I just come back to "probable cause". Any search without a warrant is bad, and to get that warrant you should need to show that more than half of those you search have the specified contraband. That's what "probable" means, after all.

Bayesian reasoning tells us that's a remarkably high bar to clear based on any sort of profile, but it's technically possible. If, say, you have good evidence that more than half of those who visited Silk Road have illegal drugs in their house right now, then, OK, that's a legit reason to search the houses of everyone who did.

But most profiling and broad searches are closer to 0.05% than to 50%. Search all the computers in the state and find one guilty? What percentage is that? Stop 1000 people at a sobriety checkpoint for every drunk you find? Well, that's a bit less than half, now, isn't it. Search people who fit a profile because they have a one in a million, instead of 1 in 100 million chance of being a terrorist? "They're 100 times as likely if they fit!" Yeah, well, 1 in a million is less than 1 in 2, so keep working on that profile buddy.

Probable cause. It's a simple concept.

Well, if civilian rules of evidence were in play, the evidence should still be thrown out - an overbroad search is an overbroad search. Even though might have found the same evidence with a narrow search, you didn't. But then, I have no clue what the rules of evidence are for the UCMJ, and it's a different world than civilian law. (And of course in the civilian world, they'd just use parallel construction to falsify the origin of the evidence.)

Everyone but you is construing your post to mean that the government investigators was OK to exceed his authority because child molesters are scum. When you call enough people idiots for misunderstanding you, you should start to think that you were perhaps unclear.

Or as the old saying goes "if everyone you see is an asshole, look in the mirror".

I recall reading some years ago that there are two kinds of atheists:

• Those that disbelieve all religions.
• Those that disbelieve all except one religion.

For some reason, people in the second category describe themselves as 'religious'. And yet you'll be hard-pressed to find, for example, a Christian who requires the same standards of evidence for the non-existence of the Norse, Egyptian, Greek or Hindu gods as he requires that an atheist from the first category provides for the non-existence of the Abrahamic god.

Only children care about looking grown-up and sophisticated. Sure, they aren't exactly fashionable, but Apple already makes the overpriced fashion accessory and there's not really room for another in that space (well, maybe in a generation or so).

Again: by the standards of men ruling men, not by the standards of angels. In each decade, look at what other powerful nations were doing - we come off pretty well, until recently.

I expect that part of what colours my experience is that the companies I typically have to call most often for customer support are the ones with the longest waits and slowest response times (that's if you even get one). I suspect that there may be a correlation. The couple of times I've had to contact Apple over the past several years they have been amazingly fast but try talking to Shaw Cable or Air Canada (other than to book a flight) and make sure you can sit by the phone for an hour or more and you can forget email because they certainly seem to!

That's what the summary says but the summary is WRONG. Read what they actually said in the article. Deliberately mis-stating what has been stated to make it ridiculously inflammatory is counterproductive and makes any criticism easy to dismiss. All the BBC says is that pirates use VPN. The troubling part of what they say is not this but that ISPs should act on any wild accusation they get to cut, or restrict, people's internet access. There is plenty to criticize there without the need to make up crazy stuff that was never stated anywhere.

The only difference between Google and most customer service today is that at least Google are honest about it and tell you that you will be ignored. Most other companies will just ignore your email and not tell you or leave you in a call queue for so long that you end up having to hang up and go do something else.

The apps from big companies are there, right? Kindle, Audible, Netflix, that sort of thing? I can't think of any way to filter the rest effectively, since the latest craze always seems to be from some indie company.

Windows has never once succeeded when playing Apple wannabe. If your idea is to make some sort of "elite phone for (people who think themselves) smart people", sorry, MS will never be fashionable. Nor will it ever be geek chic - too many bridges burned. Its current strength is in the low-end market and the app store would need to be compatible with that.

I'd absolutely love to see a store full of $2-5 games with no phoning home or in-app purchases, rather then free games with that BS, and I think it would sell well, but how the heck would you actually do that without a seriously labor-intensive screening process?

Hey now, he also took a keen interest in sweating, and in throwing chairs. Leadership Deficit Disorder - I like it.

In terms of units sold, Windows phone outsells iPhone in poorer parts of the world.

Honestly, it's fine as a phone, nothing wrong with it. It's not at all like the WinCE phones (seriously, they named the OS "wince", eesh). I played with them in the store this summer, and the UI is pretty slick, but there are so few apps. MS really needs to find a way to run Android apps too if they expect the phone to ever take off.

I was born in America, and thus I am as much a "native American" as one of my great-Grandfathers, a Cherokee, or anyone else born here. There were other people here before the Cherokee came: they displaced the previous tribes to inhabit their lands. No doubt there were wave after wave of conquerors over the ~13,000 years since the Clovis culture. Heck, reading through Wikipedia, they maybe weren't the first humans here either.

No nation lasts forever, due to conquest or occasionally starvation, but the US has a darn good track record of living up to the ideals expressed by the Founders, by the standard not of angels but of men governing men in the real world. This sort of police corruption is distinctly un-American, and we shouldn't put up with this shit.

It's great that our allies are starting to shame us for this! This is such an embarrassing failure of our ideals, and there's really no excuse.

The war on drugs got police in the habit of supplementing their budgets (and wallets) with seized cash. Policy allowing this trained a generation of police that seizing cash was not only OK, but important for the budget. There's little we can do as individuals, but as a democracy we need to push back against this, strongly.

There's no corporate corruption at work here that we need to fight, just the need for governments at all levels to start directly outlawing civil forfeiture without a specific criminal case to tie it to, and even then to keep cash and legal valuables in escrow, not in the cops hands, and insure their prompt return unless forfeiture is a specific legal penalty for a crime that someone is found guilty of.