It has a feature which captures and sends a screen shot back to the govt every time someone opens an application. Someone has to review these screen shots to be sure that there is no "Dictator Kim is a goof'' message showing.

How many minutes until someone takes a picture of their butt and sends that in to the government recepticle? And how much longer until there is an app for that, perhaps pre-loaded with the infamous goat sex guy [no link]? And would it not be nice of that government repository were publicly posted in the west?

I have a more realistic user id. Really, you guys cannot manage to sprint for more than 4 digits. Sad.

I do, however, still use a text-based mail user agent. It's called "elm", and it has the interesting feature that it simply does not run those zip files, java files, and other mailware that gets past the filters. Also it seems to be a lot faster than the graphical mail user agents.

And yes, you will please get off my lawn.

I am not sure they are really relevant any more. Their headline business, search, gets about 15 hits per day, and a third of them are typos for people thinking they want Yandex.

I may be making up these statistics, or I may have gotten them thanks to an efficient yahoo search.

What are they going to do when the terrorists realize that the long queues waiting to get through the security checkpoints are a ripe target?

Not sure. I always assumed that the terrorists had a part in designing the unconveniences at airports, shows, and the like. Either foreign terrorists or job-preserving bureaucrats; it is sometimes hard to distinguish them. For either group, the idea is to give a large collection of easy targets.

A later committee chooses which targets get hit this month. Sometimes the job-preservation group chooses: no one gets blown up, but everyone has to pay extra taxes for the safety.

the government is also incapable of stopping every murder and ensuring that no one at this very minute

Right you are. But at the same time, the govt is not specifically barring you from committing murder. Instead, murder is a crime with well understood elements. It's forbidden to me, to you, and to the fellow with the pictures stored on his devices.

The bar in this case is against one person, applies to an ill-defined set of images, and penalizes what would otherwise be legitimate, to wit, possession of his electronic devices and the content of their storage.

It is worse because of the fuzzy lines: what images should she control, and what may be ``sufficiently innocent'' that she should not. And what if he was running MS Windows, so the images have already leaked out beyond his control? Can the court compel the impossible, the re-taking of data which are ``in the wild'' already?

This is limited to intent. When some worm finds the supplosedly removed files in some sort of ``recycle'' storage, how shall we deal with it? Is it contempt because he foolishly believed the forbidden data were gone?

secret court that rubber stamps everything it sees

Not quite. In the 30+ years that it has existed, it did partially sort of turn down a government request. Specifically, it required that the government have its spooks watch its spooks to be sure that they did nothing untoward.

This burdensome restriction led to the activation of the FISA appeals court, which of course said that the FISA court was wrong to deny the govt what it wanted. In re: Seaked Case 02-001, 310 F.3d 717.

I don't think you're likely to be modded down for insulting lawyers on slashdot.

At least not when we do not have any mod points with which to moderate you back down into the mud.

The GP wasn't claiming that Oprah is so incredibly powerful that she tops the U.N. in influence,

I'd have a hard time making a compelling case that the Soil and Water district did not top the U.N. in actual power.

I'm sure that the outcome in the UK will not govern, and it might not even be considered particularly persuasive.

Remember that UK lacks any sort of useful constitution. The closest thing they have to such authority dates from the 1200s, and I don't think there was much concern for public observation or photography at that time.

The various states seem to generally follow a rule that, if you are in a place where you have a right to be, you are allowed to look and photograph. There are some exceptions: if your flash is disruptive, or if you have managed some sort of creative peeping-tom-ism, you may not be able to proceed.

I'll bet you do not have the right to photograph an arrest.

Sure you do. If you are standing in a place where you have a right to be, you may look or photograph as you will, so long as you do not cause a disturbance.

Once you have taken the picture, you are free to publish it. There can be some problems for the person photographed; some female celebrities with poor judgment have been photographed exiting cars, in short skirts, and having forgotten to wear underwear. Other people have been photographed at inopportune times, such as while they were robbing stores or while they were being arrested.

Sometimes these pictures make it harder to obtain a jury which is not already somewhat familiar with the case. I recall a football player who was photographed fleeing the police who were trying to arrest him, for instance, and it was very difficult to find jurors who were unfamiliar with the matter.

Photographs can also be useful to defendants. Imagine, for instance, a situation where a friend of the defendant had taken video of the entire event and it showed conclusively that no crime had occurred.