Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible.

No.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Simpleton Edition.

Schwab

So what?

The point is this: the person I was responding to claimed that the English Civil War demonstrated that the origin of power in the United Kingdom was just as rooted in rebellion as the origin of power in the United States is. And that's simply not true. Elizabeth II (who is not a figurehead monarch: she is the only person in the UK who can authorize war or declare peace, and that's one hell of a power; further, she can unilaterally block Parliamentary attempts to limit the Crown's interests or royal prerogatives -- a monarchial benefit that I find hard to believe still exists today in the UK) traces her right to rule back to William the Conqueror, not William Who Ended Oppression. Elizabeth II's authority derives from a long-ago act of conquest, not a long-ago act of rebellion.

With respect to "I think I disagree with you that it's a good thing," I never said I believed the US's national-origin story was a good thing. I only said that it was ours. I'm not saying the UK national-origin story is bad because it's rooted in conquest, nor am I saying the US national-origin story is good because it's rooted in rebellion. I'm only saying they're different and shouldn't be expected to be the same.

Although I agree that the UK is a model system for democracies everywhere, that's not the point. The original poster said that unlike much of Europe and Asia, America traces its origins back to the overthrow of absolute rule rather than someone's imposition of it. A respondent argued that modern-day Great Britain was obviously an exception to that, due to the English Civil War. I don't buy that. If you trace Elizabeth II's ancestry back, you reach William the Conqueror. The entire reason Elizabeth is monarch is because she happens to be the descendant of someone who imposed absolute rule. The basis for Elizabeth II's monarchy rests in William the Conqueror's invasion of England, whereas the basis for Barack Obama's presidency goes back to the overthrow of George III's rule.

Sorry there are plenty of examples either way, where this happens. Very recent one's, even ongoing one's. You are just cherry picking.

If I'm cherrypicking, then it ought to be easy for you to find five clear counterexamples for each of my examples. After all, I'm cherrypicking. I invite you to do this. If I'm in error I'd love to be corrected. The requirements are simple:

• It must be state-sponsored, or at the very least state-condoned, domestic oppression
• It must involve large amounts of lethal violence
• The enforcers of the state must be willing participants
• The oppressed must be in a disarmed state
• The oppressed must overcome the oppressors.

Nelson Mandela and the ANC doesn't count: he started his career in armed insurrection. Suu Kyi doesn't count: the Burmese military rank-and-file were passively refusing to enforce the junta's orders. (For instance, allowing visitors to come and go from her place of detention pretty much at-will, and turning a blind eye as she talked to the media.) Ceaucescu's Romania doesn't count: the enforcers were defecting to the protesters in record numbers. Honecker's East Germany doesn't count: when the Berlin Wall fell East German guards were among the most enthusiastic participants. Gandhi doesn't count: he was depending on English decency and sense of fair play to keep his followers alive. (Had Great Britain handled Gandhi the same way they handled 19th-century uprisings in India, Gandhi would have been strapped to a cannon and executed long before he made it halfway to the sea for his salt.) Yeltsin doesn't count: when the KGB ordered their elite counterterror forces to take back government, the counterterror forces refused.

When the people with the guns refuse to use guns, yes, unarmed protest movements can have stunning successes. I'm all in favor of them. But when the people with the guns are willing to use them to ensure their continued rule, unarmed protest movements turn into massacres.

If I'm cherrypicking, then show me five counterexamples for each of the large-scale massacres I showed. Just make sure they pass the requirements, because otherwise you're moving the goalposts.

Of course only an American would think that they are unique in overthrowing tyranny.

He never said we were unique. He only said that in comparison to Europe and Asia, our country was not founded by a conquering king. You hold up Great Britain as an example of a country that's thrown off tyranny, but I suspect you never quite passed your A-levels in history. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William I, after all, a guy better known to history as William the Conqueror. So, no, I'm not going to accept Great Britain as an example of a country that avoided being founded by a conquering king, given a conquering king is in the direct ancestry of your current monarch.

We also find some sections of the American populace self centered, selfish.

I'd be quite surprised if you didn't. In a nation of over 300 million people there are going to be large portions of it that you don't like. There are large portions I don't particularly like, either.

I honestly think your founding fathers is they could see what you have become as a nation would disown you.

Of course they would. "Wait, you gave the vote to women, people without property, and the darkies?!"

In the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., one of Jefferson's finest writings is engraved on the wall in huge letters for the world to see.

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

So, yes, we would definitely be disowned by the Founding Fathers. But that's okay. Thomas Jefferson himself gave us permission to improve upon the model they left us. The Framers were horribly flawed human beings. Their great triumph was not that they gave us a Constitution, but they gave us a process: not a law fixed and unchanging for all time, but a means by which we could gradually make our country a shining beacon upon the hill. Rather beautiful, really.

Ah, I see. You were actually meaning to imply they'd be ashamed of how we conduct ourselves because we don't happen to agree with you? Well. Speaking as a Virginian, which is to say a member of one of the original Colonies that rebelled against George III, let me give you the traditional Virginian response to foreigners who want to tell us how we should rule ourselves: go away.

Maybe our system is correct, maybe it's not. Either way, we're not going to pay your opinion about how we should live the slightest tinker's dam of attention. Instead we'll talk with each other, our communities, our neighbors, and we'll fumble our way forward into the future together.

