It's a Chuck Schumer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... bill that he introduces every couple of years, it gets thrown to the Judiciary committee, and then it dies in committee. Like clockwork. Here's the text of the current bill, which is presently dying in the Judiciary committee right now: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/...:

The people who care about this are the people who traffic in stolen phones, and the people who want to buy a handset and use the same SIM in a different GSM phone, or who want to change the MEID on a new phone so that they don't have to re-up their Verizon contract once they are paying month-to-month for their CDMA phone. And the phone companies, that want you to have to re-up your contract to get a new phone. It's the same reason there's about zero incentive to update the OS in Android phones, since if they never update the OS, in order to get the new +0.0.1 version number bump, you have to get a new phone, and the manufacturer gets to sell another phone, and the phone company gets to lock you into a new 2 year contract every 18 months when the new shiny object becomes available.

Since it's a PITA to get a phone unlocked for international roaming, since it has to be listed by ID with the cell network in the country you are traveling to, and it can take many weeks to get them to actually unlock the thing, and do the registration, most times it's just easier to clone the IMEI to your old phone, and then either destroy the old phone, or do an IMEI swap. This is a common "repair/refurbish" technique, and you'll notice that it's allowed under the Schumer bill.

You might also see both NASDAQ OMX Group and TeleCommunication Systems Inc. campaign contributions, and you'll notice contributions from Facebook in 2012, the year the bill was introduced, when Facebook was going big into the mobile market. http://influenceexplorer.com/p...

Little bit of vested interest there.

Rename them "manned drones" and outsource the piloting to third world countries. Problem solved, since the FAA is OK with drones in U.S. airspace.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Except for Eduardo Luiz Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who was basically paid by California and the federal government about $1.1B to move to Singapore. For him, it's was a pretty desirable and practical decision, given that the bite for short term capitol gains is treated as ordinary income by California for taxation purposes.

Who would have thought someone with a degree in economics from Harvard knew how to do money math? Uh... everybody? Hello?

Especially solar cells and carbon fiber windmills. All that nasty fossil silicon and fossil carbon from previous supernova. It's clearly a limited resource, in any case.

Portability of learned skills means you don't have to re-train your workers.

Not a problem, if you leave the "From:" line the hell alone, and only add new headers, per RFC 5322, and RFC 2919, etc.. It can look at the From line all it wants, and as far as it's concerned, as long as the rest of the headers are unadulterated, your list server is an intermediate relay server in the SMTP routing path.

Be like a first-worlder, and have less tasty intestines.

So the ether theory is back on the table?

Clearly, if the Earth is in fact the center of the universe, any repeat of the Michelson–Morley experiment would fail to detect a drift through the ether, since the Ether is in the same inertial reference frame as the Earth.

So, it's possible that there's ether, and the assumptions about Earth *not* being the center of the universe are what's responsible for the negative result, we just interpreted it incorrectly.

Is that a straw man for the claim that deaf culture is as valuable as hearing culture?

Back when the Internet Mail Consortium was a thing, we established best common practices for mailing lists, and most of them were vehemently against mailing list servers rewriting mail headers. Some popular MLM software rewrites standard headers, which breaks DMARC SPF implementations.

The thing to do here is to fix the MLM software to use the correct additional headers, rather than rewriting the headers the DMARC policy feels are important; in addition, this would allow the DMARC policy to "whitelist" based on the attached headers, assuming everything else wasn't a black mark, and avoid the "greylisting" that would happen ordinarily with most SPAM filtering systems in "medium posture" rather than "low posture" (i.e. the ones that have the concept of "suspect email" as a middle ground).

The idea that this "breaks all the IETF mailing lists" is basically alarmist BS - the IETF mailing lists are run on an individual basis, they aren't all hosted on a single machine out there, which is why they have varying degrees of SPAM and signal/noise ratios. So to claim that e.g. Namedroppers (the IETF DNS Working Group) mailing list server is impacted the same way the one Levin is all upset about is, is disingenuous.

No, it is not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Unless you are claiming Snowden participated in the 9/11 attacks? Otherwise, this has no such force relative to the War Powers Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, U.S. Constitution),

Even were you correct (you aren't), it would have to be done with military force, according to that law.

I agree. Send him in to contact them... wait...

PS: Even if he was tried and found guilty of every charge leveled against him, since we are not legally in a state of war, not having a set of articles of war signed by the president, and ratified by congress, there is no death penalty available for purported acts of treason.

PPS: Federal executions are carried out by lethal injection. Of the 3 federal executions carried out since 1963, all three - Timothy McVeigh, Juan Raul Garza, and Louis Jones, Jr., were all killed by lethal injection.

Congressional Research Service: "Once a person meets the three constitutional qualifications of age, citizenship and inhabitancy in the State when elected, that person, if duly elected, is constitutionally “qualified” to serve in Congress, even if a convicted felon."

Also given that U.S. Senators are about the only people who can get off the "no fly list" because of their special status as senators, being a senator would probably excuse pretty much and current or past conduct by Snowden, just as it excused past conduct by Sen. Roderick Wright (8 felony convictions, set aside for prosecutorial misconduct; too bad Aaron Swartz didn't have the same judge).

FWIW, Snowden is currently eligible, if he wants, to run for a senate seat in Pennsylvania, so he could conceivably be run against Bob Casey, Jr. (Democrat) or Pat Toomey (Republican).

Being a senator would certainly render him as "above the law" as other senators are/have been.

We'd have to elect him to the Senate, and get him on the Intelligence Committee, afte which he'd need a few years of seniority before he could get the chair.

But yeah, I agree with you: he'd make an excellent Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.