Yeah, tell me about it. When my sister, who lives in Sweden, whipped out her chip and pin card system while visiting me, I must have looked like a caveman seeing a ferrari.

Holy shit, that was an amazing read. Thanks!

AFAIK these only ever apply to parolees, which I don't see a constitutional problem with in principle.

I don't think having sociopaths in power is really by itself such a bad thing, in fact IIRC there's a strong hypothesis that the reason for the existence of sociopaths is that society (well, tribes) need them to fulfill the role of leaders, because sometimes a leader needs the ability to go against the rules that make most people good "citizens". The problem is, if you're going to have sociopaths in power, you had better make sure their incentives line up with the good of the population, because they will optimize selfishly without much regard for the good of others (by definition), and they'll do a really good job at it.

Oh my god, nothing has ever been more wrong than what you just said. It might be true in some tiny field I've never heard of, but in my areas many of the biggest names have books to their name. For someone who knows their shit to write a book is a great service to the community, because it consolidates knowledge and facilitates its use and transmission (be it for teaching or research).

Logitech thumbball user for 5 years, and I'm never going back. This is the discontinued wired model, and it's so good that it actually healed itself -- the left mouse button kind of stopped working a while back, so I switched to another trackball for a while (the symmetric type). Didn't like it as much, switched back fully intending to do whatever it takes to fix the thumbball, and what do you know, it works just fine. I have no clue what the hell happened during those few months...

Ding ding ding! There is no reason to expect the organizational structure and goals of the NSA to be any different from middle management at Microsoft, except unlike Microsoft, the NSA doesn't have a finite money supply dictated by the market and a CEO that would be willing to draw the line somewhere if enough money was squandered. I don't know what performance metrics they use at the NSA (doubt it's stack ranking), but at the end of the day it's going to be about helping your boss convince his boss that you should be awarded a bigger budget because what you're working on is really cool and will impress the guys upstairs.

Carlin, is that you?

Plus, bugs don't live very long. If you only need your ship to work for a couple of weeks, there's a lot you can get away with too.

Spoken like a true biologist -- "Based on 7 samples of 10000 dimensional microarray data, I have concluded that this gene causes all cancer in everyone!"

I agree, I personally wouldn't take this kind of chance. However, I think it's a really interesting legal question, so I'd kind of like to see someone attempt something like this. Might go all the way up to the SCOTUS (though it might be kept secret, too).

Because sometimes government is scarier than profit-driven private entities. Typically the worst thing that can happen to me from businesses having my private info is advertising inundation; inability to qualify for loans; getting ripped off because the entity selling me a product or service knows I can afford it; etc. The worst thing that the government can do, however, includes diminished ability to travel (no-fly lists and such), forced cooperation (warrants, secret or otherwise; forced questioning regarding one's associations -- yes I've seen it happen), incarceration, and other wonderful things. Corporations want your money and labor, government can want everything else.

I've heard similar proposals before, and it seems very murky from a legal standpoint. With a highly automated system like this meta tag, I think most judges wouldn't have a problem deciding that you violated the terms of a secret warrant by not updating it. The proposal I heard was to try to circumvent this by making the "canary" something more complicated -- imagine that, every day that you didn't receive a secret warrant, you went to some location in your city, took a photo, and posted it on your webpage. Could a judge then force you to keep doing so? Or even more extreme -- every day that you don't receive a warrant, you run a 10K. Could a judge force you to keep running? Or keep going to work? Or keep self-mutilating in some way? At what point are a person's basic liberties more important than the secrecy of the warrant?

My guess would be that in any of these instances, no judge would rule that you must keep updating the canary. However, I'd imagine that they might rule that you broke the law by setting up the canary in the first place. Of course, there's an obvious problem with that -- as long as you never get a secret warrant, you clearly couldn't be prosecuted for violating one. So it's a weird situation where an action that is otherwise legal, becomes retroactively illegal upon receiving a secret warrant. It's a bit of a mindfuck.

Just OP being pretentious. Reminds me of Louis C.K.'s "people from phoenix are Phoenicians" bit.

But you could say that about everything. Smoking 2 packs a day causes lung cancer, and yet "lung cancer is caused by genetics and lifestyle factors". There are people who smoke 2 packs a day and never get lung cancer, probably in no small part due to genetics. At some point it's a numbers' game -- when behavior A combined with genotype B causes disease D, if genotype B is sufficiently common (and behavior A is sufficiently uncommon -- i.e. A shouldn't be "drinking water") it's reasonable to say that A causes D. Where exactly you draw the line is unclear, but when behavior A is something that deviates as strongly from the historical norm as taking in a thousand calories' worth of sugar a day, it might not be so misleading to call it the cause.