Because they are storing someone else's data. That someone else (and their locally stored property) should receive the full protection of their local laws when dealing with a local subsidiary of an international company. This is not an embassy, it is not considered a territorial extension of the United States. The server is owned and taxed as Irish property. It should require an Irish court order to forcibly extract data off of it, same as it would taking letters out of an Irish safety deposit box (even if the bank had an American presence).

Would we be comfortable with courts in China being able to subpoena any US held data from companies with a Chinese presence? "Sorry Yahoo but as part of your incorporation in China we need you to produce any emails from the personal accounts of Boeing employees held on your US owned servers."

That's fine. I'm perfectly okay with saying Microsoft has to produce all of their financial information, legal analysis, etc., when required, no matter where it is stored, as a provision of being legally incorporated in the United States.

Where this gets pernicious is that the data they are being required to present is *not* their data. They are a third party holding the data on someone else's behalf. Note the courts specifically say that this would not be okay if it was a physical document, their reasoning for being allowed to subpoena an electronic document is essentially that it's trivial for them to get away with it.

From the article:

So presumably this data belongs to someone in Ireland. It's data which was created in Ireland. It may be data which has never left Ireland. But because they made the mistake of dealing with a US company, the data of an Irish citizen sitting in a room in Ireland where Irish law prevails is now being exported to America without Irish courts having any say in the matter.

Respecting territorial sovereignty is for when other countries can do something about it. A small island nation of a few hundred thousand people need not apply.

Still, it seems a bit excessive to do an extradition raid for someone who is apparently accused of hacking into zoo and deli websites. His relation to the Russian MP is probably what has earned him the special attention, part of Obama's plan to punish Russia. The message is clear, "Invade its allies and America will spoil your vacation."

What do you suppose the probability is that after some further negotiations the MP's son and Snowden trade places?

Let's say everybody does lose their jobs and is unable to buy goods or services. Is it more likely they will (a) resign to slowly starve or (b) start growing and trading for food amongst each other, providing each other the services they can't get from the robot elite, band together for social protection, etc.?

Shutting someone out from one economy just puts in them in another economy.

Ultimately, even if it costs the unsophisticated people more in time and investment to produce the same goods, the robot elitists don't care about *that* cost, they only care how many of the newly minted Robot Supreme Data Coins the poor humans want in exchange for the same service. That's an arbirtary quantity and the poor humans can always offer a lower bid than the robot automation centers.

But, remember, this whole problem came about because we found such an incredibly cheap and efficient way to produce all our resources. So, even though the humans are going to be forced to trade for what the robot elitists consider virtually nothing, for them it will have vast purchasing power since goods are now so cheap.

In general, I don't think keeping people employed is ever going to be a problem. What the onset of robot workers actually means is that relative income for human workers is increasing to where it is too costly for manufacturing companies to compete for their services compared to the other opportunities they have.

The real problem with super-efficient resource generation is its effect on political dynamics. One person controlling half the economy may be perfectly harmless up to the point where they realize they can use that vast wealth to dictate what laws will be passed. But, who knows, maybe at that point we'll all be so well off that it will actually be harder to buy votes and loyalty than it is today.

Your term limit issue is secondary, as are many other issues.

Whether or not we have term limits is a matter of reasoned public debate. Right now, we can't have that due to the money in politics problem.

It is unreasonable for you to connect your issue to the core, systemic problem of how elections are funded.

That is perhaps the biggest misconception and hangup people have. This isn't transactional politics. It's not like you get something in return, or trade-offs get made. We do that now, and the money biases it away from the overall best interests of the people.

Really, if we reform money in politics, a fair, reasoned discussion will happen. Or, at least a much better one will happen.

Term limits, and other things get decided then, not now.

This is a single issue effort. It is systemic, not partisan, and not intended to remedy anything other than the basic issue of money in politics.

Personally, I have no interest in making humanity a race of immortal lineage. People get old and die, I am on terms with that. But I am definitely not on terms with taking a gun and shooting someone, even if they are getting on in years. I imagine a similar argument can be made with respect to abortion vs. "self-abortion."

That said, I'm not sure of their ideological affiliation, as it is also of interest for simply improving fertility, but you'd be wrong to think there's not a lot of research done into improving embryonic implantation.

It takes a good deal of cynicism to speculate this is about profit, given that
(a) in all cases covering contraception is a whole lot cheaper than providing pre- and post-natal care
(b) Hobby Lobby continues to cover all forms of contraception which are not considered to possibly interfere with uteral implantation
(c) Hobby Lobby has provided health care and decent wages, including contraceptive coverage long before the mandate was passed
(d) They also keep closed on Sundays for religious reasons (Sunday being the most profitable day to be open)
(e) There's plenty of much more expensive things covered -- I'm not aware Hobby Lobby attempting to use legal means to wrangle out of any other form of coverage

Investing in funds which invest in companies which among their portfolios develop the contraceptives is not the same as investing in the contraceptives. But what is being said is that that was an accidental investment, which I don't see as unreasonable to believe.

