Why would anyone think that British Petrol (BP) is an American company? Next thig someone will tell me that they buy gas at (Royal Dutch) Shell to "Buy American".

A recent case on this was recently adjudicated in Riverside County (California). The issue was hot air balloons flying over private property. A local property owner sued balloon operators for flying over his land claiming trespass and invasion of privacy. Almost all balloon companies simply shut down as his property on many occasions was unavoidable due to normal winds in the Coachella Valley, but two fought back and the court ruled that the balloons could not be prohibited.

There are significant differences between RC helicopters and balloons, but the opinion seemed to feel that all aircraft, when flying within FAA regulations wee immune to such action. The two companies that fought are now trying to get legal fees, but so far they have not gotten them.

Not really correct. The DNS specification in RFC1035 from 1987 allows the use of underscores in names. This has never changed.

This is a common misconception because the use of underscores in hostnames IS prohibited and this remains true. Microsoft chose the use of underscores in thier AD implementation to remove the possibility of name-space collision with hostnames. BIND, the most popular DNS server in use only permits underscores in hostnames when an option is set to override the default.

Microsoft has broken lots of standards either because they didn't understand them or found it advantageous to ignore them, but this is NOT one of them.

We don't, yet, live in 451F, be we are moving closer and closer. And issues like cyber-bullying and attacks on religions that respond violently increase the calls for limits on expression. While the goals may be admirable, the results are almost always far wider ranging than the problem being addressed. More and more people are looking for absolute security at any cost. (They will never get it, but they will get every increasing limits on their lives in the attempt.)

The other books that come to mind are 1984 (which is too frighteningly real for me to even read today), Animal Farm (which seems unlikely), and Brave New World (not too close to reality, but it might be some day). Those are the best known, but there are many dystopian SF books besides these from Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and many others also fit, but were unlikely to have been required reading in school 30 or more years ago.

1984 was not like 1984, but 2014 looks to be awfully close. Orwell just missed by three decades.

You might be surprised to learn that NASA has already been there and done that.

Back in the early '60s, one of the designs for emergency astronaut return from a space "vehicle" was to leave the capsule, climb into a plastic bag over their space suit, fill it with ablative foam, and fire a small, rocket to de-orbit. The re-entry would be in a physical position that would produce a "butt down" re-entry and a chest-mounted parachute would deploy automatically.

The system was developed by GE and called "MOOSE" for Man Out Of Space Easiest. Some testing was done by GE, but NASA decided that they were not interested.

This is an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandate. They can reduce or completely halt funding. It has been made very clear that, while there will be failures and missed dates, they better not be because you were not trying. Oddly, management tends to take the possibility of losing funding very, very seriously.

I work for the NSP for a large number of government research facilities. Our network has had full IPv6 support for several years, but no IPv6 customers (other than ourselves). The prior IPv6 mandate was primarily satisfied by bring up an IPv6 connection with the customer and their pinging our router, then deconfiguring the IPv6. That was really all the mandate required.

This time we are bringing up full IPv6 connectivity with them. It really is happening this time and it mostly seems to be working.

The mandate is also pressing other providers to get IPv6 up and running. Under the mandate, if you have a provider that can't support IPv6 on Oct. 1, you need to change providers. In simple terms, the general public must be able to access your web services and all publicly linked pages as well as DNS via IPv6 if they have IPv6 connectivity to the Internet. (Admittedly, this is a fairly small subset of Internet users.) The federal governments is a rather large customer of several major providers, so this has probably been the biggest cause of several of them getting IPv6 running, though some still don't offer IPv6 to non-governmental customers.

Between the U.S. Government and Comcast, IPv6 seems to really be happening. Traffic is clearly increasing rapidly, though still very tiny compared to IPv4.

At large operations where a lot of people are detained (or even arrested), handcuffs are not used. Too expensive and too bulky to have to use a couple hundred at a time. Zip ties (nylon cable ties) are used. They are both easier and harder to escape from than real handcuffs as they can be easily cut and can generally be opened with a paper clip, but it takes help and close physical access by the other party for these. (You could probably do it on your own if you can get the paper clip to your mouth and your hands in front of you, but it still would be very tricky as the target is small and you won't be able to see it in that position.)

I keep hearing this, but it is clearly not the case.

From Article 6: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

National laws (the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof) have equal standing with treaties. Why so many have don't seem to read this.

(And, no, no other article or amendment deals with this issue in any way.) Perhaps some SCOTUS ruling I missed studying (IANAL) found some other way to interpret Article VI, but national laws are mentioned first, so I would expect a conflict to fall to laws over treaties.

Federal regulation require full disk encryption for any portable disk containing PII. HIPPA (medical) information has even stronger requirements than PII. I assume many state and local government have similar requirements (and should have).

BTW, I think the Anonymous Coward who posted the initial comment was expecting a rating of "Funny". At least it looked tongue in cheek to me.

Eben Moglen is too young. It was not science fiction writers in the 60s. The three laws were stated originally in 1942 in the short story "Runaround". You can read all about it (and avoid silly posts) on Wikipedia

Just for the record, the research facility where this work was done is "Sandia National Laboratory", not "Sandia Research Laboratory". Sandia is a research facility funded by the US Department of Energy. Your tax dollars at work (if you pay US taxes).

Or not. The embassy is foreign soil and Ecuador may grant asylum, but that does not get him out of the embassy. In the past people receiving asylum have been prisoners in some embassy for years. It may or may not be better than going to Sweden and eventually the US, but he is still effectively a prisoner. (And Ecuador might choose to toss him back.)

Note that the main-line press has reported on the fact that he can't leave the embassy, even in an embassy vehicle without facing arrest.

I guess you are unclear on what "reverse engineering"is. It is when you obtain something and analyze it to figure out how it works. When you patent something, you are handed that information in a freely available document. You don't reverse engineer anything. When the patent is about to expire, you figure out how you can benefit from it and, the day after it expires, start using that knowledge completely legally. That is the trade-off between trade secrets and patents.

A trade secret is much like property and it is a crime to steal it, but it remains your secret. I someone else figures out what you are doing, they are completely free to sell products using the former secret. Worse, they can give that former secret to anyone. When a secret is lost, you lose. A common way to do get such a secret is reverse engineering. Another is to simply re-invent it. Both are completely legal.

On the other hand, when you get a patent, you give the secret away. You are legally protected from anyone who copies it in any way or even independently re-invents it. The choice belongs to the inventor. If it is hard to reverse engineer, like a recipe, it is usually held as a trade secret. If it is reasonable that someone can re-invent or reverse engineer it within the life of the patent, you patent it.