Did you bother reading the rest of my post where I go into how we can balance public and private interests here without creating a cluster-f*ck of high cost litigation that ultimately winds up costing all of us? Or did you just knee-jerk your foot into your own mouth?

Just them? You'll note it also said suspected spies and terrorists. With "broader definitions" of terrorism coming out every day, and the criteria for being included on a watchlist, paired with these hotlines opening up for anonymous "tips"... pretty much anyone these days can be a suspected spy or terrorist. And being a citizen of the US is very little barrier against invasions of your privacy; They've even talked about revoking citizenship for people simply to avoid any legal hassles.

It might be more accurate to say "If you are writing anything you don't want made public, given to law enforcement, or any of the 170+ governments of the world, don't use Gmail." At least then we'd cover all the bases. :/

Wanna see an optical illusion? Hold your keyboard over your head, look up at it, and then shake it back and forth vigorously. (trollface)

Okay, I know you're trying to be funny, but let's be serious for a moment: Why shouldn't the EPA try to limit lawsuits? They cost you and me, the taxpayer, a lot of money. It slows down the entire judicial process, and increases the cost of excercising your rights in the judiciary. There's filing fees now, lawyers fees, and every motion and such you file also costs money. This is fine for corporations who can just pass the buck on to their customers, but for Joe Average, commencing or defending against a legal action can easily bankrupt him. Is that fair? Shouldn't he be able to sue people who have legitimately wronged him as well -- or should that be something reserved only for the wealthy? Conversely, if he is on the receiving end... should he be bankrupted defending against an action that ultimately failed? Any contact with the judicial process tends to be highly corrosive to the average person. It is often ruinous, irrespective of the merits of their position.

Given that, why shouldn't the government try to limit personal injury cases to those where the only evidence of harm won't surface for thirty years? Do you want a legal system that punishes people based on probability, or actuality? If so, thought crime suddenly becomes a lot more justifiable, as well as imprisoning people based on genetic markers, etc.

But I do acknowledge that statistically, we know that in a given group of say, 100 people, if exposed to X intensity of radiation over Y amount of time, Z of them will develop health problems. We can't say with any confidence which of them will develop health problems, but we can say with confidence how probable it is that at least Z of them will. In a case like this where you know harm has happened but the costs won't be known for a long time, a fine seems like a better way to deal with this than lawsuits, provided the fine is proportional to the actual harm caused, plus whatever punitive damages are justified (was it really an accident, or negligence?).

In this case, the government should be the plaintiff, not the individual. Conversely, the government should take the money gathered from these fines and put it into a general fund. If and when affected individuals develop health problems consistent with previously-documented radiation exposure, the government pays out of that fund.

I think this is the most fair method of enacting justice in such a situation -- the companies (or individuals) involved are penalized shortly after the actual accident occurs, so there is financial incentive to prevent it in the future, and no possibility of them profiting from it later, but at the same time recognizing that we may not know for a very long time who was actually harmed, or to what degree.

From the looks of it, this is more or less what the EPA is trying to do. Of course... such an elegant solution will never survive contact with Congress, but... it's the thought that counts.

No, he probably just looked up the statistics on the number of people that have been killed with their own gun. This is why police officers are trained to always keep their hand on their weapon during a traffic stop or during any other time when they're questioning someone who isn't in custody, and why once their gun has been drawn, they typically move away and don't holster it again until backup arrives and a second officer can approach and subdue. The risk is very real.

Your computer has tons of microcircuitry. Far more than this technology would require. If your life depended on being able to complete a call to the police using a VoIP product, do you think you could do it as fast as with a regular, land-line phone, assuming you had the software already installed and configured?

The fact that something isn't checked or maintained is not an indictment against its reliability. Maintenance usually happens on a schedule -- days, weeks, years, even decades. You don't just assume your car is going to run out of oil because you haven't checked the oil since the last time you started it -- you know that as long as you check it every 7,000 miles, or whatever the manual says, you do not have to worry about that. Why would a gun be different?

You know, you're working this technology all crabbed. A police officer could be issued a gun with a RF component in it that operated around 800 MHz or so. At this frequency, the signal clings to a person's skin and clothing. A low-power, short-range transmitter, perhaps embedded in the officer's radio, could complete the circuit. Thus if the officer was not in physical contact with the gun, it wouldn't fire.

Biometric identification isn't the only way of securing a weapon.

That's a social and legal problem, not a technical problem. Let's try and keep on topic here; This is a feasibility study, not an exhaustive analysis of "what if" scenarios...

Strike my last; ... not an exhaustive analysis of conspiracy theories.

