So if I say to my foreign counterpart "give me this data that I have been subpoenaed to provide" I am obstructing justice? You could argue that the foreign branch is obstructing US justice when they implement the policy of automatic refusal unless/until a local subpoena complying with local legal requirements is received, but nobody there is personally bound by US law, so it's not particularly relevant unless they want to travel to the US in the future. Meanwhile they might very well be in violation of local law by supplying said data without the appropriate local legal authorization.

I'm not happy with this - it seems like an issue where there's no good solution: The US can't be allowed to be "world cops" to this degree - we've proven repeatedly that we've lost whatever moral superiority *might* have once entitled us to such a position - call me paranoid but handing more power to the gestapo-in-training seems to always go badly for the common man. Meanwhile *without* such authority I can easily imagine elaborate corporate data shell games where all sensitive data is inaccessible to any government. The only answer I can see is international treaties bringing corporations to heel, but I suspect those would be tricky in the extreme to get right, even if the self-same megacorps didn't already have pretty much all the relevant politicians in their pocket.

Hah! Nobody expects the Terapixel Revolution.

Potentially both - imagine a transparent display with an additional switchable opacity layer integrated into it - essentially making a full RGBA display where opacity can be specified on a per-pixel basis. At the most trivial level you could have opaque application windows floating on a transparent pane that obstructs your view as much or little as necessary, sort of like having a bank of adjustable-sized monitors. Laminate it onto a north-facing picture window with a great view and I'd be sold.

Yes. We should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, which currently receive massive subsidies.

Nigel Tufnel: "It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black."

Not quite - modern magnetic drives still have tracks wider than the read-write head so that atomic-level alignment isn't necessary. There may be far less "overwrite" than there once was, but if a newly recorded track is not *perfectly* aligned with the last recording then there may well be several percent of the previously recorded track that remains unaltered (consider the worst case scenario case that the previous recording in this track was written at the smallest radius allowed by actuator tolerances, while this pass is at the maximum radius allowed). Now, recovering that data will probably require removing the platters and analyzing them with much higher resolution read heads, but it can be done.

I was more addressing the problems with flash though - in order to disguise degradation modern flash drives typically include more capacity than is addressable by the host system. Fill it to the brim so there are zero bytes free, and there's still several percent of the total drive capacity that is sitting unused in the reserve pool. The only way to overwrite that (barring a OS-accessible "secure wipe" command implemented on the drive) is to generate sufficient churn that the internal wear leveling algorithms cycle through every byte of the reserve capacity at least once. And since you probably don't know the exact algorithm used or wear levels of the drive to begin with, more is better - after all you have to tease out the most heavily used page currently sitting in the reserve.

Who gave you the idea that we have to significantly reduce our standards of living to combat global warming? Only the CO2 production causes problems, and there's lots of alternative energy technologies on the cusp of being truly cost competitive - if not for the vast direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil fuel industry it would already be crumbling under the onslaught of cheaper alternatives.

Indeed. And how much more successful do you suppose their lobbyists will be in facilitating such rate increases if they have a good reputation to bank on? The worse their reputation the more people will protest against rate increases, thus increasing the political capital politicians will have to spend to pass them, which in turn will increase the size of the campaign contributions necessary to get them passed.

At some point it becomes more cost effective to run PR campaigns in hopes of increasing approval ratings and thus lowering the size of the necessary campaign contributions.

>Furthermore, the wear-leveling strategies used in flash mass storage devices negates any attempt to securely wipe them short of physical destruction.

Well, it confounds it at any rate. But completely filling the device's memory 33 times in a row is pretty likely to overwrite everything at least once or twice - even the hidden "failure reserve" space if it's included in the wear leveling (and if it's not, then it doesn't yet hold any sensitive data, so there's no problem). Guttmann's values may be irrelevant to today's storage media, but that many repeated rewrites of anything still mostly does the job.

I don't know that I'd trust it to wipe vital military secrets, but it should do a good enough job for most anything in the civilian realm.

>Why? Shareholder value?
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It seems simple enough to me: increased customer satisfaction (aka reputation in a captive market) means you can inflate your prices and/or reduce the quality of service with less backlash.

I can't think of any other reason a monopoly would care about it's reputation.

Electricity providers though, there I could see some motive. They are beginning to lose their monopoly with solar becoming a viable and cost-effective alternative in most places. If you can pay for ten years worth of electricity up front you can get the next 10-20 years after that free.

I would like a better fitness watch that tracked pulse rate without a chest band, respiration rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood o2 levels, as well a movements such as swimming and riding, not just waking and running. I would like to to use the GPS in my phone and not have one built in.

Clearly Tesla is guilty of producing an excessively dangerous armored land-missile and the industry should be regulated to mandate less indestructible vehicles ;-D

I would have thought the point is that, unrestrained, you would find yourself traveling at 200mph into a footwell that is suddenly no longer doing so. And, unlike the safety harness, the footwell isn't designed to decelerate you gently.

Ah, but time being circular we can treat the outcome we know will happen as having already happened, and thus conclude that it is not safe for me to enter the Tesla.