We can make an argument the framers would not have found it reasonable as well. Just look at how our courts function.

We have a formerly strong but at least still strongly worded 4th amendment that at the time it was written would have greatly inhibited spying. "The right to be secure in ones papers and effects" in the late 18th century left the state with following you around in public and asking people what you were up to without much ability to compel them answer.

The we have the innocent until proven guilty concept, and the beyond reasonably doubt standard; which again show the intent of our societies founding document was very much to ensure the rights of the innocent were protected even at the expense of letting the guilty escape punishment and public safety allowing offenders to go free if we were not reasonably certain they were really offenders.

So all the necessary for security arguments are fundamentally invalid because the very purpose of the organization "The United States of America" is to "Secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves..." Actions that infringement on liberty is incompatible with our national objectives. The "General welfare" argument does not hold either, look at the phrasing government is to "Promote" the general welfare but "Secure" liberty; the framers absolutely intended liberty to trump welfare where required.

That would be security problem in itself. The sucuritly line at a big airport is like the perfect freaking place for a suicide bombing; lots of people in at least for many airports a pretty confined area.

Easy way to trigger you bomb to just wait for a current across the pins. Letting people 'plug stuff in' in the security line seems like a terrible idea to me.

In theory if you can't get through the security check you are allowed to leave with your property. In practice people have been prevented from doing so.

If someone does arrive at the security checkpoint with a $600 dollar tablet that happens to have a dead battery, for their $130 flight is the TSA going to let them just leave?

Right, but that can probably be pretty well managed with opiate pain killers, for any major procedure it generally has to be anyway. Addiction issues aside they risk of cardiac, respiratory failure, liver and kidney damage etc, is much lower when you are not using as many drugs and in such high dosages to leave someone unconscious.

There is also the issue that these drugs stress the body during the already stressful surgical procedure.

I am not a medical professional but if there was a safe way to just turn off someones awareness during a surgery and then limit anesthesia to post operative pain management I suspect safety could be improved a great deal.

The punishment would still be the fact that your are deprived of years of your life. I think it would still suck pretty hard to essentially wake up one morning and find yourself 10 years older.

They probably can't, the dog more than likely alerts are just about anything with electronics, but hey that is all the "probable cause" they need.

I suspect this one will end up back at the SCOTUS They are going to be forced to expand on that ruling last year about bring a dog onto someones porch.

This ^^. Lots of people are going to point out statistically the layoffs and firings are lower than ever but it isn't really true. Companies just game the numbers by using contractors to fill what really are permeate positions.

Spying on your enemies makes sense, they are after all your enemies.

Spying on your allies makes sense to a degree as well in that everyone has always done it. You might for example want to develop your own assessment of their military readiness and capabilities. You might try to obtain information about their long term economic prospects such as total mineral reserves and stuff like that as well. What you generally do not do is industrial espionage and you probably should not be directly spying on their secret government proceedings and the like, least it be discovered and you suddenly take on the unfriendly appearance of possibly attempting to manipulate or subvert their sovereignty; that is the sort of thing that turns allies into enemies.

Its a fine line, but at least when we are talking about a stable and relatively open society I think we should be erring on the side of "don't do it", especially if you think the revelation of it would be the least bit astonishing to anyone not completely naive about statecraft.

There is already a remedy for that though, if its libel than you sue for libel; so either this law is nothing new or its something entirely new that people claim it is and away for people to whitewash facts about themselves.

if people and companies always had "good judgement" there would be no need for laws and legal precedents in the first place. Laws are a fundamentally there to replace judgment, they provide a prescription of what one can or may do given a set of facts. They replace the use of ones judgement.

Maybe the EC should recognize that the problem lies with their law codes and their courts and not with Google.

Burn is a huge problem on plasma screens and there are still lots of those out there, there is NO WAY a set top box maker should be shipping something without a screen saver on by default!

It would be nice if they had settings to turn it off if you wanted and maybe even send a CEC power off to the TV if you like, but at the very least set top boxes still MUST have a screen saver. Now in another 10 years when most of the plasma TVs have been put out to pasture, it will be a different story.

I don't like caps. I don't think they should sell you bandwidth and than charge for data. I also understand the need for ISPs to over subscribe. Its simple economics most users are going to use very little of the bandwidth most of the time.

I suspect a lot of throughput is consumed by malfunctioning stuff that dumbly makes the same requests over and over and things like this. Why can't the ISPs just kill the caps and let customers know in a not so threatening letter, "hey I think you have a problem Did you know your port is lit up at 80% capacity 24-7 if you do that's find but if not there is probably something really wrong on your network"

Its not another channel its just a XML document on a webserver (pretty sure MS already runs a number of those)

RSS is the right way. Distributions lists for notifications of this type have been done with mail historically because it was there not because it was a good medium.

Consider if you use e-mail for this sort of thing you need to take care of several functions e-mail does not itself take care of:
*allow people to subscript
*allow people to unsubscribe
*scrub you mailing lists for dead addresses.

Your mail servers might be stuck with large disk queues waiting on dead domains where the MX server does not answer etc too because well that his how mail works. All of these things are not as simple as they first appear. Do you remove an address the first time you get a 500 error? Because some admins server sends an improper error code, then a bunch of users start screening about how they signed up and never get their news letter.

With RSS you just put the link out there, you don't have to manage your subscribers. You don't have to provide any unsubscribe function users can take care of themselves. You if anything from your web logs get better feedback about how often the messages are viewed because you can assume people pulling the feed actually receive it and that its not just getting filtered off to junk/spam folders.

Frankly I am glad to see someone actually doing some real research on the carbon cycle so we can understand the real issues and plan accordingly.

As opposed to what usually goes on where someone fancies up a computer model based on thirty year old assumptions backed up with shitty data from terrestrial monitoring stations down wind of localized heat sources and carbon emitters. Finally using their 'results' to push some political agenda and grab some more grant money.

This is a good thing it will put some hard facts on where the real problems are. I for one continue to suspect the biggest driver of climate change and CO2 levels will prove to be deforestation not humanities use of hydrocarbon fuel sources.