Submitter here... let me apologize, it was submitted in ignorance. I just saw the story today.

That you can capture passwords with a camera.

WTF .. This place is really gone to the dumps..

Broad-spectrum legal reform is the kind of issue that seems blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer.
And yet the number of Congresscritters of any strip running on the idea is. . .um. . .wait a sec. . .let's look at Libertarians. . .
Unfortunately, all the power is draining into DC, where the money can be printed at will, thus giving a us positive feedback loop.

Yes, they have a chainsaw under the seat.

Last i heard, if you dont protect your trademark you lose it. I dont think there are any 'humanitarian exceptions' to that rule.

However, they could 'lease' the rights to his family to use it, lets say for a dollar... Then they dont look like jerks, and dont risk the legal implications for inaction.

- government doesn't have anything "to provide", it can only take away from somebody in order to subsidise somebody else, it doesn't produce anything and has nothing to give to anybody for free. If you are talking about government stealing even more resources from those, who are already being stolen from in order to provide bread and circuses to those, who are already on welfare anyway, then all you will achieve will be more corruption, even less production, as those producing, will be moving their productive capacity out of the country even faster.

But then it occurred to me, it's not the card/usb-stick the dogs are smelling, it's the fact that some human touched it

No, the dog simply smells the chemicals in the device - Hell, if we can smell them, so can a dog. We just can't smell them well enough to find one hidden inside four containers at the back of a filing cabinet, whereas a dog can.

To your other point, however...


There's no way the dog can smell certain memory cards with certain content on it

Absolutely true, but largely irrelevant. They had a warrant to seize storage media, plain and simple. The dog just helped them find all of it.

That said, I still see a dog alerting to the smell of electronics as increasingly useless in the modern world. Assuming no malicious intent on the part of the handler (false, but let's roll with it for now), a drug dog can sniff out your bag of weed precisely because you don't have hundreds of bags of hypothetically-legal weed hidden around your apartment and they need to find the one illegal one. With electronics, however, I do have hundreds (possibly in the thousands) of circuit boards randomly scattered around my house - I'd dare say that even Joe Sixpack easily has over a hundred boards around the house, when even things like car keys and teddy bears and thermostats have them nowadays.

So while the police might love cataloging 150 individual drug charges for every seed they find in your carpet, they won't take quite the same sick pleasure in documenting your three computers, your smoke detectors, two external HDDs, your TVs, 18 thumbdrives, random old PC parts you have lying around, a third of your kid's action figures, your vintage SNES and dozens of games, a few hundred burned DVDs... And then someone actually needs to check out almost all of those to decide whether or not they have any storage capacity, and if so, what they contain? In all seriousness, if they raided my house for storage media, even narrowing it down to "real" storage devices (HDDs, burned DVDs, flash drives... as opposed to every recordable greeting card etc), someone could literally spend the rest of their life trying to decide whether or not they had found anything incriminating in the collection.

I see. We can't buy oil from other companies, nor alternate OSes. AT&T? That was Federally regulated monopoly until it was broken up.

Had this been the case, there Revolution would have been depressingly short and unsuccessful.

When you do your work, do you routinely cut corners, lie, and make stuff up just to get your next paycheck? That's what you're claiming pretty much everyone else in private industry does...

One thing we know is that absence of regulation == total chaos.
Just ask a bureaucrat.
Furthermore, we know that people are stupid, and absolutely incapable of operating above caveman level without kindly bureaucrats.
In summary, ensuring Total Regulation is a basic national security requirement.

...the other red herring argument was age discrimination...

The reality is that USA (and many others, like the Canadian or European) workers are much more expensive than workers from countries that do not have the insane socialist labour laws that raise the cost of doing business just enough for companies not to hire in those places any longer. This is not about an hourly wage, even if the hourly wage was exactly the same in USA and in India it still would not make sense to hire Americans. This is about the insane labour laws, the insane government agenda of running welfare / socialist / fascist states, where the individual is subservient to the government. It is too expensive to deal with big government where you cannot even pay a simple cash bribe for the government to go away and not come back.

You first, tough guy.

So adjustments on the scale of what the IPCC is warning us about aren't anything to worry about? Hokay....

For the last 18 years, it was well established by the pro-AGW crowd that 17 years was needed for a signal. We have 18 years - and no signal. Not to mention the pro-AGW side likes to ignore the Medieval warm period, or the little ice age (the former being as warm - or warmer - than now).

As far as Professor Easterbrook, that "Skeptical Science" site has about as much reliability as the old Enzyte site pushing penis pills. A lot of handwaving and ignoring of facts... His predictions from the late 1990s were spot-on. He correctly predicted the current pause, and calls for us to enter a period of cooling. Well, we've got the pause - now to see if we get the cooling.