If they had religious objections to invoking the police, it would be irrelevant. The police are still going to track down the robbers and arrest them regardless of whether mom and pop want to file charges. In structuring our society, we have arbitrarily decided to make a legal distinction between certain types of injustice. It used to be the case where I live that domestic violence was not prosecuted unless the abused wanted to press charges. You'd think if someone was being abused they would want their abuser to get what was coming to them. But that is not always the case, I suppose we decided we wanted the abuser to face justice regardless, because now they will be prosecuted by default.

It is just as arbitrary deciding we are going to rely on a civil enforcement of contract law. In fact, we do have measures to protect certain disadvantaged people in contracts---minors, people with mental defects---but so far not people averse to filing lawsuits. Just because the Amish are willing to allow injustice to be perpetrated against them doesn't make it okay and doesn't mean we as a society are obliged to accept it, any more than we are obliged to allow physical abuse simply because the abused wants to remain in the relationship.

The reason the Amish don't wish to file a lawsuit is because they have a different set of priorities. Their goal is to make their lives a compelling argument for what they believe in. They are instructed to shun lawsuits because legal disputes often result in discord and when it comes to a choice between the money or maintaining goodwill they suppose money is not that important. You're right that it is their choice to make. But it doesn't change the fact that they are being wronged and cheated. I don't understand why you think they need to be actively trying to get the better of their oppressors before we're allowed to be sympathetic.

Nobody likes democracy unless it's on their side. The enlightened masses who see things your way are a boon, the dazed luddites who dare to disagree a real drag. Giving up some sovereignty can be quite handy to get things the way you want them without all those ignorant plebes standing in the way. Heck, the new arrangement might be quite popular---there's no reason everybody can't get something out of the deal. Of course, the problem with having a government of governments of governments is that, the farther you abstract the roles, the less connection the people in charge have to the citizens at the base of the system.

In this case, do they know anyone who does casual hacking, any whitehats, do they remember smart kids causing a bit of mischief starting off because that's what kids do? Of course, not. They have read the stories about cyberattacks and heard from their corporate friends that this is an issue and they will solve it at the only level and by the only means they are prepared to solve it.

And better stick in some minimum sentencing guidelines because who knows what those weird parochial judges might do if allowed to act on their own sensibilities.

"Eat this and you, too, can look like a whale!"

You misconstrue the nature of the battle. It is not against malware, anymore than a modern war is againsts guns and bullets. It is against the malware authors. Yes, some variant of "malware" can always be imagined to succeed against any software-level security. But the vast majority of that hypothetical malware is completely irrelevant because no one is ever going to write it. What is missing from consideration is the time and money invested into making the malware work, to how long it is effective, and what the financial payoff will be. The more you increase the burden and reduce the payoff, the more you have shifted the balance toward the good guys. More flexible malware identification mechanisms are big wins not because they are undefeatable but because they make the bad guys work harder. And, as a matter of fact, if you can generalize malicious code based on a few samples, you can effectively have the bad guys working against each other. (Virus 1, using exploit, is successful, second guy notes virus 1's success, analyzes it, produces virus 2 using same exploit, virus 3 also uses same exploit; based on comparison of three viruses, database is able to identify common exploit and innoculate against all subsequent programs which would otherwise rely on said exploit.)

I hope they don't have a different perspective. If they do, we should pretty much nuke them ourselves right now---our tolerance for their rhetoric is couched in the belief that it really is just talk. If they were seriously convinced that they were on the verge of war, willing to use nukes against us or South Korea or Japan, and willing to take just about anything as provocation, we would not want to be following a policy of "let them get the first nuke fired off at us before we do anything."

The reason for using the real specimens is precisely to avoid the kind of speculation we are engaged in right now. Their value as a deterrent (or blackmail) is directly proportional to our confidence in their functionality, deliverability, etc. Ever having to use them is a losing proposition--North Korea would become a sea of glass minutes after the fact. (That assurance of destruction would normally make their nukes useless as a conventional bargaining chip, which is why NK has to up the crazy factor so that we *aren't quite 100% sure* about their intent, and they can demand concessions.) Thus, the only purpose the nukes serve is as a bargaining chip. If seeing fake nukes reduces our belief in their feasibility by 5%, that represents a 5% loss on their investment in that bargaining chip. Not a good play. On the other hand, if they only have one serviceable missile, or otherwise would be embarassing themselves with an honest display, it would be well-worth trying to drum up their apparent tactical abilities.

Yeah, the difference is that the latter are strictly financial concerns to the company, and what you are talking about is giving *the company* rights to protect those financial concerns. It may be that men are the more expensive to higher in each case (maybe they're just statistically less reliable). But rather than chasing after all of those distinctions (which may or may not in cases be prejudiced rather than mathematical) we prefer to say everyone is considered equal at the time of higher.

But what we are talking about right now is the physical differences of the person whose rights are being protected. Are you against the American's with Disabilities Act? Are handicapped parking spaces an abridgment of American equality since only a select portion of the population is permitted to use them? If it's unfair that women get more time off than men for pregancy, do you also think it is unfair that they get more time off than men for having cervical cancer?

