Ironically, if his own data was breached, he would likely be forced to recuse himself from the case.

I'm still waiting for a simple way to control my TV, and DVD player. Universal remote is a double negative (or a double positive resulting in a negative?) While it's possible to unify a TV, a receiver, an xbox, and a cable box; it is far from simple. If you need a CS degree to get your IOT house in order, I really don't see it being mainstream. So yeah, in short, the OP nailed it... never simple.

Well, both sides of the debate love pithy sayings, and it's never cool to be a moderate anything... we must be extreme, lest we lose any ground, and therefore lose the fight. As for me, I'm pro-gun, but I'm way to moderate to align myself with the NRA or any other officially pro-gun group. Those guys scare me more than the gun-control groups!

The providence of a pithy saying is hardly relevant to the debate though... do you reject out of hand the saying "thou shalt not kill" just because you disagree with something else in the bible? In the end, truth is truth, regardless of what other truths or lies surround it. To recognize truth, one must test it independently. I'm not in a position to spend my workday researching this, so I won't assert that it's true, but I do like the saying for what it tells you about the person who uses it... I think it says that person WANTS a society that can be both polite and armed. There are many towns in the west where this is exactly the case, and that's what people latch on to when they use sayings like that. The counter argument is that there are lots of quiet beach towns that while largely unarmed, still enjoy an equal measure of brotherly love and politeness. Either way, I'm good with a polite society. The one thing we should not have in our society is the in-your-face-about-my-guns-because-that's-how-i-defend-myself attitude. In my opinion it's just warmongering and serves to undermine a rational debate about gun safety.

A brief note on science-fiction authors though: their job is to makes stories about dystopia and make you think... so controversy is right up their alley. I wouldn't judge any society or societal goal by statements made by science fiction authors.

Whew man are we off topic or what? Back to cell phone theft!

Wow you're a killjoy.

I'll cite my personal experience in the first case... and I won't bother providing a citation for the second case, because I never claimed it to be true. I've known several people who started carrying sometime after I knew them. They each got more polite. That's my experience. Sorry it's not the cold hard facts you are accustomed to getting on slashdot.

I was simply pointing out the GP's erroneous assumption about *who* gets more polite in an armed society. I was just trying to bring a little levity to the conversation. To me it looks like you are just trying to pick a fight.

The trouble is that a fast ride to good eating establishments will raise demand... and therefore price. So your half price beer is only half price because of the difficulty in obtaining it.

I guess I don't understand the insurance industry all that well then, because it seems that an insurance company would want to have a way to locate that phone. If the insurance company asks around to the major carriers and says "hey, has this phone been activated on your system after ..." then they could contact the new "owner" of the phone, and track it back to the seller. (assuming the phone carriers really want to help stop phone theft).

Is there a reason phone carriers don't want to do this? Is it a privacy issue? I know it's a lot of work to track back that way, but that's what police work is for... and if police cracked down on this, eventually it would stop... or maybe that was the original problem all along, is that police didn't want to make the effort needed to crack down on this.

I just think that the kill switch becomes a buyer beware problem rather than a seller beware solution. It doesn't result in the arrest of the thief, and if a guy can move fast enough, he can probably still fence a lot of phones. Thinking about those grab-and-run thefts on New York Subways, I could totally see a thief in a big city advertising on craigslist for a phone that had yet to be stolen, and after getting the details of a "meet up" to buy the phone, then going out and stealing one an hour or two before the meetup. The kill switch won't ever result in the arrest and prosecution of that thief, but the buyer will get screwed every time.

You completely miss the point sir... the person who caries becomes more polite, not the neighbor. The neighbor has no idea who carries. Likewise, the person who commits crime is less inclined to do so because he/she can't tell who carries and who does not. Unwilling to play the odds, they move to California or New York to ply their trade. Its a win for everyone (unless you live in California or New York of course).

I'm curious what the motivation is for a person to sell their phone, take the cash, then report it as stolen. Where is the profit in this? It's just malicious. I seriously doubt that would happen enough to justify any concern by the general public.

Easy... the republican trolls do it for free.

Exactly... as has been opined about dozens of times before... you can never fully protect against hacking, so automakers are always going to fail at it.

