Absent any proof there was child porn on the drives the suspect couldn't be compelled to decrypt them to provide that evidence.

The FBI however was free to try and decrypt the drives.

After proving that drives at least contained some child porn it was no longer possible.

Imagine the same scenario with a house. The police think you have a grow op. But they don't have any actual proof of a grow up. They have a power bill, show up at your door and you say 'sorry, I run a server farm, not a grow op, no you cannot come in'. The police not believing this story keep snooping around, they watch you bring in lamps and fertilizer and numerous suspicious people bringing packages out. Eventually they get some sort of valid evidence that you have at least one growing illegal plant in your house. Now they can get a warrant, and you have to let them in.

You don't have to provide the police a key to your house, unless they can convince a judge there is definitely something illegal hidden behind your front door. Then you're boned.

My father taught me binary in 1971 when I was eight years old. He showed up one evening with black marbles and the bottom half of an egg carton. He had learned this from one of the original APL greybeards who attended his church. My father having himself dropped out of engineering to switch to theology had an interest in these things. Binary itself was easy (easier than learning to read an analog clock face). What took another week or so was puzzling out that binary was just a representation of the abstract notion of the integers. I wanted to learn more about computers, but hardly any books existed. Two years later I had pestered my father enough to bring home four books from the University of Calgary library. He said he had brought most of the books that seemed even valuely accessible. Most of these were stupid books full of pictures of shiny IBM consoles. I pitched them only my bedroom floor in disgust.

One actually taught some programming, mainly from the flowchart perspective. I tried to write a flowchart of getting up in the morning to go to school and all the decisions involved. This quickly got out of hand (I was fated to never become good at getting up in the morning). I concluded a month later that flowcharts were intellectually damaged: too bushy for the paltry logic they managed to encapsulate.

In 1976 I got my hands on 8008/8080 datasheets. The dumb thing took three power supplies and was far to expensive for me to ever own. I also soon acquired a TTL data book and realized I could design my own micro-controller from discrete logic. I designed such a thing on paper in the back of English Literature class. I like literature, but she was very boring and she never told my parents when I didn't hand in my assignments, so as far as I was concerned this class was a spare.

My grade six math teacher had allowed four members of the class to work at our own speed, after testing us with arithmetic quizes on a sequence of recorded tapes. I very nearly finished the last and fastest tape (very fast) but got ahead of myself trying to multitask the current question with a question I had missed. I didn't want less than a perfect score and wasn't mature enough to let that one question go. Then I jumbled five questions in a row trying to remember all five at the same time. I had never experienced not keeping up in math class before.

It was nice to be left to my own devices, but he compensated for his largess by making us write out in full nearly every darn exercise at the end of every chapter. I could pretty much read a Heinlein book on the side while doing 100 metric conversions long-hand. My progress was rate limited mainly by my pencil. By the end of the year I had completed the grade nine algebra textbook.

If my grade seven teacher had let me stay on the same track, I would have completely high school algebra by xmas. But he insisted that I stay with the rest of my classmates doing fractions again, or some rot. This bugged the hell out of me because the jocks with talent got special attention, and math is even worse than athletics as something where you can go a lot further if you start young. Just watched Proof the other night. Hopkins: How many days did you lose? How many!!. Days? I lost fucking years.

In 1978 I finally got my hands on more than a TI-30. My school bought a TRS-80 with 4kB of system RAM and 7/8kB of video RAM (16 rows of 64 characters by seven bits). This was to save ONE whole 1kBx1 memory chip. (The font ROM actually had lower case characters, but the memory bit that drove this pin wasn't there.) If the msb was 0, you got 64 different printable characters (not including lower case). If the msb was 1, the lower six bits controlled a 3x2 pixel block in the font ROM (making 48x128 pixels total, if you chose to treat this as a bit-mapped display).

