... instead of the shitty ad-filled blog

http://googleonlinesecurity.bl...

In the same way that differential air pressure "repels gravity" to keep a plane in the air???

Why didn't the rubber absorb the sound, so that no one heard the master's scream?

Sounds like somebody couldn't figure out how to set up GPG.

Nobody said that the nerves are going to work. Post transplant, the person will certainly be paralyzed from the neck down. That's why this kind of surgery is only appropriate for a paraplegic whose body is about to fail. He or she is not going to stop being a paraplegic, but might get many extra years of life by acquiring a robust new body.

FWIW, the only time I restart systemd is to update the kernel, or I guess systemd itself (though the kernel changes more often and thus I can usually lump the latter in with the former). If you do live-patch your kernel, then you can do the same with systemd - it has a command to re-exec itself while preserving state.

I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it is as robust as anything else I've used on Linux. There are fairly few daemons that I've never seen need a restart sometime in the last 10 years.

Of course the retirement funds weren't bailed out. They didn't have to be, because the companies they invested in were bailed out instead. If the various investment banks were allowed to fail then they'd probably all crash and so would everything all those retirement funds were invested in. THAT is why those companies were too big to fail in the first place.

If investments were just a toy for the wealthy then we could let them play their games and take their haircuts. The problem is that the investment sector affects everybody, so we have no choice but to intervene when things go wrong. That gives us the right to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, even if it means the rich can't play their games any longer...

While I agree with many of your points, often these records become important after the fact.

Suppose I have a record of every letter sent from anywhere to anywhere. Then somebody blows up a building or whatever and are now known as a terrorist. The database allows you to obtain a list of every letter that had his address somewhere on it. Or any letter sent to a suspicious address which originated in his vicinity even if it didn't have a return address (such as if it were dropped in a mailbox). That kind of information can be useful to expand a network of suspects.

It is like having a record of every phone call for the last 30 years. It is hard to look at call patterns and tell who is a threat. However, if somebody blows up a building you can figure out who their college roommate was, or who they dated in middle school. All kinds of relationships that would not be obvious if you just talked to somebody's neighbors or looked at their recent credit card / phone history become apparent. Maybe their former girlfriend works for the TSA and was on duty when a terrorist slipped past security, but there weren't any phone calls between them in the last 10 years. That is a lead that might become apparent with long-term record retention that would be missed without it. Of course, such techniques inevitably involve looking into the cases of people who are almost certainly innocent. If the girlfriend wasn't involved, pursuing her might mean neglecting other leads that are real threats.

Data is just data. However, there is a lot you can do with a targeted search once you know what you're looking for.

They've been doing it for well over 10 years:

cite:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...

Relevant quote:

Last month, The New York Times reported on the practice, which is called the Mail Isolation and Tracking system. The program was created by the Postal Service after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 killed five people, including two postal workers.

Lot's of people still actually hand-write addresses. It needs to get OCRed in order to be sorted.

In times past, sending porn through the mail *was* illegal, and the antiquated version of this program tracked porn mailers and receivers.

Well, it is for sorting purposes. (They've got massive machines running Linux doing OCR which replaced manual sorting, and that requires... taking pictures of the mail.)

Whether all the pictures are also retained is a completely different story. 10 years ago, I'd have said, "No; too expensive." But storage costs have plummeted, so nowadays, maybe so.

If I live in State A and own property in State B, I cannot vote in elections in both states. That is taxation without representation as well - assuming I pay taxes in both states (property or income). How is this any different? Plus they can still run for school board, go to district meetings open to the public, and participate in the PTA.

Is your school voucher program going to give me back the money I have paid in taxes for things like welfare, unemployment, medicaid, school districts, universities, medical research, and other programs I am not taking advantage of at the present moment? No? Oh, that's right, sometimes we pay taxes for things that don't benefit us directly because it makes society a better place.

On a tangent, the fact that we can't even control crime in prison says a great deal about the ineffectiveness of our approach to crime. Heck, I'm sure they can't even keep drugs out of prison.