Now, as has become increasingly common on Slashdot (I miss the old days), nothing in what I've said is either for or against whatever political cause or position you're advocating. It is simply, and purely, an engineering analysis. What Congress is, or isn't doing, or whatever your political beliefs are, or even mine, are irrelevant here. This about answering IF we can do this with the technology available today, not should we do it.

Hackers take aim at prison locks and other real-world targets
Vulnerability allows hackers to open prison doors, hiding activity from central command

Hacking Prisons - John Strauchs, Tiffany Rad, & Teague Newman
Researchers Say Vulnerabilities Could Let Hackers Spring Prisoners From Cells

Clearly, they're all full of shit too.

The electronic locks run on magical sky energy. There is no voltage in those wires.

Right, because there has never been a case of a system being thought of as so foolproof that it didn't need to be monitored. (Ominous look upwards) And what the hell is this "visual verification" you speak of? It sounds impressive, but it could mean "I had to look at the lock," in the same way I have to visually verify that my car's ignition and not just blindly stick the key wherever.

So slashdotters are safe then, since we only eat cheetoes... which I expect have been so thoroughly processed to remove any and all traces of this "potato" thing you speak of to render it both nutritionally and radiologically inert.

...and nobody's getting fat, except mama cass.

When I used the word 'conservative', I was describing their reaction, not their political views. Conservative, as in excercising an abundance of caution, not conservative as in prudish.

Okay, first, the Judge who originally told Prenda to shove it has come under fire for pornography downloads. So we have a company who makes a living off getting people's internet download history now trying to weasel out of it, and coincidentally the Judge behind it finds his download history being made public. How coincidentally is left as an excercise for the reader to determine.

So, because the judiciary is very conservative, his appointment is being suspended until the allegations are cleared. Now here's the kicker -- moral "turpitude" isn't a crime, but it is a reason to deny a judge an appointment. Out of an abundance of caution, the judge is also being asked to drop some cases from his roster where the involved parties are obviously looking for appeals and dragging out the legal process and they don't want the judge's "moral turpitude" to come under fire in those select cases as a reason to further either parties' political or legal maneuvering. That's fair.

It's especially fair when you consider Prenda tried exploiting this very thing in their own litigation. Obviously, the appeals court saw right through this and said not just no, but "Hell no." So they've managed to make the judge's life difficult by trafficking in sleeze. But what do you expect from a business that depends on sleeze for its profits?

Oh hell yes. Only a complete idiot would test this in a residential setting first. No. You find a nice big chunk of desert or some other remote place the little bastards are, establish a way to monitor the population, and then release your pheremone bomb. True to scientific form, have an adjacent area with a similar population and environment, under the same type of observation at the same time.

I was suggesting only what the weapons of mass (ant) destruction would be, say nothing of the safety considerations or unintended consequences. To my knowledge, nobody's done this kind of thing yet. It would need to be fully researched and the effects understood before molding it into a commercially-available product!

Not far from the truth. Many prisons use electronic locks on all the doors, which is in turn connected to a network and controlled through a server in the control center. You can build a card reader/writer from a tape head, and use the microprocessor inside the graphing calculator to read and amplify the pulses. You can also connect the GPIO pins to, say, the controller IC inside the door lock. A few hours of being left unattended, and using just that graphing calculator, engineer not only my own escape, but the entire facility.

Think it's a bit 007? It's already been done. Security researchers have already built mockups of the exact same hardware used in prisons today and discovered that with only basic electronic components, a prisoner inside his cell could access the lock mechanism and free himself.

It's because they can sense electromagnetic fields, which all electronics give off. Of course, the solution for dealing with these new ants is simple, but counterintuitive -- spray everything with this 'alarm' pheremone. If ants navigate by scent trail, and that's how they rebuild their nests, and it's too challenging to remove the scent trails... then you are left with only one option:

Blind the little bastards by coating everything in it. It's my understanding that, without those trails, they'll be helpless to organize to find food, each other, or even the way home. Everything depends on those trails... so if you overload their sense organs and blind them, they'll perish. After they're dead, the pheremones sprayed will slowly dissipate, but importantly... the trails they've laid down will dissipate faster, so the area is then chemically neutral again.

It is, quite literally, chemical warfare. (-_-)

can apple wipe just the 'work' portion and leave the personal (my email, etc) alone?

no?

then shut the hell up, then.

I was asked by the folks at my work to install exchange stuff so I can run outlook (sigh). I started the install when a dialog came up asking if I will grant 'whole device wipe' privs to the IT guys. fuck no! its MY device! whole system wipe? really? JUST because I want to install calendering from exchange on my phone?

I canceled and so far, my home phone has no work stuff on it.

it would be really nice to be able to keep them separate and risk-free.

apple has nothing like this, do they? normally, its an all or nothing wipe, just like outlook 'wants'.