Or they could just cut out the middle man and send the bomb directly to the building...

Is there an Occam's Razor for overly complicated terrorist plots?

A rather convoluted way to say one of the following:

The nephew of the brother is either the nephew of the father or the child of the father.

A: Your cousin's former roommate
B: Your brother/sister's former roommate
C: Your former roommate

There is a very high likelyhood that Dark Helmet went to the dark side of the Schwartz because he was owed rent and the Lonestars are deadbeats.

You missed a step:

Adobe needs to update.

Yes.

Adobe needs to update the updater.

I like to use Google Voice, some of my friends do not, some use AIM, some use texting only, some use Facebook.

Why is it any more or less shallow to demand that someone use YOUR particular choice of services (email, text, phone) and not consider that the friends might have their own preferences?

What if we said "NO PHONE FOR YOU."? How about no texting. I have texting blocked on my phone, are my friends shallow for wanting to use texting? Or preferring it as their primary method of contact?

Should we all go into Autistic mode just to cater to your preferred methods of communication?

Hopefully you came up with that on your own, because I like it, and will seek to propagate it.

I don't know if you intended the irony, but...

Citizen's perspective: It's always in your best interest to have a recording of your own actions. At least, as long as you can't be forced to give it up.

Cop's perspective: It's always in your best interest to have a recording of your own actions. At least, as long as you can't be forced to give it up.

That would be a valid point, if you got to choose the minimum instead of the maximum.

Instead, you are threatened with the maximum, and history shows that it is very likely in any trial situation (especially regarding copyright or CFAA issues) the prosecution/plaintiff is going to go for the maximum because you dared turn down a plea bargain. It is prudent to assume that you must defend yourself to a level commensurate to the maximum pentalty because you cannot know that the prosecution will not seek the maximum penalty. In fact, the prosecution has an interest in seeking the maximum penalty in almost all circumstances. In persuing (or threatening) to pursue the maximum penalty if a plea bargain is rejected, the prosecution makes the plea bargain a hard deal to refuse given the high rate of convictions. If the prosecutor was known to not pursue the maximum sentence, then the consequence to rejecting a plea bargain is reduced and the negotiating position of the prosecutor is weakened.

From the perspective of the person targeted for prosecution, without any explicit guarantee that you would not face the maximum sentence, it makes sense to plan your defense around the very likely situation that you would face the maximum sentence.

Aside from public backlash, there isn't really any reason a judge/prosecutor/jury must apply the minimum sentence. Without any real pressure to minimize the sentence, it might as well not exist.

The maximum sentence is the measure by which a law must be evaluated, because that is the measure by which the government is bounded.

Given all the excesses of the TSA, is not being allowed a small knife onto a plane really your biggest concern?

In response to an article that is discussing the TSA not allowing small knives onto planes? Yes.

If the article were about x-ray scanners, the knife issue would be of less concern, but from the perspective of this thread, yes it is the biggest concern.

And liters happens to have an easy 1/4 ratio with gallons.

So now you have easy conversions for approximations of distance, and volume.

I'm sure that people 'invented' vulcanized rubber long before Charles Goodyear as well. It's not unlikely that some latex got dropped in a fire at some point and discovered as the ashes were cleared. But if something is discovered and then forgotten, we really don't consider it a true discovery.

I have a computer at my house which has internal HDDs that have encrypted files, encrypted partitions,and some drives are completely encrypted. The computer is operational, and the drives mount/boot and are viewable via the OS.

I have no clue what the keys to those encrypted drives/files might be, even though the drives are in use. How is this possible?

1. I wanted to learn how encrypted files behaved. Could I just use the same key on an outer volume and hidden volume? Could I just copy the file or image to a different computer, install the encryption SW and open the files there? What if I filled the entire outer volume, would it overwrite the inner volume?
2. I wanted to learn how full disk encryption would behave if I installed an OS on it. How hard would it be? What does the disk look like when not encrypted? Did it have a clear formatting, or did it show up as unformatted space, etc.

So I created a lot of variants of encrypted containers, and recorded a WAV file of my voice along the lines of, "This container is for storing my financial info in a standalone encrypted file." "This is a test of full disk encryption for an OS.", etc...

