Really, why bother?

You can buy an unlocked iPhone directly from Apple these days.

Very interesting if true. References or links?

sjbe: Explain to me how some leftover vials of a pathogen from decades ago has any relevance...

(1) Labels fall off of vials after a decade or two.

(2) Viruses are not alive, and can remain viable indefinitely.

(3) A pathogen (e.g., influenza) from decades ago can cause another pandemic if released. No one alive will have immunity, which is built up on a per-organism basis, not genetically.

Link to Slashdot post of the smallpox thing.

sjbe: In all likelihood, nothing. The CDC handles copies of pretty much every known pathogen on the planet.

Did you read the news about two weeks ago? Smallpox has for decades been extinct, save for two frozen samples in US and Russia.

Oops! Someone cleaning out an old CDC-employee desk found vials of that and other pathogens that had been sitting there for decades.

It's known that plant seeds and bacteria can persist in viable form for millennia. Viruses, not being "alive," probably far longer.

I'm not attacking the CDC. Just you. Don't claim expertise unless you have it.

I've known for a long time that if you want something screwed up really badly, you call in the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is not them, the "best and brightest" of the Army, but the general army. So multiply the dumb by 10X.

But what have the "best and brightest" done for us? A few examples:

* Diverted the Mississippi river by dynamiting, such that now, land subsidence on the former delta causes a retreat of coastline by about 1/4 mile per year.
* Built a seawall to protect Newport Beach, CA. It's a straight line. Do you know basic physics? Yes, deep-sea waves do indeed recombine constructively, creating monster beach-breaks (The Wedge).
* Uh, Katrina? Insisted on NO trees on Gulf-coast flood levees. Duh. Trees are what hold hillsides together.
* Katrina. Ignoring their own rules, they used landfill, construction debris, and wadded newspaper when building said levees.
* The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. These naturally have giant floodplains, hence our good farmland. COE has leveed-off almost anywhere the rivers could flood, resulting in a huge flood-risk multiplier for anyone downriver, any time it rains in the US mid-west (see above).

OK, now back up. The above were done by the Army's "brightest." The Ebola guy is being brought to the US by just the "regular" Army.

This cannot end well.

It's been done already. Open access.

That is, non-toxic transfection and organelle targeting of a combination "marker & delivery vehicle" into live cells, confirmed by both optical and electron imaging. Special nanodiamonds in this case.

(Full disclosure: It was me.)

How is this different from what the Stasi did?

It's not.

There is a quote from a former Stasi guy (East-German secret police) regarding the Snowden leaks of NSA capabilities: "We could only have dreamed of having such powers."

If it's not fungible, it is not a currency.

FTA: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it,"

And all this time I thought that my paying an access provider, paying for web hosting, paying for email services (in the past), paying people for products through their web-stores, and donating to Wikipedia — I stupidly thought that was what powered the internet.

I will now dutifully watch all banner and video ads to avoid breaking the sacred "social contract" that enables the internet's existence.

Thanks.

I'll add a more generic reference, Adam's Fallacy, by Duncan Foley. It's about how Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is selectively interpreted by modern economists of the (predominant) Chicago school of thought.

I just hope that Wikileaks doesn't publish my non-conforming TPS Reports. I did get the memo.

. . .the "How would you feel if somebody did it to you?" test. . .

Excellent test, to propose a citizen consider being on the other end of some legal action or law, as a way to consider whether it is reasonable.

I daresay acceptance of the described international-legal concept would be the end of the concept of Trade Secrets.

It would also be a boon to any company with "favored" status in their home nation.

[citation needed]

Just claim the data was lost due to a "hard drive crash." I mean, it worked for the IRS, right?

It worked for the CIA video recordings of interrogations.

It worked for the CHP & KCSO after they confiscated, w/o warrant, the two cell phones which had video of the deadly police beating. The phones were later returned, sans video.

And so on. . .

If this were not the case then the Tobacco and Asbestos companies could have just said "all those meeting minutes and research records are stored in our warehouse in mexico so ha ha, you all lose." Any company or person, on any issue, could just mail the evidence out of state or out of country and get off scott free.

Interesting point. There is one subtle difference to consider.

The "moving physical documents off-shore" approach would be conceivable if not for the fact that such documents, etc. were generated by a US-based Corp., by people acting as representatives of the Corp., thus subject to US laws. IANAL, but I think this kind of maneuver would be obstruction of justice, contempt, or something similar to "destruction of evidence."

In the online case here, the issue is email caching. It does really make sense to cache users' "cloud" data in close physical proximity to said users. That said, one can easily imagine MS using this excuse as a shield to deliberately hide documents they'd like kept secret. Probably not the case here, but extend this ruling to company-internal documents, and you'll spot the trick that US DOJ is trying to prevent.

Kind of like how many Corps. have a "delete any email over two weeks old to 'save storage space'." If you delete a category of data, on a regular schedule, and before any subpoena, then the trick will work. But good luck preserving any sort of corporate memory...