there is a LOT to see here, this is definitely not a non-issue. This inherently makes US companies a danger to do business with many countries for hosting/cloud services where many countries have laws and/or industries with regulatory requirements that demand data cannot be taken out of the country. This ruling if upheld will make US companies like Amazon, MS, Apple, Google et al a no go when it comes to hosting, the financial ramifications are rather massive.

The huge MASSIVE problem with that position is that many other countries have VERY specific laws about data, especially privacy data leaving the borders. This puts international companies in a hugely awkward position where they must break one law or the other, either of which potentially could result in huge fines or Jail time. The US doesn't get to determine what other countries laws are and they definitely do not get to override them.

Paying kids et al with barter is one thing, bartering can be a dangerous way to commit tax fraud as my brother found out. You have to place too much faith in the person you are bartering with, my brother got burnt by the person he was bartering with being a greedy prick, he wrote himself cheques for the bartered amount so he could then claim the bartered amount as tax deductible business expense while the payment to himself still kept his income low, my brother thought there was no trail until tax man came knocking. I also know of someone that got caught because he didn't realise the person he was bartering with was honest, so that person reported the amount on his tax (as he should) yet the other person had not. Once you are involving someone else in your tax fraud you really want to be 100% certain of what they are doing on their side.

they don't have to trace it. All they have to show is he wasn't following the regulations for financial transactions and that known criminals were using his services.

Seriously is it that hard to keep the utter bullshit out of the summary. The ruling made no such suggestion that bitcoin was money or close enough. She ruled you can convert bitcoin to money, the same way you can convert a bag of cow shit. In other words she ruled that bartering goods doesn't get around money laundering rules as the goods have value.

"The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program". I know plenty of programmers that can't explain how the hell their code managed to produce certain results, and trust me it has nothing to do with the servers mysteriously developing AI.

The difference is the actual time spent driving. someone driving to make money is spending 6-8 hours or more on the road and as such their risk of being in a serious accident increases accordingly and thereby the risk they pose to the insurance company. Professional drivers or those that provide public transport are normally charged extra to accommodate for the extra risk and costs associated with that risk.

countries, states, regions changing their time zones has been the bane of developers for decades.

You may want to take that study that says smokers save society money with a MASSIVE grain of salt, it was a tobacco industry sponsored study conducted by someone that works as a litigation expert for the tobacco industry.

There are almost half the number of daylight hours midwinter compared to midsummer. (around 16 versus 8), there goes half your potential generation time, then you have the angle of incidence which reduces the effectiveness of solar cells and the filtering of the atmosphere. peak usage periods (e.g. 6pm) are outside of daylight hours in winter and during daylight hours in summer. It all adds up.

who do you think is going to spend 100 billion on securing it? and that will only be for the current release, what about the 100 billion needed next year or the year after. Software is evolving and changing so rapidly that the investment isn't a once off and at those costs a single failed product becomes enough to bankrupt a company.

All that would result in is software that no one will buy or want. You want to pay $5000 for your new smartphone because it was held up to the same engineering standards? The reality is in a consumer world people get what they pay for and the vast majority are not willing to pay what it would cost to have the software they use engineered to those standards. If you had a choice between a Samsung Galaxy s5 for $500 and a Brand X with same features but at $5000 because it has software that was designed to those engineering standards I guarantee the only outcome would be Brand X going out of business.

this is a solution searching for a problem that doesn't exist. I still wear a nice watch, mainly as a backup for when my phone has a flat battery or is in an awkward to reach place. my current watch does everything I need it to do, it tells the time, is water proof so I never need to be concerned where I am with it and doesn't need recharging more than once a year, maybe one day a smart watch will also be able to do all those things, but what's the point!

of course they have an ulterior motive, and pretty much all of them are farely up front about that, would have taken you all of about 5 seconds to find it for any of the providers. They want you to use their service and like it enough or be tied to it enough to upgrade to the premium offerings.

and what exactly is stopping you using client side encryption and storing in onedrive or amazon or googles service? personally I would not trust ANY of them with data that I considered sensitive enough to need encryption and I certainly would not be using encryption software provided by any of the cloud providers themselves. I see no advantage to anything offered by MEGA and hence I don't understand why anyone would use that service.