The reason we have a months-long budgeting process is that Congress is basically two Committees with more then 500 members, and they aren't run under Robert's Rules of Order. They are run under two different sets of rules, which are completely unique. When one of the Houses decides to delay things there isn't a lot you can do.
The issue in this case is that the Speaker is dictator of what the House of Representatives gets to vote on. He can only be over-ridden by a) firing him, or b) get a lar ge proportion of the House to sign a Discharge Petition. But discharge petitions on bills you just wrote on Monday, because you were convinced that nobody would shut the government down, CAN'T be considered until 30 days after Monday. Discharge petitions on older bills are possible, but when the Democrats tried one the 20 or so Republicans who claimed they'd support a "clean bill" decreed that this discharge petition didn't count as a clean bill.
The problem seems to be the GOP members are convinced that if they don't support the Speaker in every way that matters the Tea Party will murder them in the next primary. Since ethics rules exist, Obama can't just say "Dude, if you vote for this bill Apple board member Al Gore will totally take care of you."
Moreover most of them actually believe that shutting the government down is the Right Thing to do because a) they actually believe ObamaCare is Evil, and b) they actually think that they'll convince enough Democrats to support a delay of ObamaCare to delay ObamaCare. To them trading a few months of government services for a delay of ObamaCare is just common sense.. OTOH the Democrats are equally adamant that ObamaCare is a Great Thing Which Will Save America, that delaying it is Evil, and that getting no government for three months in exchange for not delaying ObamaCare for a year is a great idea. And if anybody was willing to give on either of these points he wouldn't have made it through a Primary.
The so-called Hastert Rule has been broken in the sense that most Republicans ended up voting against a proposal on the floor, but it has not been broken in the sense that most House Republicans actually opposed bringing said proposals to a vote. Conservatives are quite happy to go on Fox bitching about how they opposed {inevitable policy} with every tool at their disposal, despite the fact that they clearly didn't. One tool at their disposal is firing Boehner, and they didn't firew Boehner.
It's really easy for them to say that because they know it's not coming to a vote. Most House Republicans have decided that the Hastert Rule is appropriate for this mess, therefore Boehner cannot put it up for a vote until most House Republicans want it up for a vote, therefore it 20-30 House Republicans can get on TV loudly proclaiming none of this is their fault and jack-squat will happen.
Military equipment has always been anthropomorphized by the troops. Ships are actually named by the government. Historically tanks and aircraft were named, frequently with the name painted on the nose. This is partly because top-of-the-line military hardware pushed to the edge of it's performance envelope (ie: training) usually has a personality (ie: some idiot over-tightened a bolt on Tank A by 2%, so when exactly these three things happen there's a rattle just to the gunner's left, but on Tank B that bolt is 1% loose and the rattle happens all the damn time), but mostly it's because when your entire job is to work with something for 8 hours a day you anthropomorphize the damn thing. Your monkey-brain just won't accept anything this complex is simply a tool, therefore your soul is convinced Tank A rattles at the gunner because it doesn't like it when you do those three things, but Tank B is a cantankerous schmuck. And when the Nazis blow up Tank B you miss it. For like 30 seconds. Then you'll jump for joy because the replacement, Tank C, is a newer model with a bigger gun and you haven't figured out what makes it rattle yet.
This is something that everyone deals with. Us geeks get irrationally attached to computers. Normal people get attached to cell phones and cars.
It's kinda interesting that it's happening to robots now, too, but it's not exactly surprising.
It's a bit stronger then that. You work with a tool, as your primary tool, 8 hours a day for a couple years and you get attached to it. Not so attached that you get irrational, but attached enough that you go "aww, I liked that robot" and sulk for 30 seconds when it dies. And then you're fine.
Most slashdotters would probably be excessively pissed off if somebody stole their computer, even if they knew the insurance company was gonna give them a new one with better specs in 24 hours. This is pretty much the same thing.
Tankers get attached to their tanks. AF Pilots know which plane in the squadron they like best. Infantrymen get attached to their weapons. Officially none of these tools is allowed to be named, but a) that doesn't stop people from thinking of Serial #XNF370952 as "the one that saved my ass," b) Navy ships are actually named, and c) back when they were allowed to name vehicles things the Army Air Corps functioned fine.
They shed a tear when it gets blown up, then they patiently wait for a new one.
I think you're over-simplifying business a lot when you claim "every business ever" sucks money from other businesses. Economic growth is a thing that exists. Apple really takes advantage of this by putting together new ideas (granted, frequently those ideas don't originate in Cupertino) into new products and creating sectors. They frequently end up putting people out of business, but generally the people who get put out-of-business aren't their direct competitors. They're either in completely different sectors (ie: graphics people who didn't switch to computers in the 80s), or sell to a different slice of the market (RIM, Palm, etc.). Amazon is much different then Apple in that all of us can name a major, Fortune-500, US Company that went out-of-business mostly due to it's inability to compete with Amazon: Borders. All of us have heard of another direct Amazon competitor that is blaming some of it's recent troubles on competition from Amazon: Walmart. That's not bad business, illegal, or even unethical behavior on Amazon's part; but it definitely reduces consumer choice if the only bookstore in town goes out of business.