This idea that an unarmed populace couldn't fight a tyrannical government is pretty weak to be honest.

I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the death-knells of the millions of oppressed North Koreans, over the conflagration of the Jews and the Romany and the homosexuals and the dissenters in German-occupied Poland, over the cries of hunger of the one million Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor, the terrorized shrieks of the Armenians who were pursued by the Turks. We can go back even to the Mongol era, where the great Khan put large parts of Asia and Europe to the sword and unleashed a campaign of rape and terror the world had never seen before.

If you really think that an unarmed populace can quickly organize to resist an armed oppressor, then you are living in a state of utter delusion. In the Katyn Forest a few thousand unarmed Polish soldiers were mercilessly executed by Stalin's troops. They were unarmed, but trained and organized and brave and courageous and they died like vermin.

My original remark about how you didn't pass your A-levels in history was sarcastic, I admit. But now I'm thinking that maybe I'm right. Your grasp of massacre and oppression seems extraordinarily weak. Read The Gulag Archipelago or A Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovitch. Why didn't those oppressed peoples rise up? Because Stalin's thugs were the ones with the guns.

Your example about the Spanish Civil War is also kind of ... have you ever heard of the POUM Militia, the Workers Party of Marxist Liberation? They're one of the factions you talk about in the Spanish Civil War. Your countryman George Orwell fought briefly with them and wrote movingly about their courage. They died, horribly, for many reasons -- a lack of firearms being one of them. Go read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

Time to evolve and change?

It's always time to evolve and change, but I don't trust your judgment in how we should evolve and change. Not even a little bit.

It seems like, in order to get these nosy little snoops to stop snooping on you, you have to explicitly visit their site, provide them with even more info, and hope they keep their word that they won't compile data on you.

For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?

The problem is not laying down fiber or building infrastructure: The problem is that nobody else can because of contractual agreements. [ ... ]

Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.

For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.

Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?

So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.

A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?

Build out a city or two using long ago subsidized infrastructure, add some updated equipment, get kick backs from the city, put a couple of thousand on the internet all for under 200 million [ ... ]

That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.

For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric . Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.

When I was using a FreeBSD box as the gateway to my home network, the crushing majority of the spam relay and SSH brute-forcing attempts came from machines inside hinet.net. I ended up black-holeing as many of their subnets as I could in the firewall.

Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...

Schwab

When talking with a prosecutor, you should never say absolutely nothing. If you remain silent in the face of an accusation, your silence can be entered into evidence against you under the rules governing adoptive admission. If someone asks you, "So why did you kill him?" and you remain silent, your silence can be considered by a court to be an admission that you killed the person in question.

Not every instance of silence is admissible as an adoptive admission -- but the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure are complicated and varied and unless you're a criminal defense lawyer you probably have no way of telling when silence is a good policy and when it will get you in trouble.

So, instead of being silent, you instead say, "If you give me your card, I'll have my lawyer get in touch with you to answer your questions." You take the card, you give it to your lawyer, and you follow his or her advice.

A good overview of the law regarding adoptive admissions and your potential risk when facing prosecutors: How To Avoid Going To Jail Under 18 USC 1001 For Lying To Investigators.

Or, conversely, maybe it has a chance to thrive if it's being maintained by people who have an idea of what to do with it?

That was supposed to be the whole point of spinning off WebOS in the first place.

Barely two years ago, HP gave WebOS a modest nest egg and spun them off into its own independent entity (which, from the point of view of WebOS, was a good move, given how badly HP has been mismanaged over the last decade). They shared/leased some of HP's organizational infrastructure, but WebOS has been pretty much on its own since then. They definitely had/have a vision, and they've definitely been executing on it.

I'm not sure what value LG's ownership brings to WebOS -- or indeed what value WebOS brings to LG. But at least now the WebOS guys will be able to get employee discounts on nice flat panels :-).

A good rule of thumb is that in a self-defense shooting scenario, 4 of 5 rounds fired will miss. (These numbers are born out by the historical record, BTW: they're not made up. Consider when the NYPD shot Amadou Diallo. Five officers, part of a highly-trained unit with advanced firearms training, opened fire on an unarmed and harmless Diallo from a range of under five meters. Despite the tactical environment being perfect -- the officers were at point blank range, they all had the time to make a proper firing stance, etc. -- of the 41 rounds fired, 22 rounds missed. That's over a 50% miss rate under perfect conditions by well-trained personnel.)

Another good rule of thumb is that you need to place a minimum of two rounds into your target to have good -- not necessarily great, but just good -- odds of stopping the threat.

Do the math and you quickly discover that to place two rounds on target, with each round having an 80% chance of missing, results in you needing 14 rounds in the magazine. That means that with a 15-round Beretta 92, a 17-round Glock 17, a 16-round FN FNP-9, a 13-round Browning High-Power, etc., you can be relatively confident of having enough ammunition in the magazine to stop one -- one -- attacker.

There's a reason why cops carry high-capacity magazines and at least two spares, and it's the same reason why civilians who use pistols for self-defense need high-cap magazines and at least two spares.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predators'_Ball
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_gate
2012 Election coverage of Bain â" Mitt Romneyâ(TM)s old stomping ground.

Also: Storming the Magic Kingdom. Wonderful book -- informative and engaging. The Walt Disney Company was very nearly destroyed by private equity/LBO vultures.