for a large bribe. But that's still a step up from "got out of prison".

I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated.

Well, if he was a minor with pictures of his girlfriend, it's technically child porn, but somewhat excusable. If he'd received a pardon for the crime (dunno if that's available in his jurisdiction) there might be a case.

The problem, fundamentally, isn't the crime that he's trying to have erased, but that the standard of "irrelevant or outdated" is so subjective; it's insane to suggest that Google just take the word of some random person, and it's insane to actually make Google try to evaluate the merit of each claim.

The Spanish case that generated the ruling is a particularly good example. If the information was irrelevant or outdated, then why was is still on the net? If it was an individual trash talking someone, that's one thing (and maybe better actioned under a libel or harassment claim), but if it's a news archive or public documents like auction records then *someone* obviously thinks it's still relevant enough to continue publishing.

Simply put, Google's in the business of indexing stuff that *other* people consider relevant or important enough to publish on the Internet. It's a low bar, admittedly, but asking Google (or Bing, or any other third party) to evaluate the motivations of publishers isn't fair or particularly viable.

The whole concept that a single wrong letter could mean the difference between success and 200 error messages just made them ask, "You do this all day?"

shrug Some people just can't hack jobs where attention to detail matters. A missing semi-colon in software isn't much less messier than an accountant misplacing a decimal, or a millwright putting an extra turn on a depth wheel, or a carpenter cutting an inch short.

Did you not read the part about Canada? I believe they have a winter on occasion.

It's more accurate to say that we have summer on occasion.

...is the only person in the Senate who seems to have not been bought and sold by lobbyists.

I'm a bit surprised the comedy lobby hasn't gone after him. If he goes too far in bringing common sense to politics, people like Jon Stewart will be out of a job. Late Night will only be able to do a "Top 8" count. Writers will be forced to actually *think*.

Let's say out of a $100 monthly cable bill, $25 goes to non-content costs, $50 goes to content, and $25 is profit. That suggests the minimum bill in an a la carte plan might be around $50, which would preserve the current profit level.

Yes, that's what a company who gives a shit about consumers would do.

More likely, the cable company would increase the average bill to $110 (because *something* changed that they can spin as being a customer benefit), decrease the payout to content providers, and make just slightly over triple the profits.

It's also possible they might take a "grocery shrink ray" approach to it, and just give you less content the same price.

The sneaky ones might drop it to $90/month, and call it "passing on the savings".

But cutting a $100 monthly bill in half? When there's an entire customer base conditioned to sending them $100/month? What major corporation is going to give up that if they don't absolutely have to?