Correct. There is no U.S. law which compels the installation of a back door under a gag order. Gag orders are a thing, but they apply to _providing_ information to law enforcement, not collecting it in the first place.

There is something called lawful intercept which requires telecom infrastructure companies to install wiretapping points in their networks. These are openly installed, not under gag order. But it is possible for law enforcement to activate them with a warrant that's under a gag order. And again, these are in telecom infrastructure, not user applications.

The FBI did attempt to compel Apple to implement back doors in iPhones about a decade ago. The attempt ultimately FAILED in court.

Smallpox and polio only infect human beings. They may have seemed ubiquitous but compared to the mosquito they had a relatively small impact on the ecosystem.

You've investigated all the possible unintended consequences of eliminating a thoroughly ubiquitous insect from the planet? So you know for sure it's okay? Really?

The 737 MAX was reliable. Until it wasn't. We'll learn the full story in the accident investigation after the Falcon 9 loses its first crew. Until then we're both speculating.

Cool! Thanks for the bit of education there; I had no idea.

The Nazis were socialist the way North Korea is a "democratic republic." The political messaging diverts attention fro the reality. The political scientists tell us that the Nazis were right-wing, and the political scientists are correct.

This is where the confusion about the extreme political wings wrapping around to the other extreme comes from. Extreme right is totalitarian. Extreme left is anarchist. They only meet in battle.

The Space Shuttle flew for a lot longer than the Falcon 9 has existed before losing its first crew, and it did it with technology that's half a century less advanced. Let's see what the accident investigation turns up after the Falcon 9 loses its first crew.

Unless you seriously think it'll never happen? These are rockets we're talking about. Space travel is not especially safe. The astronauts are sitting atop many tons of explosives and hoping the energy moves the right direction.

It's called "fail fast engineering." Instead of navel-gazing about what could go wrong, you slap the thing together and test it. In the tests, things likely to go wrong in fact go wrong. So you fix them and test again. Repeat until things start going right. Turns out that repeatedly losing test vehicles is actually cheaper than the long, detailed engineering necessary to find the problems without losing as many test vehicles.

Great plan, right? Just one problem. There are high-probability failures and low-probability failures. The long, detailed engineering identifies both. Fail-fast only finds the failure modes which actually happen -- namely the high probability ones. And that's a big problem.

You see, there are a whole lot of unlikely failure modes. Vastly more than the number of high probability failure modes. So while there's only a small chance of encountering any particular low-probability failure mode, there's a strong chance of encountering -some- low-probability failure mode.

SpaceX has no idea what those low-probability failure modes are. They didn't do the long, detailed engineering that could identify them. They'll encounter the low-probability failure modes for the first time later on... when people are aboard.

You buy a business, you buy all contracts it has and have to honor them.

Not necessarily. Many times they do what's called an "asset purchase agreement." They buy all the business' assets, even its name, but they don't actually buy the business or any of its obligations. The obligations stay with the original owner and, hey, you're welcome to find and sue him.

Yes, but that was part of the nonsense. Shaping specific traffic doesn't work well and is rarely used outside the "enterprise", let alone used abusively.

I don't know what problem the lobbying-twisted FCC's rules attempts to solve either. I know what problem net neutrality was supposed to solve.

In short, monolithic providers like Verizon double-bill. They bill you for your packets and then they bill the person you're communicating with for your packets too. It's not like the mail where only one side pays. Both sides have to pay or neither gets served. Naturally, the side who pays more gets to define the nature and shape of the service both side get. As the end-user consumer, that isn't you.

There is an exception: Verizon is part of a cartel of about 20 Internet providers who trade traffic without charging each other. If as a Verizon customer you want to talk to someone buying service from elsewhere in the cartel, Verizon will only charge you. This process is called "peering."

Like the rest of the cartel, Verizon engages in "closed" peering. This means that small businesses and anyone Verizon can bully is excluded and must bend to the double-billing. Here's where net neutrality was supposed to act: by requiring "open" peering where Verizon would trade packets with anyone once *one* of their customers had paid them to do so. No more double-billing.

China knows they can convert their exports into assembly kits and transship them anywhere in the world for assembly, attachment of a "made in somewhere else" label and subsequent export to the United States. We can't do that because we make _branded_ products and everybody knows which brands are American.

It wouldn't be science fiction if it wasn't doing something science can't (yet) do. But there's a plausibility to science fiction, without which it's just fantasy.

In the Tron universe, everything is normal except for super-capable computers and a magic digitizing laser. The moment you break those rules, impose the simulation on the outside universe, you destroy the suspension of disbelief. It's just bad storytelling.

Thanks for reminding me about another reason I disliked Legacy.

Light cycle's wall trail slicing a police car in half?

The light cycles existed and worked the way they did because it was an arcade game Flynn wrote.

"Not disintegrating, Alan -- digitizing. While the laser is dismantling the molecular structure of the object, the computer maps out a holographic model of it. The molecules themselves are suspended in the laser beam."

Flynn in the electronic world was the "holographic model," not the physical molecules.