Some of these people go away, but some of them don't, or they get replaced by clones who are just as bad. They do seem to be under more pressure lately; they're much more likely to swear at me instead of just hanging up than they used to be. Asking if they're embarrassed to work for criminals (or scammers, or to rip people off for a living) tends to get the most anger. Asking if they'd like to make a $50,000 reward for ratting out their employer usually just gets a hangup, but sometimes it gets a confused "Huh?".

Unfortunately, it's easy to set up shell corporations that can take the risk, and if they're convicted all the FTC gets is a drawer full of paper, and the money's long gone, and a bunch of low-paid call center operators lose their jobs. You have to get at the infrastructure providers, in ways that don't trash legitimate businesses but do penalize the ones that know they're working for scammers, but as technology makes it easier and easier to do distributed call centers, that gets a lot harder.

"Rachel from Cardholder Services" and her clones slowed down for a bit, but haven't stopped calling me. I probably get fewer calls from them these days, and they are obviously under some pressure, because when I tell their robot I want to talk to an operator and waste their time, they curse me out a lot more than they used to for asking whether they're embarrassed about ripping people off for a living.

I agree that it's a dangerous law. Also, it's a way to make the crime Federal, instead of being a typical state-level crime like murder.

Bullets don't count as WMDs, because they're usually only hitting at most one victim per shit (usually.) Doesn't matter that a machine gun can shoot a lot of people in a short time.

That guy who tried to explode a car bomb in NYC in 2010 was also charged with WMDs. Unlike some terrorist attacks in the US, that one didn't even have FBI informants "helping" him and providing fake explosives, or helping mix real explosives like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

They had lots of electronics on board, but the last message successfully received was from her satellite phone, asking about a way around the weather they'd run into.

I remember James Martin's seminars in the early 80s - hugely influential.

But while he drowned, he wasn't lost at sea; he was near his retirement home in Bermuda. Sad.

Hopefully still is, shipwrecked on some island with her electronics dead, but it's not sounding good. I first met Evi back in the 80s at Usenix conferences, and she was an amazing person, as just about anybody who knew her will tell you.

Sure, you can live in a city or you can live in burbs, and there are parts of the Valley you can't easily reach from the cities without an ugly drive, but it's still the same region and you get the cultural advantages of all of them if you want to pay attention. (On the other hand, I did get married before moving here, so nightlife has been a lot less important than if I were single. I had one friend who moved from San Jose up to the city because of that, but ended up falling in love with another musician who didn't live in the city either :-)

Downtown Mountain View typically has 25 different cuisines in its 4-block restaurant drag, ranging from greasy spoon Chinese to Michelin star (depending on who's chef at TJ's that year.) You can get better Korean or Indian down on El Camino, and there are some other cuisines you have to look around for, and it can be worth driving to Milpitas for some kinds of Chinese. (And sure, Nolan Bushnell had to open his own restaurant just to get one he thought was good enough, but that was the 80s and just because he built Chuck E. Cheese didn't mean he was going to eat there.)

And yeah, if the traffic isn't bad, it's because the economy is, but it's still better than LA or NYC. And unfortunately the trains really only work for going to the city, not coming from the city down here to work.

During the 80s I lived in an older town in NJ (still suburbia, and most of the lots were 55' wide but some were 110' wide.) My house there made a nice downpayment on a condo in Silicon Valley when I moved here, but the early 90s were a bit of a real estate slump. I would have gotten an actual house in San Jose instead, but got laid off just before we made an offer, and we could handle the condo on one income.

It's apparently where the hipsters are moving, now that the Mission is full.

Any time there's significant news that's bad for the NSA, they fire up the Kardashian news generators to distract the public.

Yes, I'm ignoring your joke; sorry :-)

Fortunately, while these bugs are annoying and may break a number of different programs, they're bugs in the implementation code, not bugs in the communication or crypto protocols themselves. That makes them much more fixable. (Perhaps harder to detect in the field, but fixable.)