The privacy issues go far beyond no-knock raids. In many jurisdictions police are routinely dispatched when an ambulance is called. If they have body cameras, they will capture all kinds of intimate things that most people would want to keep private.

FedEx and UPS manage to deliver packages to me by truck without driving over any property without permission. Why is it supposedly so hard for drones to do so without flying over property without permission? Just follow the same route UPS or FedEx would use.

In fact, it should be easier for the drones since they will be allowed over property without permission if they are 350 feet up. FedEx and UPS trucks do not have that option.

Uhm...using state authority to enforce private property rights is one of the few things most schools of libertarianism agree is a legitimate use of state power.

I have no objection to the science of GMO. It is the business of GMO that I do not trust.

The difference between conventional hybrids and GMOs is that the the set of plants and animals that can be obtained by the former over any given time frame is a tiny subset of those that can be obtained by the latter. GMO gives food producers a great increase in power, and as a great philosopher once observed, "With great power comes great responsibility". I don't think the current food companies have the necessary responsibility.

With conventional hybrids, they are more limited in what they can do, and it can take longer to achieve a given desired organism. These limitations give us a chance to make sure that they are not misusing their power.

The prosecutor wanted somewhere between a couple months or so (the amount they offered for a plea bargain) and a few years (the amount they were going to ask for if it went to trial).

I can't believe that after all these years there are still people who believe that Swartz faced a 35 year sentence. He did not. The algorithm the DoJ uses to get a number to trumpet in a press release ignores the rules of sentencing, and in all but the simplest of cases gives a wildly inflated number. There are two main factors that the press release algorithm ignores.

First, there is a range of possible sentences for a given crime. Where a particular instance falls on that range depends on the severity of that instance. To get the maximum, you have to have done a lot of damage, be a repeat offender, and so on. The prosecutors in the indictment were not alleging the various factors necessary to push Swartz up to the high end on any of the counts.

For the press release, they do not consider this. So if a crime might result in 1 year for someone who caused under $5k damages, and 10 years for someone who caused over $100k in damages, they will count it as 10 years in the press release, even if they are only alleging that the defendant caused $1k damages.

Second, federal crimes are divided into groups, and when one particular act leads to multiple charges from the same group, you will only be sentenced for one crime from the group even if convicted for all of them.

In the press release, they just add up the maximum sentences for each charge, completely ignoring the grouping.

The author is confused. See this discussion on HN where a lawyer or two explain what is actually going on.

Basically, nothing is changing concerning the substantive requirements for a warrant. All that is changing is which judges can issue a warrant after the police have satisfied all the requirements of the Constitution and of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Suppose a crime took place in district X, using a computer in district Y. Before, the police would have to go to a judge in district Y. After the change, they will be able to go to a judge in district X if and only if something like TOR or VPN was used that prevents them from determining Y.

There are substitutes for consideration. The magic words used to hand wave away a need for traditional consideration are "promissory estoppel" or "detrimental reliance".

I think a bigger problem for the $1000 trick would be that a court might see that as effectively a liquidated damages clause, and find it invalid because it was not chosen as a rough approximation of the actual damages likely to befall the user if Ello started running ads.

Wrong. Genetic modification allows for a greater range of modification in a shorter time than can be achieved with selective breeding.

As Ben Parker wisely noted many years ago, "With great power comes great responsibility". Does our current food industry collectively have the great responsibility to wisely handle the great power of GMO? They have pretty clearly demonstrated that they do not.

He was a cable lobbyist (sort of--he was head of the largest cable trade association, and that association did do lobbying among other things) 30 years ago, when cable was the underdog trying to provide an alternative to the big broadcasters, and there was no such thing as a cable ISP because the public internet did not exist yet.

He worked for the wireless trade group 10 years ago.

Also in there he founded or was a heavy investor in several companies that were more on the content provider side of things, and would be hurt by a lack of net neutrality. There is no evidence that he is any more influenced by his very old (and irrelevant to internet) cable association or his more recent but still old wireless association than by his association with those other companies that were on the content side of things.

It depends on the states. If you are a resident of Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, American Samoa, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, or the Yukon Territory and you are visiting Washington, you are not charged sales tax on tangible personal property, digital goods, and digital codes purchased in Washington if they are for use outside Washington. You show the merchant picture ID that shows your address, and they ring up the sale without sales tax.

Yes, they would turn the tax money over to your government.

Yup. Generally people doing election-related software have to test with data that is as similar to what will be in the live election as possible, including names of candidates and parties. See this comment in the HN discussion of this, from a developer of election reporting software that has been used in the US and other countries, for details on why and how this sort of thing can happen.

In fact, this same thing happened in the US in the 2012 Illinois Republican primary. The reporting company providing the data to many news organizations accidentally marked the test feed as live for a couple hours the day before the election, and a couple of TV station websites, which were set up to automatically publish updates from the live feed, published this.

The problem in the present case is that it took place in Azerbaijan, which has a long history of widespread corruption and election fraud. It is quite believable that someone has in fact pre-generated the actual election results, and those accidentally got pushed early.