Ahhh... The Miranda warnings and the reason for them.. Remember we survived a LONG time without these. It was not required to "read them their rights" until 1966t.

Personally, I feel it is a failure of the educational system that we have to do this. Children should be brought up having studied the Constitution and bill of rights and fully understand what it says. For the most part, nobody knows what's in there anymore unless you study law or something and the /. discussions about this are evidence that many really do not know what their rights are as defined by the constitution and bill of rights. Crying shame, because we are going to loose all of them if we don't know what they are and protect them.

I assume he was found guilty. The question was if the silence could be used as evidence in court.

All the political stuff aside.. This ruling actually makes sense. You are not compelled to answer questions about criminal cases, but if you start answering questions, then stop, they are free to use that fact as evidence. I would suggest that anybody who is considering answering questions about any serious crime where they are in any way a suspect had better have a lawyer present when any questions are asked answers are given. If you know you are guilty, then make them arrest you and ask for a lawyer first thing, even if you intend to confess.

This is not a change to the 5th amendment. You are still not "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against" yourself. They are just saying that the fact you refused to answer a question can be admitted as evidence. If you don't allow this, what's the point of investigators asking questions of any suspect? As soon as the suspect refused to answer a question, you'd pretty much have to toss ALL the answers and forget the interview ever took place. Nope, no evidence would be usable, even if the suspect offered it up for free. That's not right either.

I think the SCOTUS actually made the right call, despite how the press wants to cast it. At least at first blush.

SO this guy who willingly started answering questions and got to the one he didn't want to answer should do what? Get up and say he has to go now?

I don't go around breaking the law, so I'm not predisposed to think the police are out to get *me* but suppose they are? I'm having a willing conversation with them and I realize that they suspect me of a crime and let's say it's a bad one. What do you do? Start asking for a lawyer? Simply leave?

Obviously, if you did the crime, SHUT UP from the start, don't volunteer to answer questions, don't go to the police station, find yourself a lawyer and keep his number on speed dial. IF/WHEN the police come calling, ignore any questions and tell them you need to leave right now. If they won't let you leave, go into the "Am I under arrest?" mode. If they don't say "yes" then tell them you need to leave if you are not under arrest. If they say you are under arrest, ask for your lawyer to be present for any further questions. But what do you do if you have nothing to hide?

In these days, you don't consent to searches, you don't invite officers into your home, you don't open your trunk so they can see in, you don't offer information or volunteer to be questioned unless you are simply a witness to something. Even then, be VERY careful and be totally sure you don't have something to worry about, even unrelated to the topic at hand.

But remember, you can still claim the 5th and refuse to answer the question AND they can then tell the jury that you refused to answer that question. If you started talking to them, this is your situation. If you cannot live with that, best to not talk to them in the first place.

In my limited experience with the three internet providers that service my home...

They usually use industry standard equipment that uses industry standard protocols. This means that you can usually purchase your own equipment, it just may take a bit more work on your part because you may need to get them to provision your modem or something.

Personally, I have *ALL* of my equipment behind a firewall I have provided and control. The ISP's equipment is usually cheap throwaway junk anyway, so I try not to use it if I can. If I'm forced to use their stuff I create a DMZ and I firewall off my stuff from theirs as much as possible. Yea, it's work, but they simply don't need access to my network.

Because that would impose staggering losses in the energy transfer. Inductive (magnetic) transfer of energy is not very efficient when there are air gaps involved. You can do it, but you are going to waste a LOT of energy. You do solve the problem of having large voltages touchable by the public.

Of course... One could just produce a magnetic system to push the cars forward in a linear motor setup and avoid much of the transfer losses. Just imagine the automated traffic control you could have with being able to control the speed of cars on your road system...

Or... Just do what we've done for years and put wires up in the air over the road.

Perhaps we had better just go find some more Oil and burn gasoline...

Um... Unless they intend to change CPU types, I don't think so. I also don't think that this module would meet the price targets for the Pi.

Of course, it is certainly an option to build a Pi like device on this platform and the WiFi being built in would be nice..

Whoa there partner! You've not done any market research, nor do you understand the technology.