I was also given an SC/MP homebrew by a local electronics instructor. He taught me hex in five minutes (but neglected twos complement for negative numbers). This was nothing but toggle switches (ten, for the address) and eight buttons to set individual bits (one button to clear the location). I had an extremely frustrating night trying to puzzle out how the branch instruction worked (not immediately realizing that twos-complement was based on the address of the instruction that followed). The next year I had an APL account on the university computer system, having taken calculus early. By then I had disassembled much of the TRS-80 BASIC in ROM and found an undocumented cassette tape routine for loading programs coded in Z80 assembly language. I wrote a Galaga-style game in Z80 assembly language using a nasty assembler I whipped up in BASIC. Since I had memorized most of the opcodes by then, it only handled the label arithmetic. Putting in symbolic opcodes would only have made the program slower and less reliable to read off the horrible cassette tape drive, which usually took five passes for the simplest program.

At university they were forcing us to take COBOL and Fortran for the CO-OP job market. My roommate and I both had Z80-based systems of our own by then. His was a Heathkit. Mine was the Osborne. The IBM PC did not yet exist, and I had never fallen in love with Apple (that continues).

One day he hands me a zip-locked baggy with a floppy inside (actually floppy). It was a C compiler from the Software Toolworks. What a breath of fresh air compared to Pascal! I was hooked on C forever after, or at least until 1996 when I discovered the C++ STL and template metaprogramming. These days I mainly program in C/C++ and R (my APL heritage dies hard).

Two years later (still in the early 1980s) I actually programmed on a Xerox Dorado for an hour or so when a classmate had a workterm at Xerox Parc and I biked to Stanford down the west coast.

There weren't many major outside influences: Knuth, Dijkstra, Hoare, Wirth, Plauger, Iverson, Brooks, Bertrand Meyer, K&R, Walls, and one paper by Michael Jackson. One book I beat to death was an early book on writing portable C programs. Don't recall the author just now, but I had it around the time I purchased my first 386 based system from an unknown mail-order company named Gateway 2000. That was the book more than any other that taught me how to program professionally. The next large system I wrote was ported from MSDOS to QNX in a very short time (the glorious Watcom compiler presiding). Man that feels good after wading through so much shit code.

#define ISUCK 42-1

Good god man, get some sideview mirrors on that expression!

for (i = 0; i < ISUCK^2; ++i) never_get_there();

Amazingly, ISUCK is a fixed point under exponentiation.

On a side note, my last completed program was a Pebble watch face written in C. Good times.

They always include a ludicrous^2 proposal to distract the discussion from ludicrous^(3/2) which itself exists to ensure that ludicrous^(5/4) is barely noticed.

While those are all legitimate points, the 'google retaining ownership' part may change when it becomes a consumer product. Right now it's in a testing phase, so google owning it makes sense. Whether they stick with that plan for commercial release will be harder to say.

Broadly I think is the question of what can google glass add that won't be a giant privacy invasion. You don't particularly need ads, some other company could just try and sell a device. But the ability to discretely record a video or take a picture anywhere is bad enough with cell phones and private investigator cameras wearable glasses just adds a new level to that. Just sticking your cell phone screen in front of your face isn't much of a problem, but to go beyond that its impossible for the data gathered to not represent a serious privacy threat (insofar as cell phone tracking isn't already).

As I pointed out, they actually do provide a service with it. They own it, so repairs are free, and because it's a public (i.e. government owned) corporation, service happens quickly with someone who actually knows what he's doing.

The downside of course is that you are paying for something that you might not ever need. It depends a lot on your financial situation and risk tolerance. If your water heater can be replaced for 300 dollars that's different than 1300 too. Depends on a lot of factors.

Boy will you be laughing at yourself in a couple of years when you look back on how you thought a few dozen TB of data a month was like, some big deal.

Boy will we all be laughing at you a decade from now for predicting that Windows would expand to fill any hard drive ever invented, unless you're the kind of person where no-one can see inside your house because your collection of yellowing newspapers has taken possession of every vertical surface.