The fact is men can work straight through a pregnancy doing all manner of exerting activity without missing a beat. Women can't. Not they shouldn't. Not we don't think they should have to because we're chauvinists. THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY DO SO unless we want to cause them and/or the child serious harm. Giving them maternity leave is required not to advantage them but to make their situation equal to that of men. And if the child is going to be breastfed, the woman is going to need to be there longer to take care of it, because she's the one who can do it. (And if we just want the family to have some time together, then I suppose that is why we are allocating paternity leave as well, in which case, how about yahoo is offering 4 weeks recovery time to the person who just had a major medical incident, plus 8 weeks to both parents to enjoy their new family.)

Honestly, forcing equality where it's not a matter of equality is the surest way to weaken the whole concept. There is a very logical rational of why people should be treated equally, it is called fairness. When you stop considering fairness and just consider whether certain numbers are equal to one another, you are not going to have a stable or desirable system.

I do like phrases, but I am suspicious of the *real* entropy associated with them (I promise you it is not just a function of the number of characters). The problem is, as always, the end user is still free to abuse the system and make dumb password choices.

I think we need to stop letting users choose their own passwords. The only reason to do that is to make it easier for them to memorize, but then the easiest thing to memorize is something trivial and insecure, and to base it on something personal (which makes things like visiting your facebook page a possible vector of attack), so you are really just encouraging bad passwords. At best, users should be allowed to prompt the generator with some inputs (take a word, embed it in a larger phrase) or choose part of a two-part authentication.

Well, there probably is *some* extra security in that Evernote has less flexibility to migrate their engineers to other projects. However, that also means bad things if their app stops making money the most sensible thing may be to basically sellout their users (and potentially their data) to some other firm. They might be gobbled up by a larger company for other reasons and be taken in an unpleasant direction (see Sun->Oracle), or simply forced to declare bankruptcy, both of which are far less likely for Google. Basically, no matter who owns it, the software needs to be profitable to continue being supported, and there are some risks even if it is.

I feel there is always some need to plan for the software you use being retired. Even if it's an open source project, if it's anything which involves integrating with other software/hardware, you are still going to have to abandon it if you continue updating your other software/hardware. (granted it is much easier for an OS project to find new maintainers)

My principal question is if I can easily export my data, which google does tend to be pretty good about. Of course, I am still interested in how long I think it will be before I have to migrate, because migrating is annoying, but if it's a very compelling piece of software and I will be able to export my data from it, it's probably worth betting on the potential shelflife.

The universe only collapses in on itself if it has sufficient gravitational attraction compared to the kinetic energy of its components. It is the difference between throwing a rock in the air and having it come back down (collapse) versus sending a rocket ship to another galaxy (obviously not going to fall back into the earth). The question of whether we would have a Big Crunch, keep expanding, or hit right smack in between the two (run out of energy on an infinite timescale) is an older question. Now that we know that the universe's components are actually *accelerating* away from each other, the Big Crunch does not appear to be a possibility.

I don't think your objection is very helpful without throwing in your proposed alternative. Do you think 1 or more instances of abusing women like this should all result the same punishment, so that after you commit the first crime you might as well keep on going, you aren't upping the legal ante any? Or do you think that the punishment per offense should be so negligibly small that even a sweeping number of victims would only tally up to a moderate sentence? Or do you want the sentence for murder to be more severe? What if 350 people had individually victimized these 350 women? Would you be upset at *their* combined sentences adding up to more than the punishment for murder, and if so, what is the reason for reducing the cumulative time if the crimes are perpetrated by just one person instead of by many?

I don't think he's really facing 105 years anyway. That is the *maximum* sentence. The judge will decide how long he actually receives, which will probably factor in how remorseful and able to rehabilitate he seems, and it may well wind up being a fraction of that. However, neither you or are particularly capable of discriminating, based on our instincts of compassion and justice, whether 5 or 105 years will address the measure of the offense and the hurt inflicted on the victims. For all I know, humans do not even live long enough for his punishment to be equal to the crime. What I do know is that, as arbitrary as any justice system is, these are not secret laws, and our perpetrator is not some hapless innocent caught up in the machines of an unsympathetic system, like a kid downloading mp3s, he is a calculating predator who he knew fullwell that what he was doing was wrong (and if not, then he really should be locked up forever for everyone else's sake).

Next you'll be telling us you're tired of hot grits and Soviet Russia jokes.

That was pivotal to Sourcecode. If you haven't seen it, you should--it is actually a quite brilliant contribution to the sci-fi genre.

Now that is simply incorrect!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp(en).svg

You don't actually need to smelt any ore, about half of the metal asteroids are essentially pure iron and nickel. It's not like earth where you have to worry about complex plate tectonics and chemical reactions affecting what's available, or about conducting geographic surveys and moving massive amounts of earth to access it. Just scope out the asteroid display case for an asteroid that has what you want and begin harvesting it.

Assuming our criterion for legislation is, say, whatever can reduce the number of fatalities by a hundred or more a year, I hope you don't mind saying goodbye to buying snackfood, owning a car, drinking alcohol, swimming in lakes, going out after dark, or pretty much enjoying life in any way.