It is very illegal for a merchant to store your credit card number for more than the 5 seconds it takes to authorize the transaction, unless they implement fairly strong protection to make sure nobody can steal those numbers later. But even if they do this, it is still very illegal for them to try to share those card numbers and what they purchased, which would be necessary for different merchants to "track" your purchases.

CurrentC probably does not have this protection. Merchants would be free to store and share the fact that your CurrentC account number bought X here, Y there, and Z there. Merchants would love that ability, which is why they've designed CurrentC to allow it; as a customer, you have very little to gain from that kind of data mining, and almost definitely plenty to lose.

This is my recommendation also. Never had any issue with their service, billing models are very straightforward, and their philosophy specifically embraces things like parody sites (within the law).

I think this hints at the fundamental disagreement between people's thoughts on "net neutrality."

Some folks think business is business and should be able to do whatever it wants, probably because they have money or some other vested interest in the current telecommunications behemoths, so they want the maximum return on that investment no matter who gets screwed in the process.

Other folks (like you) see a problem with the current arrangement, and believe that the solution is to create more competition so that the telecom industry "regulates itself." In principle I agree, but I think that's just not possible in this case.

The rest of us believe that telecom is, was, and (for the foreseeable future) always will be a *natural* monopoly. You can't have meaningful competition for building roads and sewers and power grids, in part because those things cost so much money that it is effectively impossible for a new player to enter the market, and in part because our cities would be a mess if we had to deal with multiple parallel networks of these kinds of infrastructural utilities. Telecom has exactly the same issues; no matter how data transmission technology evolves (in the foreseeable future), be it telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber optics, or whatever is next, it will always be vastly more efficient for a single entity to install and manage that physical data network, at least at the local level. There just can not be meaningful local competition in data transmission services (which includes telephone, television, internet, etc). So the solution for telecom is exactly the same as it is for water, sewer, roads, etc: allow one entity to run it, but regulate them heavily as a public utility.

The problem we're facing now is "how to get there from here." We should have made this transition decades ago, but for a variety of reasons didn't, and so now those telecom monopolies have been allowed to remain private for too long and grow to enormous size. Wrangling them back into a public utility arrangement is the only sustainable path forward, but it will also be extremely politically difficult.

Just to play devil's advocate here for a moment:

This guy knew he had been in the hot zone and may have been exposed, and was trying to get back to the US. So his options were

• a) be honest about his exposure and almost certainly be denied re-entry; or
• b) lie about exposure in order to get back into the US.

Now, if he had not actually contracted ebola, he was likely to live in either case, (a) just would have been more inconvenient. But if (as was the case) he really did have ebola, then he would have seen (a) as suicide, and (b) as a small but measurable chance to live, given the quality of health care facilities in the US.

So, he had quite an incentive to lie about his exposure, didn't he? I'm clearly not condoning it, but... that's quite a catch, that catch-22.

That sounds a little like submarine combat, as opposed to the surface naval or air combat that currently inspires our space battle sci-fi.

Well, but consider: space is big. Detecting things in it is hard, unless they've giving off light or radiation that you can detect more easily. For example, today, it is very common that we don't notice near-earth asteroids until they're less than a day away, and asteroids are a lot bigger than missiles.

Atmospheric missiles must maintain constant thrust to keep flying, in order to counteract gravity, air resistance, and to maintain course skimming the ocean, as you mentioned. That makes them easy to spot as soon as they cross the horizon, giving you that 10-20s warning.

But in space, constant thrust is not necessary. The missile can be fired initially just like a dumb projectile, and only engage its thrust once it's very close to the target and needs to adjust course to hit it. Until that time, it just looks like a very small rock hurtling through the void, giving off very little energy, making it very hard to spot.

Even if you had radar or some other kind of active sensors to detect incoming missiles before they engage their thrusters and give away their position, the attacker could simply fire their missiles inside a cloud of other flak to camouflage them. So you can see a cloud of thousands of tiny objects coming in, but you can't tell which of them are missiles with warheads until the whole cloud is close enough that those missiles activate and start homing in on your position.

Yes, there are legitimate situations where some police records need to be sealed for a modest period of time, in order to preserve the safety of undercover operatives/informants etc. Laws and procedures already exist to allow for that, all they have to do is convince a judge (privately) that some document needs to stay secret (for now) and it's fine.

This is different. This is an entire branch of law enforcement claiming that they never have to release any documents ever to anyone, no matter what's in them or whether they actually have any legitimate need to keep them secret. Given how friendly judges usually are to law enforcement on these kinds of things, the fact that they don't even want to have to convince a judge to let them keep their secrets is a big red flag to me.

Any legal/judicial experts care to weigh in on whether this argument has a snowball's chance of being accepted by any court?

The article cites Snowden's files as their source, but Snowden and Greenwald have both explicitly denied that, and even go further to assert that neither of them have provided any information whatsoever to the Independent:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

That means somebody is lying, and that is extremely important and worth your careful consideration, no matter who you think it is.

I'm disappointed that this development hasn't already been modded up in the comments here; a lot of folks are jumping to conclusions by taking the Independent at their word about who leaked this particular information.

No, it is known, straight from both Snowden and Greenwald themselves: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

They deny giving any information to the Independent. Since they are not the source, as the Independent claims, they further surmise that the timing and nature of this particular leak make it plausible that the UK intelligence agency did it intentionally, in order to justify even harsher "anti-terrorism" and "anti-leaker" laws and powers.

Yes, sure, "it cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen" -- but a sweeping dragnet that intercepts and logs every private communication of every citizen of the United States isn't exactly "targeting" any particular citizen, is it? Of course to us, that makes it worse and not better, but to the agents of the modern US surveillance state it is a lovely loophole indeed.

It is very, very important for people to read and understand the significance of this comment.

Many folks from the "middle"-class on up simply don't understand what life is like for single parents, or even or dual parents who must work multiple jobs to pay the bills. Yes, raw food of the sort that can be prepared into healthy and nutritious meals is not (necessarily) inherently expensive; what puts it out of reach for many low-income folks is not the money but the TIME it takes to go to the grocery store, bring those foodstuffs home, and then prepare them.

Single parents cannot leave their small children unattended that long, and bringing them along adds even more logistical overhead. There often isn't a single grocery store in low-income neighborhoods, requiring an even longer car trip, if the family can even afford a car; otherwise, an even longer bus ride, which also limits the trip to how much can be carried in two hands to, from and on the bus.

Making a healthy diet accessible to low-income families is not an issue of price, it is an issue of availability and logistics, and those issues are NOT insignificant. People need to understand that, to avoid falling into the trap of thinking poor folks are just lazy -- they're not, most of them work harder than you do, I promise you. Unless you've actually been a low-income single parent, don't presume to understand what the challenges are.

Can any legal types comment on whether it would be viable to fight back with our own Service Provider License Agreements?

"By providing me, <NAME> with service, you, <COMPANY> agree to be bound by this Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA)..."

Could we craft a generic boilerplate SPLA with provisions that nullify these kinds of anti-consumer restrictions, and just all print them out and mail them en masse to the legal dept. of any company we do business with? Would it be considered legally binding on them, just exactly the same way EULAs are legally binding on us? Has this already been done?

If you intend to process credit card payments through your custom application on the point-of-sale device, you'll likely fall under the purview of the Payment Card Industry's Payment Application Data Security Standard (PCI PA-DSS), which may require a source code audit and limit what you can have the software do. That may be no problem for you depending on your resources and intended use of your software, but it's worth keeping in mind.