Absolutely true. But despite the common meme this is not about assigning a corporation personhood. A book is not a person either, but if Congress said "You can say what you want, but we're going to ban your book" you would rightfully be up in arms about it, because the book, while not itself a person imbued with constitutional rights, in some ways acts as an extension of such a person, and therefore receives some comparable protections (if you want to look at it that way).

This is the same issue. Mr. Green's religious beliefs are intricately tied into his position as CEO and his ownership of Hobby Lobby. Funnily enough, no one squawks about him giving Sundays off or paying double minimum wage and offering decent benefits, both of which are driven by his religious convictions. If this was not a closely held corporation I imagine he would have been sued by shareholders for such unprofitable decisions long before the ACA became a concern.

To be fair, in the domain of common experience a 7' tall ape man living in the pacific northwest *is* far less crazy than the idea of a subatomic particle being in two places at once.

Many scientists of yesteryear were hardly willing to accept such preposterousness, though I imagine they would not have batted an eye at an undiscovered hominid of unusual cleverness. (In fact, sometimes they seemed to be far too trusting when evidence of new hominids was presented to them.) People can go to the zoo and encounter all sorts of species they never anticipated. Where can they experience quantum mechanics?

It's only through substantial and careful methodological treatment of the evidence that we're able to develop the capacity to distinguish truth which contradicts intuition, accepting the fantastic but real and dismissing the common but false.

My wild and probably quite unpopular thinking on this is as such: the people you describe are perfectly reasonable people. They are drawing reasonable(ish) conclusions. They just lack access to the expanded toolset and and supply of evidence modern science has provided. What if instead of calling their theories a bunch of hocus pocus, we simply sent them on the right trail? Used the Socratic method, as it were. They are clearly already interested in the subject of undiscovered species, so "You think there is a wild ape man? Interesting. I wonder how we could prove its existence. What about DNA evidence? There's this great book called 'Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.' Maybe we could read it to learn a bit more about genetics and see if it helps us come up with any ideas."

Because forensic analysts have determined the same gun used to kill the president may have been used to kill the Joint Chiefs. Because they think someone else may have used your gun. Because they believe the person who sold you your gun is an accomplice. Because you are contesting your confession.

It's a rather cynical view that the only point of trying someone for a crime is to send them to prison for that crime. The point is to find out the truth and mete out justice accordingly. That requires a full evaluation of all of the evidence. In this case, the lawyer has admitted the evidence exists and is located on the harddrive, but it's not clear how the details of that evidence will affect the case and subseqeunt sentencing.

Frankly, I stopped wearing a digital watch because I noticed when I forgot it class passed by much more quickly and enjoyably than when I was counting away the minutes until it was over. Also, it lead to the rude habbit to be checking my watch when conversing or keeping company with someone, as if I was just waiting to get away.

Having technology always at the ready is at least mildly antisocial, especially when it's visible to others. If I'm sitting down to do work then I want my full laptop. I will carry a smartphone for alarms, texting, important email, GPS, etc., but that stays in my pocket until it's needed, I don't fiddle with it and distract myself while I have any kind of company or other work to do. If there were useful features that only a smartwatch could perform, then I would carry the smartwatch in my pocket. I absolutely don't want some gaudy box on my wrist which can distract me from whatever I am presently doing. For the most part, each feature you add to it is another reason I don't want it.

Yes. We really need to take a hard look at network transparent displays in the context of what we can really do today as well as the future.

When I did this, 10T networks were common, and just a little slow for something like CAD. 100T networks were growing in popularity, and then we sort of jumped to 1000T.

Also during that time, I started on dialup, moved to DSL, and then more came.

Know what? The fiber connection I have in my home is fast enough to run X with few worries today.

And it's going to improve more. My 4G cell phone can run X too. Amazing!

Honestly, I miss the vision our early innovators had. In a way, the field was more open and people could build without so many legacy ties. The need to incorporate those into the next step is holding people back. Legacy "screen scrapers" should get attention. They are useful, and they do have advantages for application developers.

Network transparent, multi-user, concurrent multi-processor, networked computing is the bar to cross, and if we don't maximize it, we risk losing out on a lot of the potental.

Sad really.

All I know, is I won arguments back then, and I did it on UNIX when the dominant move was to Windows and the PC, and all that distributed software bullshit we face today. Won solid. No fucking contest.

The difference was really understanding how things worked and applying that instead of following the cookie cutter stuff we see being done so often today.

With X, one can distribute or centralize as needed!

Fonts on one machine, window manager on another, application on another, storage on yet another, graphics server on yet another, or even better, how about a few displays, each capable of serving a user?

Or, pile it all on one box somebody can carry with them!

Doesn't matter with X. It's all trade-offs, and this leaves people to structure things how it makes best sense to them. For some, having very strong local compute / storage / graphics / I/O is best. For others, centralizing that pays off the best.

Only X does this. Nothing else does, or has.

The screen scrapers are impressive, but they really aren't multi-user in the sense that X is, and that requires a lot of kludges, system resources, etc... to manage things.

I remember the day I read about X in BYTE. It changed how I viewed computing, and when I got my chance, I went for it whole hog and it paid off very well.

