The Patriot Act essentially allowed the government to do exactly this and without too much uproar. Specifically:

• Title II Section 225 - Immunity for compliance with FISA wiretap
• Title V as it pertains to National Security Letters (NSLs)

I guess I could go on but I threw up a little in my mouth and had to stop.

Link?

The problem doesn't come from the State using this information to catch criminals. The problem comes from the State using this information to harass law-abiding citizens improperly. Particularly troublesome is when the State criminalizes criticism of the State, which is not uncommon at all. Take a look at the police response to the various OWS movements. While to the rest of us, the OWS folks' behavior may seem kinda annoying and vague, it certainly doesn't rise to the level of criminal behavior that justifies the use of force we've seen against them. One could argue that there's no reason to worry about issuing the police riot gear, pepper spray, tear gas, etc: why worry if you're not breaking the law? The truth of the matter is that having this equipment (tear gas or license plate databases) is always subject to abuse. We have to very carefully control the power the State has over its citizens. Without proper oversight, I think there is ample evidence, both historical and current, that the State will use every available resource against its citizens, whether the citizens are law-abiding or not.

You want to trade penetrating bombs for cuddling bombs or, worse, where is our relationship going bombs? On second thought, that might actually work.

I started out hating Unity mostly for not being Gnome2. For business reasons, I pretty much have to stick with Ubuntu for now, and I've been a big Ubuntu fan for its ease of use.

I hesitate to admit that I don't hate Unity as much anymore. It's now more of a vague dislike: miss the menu where I can find the app I want, find Unity's desire to maximize any window I touch annoying, and, most of all, the menu proxy is difficult to use in combination with focus-follows-mouse (menu changes on the way up to the top bar if I mouse over any other window).

I find I just don't hate it enough to maintain my used-Linux-for-15-years snobbery.

Google invited me to interview for a Java programming job. They started the interview by informing me that I would be "the oldest person in the group" (I was 39 at the time). Then, I was invited to code a linked list in C on the white board while they watched. I can do this, I suppose, having done it 20 years ago while getting my computer science degree. And never done it since. I questioned the relevance of the problem pointing out that this was surely not required for programming in Java. It kinda went downhill from there...

Read an interesting article that suggests that arguing is essentially an effort to raise your tribe status at the expense of someone else. The impetus is emotional, not logical, and there's no advantage to conceding defeat. In other words, there's really no point in arguing or debating. Some set of the people already agree with you, some set disagree with you, and some set will just side with whomever they think is "stronger" as demonstrated by chest-thumping, I suppose. Nothing of intellectual value transpires.

Yeah, both Muslims, but different flavors. Saddam and his crew were Sunni despite the fact that Iraq is majority Shiite. Now that he's gone, the government in Iraq, when it finally emerges, will likely by Shiite, reflecting the majority of the Iraq population. The natural assumption is that Iraq and Iran will strengthen ties.

Sigh, I wonder about this, too. For whatever reason, our country seems to be a more violent place to live than some others. A friend of mine was attacked in her home, had her throat slit, and her house set on fire with her still in it. She managed to crawl out and go for help, but it was a near thing. Does that happen where you live? I have a permit to carry a concealed weapon and I am grateful to have it.

An argument could be made that this kind of activity increases the efficiency of the markets involved as a whole. One of the results of high-volume, high-speed trading is that the difference of the top-of-the-book for a particular security at different exchanges tends to approach zero. These systems are designed to analyze market data from many different exchanges at the same time. One of the simplest strategies is to look for a brief arbitrage opportunity based on a termporary gap between the best bid of one exchange with the best offer of another. As this gap approaches zero, the overall efficiency of trading that security increases. Everybody benefits from a more efficient market because it becomes simpler to determine the value of a particular security, which, under certain circumstances, is decidedly non-trivial.

Yeah, agreed, a more thorough search is called for. But that search should be conducted by the police, not school administrators. And call the parents. This is not in school administrators' remit.

Exactly, to put it differently, "steal an iPhone one day and have a free laptop delivered to you the next."

There's an mplayer-plugin for Firefox that streams flash (and many other formats) right in the browser.

to summon moral outrage. I know it's wrong. Really. Any help would be appreciated.

Agreed, but what if you could fix both problems? Ban hummers (the vehicles) and make dark-colored cars more energy-efficient and you're better off than if you did only one or the other.

It seems to me that, when faced with a proposal that makes, say, a 5% improvement on a problem, a common negative response is that the solution doesn't entirely correct the problem so why bother? A 5% improvement gets us to a 5% better world. Solve the hummer (the vehicle) problem next. The two are not zero-sum.