It doesn't matter either way. If they want data on US citizens they can just give the tech to the English who aren't restricted against spying on US citizens and then they'll share the data on each other's citizens. What we need is a Snowden in England to see if they are monitoring US citizens. Unfortunately we're pretty much screwed at this point. To the best of my knowledge no government has ever given up this level of power willingly.

I'm not sure what dropping $3.6 Million in bitcoin on the open market would do but it probably wouldn't be good for bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to exchange them just to collapse the market. Perhaps they'll just wait until they've accumulated even more to ensure they collapse the market and kill the currency.

You may not have as much "metal on metal" but the big issue with used electric cars is battery life. If I remember right the batteries are only suppose to be good 5 years or so with significant performance degradation after that. Unfortunately the batteries are one of the most expensive parts of hybrid and electric cars. With my wife's hybrid replacing the batteries which we'll likely have to do in the next couple of years would cost about half what we paid for the car (we bought it used at about a year old).

I've been wondering if there is a way to break the face tag feature, was curious what everyone else things. Basically the system as I understand it works by users tagging you in photos they take. If that step isn't done facebook has no way to know your face. So what would happen if you seed it with conflicting information. For example find a picture of some random model (or alternatively another person with a dislike of being tagged) and have as many friends as possible tag the individual as you. Repeat this with several other faces and facebook should be adequately confused. Thoughts?

There's a more likely reason he hasn't be identified. I'd bet Avunit was caught first and outed or helped out Sabu and the others in exchange for no jail time and not being publicly named. If you think about it Sabu doesn't appear to have gotten much of a break for helping the FBI, the best offers would go to the first turncoat... Avunit. But maybe I'm wrong, perhaps he really is that good.

Even though phone as in iphone isn't written correctly in Spanish they still pronounce it the same way. My sister in law, who was born and lives outside Mexico City says IPhone the exact same way we Americans do. In fact the the word telephone pronounced in Spanish is exactly the same with the addition of an "o" at the end.

That begs another question, was the GPS on his car while he drove the car into Mexico. If so then I bet the government broke some laws. I can't imagine it's legal for them to track people across borders like this. I imagine Mexico would have some opinions about the US government monitoring people in Mexico, probably wouldn't do anything about it though.

I think he was making a Somalia Pirate joke.

I think we've learned that nuclear power has risks but is still much safer and efficient than most of the other possibilities.

On a related note do nuclear plants have the capability to shutdown cleanly? Otherwise the upcoming zombie apocalypse means I need to get the fuck away from any nuclear plants since zombies usually don't make good nuclear engineers.

I don't know, I looked at buying a motorcycle for commuting everyday and decided against it due to safety factors. This looks like it would get better MPG and be almost as safe as a regular car.

The letter was sent to him, and specifically told him he couldn't share it's contents with anyone. So unless he could prove the letter was stolen or his lawyer posted it he'd be screwed. And if the lawyer posted it he'd probably be disbarred unless he said the client approved the posting in which case where back to him sharing the contents. No matter which way you cut it if it got out he's more than likely going to jail.

Unfortunately they do enhance security a little, although I strongly believe the enhanced security doesn't actually make anyone safer. I look at this way I could hire a virtual army of body guards to patrol outside my house and I'll be pretty safe from a break in. But that level of protection against something that's extremely unlikely to happen is just retarded. Terrorist some day will probably succeed in killing more Americans in our home country... however spending billions of dollars and completely destroying our privacy isn't justified by the possible death of even a couple of thousand people.

Oh and what these devices are really meant to detect are deadly things that a metal detector or sniffer can't detect. Such as broken glass, a true ceramic knife (most of them have metal in them purely to be detectable by metal detectors), or even a sharp stick (or pencil... wonder when they'll be banned). Keep in mind that any of these items could have been used by the 911 terrorist and would have been almost effective (if not as effective) as the box cutters they used.

The feds and specifically TSA are really just trying to see how much they can get away with before the public complains. I fully expect, (if these things are allowed to stay) that in five years you won't be allowed to have any liquids (acid can be really dangerous), batteries, pencils, pens or, shoelaces (can be very effective to strangle someone with). What we'll be left with eventually will be a plane full of people in their underware reading books... oh wait... I've had some nasty paper cuts before :-)

Ever hear of Manuel Noriega and Panama?

I'm not sure if this is what your referring to but I use a SSH socks proxy and tsocks under linux quite a bit to allow proxy unaware apps to be use it (like RDP). The only issue I have with this setup is DNS. Since it primarily uses UDP not TCP for lookups they are all performed against the locally configured name servers not the remote. I haven't found an elegant solution for this yet but your network.proxy.socks_remote_dns config may help a lot (I've never heard of that before).

For the original submitter, I understand your reluctance to being restricted and object to the idea of the great firewall as much as the next guy, however is completely open access really worth breaking the law there and potentially being imprisoned in China. Also keep in mind that while you may object to the concept of the firewall but you are a guest in the country and breaking any countries laws while as such is really disrespectful. If you really don't like the law don't travel there, if your trying to make some sort of political statement (which I doubt) then best of luck to you... China isn't well know for being good sports about that sort of thing.

The problem with torrents is that anyone can see the IPs getting the files, and in some cases it may be as important to protect the source as it is to protect those wanting information. If you can imagine an oppressive regime trying to stop the spread of some information would likely try to find the individuals in possession of the information... which would be anyone that connected to the torrent.