People use smartphones now, and almost none of them run Windows. I don't think Windows is a requirement for IoT.

I do think some sort of use case is a requirement, and some form of standardization.

Dude, he's not running a f*cking bank. He's obviously talking about a system for some phone toy like Angry Birds. Do you care if I can get into your Angry Birds account? Probably not much.

He's describing a system that is good enough for phone toys and things that require similarly low security. Like apparently Slashdot, which lets you perma-login with a browser cookie and redirects https to http rather than the other way around.

You're talking about the government seizing private property. AT&T isn't some otherworldly entity; it has shareholders who own it. In the 1890s, when this power you allege actually existed, due process protections may not have been incorporated against the states yet. But now they are.

You're not going to get a court to agree that the executive branch can seize AT&T's entire assets because it violated some minor advertising regulation.

Civil asset forfeiture is an abomination and should be abolished.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be insulting. I said the legal fiction was stupid, not you, and I didn't mean to say you were.

I think years of reading and commenting on Slashdot has made my comments a little more confrontational than I intend sometimes.

If the law provides for that penalty (which it doesn't), and it's not so disproportionate the courts would refuse to enforce it (which they might).

I caught you speeding 5 miles an hour. I'm revoking your driver's license forever. Your driver's license is a government license, not an entitlement. So I can be a dick and revoke it whenever I want, because I'm the governor.

I think I'll go revoke all the driver's licenses of black people now. Or maybe I can't do that because of the 14th Amendment. People with blue hair then. Damn hippies.

(That would still be a 14th Amendment violation, but courts are sometimes too deferential to see it when there's selective enforcement that's not about race.) Doesn't make it right. Doesn't mean you'd want to live in the world you're describing.

Re the Honduras thing:

The woman convicted was in the US, did no business with Honduras, did nothing other than RECEIVE a shipment of lobsters from a company that had ultimately gotten them from Honduras. She didn't know this: do you know what country the stuff you buy from Walmart ultimately comes from?

And the shipment was in clear containers. And the Honduran government filed a brief saying that that law had been invalidated by the Honduran courts. And she still went to jail.

LOL.

You just cited one of the stupidest legal fictions ever created. Yes, everyone knows it. Yes, it's been around since forever. And yes, it's ridiculous.

How many federal statutes are there? Trick question: no one even knows. You could spend your whole life reading the Federal Register and you still wouldn't know the whole law. And even if you did, there are statutes that incorporate the entirety of "foreign law" by reference ("No animal may be transported in violation of any state, federal, or foreign law."). So you'd need to memorize every law in the world.

There needs to be some sense to this imputation of knowledge. "I didn't know it was illegal to kill someone" is retarded; of course you did. "I didn't know it was illegal to break into that guy's house"; again, ridiculous.

"I didn't know that Honduras prohibited transporting lobsters in clear containers, rather than opaque ones." That's not at all ridiculous. And someone was convicted for that and sentenced to jail.

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" comes from a time when mob justice was close to the only justice. "We all think you did something bad, so you must have known it was bad, too!" There are still many crimes that have the quality that "you must have known you were doing something wrong, even if you couldn't cite the statute".

But there are others that, while valid criminal laws, really should only be enforced against people in some profession or other. If you own a company that catches, kills, and sells for food various types of wildlife, you should know if the state you're hunting in adds a turtle to the protected species list.

If you're some restaurant owner halfway across the country, and you just bought a shipment of turtles for your turtle soup from some company you'd been doing business with for years ... you probably shouldn't be held liable. You would think, quite rightly, you didn't really have to worry about endangered species law since you're buying from a legit corporation, and you know that the species isn't endangered because it's one of the most common turtles in the country so you didn't think to check if Rhode Island had changed its law recently.

This happened, too: some kids lobbied the state government to make this common turtle the "state reptile", and the state did, and the state's laws said "all state animals are protected species", and federal law prohibits trafficking protected species across state lines, and some company was negligent, and some restaurant owner was unaware the company was negligent, and some federal prosecutor was a douchebag, and now this poor guy is a federal criminal for making turtle soup using a turtle species which isn't at all endangered and which isn't protected in his state, at the federal level, or in any state except one random state that thinks it's cute to let 4th graders write state laws . He went to jail because of a Rube Goldberg-esque legal dominoes game.