Assuming they have made the processor smaller by using better technology to lower the die size in the wafer fab.... They will get lower power consumption for the same clock rates. This translates into lower heat dissipation (which may lead to a lighter device) AND LONGER battery life.

This is the same thing Intel and AMD have been doing with their processor lines for decades, spending billions on R&D and building out wafer fabs to sell smaller CPU's that run faster and cooler.

Really? When the ANI (calling number) along with the ESN is changed after each call? I think that would throw off all but the most diligent of investigators. They would have to have a voice tap on the dialed phone (which requires a fully blessed search warrant and not just a FISA kangaroo court approval) to do any kind of speaker identification. You *MIGHT* be able to infer who the speaker is though the handset location, but that implies you have some kind of previous knowledge about locations. My idea would pretty much disrupt most of the straight forward data mining.

Remember, if you don't want to get tracked, you cannot show up on the grid, or attempt to communicate AT ALL. OBL bought it because somebody tracked one of his guys passing notes and stuff.

Zero chance of getting tracked is your goal? You likely need to hole up underground in some unknown location and never try to communicate with anybody. (good luck with that).

Police around here don't care about stolen/lost cell phones. Unless they are after a theft ring that is trafficking large numbers of phones, they will take your report (usually), file it (sometimes) and prioritize investigating it under writing jaywalking tickets (Always). Can you guess how many of these "crimes" are solved?

The only way to win is not to play...

Or, buy a new handset and phone number for every call and only pay cash.

Yea, but it would be fun making a mess out of the company..... Oh wait.... Would that not cause a problem with your timeline?

I think I've seen this movie...

But the real *issue* here is being able to actually go though the data looking for information. Storage of this much data has been a fairly easy problem to solve if you have money, finding a way to organize and search though huge data sets to give timely results is not so easy even if you have money.

Buying spindles and connecting them in huge RAID arrays is well understood. You just build what size you need and dump your data onto it. Yea, you will have to battle OS size limits on partitions and files, but that's not too bad or very expensive. As you point out, getting the hardware isn't that expensive, even at the apparent scale involved here. Buying enough power to turn it all on and keep it cool shouldn't be an issue either, but you need to include that in the $4 Billion budget. In short, if you have money, getting the hardware off the shelf is easy. Software for this is NOT off the shelf.

The REAL money is going towards the software systems that mine the information being collected. There is no system configuration running MySQL that's going to be able to support ongoing data collection (inserts) and any kind of meaningful query results on a petabyte sized data base. I'm guessing that half their budget goes to research and development of software and systems used to collect, store and mine the data. I'm also guessing that they spend roughly 40% of their hardware budget on processing, 40% on storage and 20% on maintenance and operating costs. This puts their hardware budget ($4 Billion * 50%) * 40% or about $1 Billion, give or take.

This means that your 2 Gig turns into about 1/4th that, not accounting for the space being thrown away because it is obsolete. I'm guessing there really isn't that much being kept around on folks who are not interesting, however that is defined.

If ANY of that IMAP connection passes over the US border unencrypted, you are in the same boat. Also, don't count on your local ISP not using some hosted service for their SNMP servers or IMAP server located in (or passing though) the US.....

Point taken, but when the worst happens, the rider of a bike is going to take the worst of it, even with a small car. You may be really skilled in riding a bike, or you may be lucky. You may even be both. But, you are still taking a bigger risk on a bike than most of the nutty drivers out there who are seemingly trying to run you down. Someday you may run into a situation that you didn't see coming and/or couldn't avoid with the skill and equipment you have. I strongly suggest you have as much protection as you can, including full face helmet, boots, gloves and protective clothes, the whole 9 yards. Even then, you are taking a much bigger risk than the nut case who hit you in his smart car or mini cooper.

Who says I don't participate? It's just in my case I post such stuff AFTER I get home. It's VACATION time, who in their right mind is playing with their smart phone on Facebook on Vacation? Get out there and DO something other than keeping your Facebook status up to date or snapping a picture of your lunch for all to see.

Besides, it's NOT just your friends that may see that vacation picture. You simply do not know.