Oh, I'm all for more transparency, but I'm not politically minded enough to be sure my ideas are that great, however:
Just using the USA and Google for this example, the amount of money Google should be allowed to invest should be directly proportional to it's number of US Citizen employees.
I figure it'd be a good way to have the amount of sway a company can pull tied directly to their involvement (via employment) to the US economy in the political scene.
Yeah, no doubt it's flawed, however I wouldn't like to see a situation where no matter how much a company is giving to it's government, etc, it has an artificial capped limit.


As for if a drone kills someone I know, I'm going to be blaming the person who instigated it/directed it/pulled the (remote) trigger.
And if it wasn't any person, but some sort of accident, then I'll treat it like I would any other accident.
It's exactly the same as if a car killed someone I know. I'd blame the driver, not the guy who wrote the program that allowed the engine to fire efficiently enough to achieve the speed to achieve killing impact.

This could almost be modded informative, despite the malice in it, but I'd be interested in some references for the statistics.
Just really how many Police Officers die as compared to other professions (and probably need to sub-categorise the police, so we're just looking at beat-walkers and response units here, not including undercover or other higher risk categories, or the desk-bound low risk categories)
I mean I know there's more to it that simply the statistic: cops and garbage men are equal in my opinion, they both provide a service to the community, however Police do have a little more training and equipment to help them to stay alive, that goes hand in hand with the increased power and responsibility

Am I missing something here?
Criminal types could use it to find police?

Really?
Because it's so hard to find police otherwise?
I can think of ways to locate police from simply reporting suspicious activity at a location to... oh, Im thinking of ways far faster than I'll be able to write them down, and won't bore anyone, however:
Crowdsourced information on an app (that anyone including the police themselves can feed with misinformation if they like) doesn't seem like my "go-to" resource if I'm some sociopathic cop killer.... (assuming to be a cop killer you'd be sociopathic, but the same applies to the non sociopathic wanna be cop killers if they're out there too)

(emphasis mine)
irreplaceable? I'm not sure this word means what you think it means.....
However the area around the white house being effectively the same thing as military airspace is accurate enough :)

And here I am watching House of Cards which... ahh ok.... no spoilers :) Worth a watch if that sort of thing interests you, amazingly well written.

I'm trying to figure out what the odds are that someone within the government or FAA arranged for a drone to be found there purely to give them the media attention to push their agenda forwards....
Or as the seed for a honeypot, as drones over the whitehouse they already have covered.
(I mean, I would not be at all surprised that there's some DARPA weapon that fire some emp device that would be able to take out any small size electronics with negligible risk.... Not like drones can also manage the weight of reliable emp shielding.)

Well, sure, all big companies pour money into the government in their efforts to shape policy. I don't see this so much as a bad thing in and of itself, it's on a case by case of what the company is trying to achieve, and while there's plenty of idle speculation and guesses and conspiracy theories about what Google is getting for their money, the factual stuff I've seen is pretty consistently in tune with what I'd be doing if I were a not-evil google-type company.
If you start a company that is at the forefront of an industry, constantly pushing the envelope, and world recognised (and supported by userbase) and funded enough, you'll might find yourself dumping some money into politics as you're in a position to know how things should be shaped... That's not 'evil'. That's 'doing business and improving society (or attempting to).

You note that google provides infrastructure to the military. The military buy lots of stuff from IT infrastructure to weapons to vehicles to clothing to food to ... well the list goes on, probably very few goods and services the military doesn't use. If anyone "providing" a product or service to the military for money is evil, well, evil musn't mean what I thought it did.... And just about everyone I know is evil, including myself.
And...

OK. That's a fantastic one. let's cover a couple of quick things first:
Drones killing people == evil
Sure, it can be, but it might not be also. Unless you are of the belief that every killing is evil, in which case, you're gonna have to go down the rabbithole of lesser evils, because sometimes there's a person who is going to kill several other people, and killing them has to be considered as an alternative to killing x others. That's kind of the whole job of the military, making those kinds of decisions. You know, wars and stuff.
someone providing something that is used by someone else for killing
Well I kinda covered that earlier, but it should be pretty obvious who is responsible for the evil. Not like Google's going "Yeah, you can use our stuff in your drones, but only if you make sure and kill a bunch of innocent people with it"......
Oh I could go on, but who's going to bother reading this far :)

