It's not unreasonable if you can convince a judge to sign a warrant.

Otherwise, yes, it's unreasonable. Consider how much trouble you'd be in if you attached a GPS tracker of your own to a police car.

"No longer available in the US," according to the page you linked to.

I will say that's a really cool-looking spacey X-ray phaser gun, though. Tres Marvin the Martian.

Says the guy with his own 4 GHz computer, without the slightest trace of irony.

That's like saying to a software developer that he/she doesn't need to understand what memory leaks and segfault exceptions are, and how to prevent/fix them, because it's the job of the compiler to compile code in a way such that software never crashes.

And in a sandboxed, garbage-collected language, that would be exactly correct.

It's time for HDL developers to hold their tool vendors to the same standards that software developers expect.

But if you can't draw a K-map and cover glitch cases, just as one example, then you are not qualified to develop programmable logic.

Of course you are. That's what the tools are for. Nobody writing HDL needs to mess with Karnaugh maps, and once the tools get a bit smarter, they won't have to worry about domain-crossing glitches either.

*Wow, who is making the argument that we should "sacrifice free speech for a better society"? That sounds positively Orwellian. Or something from China, where the government runs a massive censorship operation.*

Read the comments in the NYT article. There are hundreds of them demanding just that. It's the scariest thing I've read in quite some time.

That's not a typo mistake. Sure enough, you are not intelligent as you think you are.

Not being very smart, I'll have to leave this word salad up to others to parse.

This gives me an idea, though. Perhaps the dumbshit programmers at Apple and Google should offer separate modes for their mobile operating systems: beginner, normal, and advanced. Copious text bubbles and prompts to explain and confirm various actions in beginner mode, some swipe actions disabled. Normal mode is similar to what is delivered now. And an advanced mode with more swipe actions akin to how keyboard shortcuts are used in desktop applications.

The "send my voice" feature is an example of something that should not be enabled by default, given the half-assed way it's implemented. Unfortunately, the centralized Settings menu tree is another weak point of modern iOS versions. Bury it in Settings and it might as well be lost forever. IMHO it's time to start associating Settings / Options buttons with individual applications again.

I'd probably put the "send my voice" button on an alternate keyboard or otherwise hide it. It's not a first-rank feature, and it shouldn't be in a position to be easily activated by mistake.

Sounds plausible, I'll bet you're right.

(Shrug) It wouldn't be unreasonable to ask my permission before transmitting an audio recording that I didn't even know was being made.

It happened. I don't blame you, I didn't believe it either.

Of course I knew the mic button existed, I use it all the time to dictate text messages. And I sometimes hit it accidentally, being a klutz. But in past versions of iOS, it's always been sufficient to hit 'Done' to make the mic UI go away. It has never decided on its own that, since it didn't recognize any valid speech, I must have wanted to record and attach an audio clip.

Sure, it's a nifty feature, as far as features go, but the failings are obvious: it should have asked me to confirm the attachment, or at least given me some indication that an attachment was being created. To the best of my recollection, there was no indication of that until after it was too late to remove the waveform attachment. (I'd say there's a 5% chance I'm wrong about that, as I wasn't paying that much attention.)

If anything in the message text is capable of crashing the app, the debate about who the dumbshit(s) are has already been adequately settled.

The other day I discovered a new iOS feature I had no idea existed. While sending a text to a customer, I hit the microphone icon by mistake. Another person in the (parked, idling) car was muttering about how the customer was a moron, which, although true enough, wasn't something I intended to include as part of the text. Not hard to see where this story is going, right? Well, it's even dumber than you're thinking.

I hit the 'Done' button to make the voice input UI go away, finished the text message, and hit 'Send.' As far as I knew, there was no danger that my friend's comment would be added to the text message. The car was too noisy and her voice was too low.for the speech recognition engine to understand, and in any event, the "moron" comment didn't appear in the outgoing text message. No problem.

Except what did appear in the text message, visible only after I sent it, was a small attachment balloon with a waveform. Apparently, iOS now sends the captured audio file as a binary attachment if it can't extract any recognizable speech.

So the obvious question is, what kind of drugs are these people taking? Is no one at a Fortune 500 company capable of thinking anything through these days? Do the programmers who think these features are "cool": and "awesome" not have managers with a three-digit IQ?

Fortunately for me, my phone lost its signal right about then, and I was able to kill the text app while it was still displaying "Sending." I knew from experience that iOS's text app didn't attempt to provide guaranteed delivery, and sure enough, when I restarted it, it had forgotten all about the message it was trying to send. So in a sense, I was saved by the same dumbshit programmers at Apple who tried to ruin my day.

It seems we have to adopt the same attitude around microphones that we normally apply to firearms. The gun is always loaded, and the mike is always live.

(Right rant, wrong target -- I was thinking of LightSquared.)

Lightspeed was terribly careless when it came to dealing with regulation

Yeah, they should have hired at least one attorney or at least one engineer who could tell the MBAs, "No, we can't use internationally-allocated satellite-to-ground spectrum for terrestrial communications."

But it's a lot easier to blame the big bad gubbermint.