Another thing that must be kept in mind is this is not some issue about funding some obscure little program to feed a certain variety of pigeon in a specific park some place. This is in fact a large news making issue that the public has become quite familiar with it, its also an issue that is closely tied to very fundamental questions about who we are as nation, and what the Constitution means in the 21st century..

You can't be POTUS and not have a strong opinion on an issue like this, Its your job as leader to form one even if you don't have personal convictions. Obama can't duck this one and be fulfilling his responsibilities any more than an umpire can refuse to call "ball" or "strike".

You are either for it, and should be willing and able to articulate why or you are against and ought to be willing to take a strong position there too.

For or against as President in a post Snowden political landscape he owes us more than backing the USA FREEDOM ACT, which as near as I can tell changes nothing other than who owns the building the hard-drives sit in and some nonspecific language about "tools to fight the terrorists".

I would expect much like digital telephony lag is not much of challenge to overcome unless its really really big.

Jitter would be a problem. The human brain is pretty good at adapting to consistent latency, anticipating events, delaying or cramming inputs as required to compensate. Where that breaks down is when the latenecy is sometimes 200ms and other-times 500ms without predictability. Controlling jitter on the public parts of the Internet is hard.

Yes the Windows 3.1x UI was pretty terrible, but NDW (Norton Desktop Windows) replaced a number of shell functions (file pickers, etc), the file manager, gave you desktop icons, a task bar along with user definable buttons, multiple 'views' (list, detail, icon, etc) for program groups and directories, a powerful scripting environment and more.

Windows 3 was damn near unusable without it. It was actually probably the best UI out there with it.

Keep in mind our 'use' of electricity has changed a lot too. In Edison and Tesla's day there were basically two applications light, and running motors.

For practical applications lighting (incandescent) AC/DC are more or less equally efficient. Running a motor though AC is a clear win. If you are not highly sensitive to the rate of revolution because its part of a machine tools and you can gear it however you want, or its running a compressor and the cycle on time is flexible etc, than AC means you can build a simple motor with few parts and more importantly fewer wearing parts, no brushes.

As far as early 20th century commercial and home electrical needs DC would have been aggressively stupid.

AC did other good things too, it provided a time signal that everyone could cheaply use, so clocks no longer had to run independently at least solved drift. Was useful for governing analog recording a playback devices as well.

Then came the post war burst of electronics! Now the vast majority of stuff needs DC and with the exception of the vacuum cleaner all the stuff that could benefits from AC, furnace fans, heat pump compressors, refrigerator compressor, are fixed position and frequently on their own circuits. I can see AC to the doorstep a big efficient whole house power supply that has 12vdc and 48vdc rails that are distributed thorough the house and battery backed, and few 220v "appliance circuits" off the AC.

Windows 3 + The Norton Desktop; is STILL a better UI than anything offered in the Windows world for '95 on.

The dirty little part left unsaid by many is that they think being truly objective IS being a bad person.

I also agree with you. I do think we need to make a couple more considerations though.

First "those unavoidably out of town" should not be an excuse unless the distance between postal zip codes is greater than say 200 miles, and if the post marks indicate otherwise your ballot is invalid. That is the only way to prevent abuse.

Second right now it is possible for your boss to intimidate you into not voting and certain companies probably have a pretty good idea of the voting blocks their employees fall into. We need to be fair and make election day a National Holiday! So that everyone has the day off. We probably need to make exceptions for the groups for which anti-strike laws already exist, Health, Safety and infrastructure folks who potentially have to work the holiday. There also needs to be some kind of penalty for employees who try to ignore election day like its just another MLK day have have nonessential personnel work anyway.

I agree the only way to ensure any sort of integrity is to have people GO to the polls, but we need to make sure everyone can.

Why because using something different gives you a sense of superiority. AOL was an ad laden mess once it go big. It really was foolish to use it if you did not have to do so.

GMAIL's only real issue is privacy concerns. Which *is* a huge issue, but other services are far from immune to that as well; short of running your own mail server you can't really know and it does matter really because chances are the person you are mailing is using Google anyway.