Ahh hey, I'll cop that. I no doubt do sway to an elitist attitude when it comes to this topic... I started off decades ago with html, and back then there was a lot of endless discussion and opinionating on what was and wasn't programming, and now I can program in more languages than I can remember to list off.
I was trying to lay things out from a more basic perspective, as I know not everyone interested in this topic would be able to follow if I get too specific, however yeah, this is a discussion, I'm a little elitist at times, though, as I saw on a sig earlier, I am 100% right at least 50% of the time, with no more than 50% deviation :)

As for being a dick, well, yeah, to be honest I was aiming for a little bit dickish on that post :)

I have read it. Google rep showed up with a (probably unwelcome) government shadow. Doesn't mean that Google == Government. If they did, we'd never hear about any of these goings on. Google (and many other companies, and individuals) are often required to comply with governmental directives, on a daily basis.

It seems like half the people posting here today believe that Google is giggling and sending private data to the government willy nilly, when the case is they were legally required to, have constantly pushed back where possible against this kind of request, actively help campaign for better consumer protection, and, as soon as they legally are allowed to, inform the public of what teh government is making or trying to make them do.

And as noted, it's not just Google, Microsoft also, in a big way, and many other companies of all sizes.
The common thread here isn't Google and it being evil. The common thread is the government.

btw, I'm not a Google fanboy, or an any company fanboy. I own machines running windows, osx and linux and android. I use chrome firefox and... well I only use others when I have to actually, but if you want to be calling out evil companies, there's some real actual targets like big pharma, tobacco, etc. Google is a veritable choirboy compared to them imho. As is MS and Apple too. They make profits by making life better for us, big tobacco, on the other hand....... All the evil that seems to come out of these big tech companies is pulled out legally by the government, almost always against the companies desires.

No...... That's not Google's evil, that's the government's evil. When men in suits with the the power of the government behind them come to you legally requiring you to hand over a customers information, doing so doesn't make you evil. It makes you a law abiding citizen. And if they also legally prevent you from letting that customer know, that's their evil, not yours.

They were complying with the request from their local government that was legally reasonable, and that they had no place to interfere with, which they are required (just like every other person/entity/company) to do in order to operate within their locality.....

Yeah, and that is exactly how they get around disingenuous offshore entities... by putting an office out there with at least 1 employee in it. Then it's legitimate. All the larger companies save far more than it costs to set this up when they do so. Smaller companies cannot offset the cost. But that's purely based on the amount of money your company makes. There's a point where you have to get some tax loopholes, as that's what most of your best competitors are doing, and you aren't going to want to compete with a handicap... But the solution is tax reform, and ianap (i am not a politician(thank goodness)) so getting waaay of topic here :)

How much security he has on his personal machine is secondary.

Hackers/government/whoever will target the big databases with everyone's information in them. That is worth their time. If your information is in there, you suffer also.
Hackers/government/whoever are far far far less likely to be hacking your personal computer, unless you've managed to get flagged already, and become a target through some other means, which sure can happen, but the point is, you don't need to be targeted to have your identity stolen if your identity information is being logged and stored by multiple other systems.
Simply not having/being in those big databases is better than any personal firewall imho.

Ran out of mod points, or I'd give you some :) Posting instead:
Always call people on this kind of shit. So many people trying to avoid responsibility for what they say or do these days.... and he was already posting as AC to begin with.....

Ahh, as you said, same mysql interface used in many other languages. The problem was never that "The old MySQL wasn't secure" - I actually think the new mysql implementation is too much hand holding and coddling. I've been writing in PHP using MySQL for over 15 years now, and I did/do my own security on for it, same as I wrote/write my own user authentication, and specify htaccess rules, and set up firewalls (or have the sysadmin do it for me)... The problem with PHP is also what makes it so good: It's easy to get into. And that's great, When interviewing for more PHP developers, it's really not hard to tell which ones are programmers and which aren't.
Whatever the field, it's good to have an easy-access at entry level tool that's capable of, when you learn it properly, full commercial-grade applications.
PHP is a lot like photoshop: Easy to get started in, and make a mess with, and if skilled, and you master it, capable of top quality professional work, but just because there's a lot of "I'm a designer, I've got a mac with photoshop" or similar, it doesn't mean the quality of work is there.
Most other web development languages have smaller "user bases" and higher levels of entry, so the problem is far less prevalent, or they're frameworks that allow lesser skilled developers to produce 'working' product without needing to even think about things like security. But hate the player, not the game :)