And you're right, they don't know what causes it, why are they so quick to say the vaccines aren't connected?

Is this a serious question? There was one study which suggested a link (Wakefield). This study's data was fabricated, and was later retracted Wakefield's license was revoked. There were then a flurry of studies showing no link between vaccines and autism. You really think that's "quick to say"?

I was just thinking this. The no-fly-list is counterproductive to intelligence work in which an important tool is surreptitiously tracking a person's movements to build a map of their contact network. All the no-fly-list does would do is make it harder to track the movement of terrorists because they would be forced to use less visible means of communication and transport, which means real terrorists probably aren't on the list at all, which completely contradicts the stated purpose of this "security measure". It's asinine.

As the CEO, his behavior reflects on Mozilla.

His behaviour as CEO reflects on Mozilla.

I've heard that government moves slowly, but having high-power officials 20 years behind the times seems a bit outrageous.

The first SMTP RFC was published in 1982. The first electronic mail RFCs were published in the 70s. They're way more than 20 years behind the times.

If it aint broken, why fix it?

Because it is broken. Very broken. You just don't see it until an exploit takes your personal information, and then it's too late.

You cannot have entanglement without interaction, you cannot have interaction between two things that lie outside of each other's light cones.

This is only true if interaction is local, which is not true in QM's configuration space. This is why hidden variables can never be ruled out without also ruling out QM as a whole.

It highlights how it is usually absurd to have a category of people who are journalists, and a category of people who are not, and a set of things which are okay if done by journalists but otherwise are not legal.

Hardly unique though. Owning lockpicks is illegal unless you're a locksmith.

... why, if news stories are any indication, there seems to be such a high percentage of money laundering activity or the like compared to what happens with other forms of currency?

Suppose you created an easy to use and widely available barter system that the government does not yet know how to track. Doesn't it make sense that criminals would be some of the very first ones on the bandwagon? Normal currency has less money laundering as a percentage because everyone uses it, and the ratio of crooks to citizens is thus much lower.

A barter system is just a barter system though. People will use it when it's sufficiently convenient and widely available, just like they do the internet despite its use for criminals.

It seems true net neutrality would be allow anyone to compete as they see fit - if a company is going to 'over charge', then another company should be allowed to come in and 'under charge'.

Another company can. That isn't what net neutrality is about. Net neutrality is about you charging all of your customers the same, regardless of who they are and what they do, it's not about competitors all charging all their customers the same (which would be silly). Consider the racial anti-discrimination bills which forced owners to equally serve visible minorities and caucasians. Sure, another store serving visible minorities could open up next door, but the discriminatory practice shouldn't be allowed to begin with.

Net neutrality isn't a social issue like racism, but it's still the backbones discriminating on the nature and source/destination of traffic when that information doesn't matter to them. They want to be able to identify traffic that consumers consider highly valuable, and then charge the suppliers of that info extra for letting us access it. We've already paid our ISP for that access though, our ISP has paid the backbone, and the supplier has already paid for their access to the backbone. This is just excessive greed where the backbone providers are trying to double-charge for providing the same service.

"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan. New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights."

A critical requirement of preparation is evidence of the effectiveness of your preparation. Where's the evidence that dragnet surveillance is effective?

The real solution is already known: organ donation should be opt-out by default. Studies have already been conducted that organ donation is above 80% or so in countries that adopt an opt-out default, and only 20% or so in an opt-in system. Most people simply don't take the time to opt-in, but they similarly wouldn't take the time to opt-out.

I guess that now the data is structured and easily searchable rather than having to stitch together random analog phone conversations. But in a country of 300 million people, no one is interested in your text messages, emails, etc. unless you're using them to actively plan something.

You're wrong. Scandals about the misuse of this power have already broken out. Where have you been? Didn't you hear about the NSA employees abusing these surveillance powers to spy on potential love interests?

That's just the beginning. Once you normalize that behaviour, you can expect political and other oppressive abuses to soon follow.

You're liable for things that happen in your home, but you don't have to stay home all day and be vigilant about every little thing that happens. That's what insurance is for.

That quote refers to anonymity from the government. It's not clear that anonymity whem commenting on corprations or people have the same protections due to libel laws.

Copying and providing proxy access are process controls. You discipline people for that.

No, it's worse than that. Firstly, they are efficiency impediments because they require workarounds, and moreover, they obstruct the deployment of fine-grained permissions ala POLA because users still need to be able to do something to do their jobs. Secondly, training users has never worked and will never work, particularly when such discipline conflicts with the need to do their job.

There's a reason capability-based security tokens are gaining traction with online web services at the expense of traditional wall-garden authentication scenarios: they are more composable, more fine-grained, and most importantly, fine-grained security authorizations are largely invisible to users.

You're demanding something perfect and rejecting anything that doesn't measure up.

No, I'm demanding that administrators not be able to express policies that aren't actually enforceable.