The reality is GMAIL works well and meets a lot of peoples needs. It also has good IMAP support if you like a local client. So I don't judge GMAIL users to harshly, because I don't know where they could go that would be demonstratively better for them, unlike AOL users back in the day where there usually was clearly superior and obvious choice for anyone's specific use cases.

Yes, but back in 1993 its not like you could just Google it. If you were not attacked to some organization with access, and your local public library did not offer shell accounts or something the big name BBS services (with internet gateways) AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were usually the way to go. At least until you could find a local ISP.

Keep in mind most folks were at the time using DOS and Windows. So you also needed to bring some software to the mix, to do PPP etc. That stuff was no on the shelf at your local shop and it was not simple to figure out without online reference materials. The AOL diskette solved both problems.

Once you got online and found an ISP with local access numbers, got the trumpet winsock installed or downloaded Slackware you switched to a real ISP with local dialup numbers. AOL was a first step to something more than a local BBS even for a lot of us techies though, because it as available AND accessible when nothing else way especially if you did not have friends who could help you.

You think policy don't have procedures governing the handling and questioning of persons under arrest?

Miranda is a "due process" case. Essentially the court decided the process of questioning people before apprising them of their rights was unconstitutional. There is no problem with the act of asking a question.

I am sure you are right. The criminals would adapt quickly there are plenty of inexpensive packaging materials that could be used which be sufficient to defeat detection by a dog. The biggest challenge for drug packers would probably be developing handling protocol to avoid contaminating the outer packaging with product.

That does not need to be perfect either just 'pretty good' assuming the postal service/government deployed a detective device more sensitive than a dog it would have to be tuned down otherwise the false positive rate would be insane.

Did the guy working packing at the Amazon roll a J before coming to work? Think that canabis oil from his skin won't transfer in some quantity to the absorbent porous cardboard he handles?

I doubt TSA style x-ray scanning would work well either, I don't know how you could distinguish drugs from many perfectly legal frequently shipped substances. Its a difficult problem unless you are willing to raise the costs of parcel shipping to insane levels to pay for manual inspections and all the abuse, theft, and fraud that will entail

While I realize VMware isn't effected by this vuln;

Fusion can't boot a VM off USB (why the fuck is that?) So if I want to test a USB boot stick on my MAC I have to use this to chain load the USB sticks boot loader: https://www.plop.at/en/bootman...

Its pretty convenient to just keep a VM defined with a floppy and the plop disk always attached. It would be better if it could/would boot a USB device, but the virtual floppy is my work around.

Nobody can just own anything any more can they, nor can they accept we live in an imperfect world where mistakes happen.

An app developer should do their best to provide users with concise, but complete, accurate, and timely information to the extent the technology allows. Perhaps developers/vendors have some responsibility to set realistic expectation about the quality of the information, but that is as far is can possibly go.

Beyond that people/users just have to make decisions and bear the responsibility. If your counter terrorism intelligence app does face recognition and determines Jim on camera is really Oliver Public Enemy No.1, and Mr.Policeman shoots Jim, its Mr.Police man who is at fault unless your application was deliberately misleading or you mislead Mr. Policeman about the accuracy and confidence possibly with your app.

So were the record companies. Now amazon sells mp3 files without DRM.

DVD ripping is childs play, yet they still release their stuff on that format.

Grandparent is correct eventually they will give up, probably because the competition will be beat them. The competition being indie (which lets face it the CGI that talented folks can do in their basement now is better than what the studios did in the 90s.) and their own older unencumbered stuff, and again there is so so so much of that there really is no need to watch a 'new' movie in our own life times.

Its a damn good way to get busted as well. IDS sensors and SEIM systems will pick up on a small number of hosts performing a large number of authentication attempts or a large number of hosts making attempts against the same account.

Either way you going to at least tip off the site operator. If your target is a free webmail host or something there might not be much they could/would do but a corporate security team will probably alert the account owner, and watch that account very carefully, will other folks contact the lawyers and the authorities to hunt your ass down.