I'm not sure it's a spurious claim when you consider the circumstances that they're using it in.

The users are children, meaning that they are much more likely to lose or forget their money than adults. The system is (presumably) closed, so that the only thing you can do with the funds is buy school lunches (and maybe ask for a cheque payable to the kid's parents), so it's not a very tempting target for attack.

So while it's true that "merely moving from physical currency to electronic currency does not make it more secure", it's a bit silly to suggest that it never makes it more secure (or more reliable), and this sounds a perfect case for it being both.

So?

Consumer choice makes a difference where the consumer could have avoided the problem if they had had a choice. But that's not the case here. How secure the back-office systems of a company are is almost completely opaque to a consumer, so they cannot make an informed choice, and the institutions being hacked are banks, credit checking agencies, health insurance companies, security companies - you can't realistically avoid doing business with them.

I see you've chosen not to engage with any actual argument, and chose instead to make a vague claim of superiority with no explanation. An excellent strategy for when you have no arguments to make but don't want to admit it, such as if you made up a disparaging claim, but got called on it.

I think that those are perfectly reasonable questions. It's not something that you think about a lot as a lawyer - at least not explicitly - because you get so used to this pattern.

Thinking about it, it might be easier to explain this by taking the two steps in the opposite order.

Reasonableness

I don't agree that reasonableness is the bane of all our laws. It's an important safeguard - the point is that we are dealing with subjective judgments or subjective feelings, but we want a safeguard so that someone can't be liable because someone completely overreacted to an innocent remark, or a police officer completely overreacted to very minor evidence.

The question that this is asking is "could a reasonable person, in the position of the victim, have been put in sustained fear" (or in your police example, could a reasonable police officer put in the position of the officer in question have suspected X). The reasonable person is assumed to be of reasonable firmness and resolve, to take sensible logical decisions etc. Note that the question is could a reasonable person, not would they - the person does not have to act in the way that the court thinks a reasonable person would probably act, they just have to act in a way that falls within the spectrum of actions that the reasonable person might take.

In practice, where the person is an expert the court will be slow to find that they have acted unreasonably, especially if they act within the bounds of normal practice in their profession. In principle I think that is sensible - the court is meant to check excesses, not ensure that every officer meets absolute best practice. However it does seem like the pendulum has swung too far at present, particularly in the United States, and I wonder if the fact that US judges are highly politicized means that you are likely to get judges who are more likely to side with the police (I don't mean that they are being swayed by thoughts of rewards for siding with the police, just that the executive is likely to appoint judges who they know take a more pro-executive view).

The subjective limb

This is a straightforward evidential point - straightforward conceptually, that is, not necessarily easy to prove. Subject to the applicable rules of evidence, anything that is relevant can be used to prove that the person was fearful - I'm not aware of CAT scans having been used, but expert evidence from psychiatrists, therapists, police support officers and so on are all used.

Proving that someone was fearful is obviously difficult since it requires the court to try to establish what was in their mind. There are three points though that I think tend to mitigate that problem:
1. This is not an isolated difficulty - the courts are frequently required to establish what was in someone's mind (did she intend to stab him?) and have a lot of practice at it.
2. The criminal standard of proof applies - so the prosecution has to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the person was fearful.
3. They aren't looking at this as an isolated question - they can look at all the circumstances. If, in answer to the other limb of the test, the court has concluded that the defendant's behaviour would have put a reasonable person in sustained fear, they are going to find it rather easier to conclude that this victim was, in fact, in sustained fear. For example, if you make repeated and plausible death threats that the court thinks would have terrorized a reasonable person, and the victim claims that he was left fearful by them, you are likely to find that the court is not very receptive to the argument that the victim is faking it.

As a final point, I don't think it can all be quantified objectively. That, however, is true of an awful lot of criminal laws, even the seemingly straightforward ones. My view is that it's an inevitable product of the fact that we live in a confusing and complicated world.

So where's the bit where she calls testosterone "deeply harmful and limiting"? It's certainly not in the bit you quoted.

