It is absurd on its face to suggest that a policeman should be able to take you into custody without being able to tell you what law you broke (because it doesn't exist). To suggest otherwise allows any policeman anywhere in the US to take anyone into custody for any reason ("I didn't know that sitting on your porch drinking lemonade was not a crime, my bad").

I agree with you that we have too many laws and that no one (no matter what legal experience they may have) can know them all. However, in a JUST system, the outcome of this is that the police do not enforce laws they are ignorant of, or that they do not understand, rather than enforcing "laws" that do not exist.

Don't worry, NuPlayer is sure to have its own unique collection of buffer overflows!

Your rant is dead on, but the above portion of it is accurate in even more ways than you might suspect--for example, the Supreme Court recently said that it;s OK for a police officer to arrest you, because of something that he THINKS is illegal, even if it isn't, because (and to quote Dave Barry here, "I am not making this up") it is unreasonable to expect a police officer to know all the laws they are enforcing.

So if you, Joe Citizen who has no training in law or any intersection with it, do something illegal that you did not know it was illegal, you can be charged, because "ignorance of the law is no excuse." If Joe Policeofficer arrests you for sitting on your lawn when that activity was perfectly legal, that's ok, because police can't be expected the know the law.

Honestly, the US today is like Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and George Orwell all got together and wrote a manual called "How to Fuck Up Democracy" and some assholes in government made it required reading.

Governments don't always suck at providing services, you know. The BBC is one of the only major news outlets that does actually try to be unbiased, even if they aren't always perfect at it.

In the situation we are discussing, Facebook cannot argue that the search is unreasonable, because they lack standing. I agree completely that the government has the power to search (when properly sanctioned by the courts) but when an argument hinges on what is, or is not, reasonable, how you can say this protection is not violated by the prevention of the argument? The government has further ensured a situation where there is no one to argue the point, since the target of the warrant is not informed, either.

The thought experiment below ("someone else stolen a fictional pig) is quite similar to something I had started to write in my post above, but abandoned because my construct was not clear and muddied my argument. Thanks to the AC for making the argument for me.

Rights must be read broadly, and powers narrowly, lest the state (which has effectively unlimited resources) run roughshod over the people.

I had a doctors appointment this morning, and he did things to me that customarily involve at least dinner and a movie under normal circumstances, so I, too, feel the need to be technically correct (the best kind of correct!)

The idiom you're looking for is "bees in your bonnet" not "beans." The reference is to having a head full of ideas, though I believe you are using the more modern usage relating to irritation (which I believe comes from a time when women might wear floral arrangements in their headgear, which quite probably would attract pollinating insects. Having a bee in your bonnet would be quite distressing if it were literal. I do not, however, have any sourcing for this, it is merely an inference on my part).

I agree wholeheartedly with your general points, but the above is simply unhelpful. People can have legitimate differences of opinion on a topic--or be ignorant of certain facts--and not be a "shill" for either side. Simply claiming that anyone you disagree with is involved in some conspiracy on the other side is not the way to win an argument.

This might be case law, but is entirely at odds with the plain language of the 4th amendment. You might be searching for information about the suspects, but you are searching the papers and effects of the mom & pop to do so! What about THEIR legal protections? Coupled with wonderful things like the good faith doctrine, and the above is, frankly, terrifying since the police could use anything they find against Mom & Pop, because they weren't searching for it when they found it.

It is apparent that the US is, if not already a police state, fast becoming one. Allowing the government even more power in criminal justice matters is a very bad idea, and we should weigh VERY heavily what we believe is acceptable.

There are countries (including the US) that do consider certain acts committed outside of their borders, not by their citizens, that only indirectly affect their country or citizens, as full crimes, to be persecuted and the guilty to be extradited, regardless of laws of the countries where these "crimes" were committed.

So, if given country has a law against aiding unauthorized entities from spying on their citizens, and the firm sells the software to these entities, it is committing a crime. And while extradition or direct consequences are unlikely, they are not impossible, especially if employees of the firm ever visit the country in question.

Sounds like the answer is "64 bit is hard work and we'd rather do other things + it'd break our plugins". Same issue everyone else faced when porting to 64 bit. And apparently it's easier to port code to run on the .NET VM than port it the old fashioned way whilst keeping it as unmanaged C++?

Secondly, from a cost perspective, probably the shortest path to porting Visual Studio to 64 bit is to port most of it to managed code incrementally and then port the rest. The cost of a full port of that much native code is going to be quite high and of course all known extensions would break and we’d basically have to create a 64 bit ecosystem pretty much like you do for drivers. Ouch.

(source)

But the .NET 64 bit JIT has historically been very low throughput, and the CLR is a less advanced VM than the JVM which can run code in an interpreter until compiled code is ready, so slow compiler == slow startup and high latencies on loading new screens, etc. Not good for a desktop app.

it's like the death of aaaron swartz

Or not. Apparently he was looking forward to soon putting the legal issues behind him and did not appear to have any particular suicidal tendencies.

It's awesome that a judge apparently created a new crime because he deicided that the legislature was wrong.

This isn't going to make any difference.

The EU "Right to Privacy" and indeed all the human rights encoded in the relevant document are so riddled with exceptions that you can drive a bus through them. The fact that any government lost at all is amazing and surely the result of incompetent lawyering. From the text:

There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

The national security exception by itself seems enough to allow nearly anything, but then they add public safety and economic well being on top! In fact every reason a government might have for engaging in surveillance is covered, which cannot be an accident.

But anyway, GCHQ is not about to suddenly discover that it cares about these things. It's been obvious since the start that the 5 Eyes agencies perceive themselves as being entirely outside ordinary democratic constraints, unfortunately, that perception is largely true as senior ministers think real life is like an episode of 24 and gives them essentially blanket immunity to do whatever they like.

FWIW, grid tie solar is typically designed in a way that it doesn't work during local outages (with the intent of preventing your solar energy from backfeeding into the grid and potentially killing or injuring line workers). That's not to say that it MUST be designed in such a manner (transfer switches can solve the problem) but that it typically is.

Yes, I had the same experience the few times I've used Uber. The drivers always seem happy. They don't feel like they're being exploited and often feel it was an upgrade on what they were previously doing. The flexibility comes up a lot too.

Whilst it's just anecdotes, that would still seem to be a serious problem for the "Uber is exploiting the poor proles" camp.