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Comment Re:Sure (Score 1) 500

What concerns me more is the statement in the majority ruling:

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said "Even with modern technological advances, the warrant procedure imposes burdens on the officers who wish to search [and] the magistrate who must review the warrant application." http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

So we are now losing more of our constitutionally protected rights because getting a warrant "imposes burdens" on the police and magistrates? Their wish to search now trumps our right to protection from unreasonable searches? I think the SCOTUS got this ruling very wrong.

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Comment Re:Enough with the security theater! (Score 5, Interesting) 289

This has been an option since 2003. The TSA was put into place after 9/11 but airports were supposed to be allowed to return to private screening after two years. New legislation passed last year supposedly makes it easier to replace TSA agents with private contractors although few airports have done so.

Currently sixteen airports use private contractors instead of TSA agents. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...

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Comment Re:Tesla not involved [Re:Not from the car?] (Score 1) 329

You probably haven't worked with horses before. You don't just tie all the horses in one line and allow the hard workers and slackers to pull as they want. This is a problem that has had a solution for thousands of years. Anytime you connect a horse or horses to a load you use a wippletree (sometimes called a doubletree) to balance the load. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

You see similar arrangements when applying force to uneven points. Your windshield wiper has a whippletree arrangement to balance the force as the contour of the glass changes. Also look at singletree for more information about how horses are connected to pulling loads.

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Comment Re:nobodies phone is banned (Score 1) 366

I assume it is the same authority that gives them the right to ban smoking, restrict knives and guns, and force you to obey any order from a flight attendant.

The national airspace is regulated by the FAA, just like the national electromagnetic spectrum is regulated by the FCC. Since both are a national trust, regulated by the federal government, they get to make all the rules, with very little input by the masses.

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Comment Re:To require? (Score 1) 390

The first thing that came to mind was "What a great way to track any car, anywhere." Simply query the system for any car in communication with car VIN 5N4SK8B987123. By not communicating with the target car directly, surveillance could claim they are only doing what a police officer could do by examining a license plate. Or asking the public to watch for a specific car like during an Amber Alert.

The fact that the query spreads out across the whole city and 30 miles down every freeway until an equipped car responds "Hey, that car is in the lane next to me." greatly exceeds what the hypothetical police officer could monitor would be lost in the strict interpretation of tracking laws. I can see the excuse "We are not tracking YOUR car. We are just asking other people to reply if they notice you nearby.."

Our streets and freeways become a huge distributed network where any information can flow to those who know how to ask the system for information.

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Comment Re:Target just couldn't handle this any worse (Score 0) 115

I know my card was hit, since I have friends who shop at the same store using non-Target cards that got notified...

No, you are assuming your information was taken because other people had their information taken at the same store.

  • Perhaps if Target was able to identify which POS terminals were compromised and determine your information was never processed by one of them, you don't need to be notified.
  • Perhaps the terminals encrypt the Target card information and only transmit outside card info in the clear. Your information was never in jeopardy.
  • Perhaps Target has programmed their POS terminals to automatically re-write new card numbers onto their cards the next time you use it in Target so the stolen info would be useless.
  • Perhaps they have decided the cost of notifying all the Target card holders is more than the anticipated losses and they will just eat the small cost of fraudulent use. As you said, Target cards can only be used in Target stores.

.
There are many reasons why you might not need to be notified.

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Comment Re:I have zero problems with BU's patents (Score 1) 129

There are other companies that did the same thing. Look at the patent on the LZW compression technique in the .GIF format. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format

Unisys waited almost 10 years until .GIF files were the ubiquitous picture format on the web, THEN they started suing for patent infringement. The led to the .PNG file format being developed, but everyone was still mad at Unisys for waiting so long.

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Comment Re:good ruck, chuck! (Score 1) 59

Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous...

Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.

Citation? Or are these just your opinions based on YOUR interpretation of "fairness"?

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Comment Re:I think I speak for us all... (Score 1) 335

Because if more people paid with cash, businesses could lower their prices because they wouldn't have to pay as much for the credit card service fee.

I see this at some gas stations. They have one price for cash/debit cards and a higher price for credit cards. They make the customer pay for the service fee.

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Comment Re:not exactly a troll. IA made similar, met Ninte (Score 1) 87

Perhaps because Nintendo could buy the patents for almost nothing. If IA owes Nintendo 10 million and can't pay it, so they have a sheriff's sale to raise the money. Nintendo buys the patents for 7 million, get the money back as payment for the court judgement, and is still owed 3 million in case IA has any other assets.

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Comment Re: Get a real mail account (Score 2) 388

So, isn't it obvious this is the problem he is running into? If his email address is F.M.Last(at)gmail, he will receive FMLast, F.MLast, FM.Last, FML.ast, etc.

I'm a little surprised Gmail will allow a new email account that has dotted username if they already have a user that receives all related dotted username variations.

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Comment Re:HD (Score 1) 112

Unfortunately, most of your citations are from discussions back in 2007 when a 5MP camera was state of the art.

Imaging sensors, digital signal processors, and optics have all improved substantially since then. I'm not saying the quality is an order of magnitude better, but some of those calculations might need to be reviewed.

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