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.

Not always possible. And even when it is, nothing is assured. I've checked in within 1 minute of the start period and had over 100 people ahead of me. Unassigned seating is absolutely the reason I refuse to fly southwest, I will happily pay more to assure I get my aisle seat.

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.

Nobody I know who used an Oculus even wants one of those. VR got hyped for a moment then died yet again. Its still a solution looking for a problem. It doesn't work for AR (which require you to actually see the world) and VR is a niche thing that most gamers don't even want, and that's its only usecase.

Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto were both written by people who claimed to be experts. Claiming that some book written by some nutjob is spouting bullshit doesn't make it true. Which in your heart you know, which is why you're talking about a book without citing any of the facts or arguments the book provides.

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.

You can have a walled garden with Apple or Google. Just stay with their ecosystem. Forced walled gardens on hardware you bought are anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and should be illegal. If you want that, your choice is to buy whichever you want and just never install another app store.

It goes beyond cities. Some neighborhoods have specific taxes/fees to pay for local improvements. Figuring out the tax rate at a particular location is actually a business in and of itself.

No, your AppleID and GoogleID only serve this purpose if you're stupid enough to allow it to. And they can (and do) do the same thing on desktops. And yes, my windows machine can and does receive all the notifications my Android phone does. You're just making shit up.

The only difference between a phone and a computer is the phone has a cellular radio in it. And that's not even 100%- an Android tablet may not have a cellular radio, and I've had laptops that did.

No, you should have a choice to be in a walled garden or not on any device. Now if you like Apple's garden, that's fine. Don't install any other app store. I expect that's the route the vast majority would go. But there's no reason to tie hardware choice to the store choice. And allowing them to do so is anti-competitive, dangerous to the market for software makers (Apple has many time banned apps because they decided they wanted to make a similar app), and causes increased prices for consumers (there's no competition on those percentage cuts by Apple). Not allowing competition harms the consumer, with no benefit.