Don't those left-wing nutjobs believe in their own judicial activisim

The types we are dealing with do not take positions based on overarching principle. Instead they take individual positions they were convinced to by their peers or superiors regardless of context. Thus, you will see conflicting positions that amount to obvious hypocrisy.

Two recent examples:

A Republican speaking of "Freedom of religion" while supporting a law allowing vouchers to be used for religious schools, then backpedaling quickly when she realizes that Muslims schools will get money too. She's not for the principle of freedom of religion, she just wants to promote her own religion.

A liberal satying that the Founders were talking about muskets in the 2nd Amendment, and couldn't have envisioned modern firearms, therefore the 2nd Amendment doesn't cover modern firearms. They of course have no problem exercising their 1st Amendment right to say this over the Internet, television and radio. This person doesn't really believe that rights should be restricted to the technology of the time, he just wants to ban guns.

A few years ago Yahoo released some cleansed search data. Researchers were able to pinpoint the searches of a specific guy living in Florida.

Even for what you want to mandate, there are concerns.

like gun safety classes for anyone purchasing a firearm for the first time

How do you propose to prevent this from becoming a poll tax? They must be free. How are you going to make sure localities don't schedule classes erratically in order to prevent people from taking them? What do you do for the woman who just got a restraining order against a violent man threatening to kill her? Sorry lady, class is in three weeks, good luck. Education is important, but in order for this to work without violating rights or killing people, it must not prevent lawful, timely ownership.

electronic fingerprint safeties on all new firearms

The first person who can't defend himself because of that 3%+ fingerprint false rejection rate, and gets killed, who gets to be blamed? If you are not willing to have a non-matched person grab the loaded smart gun, point it at your head, and pull the trigger, then you should not be willing to risk the lives of others on the bet that the system will read their prints perfectly in time of need.

I wouldn't even think about these until all police and military have been armed with such weapons for years and they've proven themselves in the real world. To make only the people do it is a good sign of an authoritarian state.

Anyone who believes otherwise is a progressive authoritarian, not a progressive liberal.

Both of your proposals are fairly authoritarian.

Sure, have the "freedom" to start your own (possibly unprofitable) business by not having to worry about pesky bills and responsibilities.

How about instead of cost shifting and purchase pooling we actually work on what medical care costs in the first place? In the US you can got to Cook County or the US Federal court in the Eastern District of Texas and drive up a drug company's everyday costs by suing them in a class action for side effects they already disclosed before you bought their drug. There should be some sort of grand jury or board of people with a clue who decide the merit of these things before millions are spent on lawyers.

The for-profit speculative commission-only trial lawyers are a big part of service and product costs for drug companies, hospitals, clinics, doctors, nurses, and even medical assistants and medical techs. If you want to make healthcare more affordable through insurance cost changes, change the cost of malpractice insurance so that only people who actually screw up need to pay exorbitant premiums. When I lived in Illinois it was really difficult to get a doctor's appointment within six months without crossing state lines because the malpractice rates caused several of the doctors in the area to retire early or move to more sensible states.

Also, why do we have federal and state funds going into basic research at universities that gets patented and sold to corporations to turn into products? If research comes from a largely government-funded school then the NIH or someone should be licensed to then sublicense any of those patents to all comers for a reasonable fee.

Also, why do the drug companies pay the FDA to fast-track drugs? The PDUFA means that in order to get faster drug trials, the deeper pockets get faster times to market. If we're spending billions of dollars to improve healthcare, why don't we fund the FDA sufficiently to get the best drugs approved fastest rather than the most heavily promoted ones? Why don't we partner with other developed countries to do joint trials that meet the standards of the FDA and its counterparts in, say, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and Brazil with all the agencies reviewing all the data and making decisions for their own constituencies rather than repeating the trials over and over?

As ChunderDownUnder reminds me, I forgot to mention that this phone has never been out of airplane mode, in addition to never having a SIM card plugged in. Flashing out of T-Mobile software was also one of the first things I did, and the other night I flashed CyanogenMod 11 M4. (Of course some of the guys on IRC suggest that even that is too commercial, and that I should go to snapshots over on xda-developers, to be safer.)

I keep my tinfoil hat handy, just like I tend to channel RMS and ESR. But there are practical limits...

So if I'm using my no-contract Samsung Galaxy phone as a wifi-only device, and have never inserted the SIM card at all, I believe I'm safe from this particular vulnerability.

Tin-hatters, am I wrong on that?
Explain,

Slashdot has ads?

If Feinstein thinks her committee is right in pulling a Snowden, then her position is inconsistent. That is my point. As far as the hypocrisy of Feinstein goes, the relevance of the document doesn't matter.

The only crypto currency is one which is not traceable. interchangeable, and infinitely divisible - gold or silver or similar. Anything backed by the whim of the government can be tracked, or revoked by the same government.

Why do you think Iran was laughing all the way to the (gold) bank when we kicked them out of the SWIFT wire network? Now they can trade oil for gold bars and the gold bars for uranium, and there's no tracing it.

Why is someone's worth measured in how much he helps others? Why is helping people a virtue, as long as its not yourself?

His main idea was that the OS has no business deleting any data generated by the application, that data is mine and uninstalling should only remove the program itself and let me take care of the rest.