Certainly not in history; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had some pretty strong arguments in favor of the former Soviet Union, and the dissident prisons in North Korea - if you're born there, you stay there - give even Hitler's Germany a run for its money.

On the other hand, we had a campaign promise from the current U.S. Administration to close down Guantanamo Bay, a prison which exists to grant the U.S. an extraterritoriality so that it can violate it's own laws with impunity, and I don't see it closed down yet.

It doesn't look that good...

Well, they had to make a split second decision, and since he was holding a kidney dialysis machine, they were at serious personal risk of him cleaning their blood...

The loud people are the cab companies which own the medallions and lease them to the cabbies for a large cut of their income. Obviously, cabbies with their own medallions are more upset, but less organized into a group.

The cabbies themselves are annoyed with Uber/Lyft because they can't ignore outcalls in favor of the customer in front of them. Dropping outcalls on the floor is what gets people pissed at cabbies enough to go to Uber/Lyft, which in many cases are more expensive than a traditional cab (were one to actually show up). Uber/Lyft is therefore disruptive because it forces them to either honor their promises, or lose business from customers who prefer reliability over price.

Also, if these are implemented as cabs, they will still require medallions per cab, even without the driver (the government wants their cut), and this will reduce the amount of free medallions.

I expect there will be some backlash based on trust, and older customers will still insist on humans, just as newly married couples in NY insist on a Hansom Cab, rather than a Yellow Cab or Checker Cab: reasons other than price sensitivity.

There are additional hardware requirements on a ChromeBook:

o No COTS keyboard (ChromeOS requires a custom keyboard)

o Work required on the TP bus input lines and power to deal with wake-from-trackpad

o EC modifications for wake-from-trackpad, including some tricky PS/2 state machine work

o EC modifications including additional GPIO pins and a couple of resisters and capacitors, if the parts PS/2 bus is on the C3 power rail (i.e. there's some issues with C-state transitions if the PS/2 or I2C bus for the TP are powered down in sleep state)

o EC state machine modifications for prioritization of traffic from the keyboard matrix "pretend" i8051/i8042 parts to provide a muxed PS/2 bus with e.g. a Synaptics PS/2 trackpad; specifically, HP's EC parts tend to drop keystrokes under certain conditions, and the typical solution to the hardware problem in the EC firmware is to stop TP input for a period of time following keyboard input - same solution used by Toshiba - and it means you can't use both keyboard and mouse in games, unless you use an external mouse in place of the TP

o If the TP remains powered in sleep state, for wake-from sleep, as part of the C1 rail, then there is an associated batter cost, even if you chat with it to clock it way down; this implies either clam-shell it shut to turn off the TP, -OR- a bigger battery to achieve the same battery life. FWIW, that also means that the C1 line to the TP power has to be gated by *another* GPIO line from the EC

o Wake-from-trackpad also has some implications for BIOS default state on initial boot or wake-from-sleep (C1->C3 state transition); most BIOS are broken in this regard (hint: try holding the TP click down when booting some time, and see how long it takes).

o A TPM to implement the "trusted boot" in a way that it can't be worked around in software (Microsoft Trusted Boot can work without TPM hardware, but can be worked around in software if you are diligent).

o There's a known defect in I2C bus sharing on some TPMs when doing back-to-back transactions, which means that they tend to demand their own I2C bus.

o The last HP ChromeBook was withdrawn from the market due to power supply overheating problem (this is public information), which had to do with the charging circuit and the power draw in sleep state, while leaving certain peripherals powered on that aren't on in a normal Windows sleep state.

o CoreBoot and u-boot for the BIOS (technically, you could flash both and select which one in a setup screen, but that means higher NVRAM costs for the storage of the BIOS)

So... a lot of software work in a sensitive system area, a potentially larger battery, a potentially higher per unit cost for the keyboard, a potentially higher per unit cost for the TP, a modified BIOS and other BIOS costs, and a TPM and maybe an extra I2C line, plus a potential mod to the charging circuit.

Full disclosure: I did the EC state machine work and worked with Synaptics and Samsung on the EC and hardware modifications for a number of TP and keyboard issues, as well as other of the above issues, for ChromeBooks from Samsung, Acer, and other companies while part of the ChromeOS team at Google. Basically, they'd need to make my recommended list of partner modifications to their hardware and firmware in order to build a successful ChromeBook.

I suspect that they will find the android OS not very satisfactory as well, but with a standard keyboard and other features, they can use COTS parts for most things, and pop the rip cord and switch to Windows on the thing if they absolutely had to do so.

Not because they didn't want to imprison him; it was due to an activist judge who held that there was such evidentiary misconduct that the case was dismissed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

This was due to the climate immediately following Watergate, where the judiciary had a lot of motive to prove themselves uncorrupt, at least compared to the executive branch of the time.

The current climate is one much of the evidence against Snowden would be considered classified, and therefore not challengeable. The FISA court, the national security letters, and other instruments available for use in shielding against charges of misconduct, and thus preventing such a dismissal, did not exist in Ellsberg's time.

Frankly, Snowden is lucky he initially established, and is successfully maintaining, a high profile, since it makes him less of a target for extraordinary rendition, which had it been used, he would have just disappeared into a black hole somewhere already.

More pseudoscience. They say that they're not sure whether this means that porn shrinks your brain, or if the shrunken brain causes porn viewing. But, this leaves out the very real possibility that this correlation means nothing whatsoever. The site below collects correlations that look pretty convincing in the graphs, but quite obviously are unlikely to be cases of causation in either direction:

http://www.tylervigen.com/

My place may be tiny (single-wide trailer on a .1 acre lot) but I own it free and clear. No mortgage. So they can't check my mortgage info. Phht.

Someone should inform Carmen M. Ortiz and Stephen P. Heymann about this. And, you know, brong Aaron Swartz back to life, by way of apology.

As a practical matter, the common practice of overzealous overcharging of defendants in order to force them into a plea bargain on some subset of the charges is a straight extension and outgrowth of the civil rights reforms of the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's.

The issue came down to their being no federal statute against murder, and several states unwillingness to convict participants in a number of lynchings. The first successful use of these "double jeopardy" trials was in 1946, when Florida Constable Tom Crews was convicted for the lynching of a black farmhand: by killing him, Crews had violated the mans civil rights, as, what with being dead and all, he could no longer go to the church of his choice, he could no longer eat at the restaurant of his choice, and so on.

It was a rather weak pretext for the double jeopardy trial of someone for the same crime, albeit using different charges in order to do it, but it was in fact successful, and it became the model for future similar trials, where the federal government "leaned on" the states in order to make it highly inconvenient for them to not enforce their own laws.

Unfortunately, it also became the model for so-called "shotgun prosecutions" or, alternately, "spaghetti prosecutions", where you fired the shotgun at the target, hoping one or more pellets would hit, or, alternately, threw a bunch of spaghetti at the target, hoping that something you threw would stick.

While this may be in violation of the spirit of the so-called "double jeopardy" clause of the Fifth Amendment (do people actually still believe in that?), it is, nonetheless, common practice.

It's also common practice in Europe, and in other countries, to work around not being able to prove your case against someone.

And to throw a little more fuel on the fire in the other direction: Another example where this was used in a manner which many people believe constitutes justice, was the prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 242 for the police offers in the Rodney King beating, after they were acquitted in a California court of charges of assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force.

In case you care, the specific U.S. Supreme Court decision on which all of this doubly jeopardy depends is the 1932 Blockburger v. United States decision, so that part of the Fifth Amendment has been pretty dead for a while, if you can meet "the Blockburger test". See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

I suspect Google will handle all this the same way that advertising of certain items prohibited in Germany is handled by eBay: make the results disappear in Germany, but if you point your proxy outside Germany, expect them to come right back. Basically a "no-see-um" approach to the problem of local jurisdictions. This would be in line with some of the search result filtering they were willing (and then not willing, under freedom of speech grounds) to do for China.

It's kind of another attempt at "the thin end of the wedge" by Europe, and I expect you could argue against it, particularly in the cases of sexual predators, on the basis of the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the United Nations Convention Against Torture (among others).

By giving them the opportunity to disclose any information about current criminal activities not previously recorded, in order to allow us to make a better decision? After all, it's their fault that the information is outdated, given their non-disclosure, and they're perfectly capable of correcting it for us, since they are the person in question.

It's very hard for many people to distinguish between "It's magic because I'm ignorant and don't understand the technology behind it" and "It's magic, because it's not possible to do with known technology". If you give them the first one, but don't give them the second one, they want to know why you are withholding the magic they are rightfully entitled to have in the second case.

The people who fail to understand these things are also frequently the people who don't understand that a GPS equipped device is equipped so *it* knows where it's at, and if it doesn't communicate the information to anyone, the you don't magically know where the device is just because it has a GPS. Just because you know where you are doesn't mean you can tell anyone.

I believe the issue is that you can't sell it to the cable companies and the DSL providers that implement PPPOE in order to track your surfing, to make sure you are buying your television programming from them, rather than file sharing, and they can intentionally make things like Tor not work. Not that PMTUD works on those things unless the modem proxies the ICMP messages, which are usually blocked by the cable companies, unless you explicitly ifconfig down to 1492 yourself, or enable active probing for black hole (rfc4821).

(shrug) This thing struck me as something an Audi buyer would want. I have a bike, but due to recent balance problems I have "stabilizer wheels" (adult training wheels) on it. Tomorrow my banana seat and sissy bar kit is supposed to get here. Crank-forward bikes cost mucho buckaroonies, so I figure a banana seat will give me an ass-back seating position and provide similar goodness for my old, messed-up knees. End result, hopefully finished by this weekend: A lowrider Aluminum (Schwinn) beach cruiser with training wheels. One of a kind. Cost? Not enough to buy ANY of these electric skateboard thingies. Not even close.