The only non-standard part of Apple's charging scheme is the shape of the connector. The AC->DC adapter part is a standard switching power supply, the request on the USB end of the charging cable is compatible with USB Power standards, and so on.

The really proprietary parts of Apple's cable are the bits associated with the data interface (digital audio, control systems, accessory systems, etc.); which is frustrating, but not really surprising at this point considering the 30-pin connector they replaced has been around for a decade.

The *cable* carries 5VDC at 1A (or almost 2A for an iPad). The electrocution hazard for 5V devices is entirely in the switching power-supply... the part that takes your wall voltage and drops it to 5VDC. Poorly designing that part can lead to too much power on the cable, etc.

But if you use a decently-designed power supply, even the world's crappiest cable isn't going to be problematic.

UID trolling makes me giggle.

No, according to them, that information isn't private enough to require a warrant. It still requires a court order to obtain, and it's not considered public information.

If you're going to respond to a bad situation, you have to actually understand the real situation, or you're just going to get dismissed as ignorant.

The 4th Amendment requires due process of law to conduct a search, and Congress has the power to define what that due process looks like. In the case of "stored data", they've decided that "due process" only requires a court order.

Any 4th Amendment argument that a court order isn't sufficient due process is inherently one of interpretation regarding the intent of the 4th Amendment. This is one of the many reasons why the EFF is making a 1st Amendment challenge to the NSA's accessing of such metadata. The NSA followed established due process (they went to a FISC court and got a warrant), so there's no 4th Amendment claim really (unless you want to argue that the 4th's provisions were not intended to be satisfied by a secret court -- but again, that's interpretation).

The living breathing document doctrine is not saying that the text of the Constitution is mutable, but that rather as society changes, our interpretation of what it means changes too. This has caused some problems, but it's also the root of a lot of good things, like the decision that the guarantee of "Freedom of speech" extends to all forms of expression.

If there is a real civil emergency, you need the system to notify people whether they want the notification or not. The problem is that the city used this emergency notification system to tell people about a risk to one single individual.

First, yes dammit, I must be reachable as much as possible. If a friend or family member needs help in the middle of the night, I'm not gonna be the guy who says "sorry, I had my phone off."

Second, I must be able to make a call at any time. My mobile is my only phone, and if something happens where I need to call 911, I'm not going to want to wait for the damned thing to boot.

No, they don't. The NSA doesn't do this directly, they use their legal authority to require that providers do it for them. Providers often have short-term logs of the relevant metadata for security, troubleshooting, and the like; they simply ensure that NSA gets copies as the logs are created (remember: the NSA requires that they do this).

In a phone system, for example, the switching systems that route phone calls log the switching activity. That's metadata. Cell towers log location data (as course as cell handoffs or as fine as GPS coordinates, depending on a host of factors) for service management and troubleshooting purposes. ISPs log requests, including source IPs. And so on. That's all metadata.

The storage requirements for that volume of data are so high that providers typically only retain such data for extremely short periods of time; hours or days at most. That makes them hard to subpoena; so the NSA's PRISM program allows them to simply get real-time copies of those logs, and they handle the data-retention for their purposes.

There is no proof I'm aware of that the NSA captures all data; they have the capability to capture data, but there's no evidence they routinely do so. Capturing all data from nodes would be a Herculean undertaking, and it doesn't even make sense for them to do so.

Capturing metadata gives them the bulk of what they need for surveillance, possibly falls into a legal loophole (they certainly think it does, anyhow), and requires far fewer resources to acquire, store, and process.

Not only that, but EFF is very clearly a legally-formed US organization under which all of its US activities are run. WikiLeaks was, for payment purposes, a foreign entity.

EFF could very easily sue the pants off a provider that acted to suppress payments based on their 1st Amendment protections. (Incidentally, that the EFF has 1st Amendment protection is the upside of the SCOTUS ruling that corporations are entitled to rights reserved to "people").

The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect

I wholeheartedly disagree. A dragnet is supported by either probable cause or a warrant, is subject to judicial review, and narrowly targets a specific area to find a specific person or persons.

What the NSA has admitted to with PRISM is more like the police following everyone around wherever they go and noting where they went, when they went there, and who they were with.

It's billions of counts of illegal wiretapping

I'd very much like that to be the law, but it isn't. What the NSA did is probably illegal, certainly ought to be, but it isn't wiretapping. Wiretapping, as legally defined, requires that someone listen to a conversation. That's well-established enough that the NSA went out of their way to "only" capture metadata about the conversation.

What the EFF (and others) are arguing -- I think correctly -- is that even though it's not wiretapping, it's still a violation of our rights. Given the recent history of court rulings on 4th Amendment grounds, they probably feel they have a better shot at making this 1st Amendment argument than hoping for the court to agree that capturing phone call and internet message "envelopes" constitutes a search.

Just about every comment from people who hate touchscreen laptops (as opposed to those who merely say "eh, not for me") confuses me. It seems that the haters think you have to use the touchscreen for everything... lots of comments about what touch is bad for, lots indicating that a mouse and keyboard are better for lots of things.

And all I can think is exactly. The whole point of having a touchscreen laptop as opposed to a tablet is to use traditional inputs for things they're good for (writing, precision work, etc.) and touch for things touch is good for (reading, certain game interactions, composing drafts of some kinds of visual media, etc.).

I had a touchscreen laptop for work for a while. It was wonderful. About 80% of the time, it was a traditional laptop. When I was drafting a presentation (mostly images, very little text), touch was a godsend. When I was reviewing large reports, "tablet mode" with touch was much better than reading on a normal laptop configuration.

They may not be for everyone, but I submit that most people who hate them have never used one for more than a few minutes.