The company rushed to point out that security certifications from TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton are worthless in this situation.

Are you kidding me? There's only two bits different between 0 and 9. Why the hell would you waste time overwriting the entire byte?

You are 100% wrong. I have lived abroad, and know this from personal experience. But don't take my word for it, ask the IRS:

If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, the rules for filing income, estate, and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad. Your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you reside.

What you're missing is that, since US income tax rates are so ridiculously low, your foreign income tax credit is going to nearly or completely wipe out any income tax you might have otherwise owed to the IRS, especially if you live in a civilized country with social services paid for by income taxes. It's a pain to file a form saying you don't owe any money just because you happen to have been born in the US, and that overhead isn't really free, but it's a far cry from being double taxed. If you paid taxes overseas and paid the IRS, you were almost certainly doing something wrong.

Ian

And congratulations!

Now where that doesn't work is, say, drugs. ... It takes ... like a billion dollars to get a new drug on the market, so you either need to find something that is going to sell a billion dollars in six months or you need long-term patent protection.

I wonder if that's true. I know that existing pharmaceutical companies that operate in the existing patent environment spend billions of dollars looking for new drugs and so, to sustain themselves, they need long-term patent protection. I've heard what amounts to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that the drug companies are producing more symptom-controlling drugs for chronic conditions than they are cures. These conspiracy theories are appealing because a person that has to take expensive drugs to control a chronic condition for the rest of his life makes a lot more money for the drug company than someone that takes a cure for two weeks and is then cured so the theory "makes sense" regardless if it's true. I wonder, though, what sorts of drugs would be invented if the patent system were overhauled to shorten the monopoly? Maybe the next multi-billion-dollar penis pill for 70-year-old men won't be invented and, instead, we'll cure something. It'd be nice if it worked out that way, huh?

Ian

True, but "a willing lawyer" isn't a tough standard to meet. :-)

Still - in all seriousness - it's hard to imagine a jury who wouldn't be on his side.

If his employer was tracking him, it must have been for work purposes, right? So since he was on the clock, he should at least be paid his contracted rate for all the time he was tracked.

It's a bipartisan problem. Check out Senator Ron Wyden D-OR. Sure, he's done some great things lately for sanity in copyright and civil liberties. But he's also majorly in the pocket of Wall Street.

Plenty of circlers mentioned it. I saw posts on multiply, fb, g+...

Are you trolling? You said:

There has got to be a performance hit for "extending" garbage collection to files, sockets, and databases. How hard is it to realise you no longer need a resource and free it.

They haven't "extended garbage collection", they've introduced syntactic sugar. Instead of this (with real indenting in real life because you're not limited by Slashdot's lame commenting system):

File file = null;

try {
file = openAFile();

// operate on file, possibly causing an exception
}
catch (IOException e) {
// do whatever you like with e, possibly rethrowing
}
finally {
if (file != null) {
try {
file.close();
}
catch (IOException e) {
// what the hell do you do here?
}
}
}

You can have something like this:

try (File file = openAFile()) {
// operate on file, possibly causing an exception
}
catch (IOException e) {
// do whatever you like with e, possibly rethrowing
}

// file is closed here because the compiler has inserted
// the right epilogue for you, saving you boilerplate, preventing
// you from inserting the wrong boilerplate, and not impacting
// the GC in the slightest

So either you're trolling or "The Dawn Of Time" is right: you have no idea what you're talking about.

Ian

This means that guy I used to work with (known as "Hank the Blank") was just stupid, not chemically impaired. It's slightly depressing that big an idiot could exist naturally.

We can still get Texas a seventh flag by this time next year!

That's beautiful.

Her name is danah boyd (or danah michele boyd if you want to be completist). It seems ironic that an article on "real" names doesn't use danah's real name.

Ian

What a vapid response.

...the government has no business in growing like companies do...

The government doesn't have to grow in terms of people employed, buildings built, or services rendered for the growth argument proposed by the GP to work. The government could, in theory at least, use the growth provided by borrowing to enlarge the economy for the benefit of all, for example. One way to do that would be to subsidize private investments of various forms to cause more employment, better infrastructure, and perhaps higher standards of living.

...the US government is supposed to provide some clearly defined services...

If "clearly defined" were actually true, this debate wouldn't be happening; the people involved could consult the clear definitions and act on them. One root problem in US society (and I'm sure it's a problem in every society) is that the definitions are not clear enough and so different people interpret them differently.

...government expansion sounds a lot like the road to communism...

"Big government" is not the same as communism, or even "the road to communism", whatever that is. In fact, quoting Wikipedia: "A communist society would have no governments, countries, or class divisions". You're waving "communism" around like a weapon, trying to scare people. It's kind of embarrassing.

Ian