There is no enforcement mechanism in the event of a dispute with another country, however.

Any company rich enough to get there can probably afford to hire people to defend its claim. Within a few years, they'll probably be rich enough to outright buy a company like Blackwater to serve as a small army to defend their claim if need be. That's the real danger here.

But there are no credible reports of the US allowing criminals to just wantonly defraud Russian and Chinese citizens. While all of our governments spy on each other (and each other's economies), the US at least tends to take a dim view toward its citizens committing criminal acts against foreigners.

Seriously? Under what logic is it okay to publicly disseminate, often for the express purpose of humiliation, someone else's private photographs whether obtained illegally, surreptitiously, or shared in confidence with you?

You're missing the point. It's not ok, but it is a highly foreseeable consequence of taking nude photographs, much less disseminating them. You'd have to live under a rock and have a Pollyannaish view of human relations in 2014 to have no idea that this is a common consequence. Most often now, it probably happens because someone believes they are special and they won't fall victim to what so many others in their demographic have suffered. In that sense, it is precisely the sort of behavior one expects of a child because children and adolescents are almost completely incapable of believing "you're not special and it could damn well happen to you too."

Don't want your nudes to end up in public? Don't take nudes that you wouldn't want the public to see. Then you can be a true victim. The whole concept of "revenge porn," insofar as it applies to nudes and porn freely made and disseminated, is ever so much "I want my freedom.... but I don't want my choices to have consequences of which I don't approve."

We have a term for that behavior. It's called behaving like a child.

We live in the golden age of low barrier to entry programming. I'm 31 (upper bounds of millennial). When I started, JavaEE in its earlier stages or .NET were the only choices outside of C/C++ that a typical graduate could get. Now you have Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, Groovy and all sorts of easy to use languages. FFS, JavaScript is now a serious career choice where it was considered a skill that no serious developer needed when I was in college (2001-2005).

I swear, some people won't be happy until the machine becomes sentient, writes the code they really meant to write (originally express in plain English, probably at a 6th grade level) and then gives them all of the credit at review time.

If we were to lock him up for ideas that if acted upon would be dangerous, the moderate left, center and right would be justified in openly exterminating the entire registered member list of every Socialist, Fascist and Communist movement in the US. Ideas do have consequences, one of which is that if you are going to declare that a hypothetical cannibal is a threat to his neighbors because he might snap and eat them (despite showing no signs of willingness to act on his depravity), then society would be justified in wiping out those political movements known to have a historic predisposition to slaughter their opponents.

but bullshit as in, contrary to a reasonable reading of the Constitution by a citizen of normal intelligence.

And how so? He waved his ability to execute their search in their faces and then suddenly is surprised when his failure to STFU per the 5th was held against him.

If an ordinary person believes they can give a cop legally valuable information about a case against them and not expect to have that used against them, their intelligence doesn't even rise to the level of pop culture references (you have the right to remain silent, anything you say...)

And let's be clear here. This was a lawyer, not an ordinary person. Odds are higher an ordinary person would have been smart enough to just shut up whereas this guy probably thought he'd use some fancy legal maneuvering he learned along the way to win on a technical point.

I think the correct response here would be to say that you can plead the 5th on the question of whether you can decrypt it or not, and if you claim the 5th compulsion is illegal. However, once you make an affirmative statement you waive the right to not be compelled. In terms of a key, it would be like if you had an almost impenetrable door that used a single key. The police ask you if you are in possession of said key while they have a valid warrant. You say yes, which means they have a right to compel you to hand over the key per the valid warrant. However if you shrug and plead the 5th it should not be on you at that point.

Men, particularly blue collar men, have been disproportionately impacted by the bad economy. Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men. There is also a true shortage of qualified people, unlike in computer-related fields. Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

Or perhaps a font of sage wisdom? You know, like a Council? Composed of wise people, you know, like one's Elders? Something any sentient species ought to be able to figure out. Speaking of which, I feel another press release coming on...

K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addresses the publication of the new report thusly:

"WE HAVE TRIUMPHED! Our skilled operatives from the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Propaganda; Planetary Research Council have successfully infiltrated the blueworlders' technological and informational systems. One notable document, Pathways to Exploration makes clear the disarray in which the blueworlders' long-term invasion plans lie, drawing on the history of meat-controlled spaceflight to justify future programs in organic space exploitation. Although the report promotes the invasion of our world as the horizon goal for the program, it takes into account funding levels necessary to maintain a robust tempo of execution, current research and exploration projects and the time/resources needed to continue them, and intertribal cooperation that would be required to further oppress the citizens of our fair red world."

"And its conclusion? Although the mechanized threat remains, and we salute those still fighting pitched battles with the two active land-based invaders, Pathways to Exploration makes it clear that it is not possible for the blueworlders' organic-based self-replicators to invade our world, at least not without a sustained commitment to funding at a higher level than their own tribal leaders are currently providing."

When an intern from the defense engineering board suggested that improving the capabilities of the blueworlders' EDL systems, radshielding, and propulsion and power systems were ultimately matters of engineering and not physics, and could ultimately be addressed if the tribals of the blue world ever get it into their oxygen-addled brains to work together to achieve a common goal (as, the intern suggested, the way any sentient species does), K'Breel had the intern's gelsacs addled by immersing them in a suitably-merciful quantity of liquid oxygen.

Thus spake K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Committee on Native Spaceflight; Arenautics and Defense Engineering Board; Defense Studies Board; Division of Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences; Committee on Gelsacular Statistics.

I kept thinking "I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework..."

I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework,
But here I am on Slashdot, trying harder from my job to shirk,
From HackerNews to 4chan there's no forum in which I won't lurk,
I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework!