How is this different than what would come from interviewing a witness about her having been raped, who - in the course of talking about THAT case - says, "Yeah, I know her. I met her when she robbed that store liquor store down on Main Street." Why wouldn't the police follow such a lead?

There's more to it than that. Engineers can romp around in the production system - generally without leaving a trail that could get them in trouble - while doing a LOT more than just looking at web server log files. For example, he pointed out that half the company (some 4000 people) could send tweets from user accounts AS that user, and leave no trail. Multiply egregious stuff like that times dozens of other examples (like .. high level system engineers allowed to work remotely, directly in the production systems, without having to use devices/computers that are patched and up to date, security-wise).

Whew! What a relief that SpaceX is privately owned, then, and NOT publicly traded, right?

Which means abolishing the First Amendment. It guarantees that people can assemble into groups as they see fit (like, say, political parties). It guarantees that you can pay someone to speak on your behalf if they're better at it than you, or can do so on behalf of a larger group in order to be more effective (like, say, lobbyists).

If you think freedom of speech and assembly is no good, all you have to do is get a federal supermajority in the legislature to see your point and kill the entire Bill of Rights (it can't be picked apart on amendment at a time), and then get 37 states to ratify that alteration to the Constitution. Should be no problem.

Or ... you could explore how to get kids a decent education featuring things like critical thinking skills so they aren't as vulnerable to getting their entire world view and their eventual voting patterns set by under- and mal-informed people throughout the media/entertainment complex, to say nothing of higher education's toxicity on this topic.

Something tells me that being "highly cited" isn't the only criteria for this. More like "highly cited in a way that aligns with the ideological preferences of the people at Google who tell that how to happen." Which is fine. It's their thing. But they should have the intellectual honesty to proclaim that, proudly.

No, we don't need the entire country run by California and New York. Look what they're doing to themselves, for a notion of why mob rule democracy is a terrible idea. We're a republic of fifty states. For a reason. We use variations on democratic procedures to handle what goes on in each state, and then each state operates within the bounds of the constitution's checks and balances to send people to the federal government to do the things that were set aside for the federal government to do (leaving everything else up to the states, and to the people individually). If you think we need to change it to nation-wide mob rule like an overgrown home owners association, you're going to need to persuade 37 of the states that it's in there interests to be run by the same people that are running places like Los Angeles. Good luck with that.

No, it doesn't "beg the question" of who's responsible when something goes wrong.

It RAISES that obvious question. "Begging the question" is a rhetorical fallacy used by lazy people trying to win an argument by using premises that presume the truth of their conclusion, rather than supporting that conclusion.

Junior high school level writing stuff.

No, proponents of this sort of absurd hobbling of a well understood range of mechanical devices with untold millions of examples in use ... are after any and every method they can trot out to make firearm ownership as onerous, expensive, and undesirable as possible. The gun being described won't have anywhere near the refined computing horsepower of an entry level phone, while even the most expensive ones fail fingerprint detection under anything but ideal conditions, and can get RF-swamped out of something like Bluetooth being reliable on the fly in a life or death situation. To say nothing of having a reliable, charged up battery. Idiotic. Everyone involved in these efforts know all of that. And it's why nanny-state leftists get so breathless at the thought of laws like New Jersey's: they cannot WAIT for traditional, reliable firearms to be banned, while their own law enforcement agencies insist that they not be held to the requirement to use these built-to-fail nightmares.

Your entire thesis (the "most people get killed by their own family's guns!" meme) has been debunked on its rhetorical face value for years. It's a preposterous statistic to deploy, even if you stipulate it as even close to meaningful. The number of such household deaths (the overwhelming majority of which are suicides) is utterly eclipsed by the hundreds of thousands of times a year that family owned firearms are used to stop or prevent violent crime (see the recent, third study in a row out of the FBI, or the one done under Obama by the CDC). Firearms that can be picked up by any member of the household - even with gloves or wet hands or while not being the Magic Ring Bearer - save more lives every year than all murderers take, using any weapon at all, by orders of magnitude. And virtually all non-suicide deaths employing a household gun are deaths involving illegally possessed guns kept by people who are legally barred from purchasing or possessing them, with the murders involved typically including third party criminal activity that enters the household.

Laws requiring everyone to own only badly secured, unreliable "smart" guns won't put a dent in the murderous activity of criminals who can build their own traditional firearms as has been done for centuries, or have access to a vast black market of stolen or illegally purchased guns in the tens of millions.

Don't kid yourself or try to kid anyone else about the viability of this technology outside of some extremely specific use cases. The main interest in them, legislatively, is the ability to chip away at our constitutionally protected right to self defense by making the tools of that defense wildly more expensive or for many, unobtainable. That regressive tax on self defense falls, of course, hardest on those who most need it: it's a tax on poor people and the minorities that are over-represented in that economic class and most often subject to the violent crime that legs gun owners currently prevent tens of thousands of times every week. The politicians who live in gated communities with protection details know all of this, but are sure it won't impact them. After all, their own armed guards will be exempt from any requirement to carry such hobbled firearms. Of course.

No, SV's "voice" didn't dissolve. The people with the real money and influence now recognize that half the legislature and the current administration are already doing what they're told by Google, FB and the rest, and there's no need to continue with the silly charade of an industry association that has something vague and hand-wavy to do with "the internet." That would be like having a trade association that is the voice for every business that uses electricity. It's simply not granular enough to be at all meaningful. "The internet" isn't even a useful phrase in this context.

And yet the only person who used a gun at all, and did so to kill an unarmed person who had three armed officers right behind her, was a cop.

You don't really understand what a coup is, do you.

No, it's because you can't pardon someone of a federal crime for which they haven't been convicted. Not that Trump gave any sign he would do such a thing anyway. Not to be confused with Kamala Harris, who made a big production out of bailing out people who tried to burn federal cops alive, and torch federal buildings night after night for months the previous summer.

So ... having some legislators in your party officially protest the acceptance of electoral votes from specific states is an attempted coup? Did you feel that way in the previous election cycle when Democrats did exactly the same thing? It's a routine occurrence.

And if you're somehow right, and it's just that nobody NOTICED the previous "coup" attempts that proceeded in exactly the same way on the floor of congress, why is it that nobody has been charged with participating in an coup attempt? Nobody has been charged with insurrection, either. Strange, huh? It's almost like a handful of wound up rioters made a stink, got busted, and are getting legal treatment that nobody on the left got the entire previous summer when they spent night after night trying to burn down federal buildings, torch federal agents alive, etc. If THAT's not insurrection, then neither is strolling through the barricades that the Capitol Police have just removed and waved you through. Or walking between the rope lines in the Rotunda taking selfies before strolling back out the door again after having a smiling chat and posing for more selfies with even more Capitol Police who held the doors open for them. But people who did exactly that are being held for months on end in squalid conditions, in solitary confinement. Never mind, you're an anonymous coward. You know all of this already, but like to troll.

But that's just not true. If I'm in the public square saying my piece, there's nothing stopping you and ten friends from drowning me out by shouting louder, or standing in a circle round me holding up bigger signs so mine can't be seen. The professional activist types literally give and take classes on how to make the public square unavailable to voices they don't like, and it's motivated by the same sensibilities that do that in professional, academic, and government circles. Operations like Facebook have special accounts and access set up so that government officials can flag speech they don't like on such platforms. Examples of this being used have come out in trial depositions. I have no problem with FB saying, "we don't like this kind of talk." I DO have a problem with someone sitting in the Old Executive Office Building across from the White House being given the keys to a portal that allows them to flag social media content that doesn't toe the line, politically. THAT is a blatant 1A violation, manifested through, yes, a private company. The (more literal) public square, though, is still an arms race, as usual. So of course people need to band together, pool resources, and act in concert to prevent themselves from being silenced by those doing the same. The difference, in our society, is that the people who are literally paid to do that in the public square tend to hew to a particular political/world view.

Which, luckily, is why we're a republic of multiple states, and NOT a democracy, as a nation. Very thoughtful, on the part of the founders.

Apparently, now, anything that's an improvement over anything being used is so unimaginably cool and rebellious that it's "disruption." Like, "Area man totally disrupts restaurant industry with new pot pies."