How is this evil? As far as I'm concerned, this is a great customer service. I can actually see e-mails that I want to read without having all sorts of metadata that I'm not interested in sharing with the entire world shared. Google becomes the one and only company whose behavior I have to monitor, instead of every business online that I work with. Monitoring one is a lot easier than monitoring all of them.

> With Google pre-fetching all of these, every GMAIL address id Verified for the Spammers.

Not necessarily. The article says Google is pre-fetching all incoming images. It could be doing that *regardless* of whether or not the e-mail address is valid. I'm willing to bet that Google engineers thought through all of these arguments and has implemented a system that actually achieves their goals of blocking that sort of information.

> Google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email.

Are we sure about that? I didn't see timing information in the article. Google could cache the images as soon as their server receives the message. In fact, the second article says that Google will automatically download all *incomming* messages. That suggests they're pulling them when the e-mail is sent, thus cloaking whether or not the user has read them. And since that's Google's goal, I'll wager that's exactly what they are doing.

If his job is to prevent terrorism, he's right... he can't do that without a substantial surveillance dragnet that tramples the 4th Amendment.
If his job is to investigate and prosecute terrorism after it occurs, he can do that and stay within the Constitution.

I think he would have to convince his bosses (both the administration and the American people) to be comfortable with a different mandate. Are we comfortable with that? I am -- but then, I'm one of those who believes the risk of a government with that level of surveillance abusing its powers seems to me like a worse environment than one in which another 9-11 occurs every 5 to 10 years.

There's a balance that needs to be struck. In my opinion, there's an imbalance right now.

Quoting from the end of the article:
> Foremost among them will be whether there is any mechanism that could have allowed life from
> this era, if it did evolve, to have survived as the universe cooled down. And if so, whether there
> might be evidence of it today.

Seems like it would be possible if a world was in free space during the warm period and then was captured by a sun as the background radiation cooled. Yeah, the handoff would have to be pretty precisely timed, but if there were millions of such worlds, one or two might have nicely transitioned. Does that sound plausible?

Um... did you read the article? Search for this sentence: "The first is the question of whether planets could have formed at all at this stage of the universe." and then keep reading from there. tl;dr? There would likely have been plenty of time and resources for planet formation.

I'll just point out that this "pointless conjecture" comes from a scientist who has contributed more to our understanding of the universe than most people posting on this thread.

Maybe as soon as a species figures out what Dark Matter is they immediately decide to convert over. Once you go black, you never go back. ;-)

If only we had two the NSA and a meta-NSA... the meta-NSA's job is to spy on the NSA. Then we could listen to the NSA and accept advice from them only when the meta-NSA tried to undermine it -- because then we would know that it was a suggestion that actually made the meta-NSA's job harder. We could set it up such that however many files the NSA has in its possession, the meta-NSA's job is to copy as many as possible, and the more documents that the meta-NSA does copy, their pay goes up and the NSA's pay goes down. That way we maintain enmity between them.

> aircraft carriers ain't going away anytime soon

Gotta have someplace to park the drones, right? How are the rolling drones for repairing the flying drones coming along?

In Britain: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
In USA: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

The publisher could've just said, "No, we're not changing it for Americans who we think will be scared off by the word 'philosophy'. It's just one of our DRM changes that happened to end up in a particularly visible location." :-)

Aren't they still legally under a gag order even if it has been disclosed? The FISA letters don't say "keep quiet about this unless it is already public." They say "keep quiet about this period."

It's hard for me to see how we will allow various technologies like self-driving cars to go forward while still holding back the war machines. I mean, I want to hold back the war machines, but writing a law to keep those two use cases separate will be tricky. A child runs out into the street... does the self driving car hit the child or swerve possibly hitting some other car? Does the car evaluate the people in the other vehicle? Whatever logic we put into the cars, that's the same logic -- inverted -- that would run the war machines.

I hope we have high wisdom politicians writing that particular body of law. I know... improbable... but hope springs eternal.

So, if there's some video I don't like on the Internet, I just go there and add a comment saying that it is this Irish dude doing whatever it is that is in the video? I can think of lots of embarrassing videos that various celebrities would like to see go away. Just add "Hey! That's Eoin McKeogh!" to the video and then sue in Ireland.

This is just one of many problems I see with this ruling. It just was the most interesting one.

I think that's why the court required the "when notified" part. I don't agree, but at least it is feasible to implement.