Laws are not laws if they are repealed. If everyone had this attitude african americans and women wouldn't be allowed to vote.

I work in Telecom, fiber cuts happen every day on major networks. Backhoes and rats cut underground fiber, trucks and squirrels cut aerial fiber. It would easy to put a splitter in place, but hard for it to stay in place without someone noticing. I think in most of this tapping the carrier is complicit.

You can't buy a custom ASIC off the shelf at Fry's, but you can buy a CPU or a GPU. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison if you throw in custom hardware.

And if you do die in a car accident, it's probably a burning Tesla.

From looking at the map, it looks like most of the GPS monitoring stations are on US Military bases anyway, so there's no need for a front. Everybody knows we're collecting any signals we can pick up.
It looks like Russia is trying to put theirs in corn fields in the middle of the US.

This is just basic smart politics. An old speech can never help you in an election, but can be mined for quotes to be used against you. Journalists should keep their own records anyway, or establish some 3rd party trusted repository.

That's a fairly modern distiction. For decades the progression was Single Action - Double Action - Automatic. I still refer to "revolver vs automatic"

It's going to be hard not to notice the person staring into space and drooling.

That's not particularly meaningful, given that totalitarian regimes are to the UN as the tea party is to the US Congress. They've got enough votes to accomplish a lot of things that don't make sense and they vote in blocks.

Cheap power is profitable power for the guys that own factories, foundries, datacenters, etc.

Still more deaths than Fukushima though.

Data structures, OSI network model, big O notation, all these things are as relevant today as they were decades ago. University isn't vocational school.

Legal drinking age in Germany is 16, try again.

I rode on the articulated subway in Berlin this year during a weekend, including early Saturday morning. Lots of partiers, no vomit. Maybe Canadians drink like teenagers? :)

What ship has ever been invincible? I think the idea here is that between stealth for defense and enhanced radar and electronics for offense, this ship will shoot first.