Forcing the jackasses to go on the record as to whether or not they support the bill, rather than allowing them plausible deniability on whether or not they would have voted for it is actually a fantastic thing, particularly after the John Oliver interview of Edward Snowden, which basically makes it pretty obvious that the government gets to see you dick/boob picks if the bill is passed.

No fad is a long term winner. They are all short term winners. It's time for them to pick a new horse, if the old one is dead.

Or just use a power of 2 chunk size?

What idiot configuration did someone have to have to trigger this bug?

It's not spreading all over because infected people from hot zones like the Philippines are not really doing a lot of traveling to the U.S., and, as I said, after onset of symptoms, people self-quarantine, and after an outbreak, people avoid other people they don't personally know, and avoid large gatherings of people where transmission is more likely.

Vaccination is not 100% effective, but strong border controls on people traveling from hot zones and strict quarantine rules are 100% effective.

Can't have an outbreak without a patient zero...

Yeah... it's a pretty genius tautology.

In related news, the major cost of creating new software is in the creation, and the major cost in deploying new software is in deployment.

Hydrogen gas was used by the Nazis too...

If you start a mile north of the South Pole, walk a mile south, then you cannot walk west, so it still fails.

Also, the North Pole isn't ice-free all year long. (I've not been keeping up with how much (if it has happened yet) it is ice-free during a year, but it's certainly not the whole year. Yet.)

You are in a square room. All four sides have Southern exposure. A bear walks by. What color is it? :)

You can't walk South from the South Pole. :)

uBlock isn't available for the _Android_ version, which is the problem. I use it on the desktop; I'd love to use it on Android as well.

You would think so, and you'd be right. Except that politicians beg (or rather: insist) to differ. Same here in NL, downloading was made illegal but the taxes remained in place. Over here they even renamed it to the "home copy levy". There's a levy on all storage media (hard disks, blank DVDs), which is for "compensating authors and artists for copies made of music and movies from legal sources for private use". And since downloading stuff from the internet is now illegal, this means that this fee is levied solely on CDs and DVDs that you already own. Fuckers.

We're doing poorly even by European standards:
* €1.70 / l (about $7.20 / gallon)
* About €800 - €1200 in road tax per year (regardless of milage, and this is per vehicle; we own several. There are some special exemptions for old-timers though)
* VAT (21%) + a special car "CO2" tax on purchase of new cars. For some cars, the VAT + CO2 tax exceeds the factory price of the car.


We may be a small and densely populated country, but as one clever blogger remarked: "We do not have too many cars in this country, but too many people who hate them". That's also reflected in the fact that our roads, though generally in good condition, take ages to build. Between planning a road and the ground being broken, there's zoning, environmental impact studies, protests, court cases, etc. One case: a very short extension on one highway that will provide tremendous relief in congestion and pollition around a major city, is oonly now being built after planners decided to go ahead... over 40 *years* ago.

Indeed. Let's strawman the minimum strawman to a billion strawmen per strawman. Then we can all be strawmen!

I think we should be able to trust our government with such data under a few conditions:
1) There should be a reasonable balance between the privacy intrusion and the benefits derived thereof
2) Data security and access restrictions to that data should be in line with the sensitivity of that data
3) The data should in principle only be used in ways for which it was collected, with a few limited and explicitly stipulated exceptions (such as law enforcement having access to subsets of the data with a court order). And always: not compelled by law to share means *forbidden* to share, no data may ever be volunteered.
4) Data retention should not be longer than needed for the purpose for which the data was collected.
5) There must be appropriate oversight to enforce these rules, with trustworthy audits and real consequences for those responsible in case of transgressions.

In many cases I do not in principle have issues with the goverment obtaining certain private data about me. However, in almost all cases, the reasonable conditions listed above are not met. In most cases, *none* of them are met.

In any case, you ought to be happy that your government at least set some limits on how and when this data can be used. When my country's government proposed a similar road pricing scheme, privacy was not addressed at all, on the contrary. No limits, any government agency would be allowed to use the data, and retention was pretty much forever. Politicians were already floating some alternative uses for the data: the police could use it to track suspicious movement, and the tax office could use it to catch fraudsters (such as catching people making private use of a company car and not declaring the milage, the way they recently did by requesting and receiving data from pay-by-smartphone parking providers). If our government sees no issue in buying data that was stolen from Swiss banks in order to catch undeclared offshore savings, they will certainly not stop short of abusing data they already own.

What if this pile of crap is the *only* surviving archive after 200 years?