The other replies cover the window-like way of doing things. The other way to do it is to make it so that if you look right, the screen rotates to the right. Usually you have a multiplier, so that a small head rotation translates into a much larger rotation on-screen. Looking backwards might only require turning your head 45 degrees, which allows you to still look to the side and see the screen.

This might sound awkward, but your brain adjusts to it with almost no effort. The main problem I've seen with head-tracking is that stuff on the screen never stands still, which makes it hard to click on small objects. Usually people who use head-trackers need to use a button to pause screen motion, dampen it, etc. Dampening screen motion other than a slight amount to reduce jitter is a bit hard on the eyes I find, since everything you see has a delay attached to it.

Well, in practice all that really is relevant is whether the US government thinks they might be able to produce the data, and whether they can get their hands on him.

Everything else makes for great moral debate, but if you're standing on US soil and the US government really thinks that you have something that they want, then you're going to be in for a world of hurt if you don't produce the goods or convince them that you don't have them.

In practice, the law is whatever the government says it is. It is quite possible that MS will prevail on appeal. If it doesn't, then they'll really be between a rock and a hard place, and companies will basically have to look at incompatible national laws and choose which countries they'll base their operations in. MS would not be suffering this problem if they didn't own so much property in both the US and EU, and desire to sell their products in both markets.

The PRACTICAL question isn't where the corporation is based, or who owns the data they have been entrusted with, but rather with how much money Microsoft has tied up in US assets. The courts can confiscate as much of those as they want until MS complies. Foreign governments can do the same.

When you travel through or own property in some jurisdiction, you're effectively within their control to the extent that you're unwilling to part with it.

Maybe in principle it does, but it practice the sovereignty of any country is whatever that country can enforce it to be.

That very-much depends on the details of the situation. Suppose the US wants the contents of your German safe deposit box.

If the US sent some agents to Germany without cooperation with the German government and they broke into the bank and were caught, then sure they would be arrested and treated as criminals (assuming they lacked diplomatic status), as in your fantasy scenario.

However, they would never do this.

Suppose instead you are in the US on vacation. The US grabs YOU and puts you in their own safe deposit box until you hand over the contents of your box in Germany. It is true that they might not have the means to FORCE you to comply, but they can literally hold you in prison until you die of old age without even charging you with a crime if you do not.

That is the more appropriate analogy here. If MS wants to avoid being subject to US law they should probably avoid having so much of their property in the US, where it is trivially seized.

Well, the US government might ultimately fail in getting the data, but they could confiscate all the assets of Deutsche Bank in the US, which would effectively block them from doing business in the US.

Sure, but if the US Courts are fining them every day the data isn't disclosed, and they don't care if the foreign employees refuse to cooperate, then the company is probably going to pressure those employees in any way that they can. They might even close the foreign datacenter entirely if the courts insist on it. Either that or they could close all their US operations.

Well, whether this survives appeal is anybody's guess. However, if the US Supreme Court upholds it then MS will end up turning over the data. This isn't about making the world bend to his "black-robed will" - this is about making Microsoft bend to it. Once the appeals are exhausted they'll be told to produce the data. If they refuse then they'll be fined a million dollars a day, and the fines will be increased if that doesn't seem to be enough. Eventually Microsoft either goes out of business, or it capitulates.

Sure, after it happens the EU can then start fining them millions or billions of dollars if they want to. But, the only way around something like this is for a company to not own property or assets of any kind in both the US and EU. Courts can seize assets, which basically puts you in your jurisdiction no matter what your principles might otherwise dictate.

So, what solution do you actually advocate then? Right now the NSA/GCHQ can still break the internet, and so can about a million other people. Oh, and everybody gets to pay $100/yr or so for every webserver they run, and virtual hosting is a pain.

DNSSEC is a lot better than what we have now. Moving to it doesn't prevent us from moving to something even better assuming that somebody figures out what it is.

The only solution to that is to have ICANN be under the control of somebody that everybody can trust. Either that, or give up on having a single root. There isn't any reason that you couldn't hard-code into the browsers the keys of the TLDs, other than it making those keys harder to change.

Of course, that isn't going to help you all that much, because if the NSA needs to impersonate a European domain they'll just nicely ask the government hosting it for the keys and they'll cooperate, since while they all complain about the NSA in public the fact is that they love having access to all that data.

Keep in mind that you would have to have control of the registrar that issued the domain. With SSL today anybody on the trusted CA list can impersonate any website anywhere. With DNSSEC Verisign certainly could impersonate .com websites, and Iran certainly could impersonate .ir websites, but neither party could impersonate the other's websites. That is a BIG reduction in the vulnerability space, even if it isn't perfect.