Another contained a massive WAV file that I just left recording ambient noise until it exceeded the capacity of the encrypted container so I could watch how it would fail and if it would impact the data on the hidden volume.

I've long forgotten the keys to those files/drives, and I've never gotten around to deleting some of the encrypted containers or formatting the drives. Some were just 40GB drives which aren't useful to me anymore and I don't feel like opening up the case to pull them out. So there they sit, adding a few cents to my utility bill, useless and forgotten, but still encrypted and on my computer.

I'm quite sure that I will continue to find 'odd' WAV files which have been saved into my backup folders accidentally and will be discovered by my grandkids when they root through my records 50 years from now.

The point is, it's quite easy to have encrypted volumes sitting in active computer systems which you literally have forgotten both the key and the fact that the volumes exist in the first place.

As long as we aren't talking about post WWIII levels of tech, I don't see how this will be a problem.

Interpreting the data is trivial compared to preserving the data. As long as it isn't encrypted, getting useful data out of a format, even a long dead format on a long dead piece of equipment will be possible. Potentially hard and expensive, but possible.

Recovering data from formats which have been allowed to deteriorate is a much bigger problem because you aren't dealing with extracting data from a difficult medium, you are dealing with data that is no longer there at all! That's the problem with old tapes and other formats.

Specifically, there is basically nobody who properly markets Linux, so a lot of people have never heard of it and even those that have largely think it's a command-line only hardcore-geek thing

So of the people who have heard of Linux properly categorized it as a hardcore-geek thing? OK, perhaps not hardcore-geek, maybe even casual-geek, but certainly not a non-geek thing.

In my office, I'm the 'IT-guru' simply because I know how to fix the margin settings in MS Word or how to get an excel table to properly import into Powerpoint. THAT is technical wizardry to most people, so think about how non-geek friendly Linux really is.

Unless the marketing is cleverly disguised training-infotainment that teaches people the differences between what they do now, and how things work in Linux, most people will balk at something as simple as having the window min/max/close buttons on the left hand side of the window.

The only way I've found to ever successfully switch someone from one OS to another is to completely eliminate any possiblity for that person to use their original OS. Including myself.

Switching from iOS to Android? Had to switch to Verizon before they had the iPhone so my old iPhones were either sold or used as home remote controls.

Switching from WindowsXP to 7? Upgraded to 16GB of RAM, (some other incompatabilities as well)

Switching to Windows8? Installed on the 'kitchenPC' and..... oh who am I kidding. I need to get XP on that machine ASAP. Even with a multi-touch pad that damned thing drives me nuts.

Switching to macOS? Install Windows 8 on your kitchenPC.

I would alter your statement by substituting 'state' for 'society'.

Growing up in Pennsylvania has exposed me to some societies, communities, and some governing bodies which have forsaken violence to the point of being recognized by many countries as membership in those organizations being defacto proof of conscientious objector status. The Quakers and Mennonites(including the Amish) being the two main groups I am most familiar with. From time to time (and prior to the formation of the US), as governments formed to represent areas populated by these cultures/communities, non-violence was incorporated into their laws.

I grant you that I don't know how an actual Nation-state could exist without claiming a monopoly on violence (even if the exercise of that monopoly is to prohibit violence by all, including the government), but there are indeed societies which do exist, and have existed with non-trivial historical impact that have eschewed the application of violence.

Another way to look at it is this:

I rent an apartment. I do not own that apartment (I don't even own the furniture in that apartment, I'm renting that too) Yet after I read my mail, I put the things I want to hang onto for a while longer into a plain manila folder and leave it in the desk (which I do not own)

I would be quite angry to discover that just because my opened mail, left in a location I'm renting would be subject to searches simply because it wasn't specifically in a building which I specifically owned outright and didn't just rent/lease.

I think the fact that they can't just search a rented room without a warrant should have clued in the DoJ that a rented data storage medium should also require a warrant to search. Just because the cost to store data is very small doesn't mean that data is abandoned. I'm paying a company to archive and store it for me. I'm not paying them much (often just ad impressions), so I don't have much expectation that they will do a good job at preserving the data, but I intentionally left that data, by virtue of the fact that I didn't delete it, in their care. That they might be poor custodians of that data is irrelevant.

Every single email I intentionally do not delete is there because I want it to be there in case I desire to access it later and therefore not abandoned.