(Hilarious and ironic? Is that a challenge?)

What's hilarious and ironic is that you here are doing the Exact Same Thing.

Whoa there, buddy. I'm an innocent witness! I told you something fascinating (IMHO) that I saw happen in 1985 and now you're giving me shit for it?

Fine. Next time someone tells you they're concerned that "hackers" may have influenced their computer, I'll just let you go on thinking that they're bragging about how awesome their computer is. Then we'll see who looks like the insensitive clod.

Later you'll find out, briefly wonder why Sloppy didn't tell you about the new meaning of "hacker," and then you'll remember this day. You'll come crawling back, on your hands and knees, offering to do to all sorts of gay things to earn my forgiveness.

Genie's out of the bottle. You can whine and bitch it all you want about how stupid it might be, but "gay" has at least three meanings now, and some hipster (THERE! Now you can accuse me of labeling people) will come along and explain "gay" is up to five meanings now. And maybe then I'll join your side, saying, "Enough. I don't want to know."

This isn't evil; it's stupid. It's not even embrace/extend/extinguish. It's embrace/back_off/get_forgotten. Google is kidding themselves if they think anyone cares about .. what's the name of their obscure niche chat product again?

I saw it happen, plus the resulting confusion. What's really shocking is how long ago it was. It was around 1985. English teacher gave hard assignment. Student said "that's so gay!" meant as a generic pejorative. Teacher thought he was being called a homosexual and student was in deep shit.

It happened, over a quarter century ago. I can cut the 1985 teacher some slack for not knowing. I can cut a 2013 teacher some slack for disciplining a student for bitching about homework. But I can't cut anyone slack in 2013 for not knowing "gay" is a generic pejorative. If you don't know gay is a generic pejorative by now, then you also probably missed the memo that it means homosexual. You probably think it means "happy."

Words. They're like tech skills. Keep up or be left behind.

"By my hand, a $BAD_EVENT can happen to anyone, any time. There is no defense unless you crawl into your shell and stop living life. You might sometimes think you are safe but no matter who you are, I might inflict $BAD_EVENT upon you. The random $BAD_EVENTs will continue until you, my pool of victims, collectively persuade your government to alter its policies in accordance with my wishes."

We all agree that the above really is the very essence of terrorism, right?

export BAD_EVENT=reporting innocent people to the terrorist suspect database

politics is bullshit.

No, "nicely done" to you, because you know just how to push my buttons, proving you to be a better troll than I. It's not POLITICS!

By misspelling "grief" you defied the adaptive Huffman table's expected distribution, thereby wasting memory. You're lucky this is a C64 story where memory is abundant, because if you had posted this in a VIC-20 story (where every single byte truly counts) I would have called you Not Worthy.

where can I get it?

Dude, it's right there in your ROM.

But doesn't Punter protocol upload in 256 byte blocks anyway?

On no: the horror. I don't remember for sure! When did that happen? In 1985 I so would have schooled you. Look at me now; how sad.

For that kind of situation, perhaps what you need is a non-lawyer attorney. ("Aren't attorney and lawyer synonyms?" No.) Not everyone who represents you, need be a professional. I remember that from No Laughing Matter and if the guy who wrote Catch-22 (and his friend) ain't qualified to offer legal advice, I don't know who is! ;-)

If I am as impaired at 0.1 as you are are at 0.05 why can I not drive at 0.1?

It looks like there are (at least) two different ways of looking at the word "impaired," relating to exactly what you're benchmarking the driver's state relative to. Are we comparing it to average (or worst) drivers or are we comparing it to the same driver?

Maybe you are as good a driver at 0.99% as I am at 0.049%. It's possible. There's a school of thought out there, though, which says this is irrelevant unless (!) you're also as good as driver at 0.99% as you are at 0%. Are you? [Sloppy's finger tembles, hovering over the "call bullshit" button.]

Are we trying to punish people for being bad drivers, or are we trying to punish them for not being the best drivers they can be? Half of the population consists of below-average drivers, but we don't appear to have any policies where these people are continually tested and ticketed for being bad drivers. Why not? Because the fuckwits (*) are either trying but suck and we give them a break so they don't rebel, or we haven't figured out an objective way to demonstrate the fact that they aren't really trying as hard as they could.

There's probably a lot of truth in that first possibility: we accept that half the population drives bad, because pointing cars at us accidentally is probably safer than getting them mad where half the population they point guns at us the other half and says "let me drive or else." But I prefer to idly ponder the second possibility.

The "neat" thing about blood alcohol testing is that whether it's a perfect indicator or not, at some point you have an objective number that represents [handwave] something, and we all know how to work with numbers. If we could arrest people for driving while impaired, in cases where they were impaired because they were yelling at the kids in the backseat at 4.4 syllables per second which is over the unsafe threshold of 2.5 syllables per second, we probably would do it! But we don't have the measurements to point to, just like we don't yet have the brainwave measurements that show a driver was daydreaming (i.e. impaired) (**) instead of consciously paying attention.

(*) Wait, did I just call half the population fuckwits? Geez, I'm such an asshole.