I never said Apple should not be punished, that the Judge has punished Apple enough, or that Amazon should be punished. What I said was that I am very troubled by the level of market-power Amazon is acquiring. Apple's response to this market-power was illegal, and did deserve to be punished.
I wouldn't mind if the Judge had ordered Apple to let Amazon/BN/etc. sell eBooks in their iPad apps without the 30% Apple Tax, but a lot of the crap the government was asking for just seemed to be incredibly stupid from an anti-trust standpoint. eBooks online right now are Amazon/Apple/BN/Kobo. There is no other option. BN is hobbled by it's physical stores. If Apple gets hobbled by a judgement then eBooks become de facto a competition between Amazon and Kobo, which basically means an Amazon monopoly. Online video is subscription streaming services (aka: Netflix plus a bunch of coalitions of content producers), Amazon, and Apple. I can't stand streaming video services. Gut Apple's ability to negotiate price deals with studios and then my market choice is reduced to Amazon, Amazon, and Amazon.
Keep in mind that the fines penalty phase of the trial hasn't happened yet. According to a commentator on Ars technica's thread the footnotes of the decision indicate the financial penalty phase will be in May. As for Apple currently doing this with other content, it's unlikely it would work with other content because other content-producers aren't going to agree to increase retail profit margins at their own expense to screw some third party. It's not like the movie studios are paranoid that Netflix will drop their products if they fail to kiss the ring. Music retailers might, but the third party they'd want to screw is Apple. Moreover if Apple does try any of these things within the next one to five years there will be a government nabob sitting in on the board meeting where they agree to do this, which will make it very hard for them to do so.
As for "carefully organized screwing over of consumers," that's what the DoJ thought it convicted Apple of. But the Judge seems to be more convinced Apple carefully organized a screwing of Amazon, which had the extremely illegal side-effect of screwing consumers. And if that's the case the way you prevent future occurrences isn't by gutting Apple, it's by ensuring there's a guy at the Board Meeting who can say "Morons, if you do this business move it will screw consumers and I will tell the Judge to fine you $8 Billion."
BTW, I sincerely doubt Apple's fine will be as high as you'd like. Apple has more revenue in a quarter then consumers spend on books in a year, a lot of that revenue is profit, and they're sitting on most of the profit. Only a fraction of the book-revenue is from eBooks, and a fairly large proportion of what consumers paid for those eBooks would have been paid anyway because even Amazon insisted on charging $9.99 for books. Since any fine has to be proportional to the extra money consumers paid, it's likely the fine will be closer to $250 million then $2.5 Billion.
OTOH, the Judge may decide that since he was so nice to them in their business practices he has no choice but to be a major hard-ass in terms of the fine.
The price advantage limited run books have is more supply-and-demand then a judgement on the quality of the books. The Complete Works of Shakespeare has been been published thousands of times, so there are probably hundreds of millions of copies floating around, which means it's fairly easy to find one. A first-run copy of an obscure title from a specialty publisher in a niche field probably only had a couple thousand copies printed, many of which are off the market (they're hiding in an attic, library, destroyed, etc.), which means that if you want a copy you're gonna be paying cash for it.
For example, I have a book on what to do if your early Mac spits out an error at you instead of starting up. It has detailed info on what chips to replace. I paid a lot more for that then I would any book on a topic of interest to people who have never dabbled in that particular obscure hobby, simply because nobody has made any new copies since the mid-80s and early 90s.
I actually suspect self-published non-fiction books might be of more interest to an expert in any field then the ones real publishers put out. With self-published books you get exactly what you're looking for, with publisher-published books you probably get better writing/editing but you are getting the book the publisher thought you might like, not the book you actually want.
As for Amazon, my complaint was more that Amazon was on the verge of engaging in anticompetitive practices by leveraging their monopsony in the wholesale market to destroy the publishers, which would, in turn, boost their own self-published eBooks business.
You mean, Amazon was guilty of precrime? It wasn't what they had done, it was what you feared they might do.
Pretty much.
Granted the way you put it makesw\ it seem silly. But I simply haven't thought of another reason for Wall Street to shower cash on a company that is basically breaking even (their Q1 profit margin was 0.5%) on the basis that "aggressive sales growth in new markets is expensive" unless Wall Street is convinced that as soon as Amazon hits a certain point in said markets it will jack up prices. Since they do not create new markets they are taking sales from somebody, which means they are driving their competition out of business.
Which would be highly illegal, and very difficult to un-do. I don't know that Bezos is actually gonna do anything quite this unethical/illegal, but I'm not entirely comfortable just trusting him to not be evil. I'd rather have over-aggressive cartels breaking up his potential monopolies before they start, and then getting slaps on the wrist from the Fed, then being forced to start referring to him as My Benevolent Overlord.
