Let's not exaggerate about "no difference". Writs of assistance, and searches in general, back in the revolutionary days were highly disruptive to life and business. If someone copies out your entire gmail folder you probably won't notice it, it's not like they'll be taking up space and getting in your way and throwing your files around as you try to read it yourself. They were even used to gain entrance to a place and trash it under the guise of a search.

I'm not making a value judgment on the merits of this case or whether it's reasonable or not, but you are drawing a false equivalency. Seizing all of a person's electronics equipment or servers is a much closer analogy. Non-destructive copying with zero downtime is not.

"Top men."

Thing is, that's not actually so bad to me at all. If you could tell whether someone was lying or telling the truth about performing some illegal act--and be certain of it (big assumption)--I'd wholeheartedly support it. It would catch criminals a lot faster, and exonerate the innocent a lot faster, what on earth could be bad about that? As you're describing it, it doesn't sound like it's violating any privacy of yours, except for the specific fact "did you commit the crime". It's just a one-shot perfectly accurate truth serum.

It certainly doesn't violate the 5th Amendment. The "no self incrimination" is specifically to cut down on coerced, inaccurate testimony. If this thing was accurate, it's a completely different issue.

It seems to me that almost every Internet Anti-Government Crusader's true agenda is "protect my right to lie to the authorities", or "protect my right to not get caught". Doesn't get any of my respect.

God, it's nice to see someone on here who doesn't think the government is a literal force of primal evil. Having even a little faith in the system seems to be thoughtcrime on internet boards.

or New York City for that matter...

In truth, this is also why Social Security has its problems. When it was established, it was "You likely won't live to use it, but if you do, you will be well taken care of". It was insurance against an uncommon and, in a way, kind of negative thing happening to you: Living to an age such that you could no longer support yourself. It was a luxury that not many people had, and it could absolutely be hard on your family. Of course, now almost everyone lives long enough to collect it.

No, it wasn't meant to be a replacement for savings, and you weren't supposed to get out what you put in. A small portion of the population was supposed to collect it, because most of them didn't live long enough to.

Uh, what else would you control it with?

(serious question, I guess? I've never seen a dimmer that wasn't a push-knob)

I don't know much about what he actually did at Epic aside from some of Unreal Tournament's best maps (it was pretty awesome that it showed the author name when you loaded a map) and I don't know what his job was the other companies at all. Was he a coder? Designer? Producer? Artist/art director? Nothing but level-design-o-rama?

Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves. I nearly killed one two years ago because he blew a stop sign coming down a hill, swerved in front of me, hooked his tires into a trolley track and fell over about 20' in front of my car. If I hadn't been driving below the speed limit he would have been street pizza.

Biking in hilly, high density areas (like downtown Seattle) should require a license. One that can be revoked.

See though isn't that destruction of evidence? Which is pretty clearly illegal.

"Oh, you were looking for documents at my house? Sorry, I built my filing cabinet to shred and burn everything if I don't press a button every week" -- if you're arrested for (for example) financial fraud and you pull that kind of BS, you're in deep trouble. In fact, after you've started being investigated for something, any action to destroy potential evidence is super suspicious and may well be specifically illegal, even if (especially if) there's no way after the fact to prove whether it was incriminating or not. Just because you took that action far in the past when you set up the dead man's switch, doesn't excuse you from the consequences.

It's well established in corporate cases that people have an obligation to prevent automatic deletion of materials during an investigation. I'd be surprised if that didn't hold for private citizens too, why wouldn't it? If you would reasonably expect that the police have a lawful reason to search your documents, and you don't volunteer that those documents exist and are going to be deleted...I really don't see any ethical difference between that, and finding some way to delete them remotely yourself.

In a criminal case I don't see an ethical difference between "I did X and Y happened", and "I knew Y would happen if I didn't do X, and I didn't do it". Kind of like "I cut her brake line" vs "I knew her brake line was cut, and that she was going to drive the car, and I didn't inform her".

If there's an argument that a dead man's switch really is ethically different from active deletion...and I really do mean ethically different, not "more likely to get you off the hook for a crime"...I'd love to hear it.

I'm out of the blast range up north (Seatac) but would still hear it if it went off.

That said, magnitude 2 is basically "hit the ground real hard with a sledgehammer". A nearby major construction site causes a lot more vibration, so does a big truck on the freeway.

Honest question as a heavy C# user. Why Visual Basic? What advantage does it give, either in function or practice or even aesthetics, over C#? It seems that they are functionally identical but that C# has the better syntax; clearly there must be some reason VB.NET is still around though. Enlighten me please?

Just rediscovered Alien Legacy, a true Sierra golden age underdog from 1994. It's a space colonization game that's not a 4X, how novel!

I really really wish I could find all those old DOS TSRs from the mid-late 80s. I had one that put a bunch of ascii smiley face characters on the dos prompt that careened around and bounced off of lines of text; hold ctrl or alt to make them go in circles. I would not be surprised if it was really, truly lost in time with no remaining copies.

Visual Studio when doing C# stuff. Eclipse when doing Java stuff. On Linux, vim or notepad++ when doing C stuff or any other random shell junk. On Windows, notepad++ (okay, let's be honest, it's usually just noteBut I always wind up missing Visual Studio. It seems to fit my workflows best, and if it worked well with Java I'd replace Eclipse with it in an instant.

Don't have evidence of crimes on my phone? How about perfect legal but very private photos of my wife that I don't want J. Random Officer looking at?