With a warrant, that is. Same with webmail and any other hosted service. Warrents describing a particular place and person have a way of producing encryption keys from service providers. When warrents aren't fast enough for them, then you know they're doing something very, very wrong. Unlike movies where Jack Spy decrypts the terrorists' plans in real-time to thwart them, our jokers can barely even share high-priority bulletins about suspected terrorists planning to board a plane in a day or two. It's ludicrous to suggest that they need faster access to information when they can't even manage what they have already.

How about this; the 9 supreme court justices post their public keys on www.supremecourt.gov, keep their private keys safe, and I'll voluntarily split copies of my private keys into 5-of-9 shares using Shamir's secret-sharing scheme and encrypt each share to one justice and post the ciphertext publicly. Then the NSA can stop introducing weaknesses in the free software I use, and heaven forbid they need to peek at my shopping list, but if they do they can convince some actual judges to let them see it.

I dunno, I'm happy enough with my voluntary free association with the United States. I'm free to leave if I stop liking it, as are you.

What anti-state people don't seem to grasp is that the very same people who you hate in the government, the people who want to control your life and take things from you, weren't made that way by big government. Just look at Mexico. Big drug cartels (who may or may not be entirely the creation of anti-drug big government) are more powerful than the government. Wherever there is an advantage to be had by banding together and robbing the weaker or more honest people, you'll find that niche being filled. The job of government is to fill that niche with the least harmful and most inept robbers. That overpaid, uncooperative, unfriendly civil servant that you despite? Give them a gun and a posse and see how well that turns out for you.

Actually... It is being rationalized on both sides of the debate, not one. Logic is being used, but only for one set of values, leading to a mistaken impression that one is right, as opposed to just having an opinion. Nobody is on any higher ground than "I have buddies here that agree with me". The reason for that is that this article was never about choosing which lives to save. The poster I replied to, in order to pose as a 'smarter than the rest of us' person, attempted to pervert it into that. But since he based it on a misunderstanding of why it came up in the first place, replying to my post about the actual value of the individual lives is fruitless. This scenario doesn't lend itself to this discussion.

None of what you said has any relevance to why the number of children and infants was brought up by the news outlet. If you want to have a hypothetical debate about the value of children, then let's talk about a scenario involving life boats.

It doesn't.

Yeah, you can tell how unknown he is by the fact a movie was just released about him.

I wish contrarianism didn't beocome so popular on this site. I mean, really, taking a shot at Hawking?

I heard your entire post in my head in Seven of Nine's voice.

Adults have lived some of their life. Kids have missed out on things most believe everbody should be able to do before they die, like their first kiss.

Everybody here actually understands this, I have no idea why you all picked now to suddenly act like you're Mr. Spock.

What's the value of an asshole that spends his evening judging the value of others he has never met?

I don't know which distro, I just know my friend griped about me sending him links to sites that use Flash because they frequently crashed Firefox. Heh

Yes, if you substitute one belief for another you greatly change the outcome of the extrapolation. "I beleive AI will never exist so that won't happen." Thanks for supporting my point that this sort of extrapolation is not science.

The artist workstations at Sony Imageworks are Linux.

If you're going to commit to this exercise where you use extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion, then you're going to have to take things like 3d-printing into account and even just the general demand for machines that build machines that will lead to eventual technical advances.

Try to remember that when you cherry-pick what does and doesn't count when extrapolating stuff like this you're simply adding to the risk that earlier you implied was a bad thing.

If you apply that same extrapolation to what's happening here on Earth right now and you get right back to the super-robots being dominant. I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.

And the scientific evidence of this conclusion is...? ;)