In a reasonable world, the inland "border" searches would be limited to those individuals whom the Border Patrol has reasonable suspicion to believe has recently entered the country and/or attempted to evade a search at the actual border.

If they have no reason to believe I have been out of the country or an conspiring to smuggle contraband, then in a just world, they should not be able to search me. The rules would need to be written to allow then to search someone never left the US, but picked up a package of contraband that someone else moved across the border (perhaps by catapult). Other than those cases that actually involve the border DHS should have no authority.

Unfortunately the lithium-ion battery in the iPad will wear out in 3-5 years.

Photoshop + Cafepress = shirt now exists.

Without class actions, how can a company be punished for, for example, cheating a million people out of $10 each?

I suppose that the government could step in, but a class action has the advantage of providing a market-based solution to the problem. A greedy law firm can determine that the payoff will be profitable, and then invest their own resources to punish the offender. The fear of being on the receiving end of a suit helps keep big corporations in line, and this explains why they hate them so much.

...as long as it does not eat your cat.

Over the camera should solve the problem.

The fact that we don't jail people for making bad movies is the reason that there have been riots around the Muslim world the past week. Many of the people in those countries just cannot comprehend that the government can do nothing about the film other then issuing statements.

If so, that may be a good thing if it exposes end users to the patent craziness that is screwing up the industry. As the best way to get rid of a bad law is to strictly enforce it, unbundling the MPEG licenses will annoy end users.

I was referring to that case where a police officer follows someone out in the open, on public streets. In that case, the cops have as much freedom of movement as anyone else does. If they were to trespass on private property, or take any other action that would be illegal for a normal civilian to take (wiretaps, access to any non-public corporate data, tampering with someone vehicle to attach a tracking device, etc.) then yes, they should have to get a warrant.

The best argument against this is that trailing a person requires resources (the cop), and has an opportunity cost for the police. They are not going to tail someone without a (hopefully good) reason. If, on the other hand, they engage in mass surveillance with minimal cost cost per victim, that eliminates the cost for the police to engage in such behavior.

The Arduino Uno does have a CE mark. Look at the picture of the back of the board.

I don't know it is required, but it does have it

Nice thought, but it won't work. You just need a bill, and you can copy the serial number, signature and all.

What might work is the following: Manufacture each bill with a random "fingerprint", and and sign that. This fingerprint would need to be something that is impossible to create in given configuration (it must be random, and there cannot be any alternative non-random way to make it.) It should also be easy to verify. I do not know of anything that meets these criteria, but there may be something.

I cannot say for the C standard, but in my work, we do some standards development under ISO. None of this work is funded by ISO -- it is either funded by my employer, or government agencies, commercial end-users, or others that have in interest in the technology getting standardized. This process can be quite expensive -- salaries, travel, meetings, but none of that is paid by ISO. It is all paid by the participants (or funding they can acquire from other interested parties.).

ISO basically acts as a middleman. They collect their fee on the work done by others, and do not provide any value add other than blessing the standard as an International Standard.

One problem with the perjury remedy is it a criminal matter, and thus takes a the government to initiate litigation. There is no private right of action, and you are pretty much SOL unless you can convince the US Department of Justice to prosecute someone fora false DMCA take-down request. The way I always thought this should work, is that if an infringement claim is made and the poster does not contest, the material is taken down and the issue is closed, if the poster does contest the remains accessible, but the person who posted it accepts liability is the alleged content owner decides to sue, and the material will remain visible until the poster or a court orders it removed. This way, anyone can post anything without fear of a takedown, as long as they are willing to defend their actions in court.

So they go through all the trouble of banning liquids on flights, and other security theater, while allowing provably dangerous electronics onto the planes without any question. What happens when some terrorist is able to reprogram a phone or computer to overheat on command? Perhaps they could even "forget" the phone on a plane, and arrange for it to cause some mischief after the bad guy deplanes.

I would love to see them ban computers and cellphones because that would effect frequent business travelers, and perhaps cause some pushback against the insanity of airline security.