I said nothing about people being forced to see it, and that has nothing to do with my argument. My argument is one of morality, and it is my opinion. Society has always defined a line of what is moral, and what is immoral. That line has moved back and forth through history, and depending on ideology. Scantily clad women don't bother me all that much, but more importantly it doesn't bother me that others take pleasure in watching it. That's the line I draw. But for me Murder is on the other side of that line. It bothers me that there is an element of society that gets pleasure out of that, and therefore I feel compelled to speak out against anyone who makes that type of material easily available. If you saw the video, ask yourself: what did YOU get out of it. Did you enjoy it? Did you get off? Did you get outraged, but in some weird twisted way, you enjoy feeling that rage? Societal acceptance is perhaps the purest form of democracy. Each member asserts a little pressure on the line of what is acceptable and what is not, and the line moves a little to the left, and a little to the right. It's just the way of things. But never forget: What you allow, you encourage. I am appalled by what FOX is currently encouraging.

Wow, I'm not even sure what to make of what you just said, but I think you misunderstand my point. I'm saying that people who will be emotionally moved by these events, don't need to see the whole clip. People who get off on violence and hate do. This doesn't have anything to do with Jordan, or Japan, or the US, except to serve as the background for the debate about how much proof do you need to provide the "news" vs. how much proof you need to "sell" the news. It has to do with FOX, and their motivation for showing the whole thing. What is their purpose in showing any portion of the clip, and what is their purpose in showing the whole thing? If you say that 30 seconds is the same as the whole thing, then you truly don't understand ISIS and you truly don't understand evil. They are terrorists, and by showing the whole video and whipping people up into a frothy argument, Fox has played directly into their hands. As another commenter above has stated, Fox is practically the marketing department for ISIS now.

So why do you think it is, that when a news reporter opens a story, they start with all the salacious details first, and then just seconds before cutting to the video, they say "this video is pretty graphic, so discretion is advised" and then instantly cut to the graphic video? I think it's their expectation that everybody children included are going to watch it, so really all they are doing is feigning concern for the younglings, while deep down, they're advertising to your sense of the macabre.

In order for the warning to be fair, they'd actually have to give you time to get your kids out of the room before cutting to the blood and gore. It'd be hilarious if a newscaster said "so pause your DVR and get the kids out, then resume watching this horrific video"

The debate in my mind is this... sure it's important to see the barbaric nature of the ISIS group, but on the opposite site, you know there are people in the world who get off seeing this kind of stuff. So the issue is one of "do we show the truth, in an effort to raise sympathy for the victim, when it will inevitably become a source of enjoyment for some, and a source of sympathy for the enemy for others.

In my mind, I think you can show enough video to prove that it really happened, such that it raises the outrage of those who's outrage Fox wishes to raise, without showing the entire 22 minutes of it. At some point, it stops being evidence of a crime, and instead becomes an orgy for masochists.

To express this another way, imagine you were called to sit on a jury where a man was accused of producing thousands of images of child porn. As a jury member, would you want to be forced to watch EVERY SINGLE image/video, or would you at some point say enough is enough, I don't need to see that to know the guy is guilty? In some cases, it is actually necessary to do so, to ensure that justice is done. But the court certainly isn't going to release all those images to the media to convince the court of public opinion that the guy is truly guilty.

Similarly, someone in the Japanese government should probably see the whole thing just to confirm that it wasn't a fake, and it really happened, but at that point, what purpose does it serve to show it in it's entirety? None really, except to gratify those who either support ISIS or get off on this kind of thing. If knowing it happened, and seeing a short clip of it isn't proof enough to stir up the national outrage to finally put a stop to it, no amount of video will.

While I agree, it would be nice... It's a reality that we can't move backwards on this. Nobody is going to dismantle the idea of "credit for everybody", because to some degree, everybody needs credit. The only reasonable path to take is to move forward with this and improve the system.

To some degree, what you have said is already available to you. If someone uses your identity to get credit, you can dispute it. You are welcome to sue the credit company, and you are welcome to sue the credit agencies who incorrectly besmirched your name. But it is pretty unlikely that you are going to win enough statutory damages to break even.

The point is, you can live off cash, and not participate in the "credit" system, and by doing so, you can largely ignore any letters from creditors asking you to pay up... because if you never take credit, it's pretty easy to prove it. But in the end, you are either in the system or out of it. You can't go to an agency and ask for credit, but tell them to their faces that you intend to buck the system they have put in place. Right or wrong, it's the system we have. Change it or GTFO.