A swing and a miss? More like knocking himself out with the follow-through.

Anybody who honestly thinks Libertarians are tools of the Right is too ignorant to be dangerous.

And anyone who thinks Ted Cruz is a Libertarian could probably learn a lot from a school of those trout.

Of course, if you seriously advocate that people take responsibility for their networks, their equipment, and their decisions and realize the part they play in enabling the problems they complain about, you'll be accused of "blaming the victim".

Still, unlike the harsher laws that vary by jurisdiction (of which some have no extradition treaties), this actually stands a chance of working. On a hostile network like the Internet, nothing other than hardening the targets is going to actually improve security. It would also be nice for the rest of us not to have to contend with botnets and other problems made possible entirely by the clueless who want all the benefits of a general-purpose global network but don't want to put forth the effort to learn how it works and how to use it responsibly.

They strongly resemble the child who wants a pet cat but doesn't want to feed it and change its litter box because that part isn't fun.

That last sentence is false and shows you don't fully understand what you're discussing. The merchant is charged a fee, usually a small percentage of the transaction, each time you use your credit card. Even if you never personally pay interest because you pay in full each month, the bank issuing the credit card is making money from your use of that card.

Incidentally, this is also why some small, local, mom-and-pop stores won't accept a credit card unless your total purchase exceeds a certain amount. The fee they must pay isn't worthwhile to them if the transaction is too small. Larger stores are better able to absorb it and just consider it a cost of doing business.

No. This is where I say Whoosh.

It isn't that it's not a worthwhile thing to do. It's that (A) the iPhone solution is meh, and (B) this whole subject is meh and not worthy of Slashdot. It has been done so often as to not be newsworthy.

You ALL seem to be forgetting interleave, which is the one motion-enabling technology most responsible for reasonable motion effects on television. (NTSC TV of course also has a higher frame rate: 29.97 fps.)

1080p (p for progressive, i.e. one full frame at a time like film) became the norm because of its higher pixel-per-second count. But let's not forget about 1080i, where the i is for interleave. 1080i shows motion much better.

WHOOOOOSH!!!

That was GP's whole point: anybody stupid enough (or forgetful enough) to try to carry something like this onto a plane just isn't much of a threat.

TFA in a nutshell:

"We're going to discover all these neat behavioral things via neurobiology, and change the world!"

It doesn't say they've actually discovered any of these things yet. Just that they plan to.

It reads very much like this.

This is a common syndrome in erstwhile free societies: the police are always complaining that they can't catch criminals, that they need more leeway and exemptions from the law themselves in order to do so.

And when people believe them, the inevitable result is less freedom and more Big Brother.

Anybody who thinks Snowden did not ultimately do us all a huge favor isn't seeing straight.

Please elaborate. What are these "bogus" ecological claims?

There are exceptions, but in most states they are few and specific.

Ditto.

"Seem to be absolved from" is not the same as legal. That's a straw-man argument. I wrote "they're not allowed". The dog is not allowed on the bed. That doesn't mean the dog doesn't get up there sometimes. Only that it isn't supposed to.

Having said that, again yes there are exceptions. But those exceptions are very specific and we know what they are.

Though they sometimes might not get prosecuted for breaking the rules, they sure as hell should. That's a genuine societal problem, not how things are "supposed to" be.

"They" put it in huge reservoirs. I used to live there, and I know them well. Also the Central Valley, where a close relative owned a farm / ranch. I am intimately familiar with these things.

And don't ben an ass. "All"? Of course not. Being deliberately literal when I was not doesn't make for compelling arguments. It's pretty obvious that I was oversimplifying.

Still, the basic point remains. Stand at the mouth of the San Joaquin "river" most of the year and see how much water comes out. I have pictures of my grandfather with strings of large salmon caught in that river, back before it was being mostly used up. Now, it's not very common to see more than a trickle most of the year. And ask residents of L.A. about their "river". You've probably seen it in movie "chase scenes"... a vast concrete canal with seldom more than puddles at the bottom of it.

And don't forget groundwater: they've been gradually depleting the aquifers for generations, and they were aware of it.

Yes, I certainly can, and the answer is no.

Guess what? Oregon and Washington make use of that water. Shipping it down to California seriously diminishes quality of life for those who live there, not to mention the environmental destruction that would ensue.

Let California go broke. Hell, it is anyway. People can buy their food from elsewhere.

IANAL, but my understanding is that you are not generally required to go out of your way to assist the police. You are not a policeman, you aren't being paid to be one.

Even phone companies insist on payment for allowing wiretaps, or government requests for information. And even those are only mandatory because there are specific laws that say so (such as CALEA).

Unfortunately, though, we now have far too many laws, including contradictory laws. Even if somebody had their own legal library, every year some things change. A hypothetical typical, reasonable citizen could not possibly know them all, much less be reasonably expected to. They wouldn't have time to do anything else.

So here's my question: since our common law system is supposed to be based on the reasonable man principle, and it is provably not reasonable to expect the average citizen to know most laws, much less all, how could ignorance of the law NOT be a valid excuse?

Have you been living under a rock the last 5 years?

Yes, prosecutors have tried to use the TOS thing as an excuse to prosecute. But that is being actively fought by EFF, EPIC, and a whole alphabet soup of other organizations acting as amici to the courts, and with actual legal defense as well.

It is pretty clear that Congress never meant the law to apply to situations like Aaron Swartz, for example. Government prosecutors have been fighting actually getting that one to court though because they know they'll lose, and they want to retain the ability to threaten people with it.