If the NSA really does has everybody under their thumbs, then face it, you aren't going to be able to evade them using anything likely to ever become mainstream. We can't judge every security improvement solely on whether it solves "the NSA is out to get me."

Well, if they want to launch their rockets from next to schools, then they shouldn't be surprised when their kids get blown up by artillery fire. That is probably their objective in any case - it makes for good PR.

Is firing artillery on schools wrong? Of course. Is firing rockets from nearby a school wrong? Of course. The one is still a consequence of the other.

I don't really see the Palestinians achieving their goals with the methods they're currently using. I get the impression that their plan is to keep blowing up the odd house until God comes down and wipes out the infidels for them. Or maybe they're just happy dying in the attempt.

Conducting military operations 100m away from a civilian building is inappropriate. If a conflict broke out in just about any civilized nation that required basing soldiers within 100m of a hotel, the hotel would be evacuated. Heck, the whole city would probably be evacuated.

Well, then don't launch rockets from within Gaza then. Those rockets generally aren't targeted at military targets anyway, so there is nothing legitimate about firing them off in the first place.

When conducting war you have a responsibility to minimize the danger to non-combatants. That includes not basing your soldiers in close proximity to non-combatants (and 100m is close proximity).

The alternative is to return to tactics like WWII bombing, and that isn't in anybody's interests. Those fighting in Gaza (whatever they want to call themselves) are not acting as soldiers - they're basically acting as terrorists.

Meh, it seems that more and more the blame is shifting to whoever wrote the requirements or the project manager. But, without fixing all that other stuff, there isn't much they can do either.

The whole reason Agile was created was to try to deal with some of these pressures, which many consider unavoidable. The problem is that many companies just don't grok it, and insist on a fixed scope in a fixed time at a fixed cost. This approach fits in better with annual planning cycles. If you have a million dollars, a set of objectives, and a year to achieve those objectives it makes sense from the manager's perspective to tell the developers to just deliver that whole set of objectives. The problem is that after a year it turns out the objectives weren't quite right, the situation was more complex than people realized, a million dollars wasn't quite right, and so on.

Heck, if they want to stop the continuous decline of contributors of any gender they'll do that stuff. I don't really care enough to deal with the fuss that is Wikipedia. If I want to post something informative I'll do it on my blog, which will get picked up by high-reputation feed aggregators and get plenty of visibility on Google and will be available for all posterity. Maybe somebody else will wikify it for me, which is great. I would love to just post initially on some site where everybody can collaborate to make it better. The thing is, I just want to contribute - I don't want to defend every word I write and debate whether it should be expunged or not. I'm all for improvements, and I'm sure my word on any subject is not the last (that's what comments are for!), but my sense on Wikipedia is that if I took the time to write something instead of improving on it there are many who would just campaign to remove what I wrote entirely.

In the world of millions of things I could be doing with my spare time, Wikipedia just doesn't rank up there.

Sure, but can we be sure we have found every one of them?

It isn't just the boomers that are a problem either - I imagine their attack subs can carry cruise missiles.

But, think about it. The only way a war could start and stay contained is if the US sends troops to the Ukraine, the Russians don't do anything to interfere with them arriving there, and the US troops just fight along a front with the Russians to push them back to the border. How likely is that? It would certainly be a bloody war - nobody fights that way since WWI.

The more likely scenario is that the US mounts invasions of Russia from somewhere OTHER than Ukraine, which would put Russia on the defensive. They would immediately have to pull out of Ukraine or they'll end up being encircled, or losing a city in the north like Moscow or St Petersburg. Since that would be all-out war the US would preemptively attack all Russian Naval assets, expecting them to retaliate with unrestricted conventional warfare otherwise. We are now talking about a global unrestricted conventional war between the US and Russia, that we hope stays conventional even though the US is fighting on Russian territory, and will likely capture quite a bit of it assuming they can get enough ground troops over there before the real shooting starts (there is a logistics challenge here as Russia is huge and the US isn't basing thousands of troops in Latvia or anything like that). If the gloves are off, then you also have to factor in things like special forces, sabotage, and so on. I'm not sure that Russia's only option for striking the US is submarines.

I'm sure this would make for a great Clancy novel, but nobody really wants to actually see this stuff happen. I think the US/EU would let Russia march right up to the border of Germany before they'd do something about it. Maybe they'd stop them at Poland this time or something. I doubt that they're ready to draw the line at Ukraine, or even the baltics. Everybody is just going to want to pretend that it isn't happening, or that Russia just wants a bit more buffer.