Also IMHO, part of this vision really should be to provide developers with dead simple tools to get things done. It is true that building an efficient network aware application takes some work. SGI, BTW, did educate people. If you developed on IRIX, you got the tools to make it all happen, and you get the education and consulting of a vendor who knew their shit cold.

Today, we don't have that surrounding X, and it's hurting development pretty big.

Back in the 90's, I was doing video conferencing, running things all over the place on lots of machines, melding Linux, IRIX, Windows, etc... together in powerful ways, often using machines secured from a dumpster. No joke.

We've managed to cobble that together again, but it's a far cry from what could have been, and could still be with people thinking this stuff through like it was the first time.

IMHO, the other real problem is as I've stated. We have a whole generation of people doing this stuff now who basically have no clue! They were never introduced to multi-user computing properly, never got to experience X as intended, etc...

When I explain some of this to people, they make comments like, "sounds like Star Trek" and "amazing", "wish I were there..."

Yeah. I was. Many of us here were.

The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people who want faculty positions compared to the number of available positions. I quote directly from our university president, "I can get professors anywhere."

There is pressure from the administration to buffer grades, as that effects various important statistics for the school, and it's far easier for them to give out As rather than worry about complaints and legal action etc., but otherwise the administration couldn't give a rats arse about how popular the professors are with the students. They care most about how much research money the professor is bringing in. Maybe at some big private school where you have legacies and wealthy donnors to worry about the administration actually cares about the students' feelings.

No one goes into a professorship expecting a 9-5 job, but pointing out professors are spending extra time with their students isn't really making the case the situtation is detrimental for education, either. When you get your degree, you have a decision -- do I enjoy doing research/teaching so much that I go into academia, or do I want a profitable career and go into industry? Professors aren't in it for the money. They're the sort of people who just wouldn't fit anywhere else. You don't need to pay them well. The professors making $40k tend to work as hard and spend as much time in the lab as the professors making $80k. I'll bet many would work for room and board if you gave them a nice lab to go with it.

If you want to improve the situation, your options are either establish some legal minimums, or curb the excess of academics by providing either positions for them and/or doing a better job of training people for other positions. Unless you're an engineer, most bachelors degrees are more or less geared toward becoming an academic, even though relatively few people will wind up in academia, and it doesn't help this situation when you have a flood of graduates who aren't really sure what they can do with themselves besides stay in the university environment.

Ha!

Did this in the late 90's through early 00's.

That exact scenario. Know what? It kicked some very serious ass. Still to this day we don't really have a software combination quite as potent. Here's the setup:

SGI Origin multiple CPU, lots of RAM, one or more 1000T interfaces. I started the thing on 100T, which was more than acceptable for most users, but I ended up with a lot of users.

ONE COPY of the software, ONE shared data repository, and the software contained data management, revision control, etc...

That machine hosted 30+ users via the X window system. Users could run another SGI, a PC, Linux, whatever they felt like running.

A simple script logged them onto the CAD system, where they could build solid models, make drawings, perform analysis, and many other things.

No user ever touched the data store. It was owned by the account that ran the application (SUID), and no user ever touched the application data either. All remote display.

Admin on this thing was fucking cake. Never had it so good. Still don't. And systems today that either run "cloud" or copy data all over the place are a mess by comparison.

The network model of the X Window System had some very serious advantages. Today we are missing out on a few options in most cases due to the lack of network transparent display capability. That lack is costing us a lot of time and money too. Thing is, nobody actually knows, so it's all A-OK.

At the time this was done, I competed with traditional setups and kicked their ass solid on every single metric. Cost, administration, performance, etc... It wasn't even a contest.

Today, with the networking we have and overall compute power available, it's hard to imagine how freaking good a similar setup would run.

Shop floor, various departments... no worries.

For the odd user at home, X required too much and we didn't have things like NX yet. That was a case for "screen scraping" type tech, to which I just setup a VNC like thing, let them access that over the home network, and life was good.

I could, and did, administer that thing from all over the place, often using one of those "Free JUNO" accounts, just to get a dialup and a few K/sec needed to run a command line or two.

Brilliant!

Truth is, the direction we took from those times, the decline of UNIX for this kind of thing, etc... was so much more labor intensive and expensive, I moved on to other things, occasionally consulting and mostly laughing when nobody sees the clusterfuck for what it is.

I agree with you about 4K and some other cases being more optimal without network transparency, but that's not the point. We also have other resource issues associated with those.

The protocol needs to have it all baked in, so that as we gain capability, smart people can apply it and actually get the benefit of it, not some diluted down thing we wish were as good as planned.

X did that. The protocol was there for when things grew, and some of us applied it all, and it rocked hard. A whole lot of us don't get it, and are still slogging around doing so many extra things we don't need to, it's a wonder there are any gains at all.

UNIX + X is multi-user computing. It's the bar, and most of the industry has forgotten what multi-user really means and how it can be used. Their loss.

It's like saying, "I'll get around to it when pigs fly," except in this case the pigs are being strapped to very large rockets.