Well, yes...but if it's illegal (under Irish law) for the company in Ireland to transmit the data to the US, they they are demanding that the company chartered in Ireland under Irish law comit a crime.

I don't know that that applies in this particular case, but there is much information that the EU forbids export of to any country that doesn't protect the information. And that definitely includes the US, where personal information is seen as a corporate asset over which the individual has no right.

In fact, I find it quite plausible that the demanded information might be illegal for the Irish company to transmit. (This goes contrary to the assertion made earlier that the agent of MS merely needs to push a button located in the US and the information will appear...unless there's criminally sloppy systems design.)

Traitor doesn't fit the definition given in the Constitution. OTOH, they do appear to be guilty of multiple counts of malfeasance and conspiracy to commit malfeasance. So criminal would fit if they were prosecuted.

However, since they have not been formally accused by any prosecutorial authority, I think the best word may be "lying scum".

That's oversimplifying, but it was certainly a big part of it. People are incredibly self-centered...so much so that they don't even notice it. If something isn't affecting them or people that they know directly, most people will just ignore it.

Please note: This is not a criticism of the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era. It was a totally stupid war for no reason that was ever explained ... or rather the explanations did not justify it, and were often lies. The ani-war movement was just, moral, and proper. It also woudn't have happened if people who had access to power weren't forced to face what the war might mean to them.

Please note, the current wars in the middle east are much more justifiable, though nobody in government dares to mention the real justification: oil. The wars are a blatant resource grab. (I'm not sure this extends to Afghanistan. I think that may be basically a war to test out the new military toys in a live exercise. But I'm not sure.)

Please also note that the "military toys" currently being developed and debugged are designed to allow a government to attack an armed civilian uprising. And note that simple verstions are being distributed to various police forces all over the US. This may explain what the real purpose of that "war" is.

If I were depending on the word of the CIA that the world wasn't a painted backdrop, then I would consider that excellent advice.

No. Some agency is necessary. The CIA and the NSA as currently constituted are not.

To claim that they are needed is as silly as claiming that because a limited copyright is good, one that extends forever it needed. It's as silly as claiming that because some patents are needed, a patent on something that everyone has been doing for decades is justifiable, and that allowing it is mandatory.

Scale the NSA back to what it was in the 1950's, and the CIA back to what it was back in 1944, when it had a different name. Those agencies were probably necessary, but that's not at all the same as saying the current agencies are necessary, or even desireable. They are currently SO bad, that we'd be better off just totally abolishing them, even though that's clearly a bad idea except as one stage of a "redo from scratch" operation.

Excuse me, but many of us, or at least myself, do believe that they broke actual laws as well as being blatantly immoral. IANAL, so I can't be certain, but I believe that they did.

OTOH, I don't normally condemn people for breaking the laws if I feel the laws are unjust. I'm much more upset that they acted immorally than that they acted illegaly.

I understand your stated expectations. This is to be expected of one who blindly trusts authority. However it is worth noting that most of the statements by CIA/NSA/etc. spokesmen cannot be checked by anyone not a member of those organizations. (And this is why the "blindly".)

Just not being able to prove them wrong is not grounds for trusting them, when they (i.e. the organizations collectively) are the reason that those statements cannot be checked.

OTOH, statements from "techno libertarians" aren't always correct, but if they can't be checked, then it's clear that they can't check them either. This is a very significant difference.

I don't know the design, but couldn't you use the charge difference to separate them a bit, and then throw both away in the same direction? This seems implied by the comment that it violates conservation of momentum, because if the virtual pair then recombines momentum would seem to have disappeared.

A question is whether you could do this without using enough energy to stabilize the virtual pair as actual particles. It not then it would be extremely inefficient energetically.

Well, if you threw away both halves of the virtual pair, you would transfer momentum to them. If they then recombined what would happen to the momentum?

No, but it does sound like malfeasance. Which is a felony.

Some of them can write.

I'm not sure. I suspect that this is going to largely be "an invention looking for an application" for a decade...just like the laser was.

The problem is we've never been able to create alloys as a tightly controlled gradient of multiple metals before. Now if it could print a sharp disjunction between the materials, and especially if it could also print an insulating layer, then the applications would be obvious, but this is a very different thing. Different metals, e.g., conduct both heat and electricity differently. What will the effects be is one can print a gradient that oscillates between two different metals? How well can alloy crystal properties be predicted?

I think this is something that has a LOT of potential, but what those potetials actually are may well take quite awhile to figure out.

Yeah, but either could just sell that part of their business, or even just decide it wasn't worth the effort and shut it down without warning.

FWIW, I seem to recall approx. that already having happened, though I can't give a specific reference. The only real answer is to make backups BEFORE you put the data out to the cloud, and keep the backups (and test them periodically).

Trusting a(nother) company to guard your data has a long history of failures. But so does relying on local backups. You need both.

Which is why they need to be searchable by Google. But multiply this by most of them can't write coherently. And many of them don't want to really spill their secrets, just to prove that they have them. (This is the basis of many companies, so don't laugh too hard at them. Also remember the astronomer who published a coded note when he first sighted Uranus, so that he could claim priority if someone else completed writing their paper on it before he did. That still happens, if not so blatantly.)

I only ever found one of their journals of any value whatsoever (Computing Surveys). Their "collected algorithms" was lousy. If I were interested in representation of polynomial equations in Fortran it would sometimes be useful...but I haven't done that since college...decades ago.

Occasionally I'll follow a link that ends up in the ACM members only section. Sometimes it looks interesting, but back in the time I could follow it into the article only once was it really at all interesting, and that time it still wasn't useful.

If you've got a set of Knuth's books, then I don't think the ACM has anything to offer.

WRT ACM articles linked from Google: They are there, if only as indirect links [not sure], because every once in a while I end up on one of their "you can only read the abstract" pages. I never regret not being able to read further, because I *was* a member and *could* read the linked article for awhile. Every single one was worthless (for my purposes).

The only useful thing I've ever gotten out of the ACM site that I didn't find in Knuth was a date algorithm. And I already had most of it down. And their version still didn't deal with pre-Gregorian dates (except as if they had been Gregorian dates). (To be fair, Julian dates are rather different. Still...) Also it didn't properly handle dates BC, even in Gregorian terms.

Well, they guy that wrote the algorithm was still really tight on conserving RAM usage. It *was* a very concise algorithm. And it worked without problems (in Gregorian) back to 1AD. It was also (IIRC) nigh unintelligible because of embedded magic numbers. When unpacked it basically just said skip leap years for centuries unless the century divided by 400 is an integer. But he did it in one line of fortran.