Didn't Apple go through this exact same issue with the iPhone app store a few years ago, and they fixed it?

Those rules were written in 2010 — and AT&T has pledged to abide by them for three years if its DirecTV purchase goes through — but were knocked down by a federal court in January.

Even if AT&T did abide by these rules in three years their commitment is over and they can do what they want.

As intrusive as the Google Glass has proven to be, it will only be worse when observation recording tech is more difficult to detect.

I disagree. The exact opposite: when people stop noticing, they will stop caring. It won't be perceived as intrusive anymore, and people will be less annoyed by it.

It's the conspicuousness of the camera in Google Glass, the constant reminder that you might be recorded, that makes most people feel creeped out. For the previous decade leading up to that product, nobody cared about small+cheap camera tech itself. And people walk/drive by fixed-position cameras all the time, and don't give a fuck there either. Peoples's behavior shows that "intrusiveness" happens when a cameras looks like a camera, and I suspect it also has something to do with being face-level, literally "in your face" and you're making eye contact with it, unlike the case with less conspicuous cameras. It was never about privacy; it's some aspect of self-consciousness kind of related to privacy, but a different thing.

You might say "maybe you, but I sure care. Hell yes it's about privacy." Of course you say that. I'm talking about how people behave and the emotions they display. Not their innermost secret thoughts that they are always terrified to express in voting booths or policy decisions, yet are happy to speak of on the Internet.

You know, the Internet, where they don't have a camera in their face making them all self-conscious! The Internet, where instead of a terrifying 1x1 pixel image that makes you think "WTF is that? That's weird! Are you watching me?" you now instead see a bunch of "like buttons" which are obviously for liking things, not getting your browser to send a request to an unrelated tracking server.

In addition, there's a certain inevitability about it all. The cameras have been there a long time, there are more today, and there will be even more tomorrow. You can't do anything about it, except stay at home. So you'll either accept or you'll go insane and get selected out. You'll handle it. (Contrast that to Google Glass, the one small camera out of the hundreds out there, that you actually recognize and is also rare enough that there's little social cost to shunning. With GG you can refuse to accept and also stay within social norms, so GG is different.)

They have shown that they can not be trusted. They must lose the power to do this.

Pull someones certificates or kill some CA. Someone needs to suffer because of this.

What happens now is that there's an investigation. Depending on the outcome the CA may be revoked for good, or merely forced to reissue lots of certificates. The deciding factor is the reason for the screwup - for instance they may have got hacked, rather than been actively corrupt. In that case Microsoft will have to decide if they have patched things up enough to continue as part of their root store program or whether to pull the plug. I doubt many people have certs issued by this CA so the damage would be relatively minimal.

Unfortunately you can't just kill any CA that screws up. For one, if the CA was widely used it'd be disrupted. For another, nothing is unhackable, especially when you get the NSA involved. Expecting CA's to be able to reliably fight off professional hackers from dozens of governments and never ever fail is likely an impossible standard to ever meet.

Hard decisions ahead for browser and OS makers for sure ...

Actually, I started off generally believing in GW and AGW, but the evidence presented for AGW (not to mention GW) has itself changed my mind.

It doesn't help your case that the word "denier" is used exactly as is the word "heretic".

That was exactly my thought. If his work is used to influence public policy, then everything related to his work should be public, including any relevant emails.

"I don't claim Obama is not an American. I'm just saying that the White House, for reasons of its own, has put up a faked document."

That's pretty much my view. I don't know one way or the other what his legal status is, tho I know of no reason to disbelieve the Hawaii statement of information accuracy. What we do have is an image that was unquestionably altered (as anyone with experience editing compressed or layered images could instantly see), rather than a pristine copy. I lost interest after that and if anything else came to light, it's missed me.

And the one big reason it matters is because you can't prosecute a non-citizen for treason, in the event.

As to the rest of this thread, looks like you've encountered the slashdot equivalent of the UFF. :(

The trouble is, we may in the future discover that the sequenced DNA does not suffice. Or that there's an error. If we don't have reference material, we can't fix any such errors, or even discover them in the first place.

This is kinda like deciding a project is no longer needed, so instead of archiving it, you compile one last binary, then destroy all the source code.

I wonder if any of the milder diseases we see are actually attenuated or mutated smallpox, still in the wild.

Well, I've got my smallpox vax scar... nowadays that's how you ID an old fogie!

Considering all the other stuff Dubai has built, how does this mall rate more than a passing mention?

It's your father's microkernel. A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Bitcoin's primary purpose is to traffic/launder money and goods.

Objection. Will stipulate that its primary purpose is to traffic. But I call mega-bullshit on its primary or even secondary purpose being to launder, though there might be a way one could use Bitcoin for that.

This seems to be quite typical for government consultations. There's very little in the way of rigorous process. I remember years ago in the UK there was some poll that showed people were worried about anti-money laundering laws and their effect on freedom and civil liberties (it was a poll about risks to civil liberties, Ithink). So the British government said they'd respond to this by ordering a consultation on how best to improve Britain's AML laws. They invited public comments, etc. 6 months later the consultation was published and it recommended making the laws even stricter. There was absolutely no evidence-based approach used at all.

I was going to say something about people who are financial tools themselves...

However, I guess you're right. I want to be responsible for my money, and I want to be able to use it freely, without government snooping. If that makes me a money launderer, so be it. It's like those politically organized pirates that simply want to use a free Internet, rather than rape and pillage.

Bitcoin isn't even particularly anonymous. If you want to launder your coins, you need to trust a third party, which kind of ruins the point of a decentralized/free currency. There are much better cryptocurrencies out there for anonymous purposes.