There are too many laws, and society is too complicated, for us to keep saying "ignorance of the law is no excuse". You're right, but you shouldn't be.

This may surprise you, but the federal and state governments cannot unilaterally "revoke the charter" of a corporation without cause. We live in a nation of laws, where the government has limited power, and handing the executive branch the ability to appropriate the private property of a corporation's shareholders in this dramatic way would increase the power of the executive branch of government dramatically. If history is any guide, this power would be used capriciously, against corporations unpopular for stupid/religious/moral panic reasons, and against corporations that are competitors against those the executive branch has a financial incentive to see succeed.

Due process of law is a thing for a reason. Let's not make the executive branch judge, jury, and executioner. That doesn't ever end well. Ever.

The point of this is that these countermeasures deliberately obstruct access to the information the algorithms need. It's not a simple bug you can fix; you'd need a whole new approach to face recognition.

It is arguable that the US is constitutionally prohibited from restricting US citizen travel. Technically, during the Cuba travel ban, it was spending money in Cuba that was prohibited, not traveling there.

The US State Department already urges US citizens, in the strongest terms, not to travel to North Korea:

http://travel.state.gov/conten...

Anyone who does anyway is a fool.

"Perfect use" of the pill is just taking it each day. That's not very hard to do. You can use those little weekly pill things with the days on them. Perfect use failure of the pill is .3% per year. Perfect use failure TWICE over a 10 year period has a probability of happening of approximately 0.1%.

It sounds like your wife sometimes failed to actually take the pill. This isn't intended as an insult, just an observation that correct use of the method she was supposed to be using would render a family of two kids highly unlikely to occur.

Again, I'm glad everything worked out so well for you. And you're right; it's certainly good for a kid to have a sibling who is close in age.

But for anyone reading this exchange, I would argue the takeaway lessons are:
1. If you want something done right, and you want to be sure it's done right, you have to do it yourself.
2. Use more than one birth control method, because .01*.01 is a lot better failure rate than .01.

What area are you in? Can you post some more details about how you did that? I tried to get a separate router to work, also using MAC cloning, and it didn't work. I found some random sites on the Internet purporting to give the PPPoE username and passwords used by all Verizon FiOS customers, but no luck.

I'm glad things worked out for you, but how the fuck did you not learn your lesson about using birth control after the first unintended pregnancy?

"The FBI was successful taking down these two illegal darknet websites. Therefore, the FBI will be successful in taking down all illegal darknet websites." You fail Intro to Logic.

I'm sure there are some competent people in the FBI, but their track record with technology isn't great. And they know it, which is the reason behind "Operation Onymous", where they took down a small number of darknet markets on the same day using a different method for each one, and not relying on any fundamental flaws in the in the Tor protocol for any of them. Meanwhile, markets like Agora that were running on the day of "Operation Onymous" are still running, because they didn't make stupid mistakes. "Operation Onymous" was a pathetic attempt to FUD the drug-buying/selling public, and the FBI obviously chose this strategy since it was impotent at shutting down the competently run darknet marketplaces.

I'm not in favor of illegal darknet markets. Extreme libertarianism, like all extremism, has the potential to motivate and make possible atrocities. But the technology behind these markets is solid. Handwaving and saying that all criminals get caught is just wishful thinking on your part.

Without intending to start a general Libertarianism-is-good-no-it's-bad argument, I'll just say that I think employers that think it's okay to try to control their employees' private lives in that way are despicable. It is none of your business what I do outside of work, and if you think it is, then fuck you.

I'm not saying regulations against a direct supervisor dating a subordinate, or stuff like that, are offensive. But there is a very clear line, and that line is at preventing clear, work-related conflicts of interest that would be caused by the relationship. And even in that case it's more respectful to have a policy like "report it so we can deal with the conflict of interest through reassignment, etc." rather than "don't do it".

Oh and segregating a workplace by gender is so stupidly ridiculous that it would honestly shock me if anyone not in the cultural orbit of backwaters like Saudi Arabia proposed it seriously. So I'm going to assume this guy wasn't serious, because he'd have to be such a shithead to seriously suggest that that it's more likely he was joking.