(**) In my personal experiences of my own collisions or speeding tickets, daydreaming is impairment #1, the most common cause of me being unaware of what was about to happen. But you can't measure it (yet), so you can't prove it, so, so nyaah nyaah!!

why should I not be allowed to support the candidate I believe in?

Nobody's suggesting you shouldn't be allowed to do that. The proposal is that you shouldn't be able to do commercial business with them, within the narrow context of the re-election business specifically. Support them in all politically-imaginable ways, and even form a corporation with them to sell cars, if you wish. We just want to point a gun at your face and say "stop giving them money." We want elections to become political instead of commercial.

Consider some so-called politician that you happen to hate. (Please don't tell me you're the one person in this country who doesn't hate anyone.) (Obama? GWB? Reed? Boener?) Now admit it: you don't really think of that person as truly political, do you? You could respect a true sincere adversary, but this guy, he's not quite that. He didn't win over his supporters by showing he knows how to make wise decisions; he used expensive media advertisements to trick a bunch of fools into supporting him, right?

If only Obama were the actual socialist that a certain media company says he is, you might actually hate him less. But he's not: the bastard is corruptly selling his DoJ to the highest bidder in a way that would horrify Marx and Engels. If only GWB were the conservative he ran as, you would hate him less, but at least your cold uncaring government would be cheap. But he wasn't: somehow the dimwit managed to commit to more spending of public funds than LBJ and FDR combined, funnelling it into contractors' pockets at everyone's expense.

Where's the political philosophy?

If only those people actually had to sink or swim on their actual political merits or lack thereof, then maybe your guys would finally crush that party, once and for all, and the country could get back on track. Or at least you'd finally get that fair fight you've always wanted but the country never really has, and then if you lost, well, that opposing philosophy isn't all bad. Even Marx's|Rand's society would have a few nice things about it, as stupid as it would be.

But instead those people buy slick ads, and the sheep in That Other Party keep falling for it, believing the ads and voting for the slickness instead of the politics. And the reason those other people aren't merely polically wrong (if only that were their failing!) is that the ads they use to buy the foolish voters are expensive, so they owe favors. Thus, their misguided conservative|liberal foolishness, goes beyond wrong, into corrupt.

Regulating the election business is one proposed solution to that, for allowing things to get back to politics and allowing democracy, instead of media ad budgets, decide our fate.

Skype used to have a reputation of using encrypted peer-to-peer transmissions.

That's funny. I remember their reputation always being "no one knows how the key exchange works and therefore nobody can trust it."

"Encrypted" means jack shit. Skype never had a reputation for being secure because they never showed anyone that they are. With any serious VoIP protocol (e.g. zfone) they tell you how it works. If the design is a trade secret, then it's a scam. You've known that for decades.

Then what's going on with the backlog; why isn't Apple just telling LE that they can't crack the phones? Does that setting come with the wrong default?

First of all, remove the four digit constraint; that's ludicrous. Change prompt to "passphrase" and use whatever they enter, no matter how long. If some users desire to stick to only using numeric characters, and only want to enter up to four of them, that's their business. It shouldn't be required or forced upon the user, though. There's just no reason for that, and nobody who has thought about it for more than a few seconds would do that. Even Apple's own Mac OS X doesn't force you to use 4-decimal-digit passwords, though I think Mac OS X may just be a relic of the company's earlier sane/competent/user-friendly era. (If Jobs had lived, I wonder if he would have killed off the Mac by now.)

Second, as a hardware maker, Apple has tons of options above and beyond mere software interfaces, for providing keys. (I'll let your imagination run wild as to what you can do for authentication using a usb port, though this approach might not be so great for the kind of people who primarily need to defend against LE seizing their possessions.)

Four-digit decimal passwords are a 1970s thing, maybe which people are still used to, due to ATM legacy. Anyone who does that in a new product in 1980s or later, at a minimum ought to be called on the bullshit. If MS Windows had forced a 4-decimal-digit constraint on user passwords or their encrypted filesystems forced that upon the keys, you know this would have been in huge print in some full-page Mac OS ad in the New York Times. And every damn one of us (me included) would be high-fiving Apple while joining in the laughter. It would have been better than even their FAT filename constraints ad.

It's gotta be broken on purpose; that's the only thing that makes sense. And if Apple made a conscious decision to make it easily crackable, you could make an argument that they're accepting the expense. I think it's a weak and dubious argument, but it's not totally out of thin air. They've created an expense which ought to not exist at all, due to the brute-force cracking normally being completely beyond reach.

If you design the product correctly, then it only takes a few seconds to tell law enforcement, "We lack the ability. Even the NSA lacks the ability. Give us a hundred billion dollars and we might be able to do one phone every hundred billion years." The fact that there's a backlog, shows that Apple screwed up big time, to the point of shocking negligence. Having them bear the expensive of the mistake might be the best incentive for them to fix the next version of the iPhone.

Not that that would really be fair -- it's not Law Enforcement's place to be providing incentive for Apple to do crypto competently. OTOH, if there were laws mandating people use best practices for mainstream consumer PCs... *laugh* Sorry, it's just one of those crazy ideas people sometimes get.