And just how is anyone supposed to evaluate the soundness of the legal opinions rendered by the FISA courts since their legal opinions are sealed?

The FISA courts have produced significant rulings and new interpretations to the 4th Amendment that no one but a select few are privy to. Are we to have a furtive judicial system where only a select few actually even know what our laws say and mean?

Secrecy, of course -- this is always required in war and intelligence activities. But seeing as how he fought against general warrants issued by the crown, I have no doubt that he would be horrified at the scope and breadth of the NSA's broad collection policies.

For a robust demonstration regarding the need for (public) whistle blowers just look at nefarious characters like J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon who used the government's intelligence apparatus as a sword against their personal and political enemies. What place is there in this logic for whistle blowers who should expose those who are acting outside the legal confines of our great nation (e.g. Hoover, Nixon, etc.)?

I hear Somalia's quite the libertarian paradise.

To believe that libertarians are simply anarchists (Somalia is in a state of anarchy) is to fall into error. Libertarians, almost without variance, believe in property rights and common law. This sort of thing necessitates peace officers, national defense, and court systems (among other things).

It is true however, that Libertarians believe in a far more limited government than most people.

I worked in electronic discovery for a time which deals with ferreting out electronic information during trials. Doing something in the manner you're pondering would likely get you into a lot more trouble than you're counting on.

During your trial the judge the judge would likely find efforts to destroy to be in bad faith and give the jury an instruction to make an adverse inference about the evidence you destroyed. Basically this means that whatever bad facts the prosecutor claims were on the hard drive (with a modicum of fact and or educated guessing backing it up), the jury would assume those bad things were found to be true during trial. there is a small chance that the judge might invoke a default ruling (i.e. you're guilty).

You would likely be found guilty of both the original charges (whatever they were) and destruction of evidence and whatever else the prosecutor can come up with (which is likely to be lengthy). In general it is a bad idea to try to outsmart the court or play fast and loose with evidence. Very few things will tick off a judge faster or more violently than the destruction of evidence in bad faith (i.e. you meant to destroy or hide evidence to avoid getting caught).

Then I would use an email address with periods and filter any "periodless" emails to spam. The spammers don't know how you're really using your email address (with or without periods). In either case you can still filter them.

Nothing but you could use an email address with periods 'buford.pusser@gmail.com' and send everything without periods 'bufordpusser@gmail.com' to spam. Or if you've already started using the address without periods you can flag certain senders as safe and then filter the rest to spam (while starting to give out your 'new' email address with periods).

While not exactly an implementation of a throwaway address, you can use plus sign addressing (subaddressing, i.e. name+slashdot@gmail.com) with Google. I use it for every site I sign up on so I can see who gives out my email address so I can filter everything from that alias into the trash.

Additionally you can also place a period anywhere in the user portion of your email address and gmail will route it to your address.

For instance, if your email address is "bufordpusser@gmail.com", you can also give out "buford.pusser@gmail.com", "b.u.ford.pusser@gmail.com", etc. and all of them will route to your original address.

yeah, it took 2.5sec to unfreeze the page while it was loading on my crappy firefox.

The secure version still uses the more traditional approach if the new feature makes your machine cough and wheeze.

This new DRM system is essentially a virtual dongle and will likely hold up about as well as the old DRM systems (i.e. not very well at all). The remote server will be emulated or the bits of code which check for the dongle will be cracked.

I don't see how this system is all that different from early attempts at DRM in the 80's other than potentially annoying their legitimate customers a lot more. That and there are a lot more skilled crackers now than in the 80's.

True, insulation saves a lot of money and if green mandates stopped there I would not mind nearly as much. However, in the example that initially started this thread concerning putting money into green research (solar, wind, etc.) it would almost certainly take money out of the pockets of the poor. Unfortunately, when people start making rules they find it hard to stop because they enjoy the power and authority. :-)

Thank you for the amazingly civil discussion. They have become rare on Slashdot lately. It is always fun to speak with people who have a very different perspective. Have a great day and all that. :-)

Aren't you making life a little worse than it would be otherwise by pursuing a non-optimal solutions? While I applaud your intentions, we must also consider what we're sacrificing. Consider the working poor, don't you think it is especially unfair to them that they have to pay a lot more for their heating bill (relative to their income) because society has decided to solve a problem which may or may not exist? Society is in essence, taking money out of their pocket that they could otherwise spend on more practical things.

Assuming that is the case (i.e. man made global warming is statistically insignificant or totally false), don't you think that the same money could have been better spent in other areas of research instead of solving for a nonexistent problem?

The truth is no one really knows what the real percentage is regarding pirate games since, as far as we know, it has never been properly studied. Also, piracy does not matter nearly as much as lost sales. The 11 year old kid who has no money (and other similar groups) is not a lost sale and the gaming industry should not care about them too much. We're totally in the dark regarding lost sales since the gaming industry no idea what this number is. Either the gaming industry execs don't enough care to know what the number is, or they know the real numbers and believe it is more effective to spout fictional lost sales numbers. For myself, either answer is completely deplorable.

Brain dead measures such as the ones Ubisoft is apparently enacting will likely only cause them greater expense (infrastructure and DRM costs) and drive more people to pirate their games. It's a shame really, I used to really like some of the games they published.