Doesn't matter what it is - if Noscript is blocking scripts, then it doesn't play (I had to allow scripts on this site before I realized what people were talking about).

The fuss isn't over the employee's email being read. It's about the email of a blogger who is *not* associated with MS (other than using a Hotmail account) being read.

What, you mean that someone who pays his ISP for a connection to the Internet shouldn't have to pay extra if he actually wants to use that bandwidth? I'm pretty sure that'd be classified as communism, or terrorism, or whatever the 'ism of the month is.

ISPs will fight tooth and nail to keep from becoming the "dumb pipes" that true net neutrality would make them. Because then they wouldn't be able to siphon off the profits of companies that have actually innovated themselves a business in the Internet space, rather than just continuing to make a buck off of their infrastructure semi-monopolies.

How about "it keeps you from being hauled off to jail by some really mean feds because someone used your wireless to download kiddie porn"? *That* most people can easily understand.

Only if you don't consider externalities. If the person hasn't been successfully rehabilitated, then your cost savings would be eaten up by the increased cost of the new crimes committed once released from prison.

And the simple truth is that we don't know how to effectively rehabilitate many criminals. The most effective rehab processes (such as those used by Sweden) still have a 35% recidivsm rate.

Because trademarks don't work that way. In the US, you either have to already be using the mark as a part of your business, or have a genuine intent to use that mark in the near future (for the second case, you may be required to present a business plan showing how you are going to use the mark in order to prove your intent is genuine).

The reality is that Fluke has been using the "dark face with yellow edges on a digital multimeter" for as long as there have been digital multimeters. Anyone who uses multimeters regularly would likely be able to identify a Fluke by it's color scheme. Which is exactly what trademarks are intended to protect.

Here's the explanation. There was no Grand Consipracy to prevent scientists from obtaining and studying the seeds. What wasn't allowed was for scientists to have access to the fields where the plants were being commercially grown.

They *could* have obtained the seeds, planted them, and done their studies on those crops. But they couldn't possibly reproduce the sheer scale of Mega-agrobusiness. Since evolution involves lots of random chance, there would be a lot more chances for resistance to develop in the millions of acres of commercial fields than there would be in the much smaller scale fields available to researchers.

About the onlly thing to be alarmed about is the fact that the EPA didn't require monitoring of GMO-planted fields for such changes. But while that might be alarming, it's not particularly surprising, given the way the US goverment caters to corporations.

And how would you count the strikes? That would require some sort of central records of warrant applications, each one indexed by something. Using a suspect's name wouldn't be reliable (warrants listing "john Doe" are issued all the time, when law enforcement is trying to get evidence needed to identify a suspect). And you wouldn't be able to rely on a "case ID", since law enforcement would be the one issuing said ID, and could just "open a new case" when they ran out of strikes.

Now add in the possibility of different jurisdictions - a warrant for someone's email could be sought in the jurisdiction in which the person lives, the jurisdiction where the email provider's headquarters are located, the jurisdiction where the servers are located, etc.

And of course if we could rely on prosecutors to police themselves on the matter, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion...

What else is he supposed to do in this case? There is nothing like a "double jeopardy" rule that applies to warrant applications, so the government's attorneys have and always will have the ability to keep doing it over until they get something that the judge finds acceptable.

Lol - tried that one with my mother (age 78). After about two hours of my showing here the different desktops, she finally flat out told me to stop wasting her time, and install something with the 6 applications that she gave a damn about.

So now she has a Debian Wheezy system with LXDE (it's an older machine), and 6 application launch buttons. She has no idea whatsoever how to change *anything* on that machine, and couldn't navigate her way to any of the applications via the normal menu.

And she loves it.

The moral - don't try and turn Gradma into a nerd. You probably won't succeed, and she won't be very happy with you for trying. Instead, aim for something like a "walled garden", with you being the gardener...

Wish I had mod points. The reality is that the SEC is to unregulated speculation what the TSA is to terrorism - just a show to convince the people that the govermnet is actually doing something about the problem.

Maye we should add the term "regulatory theatre" to the lexicon along side "security theatre"...

If they got such a warrant, it would have been thrown out (along with the seized evidence) later, assuming he had a decent lawyer. Your logic assumes that that police already knew that the bomb threat was made in order for a student to evade an exam. But they had no evidence of that until *after* he confessed. The bomb threat could just as easily have been made by someone who wanted to spook a student who was taking the exam. Or for a reason unrelated to the exam at all...

And added to this is the fact that the police had no evidence whatsoever that the bomb threat was made via Harvard's network. That was just a (not unreasonable) guess. But such guesses, while a staple of police investigative technique, are NOT evidence.

So at most, the cops had a guess as to the reason for the bomb threat, a guess as to where the bomb threat was sent from, and some evidence that *if* the bomb threat was sent via Harvard's network then this person *might* have been the one to send it. Hardly what I would call "probable cause".

Did you read a different warrant than I did? I saw *nothing* in the declaration that would count as probably cause for a search warrant, until it got to the part of "he admitted it to me". So most likely they did NOT have enough to get a warrant for his computer (the fact that he accessed TOR on that day wouldn't, by itself, be enough - he could have been using TOR for any number of reasons).

You were dead on about him not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, though. What probably happened is that the police talked to him (along with everyone else who accessed TOR via the campus network on day in question), noticed that he was *very* nervous when they started talking about the bomb threats, and then proceeded with the standard "good cop/bad cop" interrogation (excuse me, *interview*) technique and got him to confess.

"Found. Would you like the entire list of 572,468, or just the 3 that aren't employed by the federal government?"

Uhm, what exactly is this "unaltered bible". Even the King James verison, which is the closest there is to a "standard" bible for the English language, contains more than a few translations errors (when compared to much older Greek texts from which it was translated), as well as some deliberate alterations.