If your bike was made of solid gold, then a conventional bike lock would be useless. Also your bike would be very heavy.

The point is that your analogy has some flawed interpretations. What you're saying is that the use value of riding your bike anywhere outweighs the expected cost of its being stolen. That's completely valid. Likewise the marginal cost of a more sophisticated lock may not be worth the marginal reduction in expected theft-cost.

But information has a wider range of uses and values than a bike does; you can't just say, "well HTTPS may not be perfect, but it's what we've got and it's good enough." Some information is literally priceless. Other information may not be priceless, but maybe it's not really needed on a system so you can protect it by moving it to a less exposed system. HTTPS is just one of many tools you have to work with when addressing security. Naturally you want to use it as skillfully as possible to reduce your vulnerabilities, but part of the process in many cases is imagining what would happen when something you're relying upon fails, then planning to deal with that.

TELNET. Of course "flawless" means "meeting its design goals," it doesn't mean "suitable for any application."

China is a signatory to the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", Article II of which states:

It depends on how the money is handled. If it goes into the general fund, then I think this is great. If it is used to fund NSA operations, I think it is bad. That would make it too easy for the agency to avoid Congressional oversight.

In general self-funding government agencies are terrible idea-- that's why running the government "like a business" sounds good but is a lousy idea. Government agencies should serve the public, they shouldn't be profit centers. That's a conflict of interest. In places where police funding depends on seizing property involved in crimes -- typically drug crimes -- there's an incentive to do it to make money rather than fight crime.

There are some exceptions, like water districts that are funded by water and sewer fees, but these are essentially utilities that are run by the public, their rates set by boards elected by the ratepayers. But no agency should be self-funding except that it is controlled by the people providing the funding.

This is definitely a YMMV situation. I have heard lots of reports of CFLs only lasting a couple of years, and I'm sure they're true, but I converted all the fixtures in my house to CFLs in the early 90s and most of those bulbs are still in service. I have been replacing them recently because their output and color temperatures have dropped dramatically, but so far none of them have "burned out".

When I bought these CFLs they were very, very expensive relative to incandescent or halogens. Now you can buy an eight pack of "60 watt replacements" for under $12 -- just a dollar more than an eight pack of equivalent incandescents. You can find 12 packs for $18, I wonder whether manufacturers have pulled back on quality to cut the price. I've seen non-dimmable 23w CFLs at unit prices as low as $2 and as high as $13.

As for LED bulbs, I have two supposedly identical bulbs but one has obviously sloppy build, lower-than advertised output, flicker, and an eye-frying violet color temperature. The other has flawless build quality and seems right on-spec. What I suspect is that the low quality bulb is a counterfeit. Cheap li-ion batteries are often counterfeits, sometimes made in the same factory that makes the genuine article. Who'd be better equipped to make an undetectable knock-off?

So the lesson may be to be careful where you buy your bulbs.

India arguably needs to be a tech powerhouse more than the US does. It faces tougher problems with fewer resources; it has to do more with less. It already has a huge middle class, but it needs to grow that middle class to bring capital in for the even huger underdeveloped portions of its society.

I wish them well. Nations becoming more technologically capable is not a zero sum game.

The IR thing puts a somewhat different spin on matters, because it's a step towards seeing through walls. A case like this came in front of SCOTUS a few years ago and even Scalia balked at giving IR detection his blessing.

Last time I looked into this the courts were still working out where sensory enhancement/extension crosses over the line. If someone were being loaded into an ambulance and you overheard the conversation, no foul. But if you couldn't hear the conversation and used a parabolic mic, that would cross the line. But what if your cell phone camera happens to have a really good mic? At some point the extension of the normal sensory capabilities begins to intrude on normal "expectations of privacy".

That probably depends on the part of the country you're in, but you're probably right in most places.

There's another angle to consider, which is that in some places the property value for tax purposes is rarely updated. That means in those places many if not most properties are undervalued for tax purposes. And voters aren't keen on stepping up the pace of re-appraisals because a lot of them are paying taxes on valuations from ten years ago, sometimes longer. And if you get reappraised before your neighbors, you'll feel hard done by.

