You know somewhere that provides reliable hosting for five servers supplying 40MB/s each for less than 5-10 bucks? I doubt that very much. For the dedicated servers I use on one of the commercial sites I mentioned, I'd be running at over $1,000 per day for that kind of traffic.

Obviously no-one running at that kind of scale is still on the same kind of hardware and pricing set up that my little site is on, but dedicated/unmetered lines aren't cheap either. In any case, you get the point: the servers aren't the problem for high traffic sites, the network bandwidth is.

Oh my fucking God! Shoot him! He made a fucking TYPO!

Asshat.

Nonsense. Microsoft is a multi-national conglomerate with seperate corporations/business entities scattered around the world. Those seperate entites are not US businesses, though they are owned by a US business, they are subject to the laws of the jurisdictions they operate in, not US law.

It wouldn't matter - any company with a presence in the US would be at risk, no matter where they hoard their earnings.

You are incorrect. the case would impact Europian Microsoft customers as well. Indeed, the account in question is almost certainly held by a non-American.

The US could take a page from the Russians on the whole issue of legal jurisdiction. The Russians have mandated that all corporate and personal data hosted by "the cloud" must be on servers on Russian soil so there is no question of legal jurisdiction when they're trying to investigate and prosecute a case involving a Russian entity.

The US and every other nation should be doing the same thing: mandating that the data owned by their citizens and corporations be hosted in country so that it can't be "hidden" by legal loopholes of the jurisdiction where the data resides.

But, hey, the US cloud operators don't want to invest in that many offshore nodes/clusters, and they're the ones paying off Congress and the Senate, so I doubt we'll see such sane legislation passed in my lifetime. Far easier to try to shove your legal system down international throats, eh?

Pffft. I fart towards the south...

The US needs to wake up to the fact that they are not "world law." Their law ends at the boundaries of the US.

It doesn't matter if the email account in question is owned by an American. It doesn't matter if the servers are indirectly owned by an American company.

They are in a foreign jurisdiction and the US government needs to go through the judicial and legal processes of that jurisdiction if they want access to the data.

Quite frankly, fuck the "war on terror", the "war on drugs", and every other tired old excuse the US government and it's subservient courts use to try to justify shoving the US legal system down the world's throat.

I literally read your anicdotal comments literally once, and must say I literally agree with your experiences. Literally.

The information is still available if you choose to browse at -1, so no, it's not censorship. Now if they were deleting -1 rated posts, then there would be an issue.

Of course. Which is why all the multi-nationals that you mention will weigh in with "Friend of the Court" briefs.

Of course it's "self interest", and more accuratly "self preservation". Micrsoft is a business that ultimatly has to answer to their stockholders. If it comes to pass that US "law enforcement" can reach out and get personal data from non-US servers, it will completely destroy Microsoft's European business, due the the much stricter data privacy laws in Europe. It would be "game over" for Microsoft in Europe.

I thought these were all side effects from reading Slashdot.

In cryptography, it means a number that is only used once -- n-once. However, it is actually the wrong word to use here, as a cryptographic seed's most important attribute is unpredictability.

Don't underestimate the importance of the right education. Our company almost collapsed under the stupid organizational structure put in place by our last CIO, who was not an engineer, and had no idea how engineers work. I never before realized how much damage an org chart could do.

The War on Drugs has been a failure- it's put millions of people in prison, cost our society billions of dollars, and fueled honest-to-God warfare in South America and Mexico- and Americans are slowly starting to realize this. That being said, I think we're running the risk of having things swing too far in the other direction. There seems to be this attitude out there that pot is harmless, and that's just not the case in my experience. In moderation, it's probably safe. But chronic use- long term use at high doses- seems to really fuck people up. I know people from high school who used to smoke once in a while, and they're fine- productive members of society, good spouses, good parents, etc. I also know people who went on to smoke weed daily for many years... and they're just not all there anymore. They're always in a pretty good mood, but it seems disconnected from what's going around. They're hard to connect to, they can't seem to empathize with other human beings, they seem scattered and their thought processes tend to run wild; there's a lot of creativity but they lack the focus to do anything with it. The PSAs were right: drugs DO fry your brain.

I think alcohol and Prohibition are a good parallel here. Prohibition was clearly a disaster, and when used in moderation, alcohol is harmless and probably even beneficial. But long-term, daily use of alcohol in high volumes can really screw you up. All things in moderation. Just because you can't OD on pot doesn't mean it's safe to take as much as you want as long as you want.