At times, this mechanical application also resulted in conclusions that are clearly ridiculou from any sane ethical perspective. His take on the rights of children is a prominent example, where he concludes that "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children".

Vodka was cheap and plentiful in the USSR, just FYI.

Congress can pass anything it damn well feels like and also why generally you can't challenge a law in court until it's 'harmed' you.

Legal doesn't mean morally right, just that's what the 'law' says, and the law clearly does say they can do this crap. Or at least that's what they tell us it says since until very very recently they haven't even let their interpretation of the law be public.

We have the same opinion of their constitutionality but until SCOTUS rules on them, they are the law and are what defines 'legal' in this country.

Because he knew that if there was an indiscriminate data dump, governments would use that to distract from the real meat. By getting professional journalists to digest the data into understandable stories, he ensured that would not happen. Also he feels details about specific operations or sites or whatever isn't really important to the debate, which is what he cares about the most.

Now that said, we'll have to see if he is happy with the current level of disclosures. My impression so far is that he has been very happy with how things worked out. But this is a guy who had EFF and Tor stickers on his laptop. If he knows Tor is broken and the Guardian do stories implying that it's not, it'll be interesting to see if he has any reaction to that. Right now he's lying low because he wanted to fade away so the stories focus on the material - and that's something he has done amazingly well.

I was waiting for someone to bring up the RAM alternative so I could ask my stupid question: If it's 8Gb, why didn't they just use DDRx instead of flash?

Because Windows already takes care of this with SuperFetch. After you load the OS it immediately caches the applications you use most often into available ram, and removes them when you actually USE that ram. The cached applications load instantly, and the hard drive is none-the-wiser.

In fact, there used to be a grand push to put as much DDR cache in hard drives as was cost-effective, but the performance improvements have really disappeared after 32MB. The fact is that people access far too wide a range of large data files, and the OS has been smart enough to keep everything it needs memory-resident for awhile now.

The SSHD is an attempt to handle the two major weaknesses of SuperFetch:

(1) Boot time is still limited by the speed of your hard drive.

(2) Application loads are cached, but not data I/O. They are also removed from cache when memory is needed by other applications.

It does a surprisingly good job for such a small price premium. As long as you're not doing more server-oriented loads (i.e. streaming media to multiple users or serving large numbers of Bittorrent users) the non-volatile cache works well to compliment SuperFetch. It's a good compromise solution for people who don't want to pay the premium for an SSD + hard drive.

Sadly, no it isn't illegal anymore. It should, however, be ruled unconstitutional once we manage to pry a case up to a competent SCOTUS (and I'm not sure we have one currently).

A few days ago a well known Tor developer was getting angry on Twitter because he thought the Guardian was holding back a story on Tor due to redacting requests and pressure from governments.

The presentations cited date from 2007. That's 6 years ago and tells us diddly squat about their current capabilities. All it tells us, really, is that in 2007 they had developed some working techniques in the lab, and were talking about the same kinds of attacks that were being discussed in public. It also tells us they use custom malware - but that was already revealed previously.

The Snowden files contain a complete copy of GCHQ's internal wiki. It seems highly unlikely that there is no further information on Tor after 2007. Rather, it feels like the British and American governments treat their capabilities against Tor as one of their most valuable secrets and applied significant pressure, the resulting compromise being "you can make a story about Tor, as long as it's based on old information that is no longer relevant".

The 'evil capitalists' aren't the small businessman made good. They are the massive international conglomerates that buy laws that prevent others from competing against them - and end up paying nothing in taxes on top of it.

.... however, you can install apps from outside the Play Store on Android.

It's also rather duplicitous. This study shows a graph that clearly indicates a bloodbath in recorded music sales, and then says "the drastic decline of revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence". The reason for this conclusion is that concert revenues went up. But perhaps those revenues would have gone up even in the absence of widespread music piracy. Regardless, it is irrelevant - the record labels (which are remember fairly small companies whose clients are actual artists) predicted a drastic decline in the thing that suddenly became easy to steal, which is exactly what happened. It does not change the brutal fact that income from recorded music halved once mass piracy became easy thanks to fast internet and MP3.

Does anyone believe the world consumes half the amount of recorded music as it did in 1999? No.

The debate on piracy is important because although music felt the sharp edge of the sword first, ultimately all creative industries have to suffer from it. OK, so parts of the music business that happen to put on good concerts might have been able to replace losses from piracy by travelling more. But TV shows don't put on concerts. Movies don't put on concerts. Video games certainly don't.

Trying to make an argument about piracy and copyright based purely on the fact that (parts of!) the music business found ways to replace lost revenue is pointless - it ignores all the other industries that rely on working copyright.

It should further be noted that the standards that are set by the feds in Canada are not binding on the provinces. They have to adhere to them to get federal funding for their healthcare systems, but if they don't like it they can always reject the money and run the system as they see fit (or not have one at all). The feds can do nothing about it because the Constitution Act explicitly assigned healthcare to the provinces.

The sad thing is that the half/half split is also very much artificial. There's no reason why foreign policy, economics, and social issues like abortion have to all be lumped together. For that matter, there's no reason why completely orthogonal social issues, such as abortion and gun control, also have to be lumped together. Yet, in my experience, Americans overwhelmingly tend to side with one of the parties based on one or two issues they particularly care about, and then blindly follow whatever policies that party promotes.

Personally, I would be perfectly fine with removing the corporate income tax, and then jacking the individual capital gains tax way, way up (like from 50% up, progressive scale).

PFS would not help in this case. The FBI asserted that a pen register (which is not a warrant and merely requires the government to assert "relevance") is sufficient to obtain the SSL keys for an entire service, because they choose to implement it via an SSL interceptor. LavaBit argued the pen register does not grant such broad power, so then they went and got a search warrant for it instead.

Obviously if the FBI has the SSL key, they can impersonate LavaBit and intercept everything at that point. It helps only to prevent the NSA reading their old packet logs.

The news here is not change your crypto - it doesn't work in the face of the $5 wrench attack (more accurately, $1000 fine per day). The news is that the FBI believes (and the court agreed) that the only thing they have to do to obtain an SSL key is assert that it is "relevant" to an ongoing investigation, an extremely low standard that is almost meaningless.

A CA just verifies identity. Compromising one lets you mint fake SSL certs, if you can do a MITM attack, but it's the kind of thing that would eventually be noticed.

Also there are efforts underway to fix this through the "certificate transparency" initiative.