Well, but consider: space is big. Detecting things in it is hard, unless they've giving off light or radiation that you can detect more easily. For example, today, it is very common that we don't notice near-earth asteroids until they're less than a day away, and asteroids are a lot bigger than missiles.

Atmospheric missiles must maintain constant thrust to keep flying, in order to counteract gravity, air resistance, and to maintain course skimming the ocean, as you mentioned. That makes them easy to spot as soon as they cross the horizon, giving you that 10-20s warning.

But in space, constant thrust is not necessary. The missile can be fired initially just like a dumb projectile, and only engage its thrust once it's very close to the target and needs to adjust course to hit it. Until that time, it just looks like a very small rock hurtling through the void, giving off very little energy, making it very hard to spot.

Even if you had radar or some other kind of active sensors to detect incoming missiles before they engage their thrusters and give away their position, the attacker could simply fire their missiles inside a cloud of other flak to camouflage them. So you can see a cloud of thousands of tiny objects coming in, but you can't tell which of them are missiles with warheads until the whole cloud is close enough that those missiles activate and start homing in on your position.

Yes, there are legitimate situations where some police records need to be sealed for a modest period of time, in order to preserve the safety of undercover operatives/informants etc. Laws and procedures already exist to allow for that, all they have to do is convince a judge (privately) that some document needs to stay secret (for now) and it's fine.

This is different. This is an entire branch of law enforcement claiming that they never have to release any documents ever to anyone, no matter what's in them or whether they actually have any legitimate need to keep them secret. Given how friendly judges usually are to law enforcement on these kinds of things, the fact that they don't even want to have to convince a judge to let them keep their secrets is a big red flag to me.

Any legal/judicial experts care to weigh in on whether this argument has a snowball's chance of being accepted by any court?

The article cites Snowden's files as their source, but Snowden and Greenwald have both explicitly denied that, and even go further to assert that neither of them have provided any information whatsoever to the Independent:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

That means somebody is lying, and that is extremely important and worth your careful consideration, no matter who you think it is.

I'm disappointed that this development hasn't already been modded up in the comments here; a lot of folks are jumping to conclusions by taking the Independent at their word about who leaked this particular information.

No, it is known, straight from both Snowden and Greenwald themselves: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

They deny giving any information to the Independent. Since they are not the source, as the Independent claims, they further surmise that the timing and nature of this particular leak make it plausible that the UK intelligence agency did it intentionally, in order to justify even harsher "anti-terrorism" and "anti-leaker" laws and powers.

Yes, sure, "it cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen" -- but a sweeping dragnet that intercepts and logs every private communication of every citizen of the United States isn't exactly "targeting" any particular citizen, is it? Of course to us, that makes it worse and not better, but to the agents of the modern US surveillance state it is a lovely loophole indeed.

It is very, very important for people to read and understand the significance of this comment.

Many folks from the "middle"-class on up simply don't understand what life is like for single parents, or even or dual parents who must work multiple jobs to pay the bills. Yes, raw food of the sort that can be prepared into healthy and nutritious meals is not (necessarily) inherently expensive; what puts it out of reach for many low-income folks is not the money but the TIME it takes to go to the grocery store, bring those foodstuffs home, and then prepare them.

Single parents cannot leave their small children unattended that long, and bringing them along adds even more logistical overhead. There often isn't a single grocery store in low-income neighborhoods, requiring an even longer car trip, if the family can even afford a car; otherwise, an even longer bus ride, which also limits the trip to how much can be carried in two hands to, from and on the bus.

Making a healthy diet accessible to low-income families is not an issue of price, it is an issue of availability and logistics, and those issues are NOT insignificant. People need to understand that, to avoid falling into the trap of thinking poor folks are just lazy -- they're not, most of them work harder than you do, I promise you. Unless you've actually been a low-income single parent, don't presume to understand what the challenges are.

Can any legal types comment on whether it would be viable to fight back with our own Service Provider License Agreements?

"By providing me, <NAME> with service, you, <COMPANY> agree to be bound by this Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA)..."

Could we craft a generic boilerplate SPLA with provisions that nullify these kinds of anti-consumer restrictions, and just all print them out and mail them en masse to the legal dept. of any company we do business with? Would it be considered legally binding on them, just exactly the same way EULAs are legally binding on us? Has this already been done?

If you intend to process credit card payments through your custom application on the point-of-sale device, you'll likely fall under the purview of the Payment Card Industry's Payment Application Data Security Standard (PCI PA-DSS), which may require a source code audit and limit what you can have the software do. That may be no problem for you depending on your resources and intended use of your software, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Let's hope we heed the warnings of sci-fi.

Can anybody more knowledgeable than I comment on how this will affect binary (nVidia/AMD) video driver performance or compatibility, and thus Wine gaming?

If corporations were not recognized as individuals in a number of other annoying contexts (political contributions, "personal" rights, etc) then I *might* be inclined to agree. But as it stands, they've got the best of both worlds; no meaningful taxation like individuals are burdened with, but all the same protections and "rights" as well.

If the universe is under 15 billions years old, how do we know red dwarves can last 100 billion years?

Is it really that baffling? Let me take a stab at that missing piece:

Campaign manager: Hey tiny film studio, how do you feel about perjuring yourself to shut down this ad that's making us look bad? We'll owe ya one, and we have this funny feeling the perjury won't be prosecuted anyway.
Tinyfilmstudio: A corrupt congressman in my debt? Yes please; consider it done.
Campaign manager: I knew we'd see eye-to-eye on this one.