If his job is to prevent terrorism, he's right... he can't do that without a substantial surveillance dragnet that tramples the 4th Amendment.

He can't do it with that dragnet, either. All this NSA dragnet shit was in place for YEARS at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, and it wasn't worth shit.

-jcr

If his job can't be done without violating the fourth amendment, then his job should be eliminated.

-jcr

I grew fed up with android years ago. What kind of calculator app requires weekly updates? Dumbphones FTW

You don't *have* to update. Once I find a fully working app, I never update it. What would be the point, since it already works?

Well it's Google, what do you expect...

If you think Google works for the good of the user, think again.

You miss a crucial point : no small animal will be out and about when it snows in the northeast - and paperbags will get soggy in a hurry too - so the detection feature is not needed in those conditions.

Autonomous taxis already exist: you tell the driver to go the shortest or quickest way, and the driver almost always ignores you and chooses the least direct, more gridlocked route instead, all by himself

Also, you don't have to drive the taxi yourself.

Can it tell if the small animal is *inside* the paperbag? I'm thinking of cats specifically. Cats and paperbags... cat lovers know what I'm talking about.

When Google started shoving G+ down everyYoutube user's throat, I abandoned my 10+ year old Youtube account and moved all my videos to Vimeo and Dailymotion.

Youtube is Google is a privacy nightmare.

The last video I posted on Youtube before letting my account go derelict is a static image with a text describing why I will upload my videos elsewhere, and where to find them, and that video got many, MANY likes and comments from upset users. To me, that says I'm far from being the only Youtube user who's sickened by what Google has turned it into.

Hopefully the near 12 million pound savings can be expanded upon and cause others to follow suit.

The savings will surely help fund their joining the United Kingdom...

I think it was the days when Reagan was president and Dallas was best the tv had to offer.

And you think that was bad? At that time, Derrick was on tv too, and that's the image most people had - and often still have - of Munich around the world. They *had* to do something to change their image!

But you can get that just by fedexing copies of your backups to friends in different cities.

-jcr

Not anymore.

Switzerland stood up to the nazis, but they caved to the American IRS. There is no more reason to trust a Swiss bank today.

-jcr

Big data monopolies like Google are the stuff of nightmare for privacy-minded individuals.

But there's a silver lining to that particular cloud: as the most important player in the field, they're the most visible target for abuse of all kinds. Which means that you have a better chance of dodging the abuse if you simply don't put yourself in the center of the target, by not using any Google product.

Kind of like when Windows had the lion's share of the OS market, and you could avoid most viruses by running another OS, not because the other OS was more secure, but because virus writers had a better return on investment writing viruses for Windows and left your fringe OS alone.

Sure, $2/day is relative and can mean anything. Our grandparents lived a healthy life on about the same amount but due to inflation the dollar became worthless.

I'm not sure what you're trying to demonstrate here. Your grandparents lived on $2 a day when $1000 bought you a car. Today's starving africans live on 2 of today's dollars, when $1000 buys a wing mirror. Your point is...?

The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds â" just like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous.

It would allow for micropayments without processing fees â" just like bit coin.

Processing fees are common with Bitcoin.

And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union â" just like Bitcoin.

Wire transfers are largely an oddity of the USA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't use wire transfers anyway.