There will come a day where rendering a ROTK tribute will be an afternoon school project. That decade is not this decade.

We're at the point where we should be measuring bandwidth in dBA where 10x energy is perceived as 2x loudness.

The hot water heater is monitored/owned by the local utility, and they monitor your water usage (total) as well. Ontario canada, several cities, and it was the same in New Brunswick when I was living there briefly, this procedure has worked in. Also, when the liner of my mothers hot water heater disintegrated and there were liner bits spewing out of the taps she just called the local utility and they just came over and replaced the heater later that day. No (added) cost.

We have the same for electricity and natural gas (methane). Occasionally the guys who check the meters for electricity or methane read the wrong one, or read the meter wrong and we get called too. The meters are read remotely and if there's an unexpected spike we get a phone call, but they come and check on them to see that they aren't tampered with a couple of times a year.

If we have a leaking hot water tap the water company notices after a full month after it started and calls us as our hotwater usage spikes and our bill is way up.

How many users know the difference between 10TB and 10MB? Legal fine print is there for a reason, for those of us who actually do know the difference. For everyone else confusing the issue is unlikely to be helpful.

Still different pots at different tax rates.

You can make a serious discussion out of which income groups are hurt more or less by federal versus state expenditure in different places.

Every major country in the world has various levels of government, even the UK which is relatively centralized still has city, county and now the national but sub national parliaments in wales and scotland.

The feds pay the state, the state pays the county, the county pays the city. Yes, if you're a taxpayer from anywhere outside of Utah or one of the areas attached to their grid it doesn't really matter to you where exactly the money is being spent. But if you're the poor dude in area of this facility where you'd be asked to subsidize a federal facility because it's in your district (including potentially the employees who work there), you'd much rather it be spread around to more people.

In general though a private company will have guaranteed deals, they will have a contract controlling the price increases they could face for some period of time, and they (like the feds) can always leave. The federal government like a megacorporation can also play political hardball, and say you know what, we're willing to spend 20 or 30 million dollars (or 300 million or 1.5 billion) to relocate this facility to save 2.4 million a year and we'll take all those jobs and all the development you got and leave you with nothing.

What does this story have to offer?

The world is a competitive place, except when it isn't. And why is that, exactly? Why do social insects exist? Why, for that matter, do social mammals exist? We wouldn't even have social networking unless the roots of cooperation in our genetics and culture are nearly as deep (and indispensable) as nature red in tooth and claw.

Competition will never not be present, which provides an excellent enclosed gondola for all the slippery-slopers out there. How nice is that? You can never be entirely wrong arguing that competition will always exist. Safe! Secure! You'll never say anything insightful, either, about how competition self-regulates into ritualized displays of dominance/submission without goring every participant.

You are free to ignore a congressional subpoena and tell us about the experience.

It does go through the attorney general and a grand jury, so you can try and defend yourself though.

Congress has lawful subpoena power in the US.

Failure to comply would be a contempt of congress

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress

Tell that to the thousands of people walking around with them. Not released to the general public, not released at a price for the general public, still in a prototype phase they are still in the wild and could pose a threat to public safety. Imagine if they had a serious risk of catching fire for example.

Congress can still compel them to provide anything they ask for as part of their powers to make laws.

Drone strikes aren't any place.

They're any place that won't shoot back, either because they are unable or have agreed not to. Drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have to this point been done with the (sometimes secretive) consent of the host country.

If the US tried to launch drone strikes in Saudi or India or the like they might get one off, before the Saudi's or Indians started shooting the drones down.

I need a robot to help me proof read my forum posting.

depends how much more crap we have.

Not just design, but sales too. Think about the narrow world of video games. There are more video games than you have time to play, if you want to play video games at all. There's huge potential in having lots of sales expertise on aggregating what kind of game(s) you personally might want to play. What kind of car/toast/dishwasher/clothes etc. to buy.