I read that quote as saying that they should get rid of the stereotypically girly-girl "ladyfig" series and get rid of the stereotypically male, testosterone-charged macho combat, and make "products that foster creativity and imagination that children of all genders will adore". I.e. she's talking about the lego playsets not men. I think that's obvious from the transcript, but you can also tell that because when she talks about the "macho testosterone" she puts up a picture of a lego figure in combat, not a picture of a human male.

She's pretty outspoken and not afraid to make a point. If she was really saying that testosterone was a negative trait in males don't you think she would have said it, rather than leaving it as an inference that, reading the replies to your comments, nobody except you is picking up on?

And if you're still sure that she meant to denigrate all men, if the most egregious example you've been able to find is an, at most, ambiguous and oblique reference to testosterone, don't you think you might be blowing this out of proportion?

This point has been made further down the comment thread, but just to point out: this claim is untrue.

Belial6 has said that the video in which the comment is made is the second part of the video on Lego. You can watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe65EGkB9kA. You can also review a full transcript at http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/02/lego-gender-part-2-the-boys-club/.

From both you will see that the statements that Belial6 is relying on are never made. This claim is just not true.

No - there's an objective element to this test as well. Where is says "reasonably to be in sustained fear", that creates a test with two limbs:
1. Was the victim actually in sustained fear?
2. Could the statements have put a reasonable person in the position of the victim in sustained fear?

A threat that obviously wasn't serious would fail the second limb.

(Source: I am a lawyer (although not in this jurisdiction) and this is a common way to formulate criminal laws.)

This is incoherent.

Your first point is that it is worse if the car's location is not private than if "everything that happens in and outside your car" is not private. That's just obvious rubbish.

The remainder of your comment is just saying repeatedly that "the government should not be tracking people". First, this is a strawman - there is a difference between vehicle-to-vehicle communication and centralised tracking. Second, it's not an argument, it's just a soundbite. You aren't engaging with the issue: how much erosion of your privacy would be a reasonable price to pay to make safe, driverless cars a reality?

Government is the source of your land rights - you have rights to control what happens with your land because of the laws enacted by society, through the Government. Your whole point here is incredibly wrong-headed.

And - really? Assuming you can get around the whole rights-without-Government issue, you don't think there are any other obstacles to monetizing that airspace? Or do you just prefer to blame "government" for every perceived ill, because you don't really understand?

Will they? There are a lot of advantages to running this in Ireland: low tax rates without the negative publicity of operating in a tax haven, other favourable financial and tax rules that allow foreign companies to book their profits there to further reduce their tax bills, a skilled workforce, good infrastructure, and all the up-front costs that come from building and equipping the data centre in the first place have been paid already. Call me cynical, but I'm not convinced that many data centres will move if Irish law allows the authorities to get this data.

Do you have a source for that malaria fact? I just wonder whether there's maybe more to it than just its effectiveness in newborns.

First, it's pretty obvious that jeffmeden was talking about privacy in terms of the car's location, not "everything that happens in and outside your car". Your comment doesn't show that his point is "absolutely false" unless you completely misread what he said.

Second, everything you do involves a tradeoff of privacy, safety, freedom and a dozen other things. If you go outside you lose some privacy; if you get in a car and drive in public you lose some privacy and some safety. The idea that you can be some sort of privacy and freedom absolutist who never trades either of them for anything is just nonsense.

There are plenty of solutions to this problem that only marginally reduce security. For example, keep copies of the encryption keys on index cards in a safe at the Ministry of Justice head office. An attacker would need both the backup hard drive and the key, and they are now in separate, secure locations.

As for why not move the backups off-site too - it sounds like that is the long-term plan, and this is just the stop-gap for prisons that haven't moved over to it yet.

Don't understand evolution in what way? Why do you think it's just "pseudo scientific hand waving"? The GP's point (which I understood to be that there are reasons why evolutionary pressures might push in favour of a longer life expectancy than required just to reproduce) sounds reasonable to me - I'm genuinely curious to know what the misunderstanding is.

I don't think the GP is saying that at all.

It would just be nice to have a bit of balance. I don't think we should scrap online anonymity because some of its uses, in opposing tyrannical powers, whistleblowing and similar, are too important.

But we should still recognise that it has costs. Anonymous online abuse can and does have very serious consequences, including depression and suicides. Too often the argument is presented as one-sided.