Ah, but you made and improvement to your property. Of course we have to update the appraisal. And even if that improvement hasn't added a nickel to the resale value of your home, you may find yourself paying ten or twenty percent more tax, even more depending on what the market is like in your area and how long it's been since your property value was updated.

You seem to have trouble grasping we are living in a society that has laws, and one of the things that laws do is restrain what a party that has a financial interest in something can do with that thing.

I know in everyday discussion we say that the "bank owns the car", but this is not the case. The bank doesn't own the car, they have a non-possessory lien on the car. This does not entitle them to do whatever they like with it.

Even if the owner of the car agrees to let the bank remotely disable the car (if state laws allow this), the bank still has a duty to exercise that power responsibly. If they stop a car in the middle of an intersection, that may be good for their bottom line, but they are still responsible for creating a public hazard and inconvenience.

The main component of wood is cellulose, a polysaccharide consisting of building blocks of six carbon atoms, ten hydrogens and five oxygen atoms.

Take one of those C6H10O5 building blocks an burn it completely with 6 O2 molecules, and you get 6 CO2 molecules and 5 brand-spanking new water molecules.

Of course real wood fires release other byproducts as well, carbon monoxide and soot, which are particles of mostly amorphous carbon. But water is definitely a byproduct of burning, just as it is a byproduct of respiration by organisms.

Yes, you've got it right. They tax the value of the property, which is supposedly higher if you put in the pool; at the very least that would trigger a revaluation in some jurisdictions. The same would happen if you added on a porch or a new wing. There is no "porch" or "new wing" tax, just a tax on the value of the property.

I don't know what it is you got from my other posts. I don't make the law, I'm just reporting what it is, which I've learned by taking a couple of night classes in IT related law that I took to keep up with new developments that might affect my work. Most of this stuff isn't new, however. The "open fields doctrine" dates back to 1924. The ruling that surveillance from the air does not violate the 4th Amendment dates from 1989 (Florida v Riley).

RCS came out in '82. I remember using SCCS on Unix System III in the mid 80s, and it dates back to 1972 or so. Bash came out around '89, and so it could have been managed with either SCCS or more likely at that point with RCS, although it's also possible that no revision control system was used before the original release. In those days revision control wasn't universally used. Even as late as the early 00's I was training engineers coming out of master's degree IT programs who had no idea how to use a revision control system.

Maybe you want to share information with people for whom you don't want to set up a dashboard for and train them in (e.g. potential investors, advertisers, loan officers, managers who don't need to be monkeying with stuff, etc.).

FYI, this came up many years ago in the US. Defendants challenged the admissibility of evidence from aerial observations. The courts pretty much held that since the police are allowed to fly helicopters and airplanes over your house, anything that they observe while doing so is admissible under the 4th Amendment.

The basic rule for criminal evidence is that the cops can make observations from anyplace they're allowed to be. If they're standing on a sidewalk and see a marijuana plant in your front window, that's probable cause. Same if they walk up to your front door. They can look around any non-fenced areas on your property too. They can't stand in the bushes and peek through your windows, unless they have some other business being there (hint: do not have a burglar alarm if you're growing weed anywhere someone can see it through a window).

So if the cops can see your mj plants (or pool) from the air or some unfenced part of your yard, you're toast.

The rules for adminsitrative searches (e.g. code enforcement or tax enforcement) are much more lenient than criminal searches. Administrative searches often don't require a warrant, or if they do the warrants are much easier to obtain.

Only they were using aerial, then later satellite photos. We scanned the aerials, orthorectified them then registered them in a coordinate system for the city's GIS. They'd overlay a lot map and go plot by plot looking for pools, decks, and additions that weren't in the property tax database. These were mostly wealthy towns in Connecticut where this stuff added up to real money.

Now of course you can do that with Google Maps, if you don't mind waiting 1-3 years to catch people.

Just because you do *exactly the same thing* with a slightly different tool doesn't make it new. Back from those days one of the senior managers used to come into my office and say, "I just read about this patent where --" and I'd cut him off right there.

"This isn't going to be another one of those things where they take something people have been doing for ages with LORAN and substitute GPS, is it?" I ask.

"Well..."

"I don't want to hear about it. Whatever it is the patent is sure not to stand up to scrutiny, but I still don't want them holding treble damages over our head."