Keep in mind that prior to being dicks ALL monopolies are good for consumers. They become monopolies by pleasing their customers so much that said customers fire their competitors. In many cases they actually continue to cultivate consumers long after they become monopolies, by screwing everyone else in their industry. For example, if Amazon sells all the stuff it wants to sell it will have a huge proportion of the of the shipping market in the country it could easily drive either UPS or FedEx out of business, so it can demand massive price cuts from them. If Amazon passes some of that price cuts onto consumers then Amazon has helped consumers of it's products, entrenched it's market-dominating position (as their competitors can't force down their shipping prices this way), and increased it's profits.
For the record, the Mac model he's claiming to use is 16. It is incapable of running any version of OS X. Which means he's running Mac OS Classic, probably some version of Mac OS 8 or System 7, but possibly as new as OS 9. In any of those cases his version of of the OS has a shitty version of multitasking which isn't preemptive multitasking, largely because Mac System 1 had to fit a full GUI and all it's bell and whistles into 128kb of RAM and when you do that you don't get many bells and whistles like preemptive multitasking. You also don't get an architecture flexible enough to support new bells and whistles (ie: real multitasking) when the 90s hit and people stop thinking of multitasking as a bell-and/or-whistle and start thinking of it as a core feature. Mac OS Classic has cooperative multitasking, which requires every program to agree to give up processor cycles. And this guy was trying to convince the OS to give up processor cycles to multiple programs while it was in the middle of an apparently failed file transfer. That was not gonna work. He had to kill the transfer, pray it didn't fail due to disk corruption, and try again.
The experience he's talking about apparently did happen to a guy back in Nov. '98, but that version compares the Mac to a Pentium 200 running NT 4. Back in '98 NT 4 had the most bells and whistles of any OS except Linuxen, BSD, and minor commercial OSes (BeOS, NeXT, etc.). Since these bells-and-whistles included preemptive multitasking his non-copy processes probably woulda worked fine on that box. I never used NT so I have no clue how well it handled file transfers gone bad, so it's possible he woulda got distracted by slashdot or something and come back a half-hour later to notice his file's still hadn't transferred.
I'd still disagree about the odds the unnamed US Government Agency was actually at fault. It's certainly possible he's pissed off the CIA or somebody similar, and I don't doubt that if he had done so serious skullduggery could be happening.
But the odds are much better his ISP is a) incompetent, and hasn't negotiated the bandwidth it needs, or b) intentionally screwing him because they have a ridiculous and secret anti-VPN policy.
First you're mistaken if you think there's been any proven NSA involvement in the MegaUpload case. It's been proven that the US Government used something very similar to what the NSA uses, but that doesn't prove the NSA did it. Arguing otherwise is exactly like arguing that [insert attack from US warplanes] must have been carried out by the US Marines because you just read the wiki page on the Hawker Harrier. Don't act like you would be surprised if a) the FBI built it's own copy of PRISM at great expense, or b) the FBI and NSA actually share PRISM. To conflate the entire US IT Surveillance state with a small part of that state is just sloppy thinking.
Second, nobody has claimed his story is impossible; just that it's highly unlikely given that a) VPN slowdowns are something ISPs love to do, b) there're a lot of connections between Peru and the UK that could cause such a slowdown, c) nobody else seems to be claiming a VPN slowdown, and d) why would the NSA tip off Wikileaks that they're analyzing South American data real close?
I am saying the French have a lot more control of Italian politics then the US. And if you paid any attention to Europe at all you'd say the exact same thing. There was a whole conference where the French and Germans had veto power over the entire Italian budget in 2011, and recent Italian budgets have avoided a new conference by the skin of their teeth. Italy pisses off Hollande the French might insist on a new conference and new austerity measures the Italians hate, Italy pisses off the Bolivians and nobody gives a shit because Bolivia is a long way away.
As for why the French would do this, you're clearly anglo-something. France doesn't divide the world into allies and enemies as simplistically as the Americans, Brits, and our Anglo cousins do. They will support the US in some issues (ie: they're in NATO, and they have 1,400 troops in Afghanistan), and oppose on others (ie: they spent most of the Cold War outside of NATO). In this case they don't give a shit that they're helping the US position by screwing with Snowden, his friends from Bolivia, and their allies Wikileaks. The US position is not totally irrelevant (if they'd caught Snowden you can bet they'd insist Obama owed them a favor), but if they didn't think they had a "compelling national interest" in supporting the US position they wouldn't do it.
What they give a shit about is Wikileaks. Wikileaks is dedicated to extreme transparency. Extreme transparency is exactly the type of thing you want to avoid if you're France. They want their people to see French troops on the ground in Mali defending Malian freedom, they do not want the French people to know whether said troops have their hands full keeping so-called "black" Malians from massacring Tueregs. They want nobody in France to ever hear the word "Rwanda."
If Snowden can be kept trapped in Moscow (where the information that gay people aren't insane is banned), while Assange is trapped in London (whether he's falsely accused of rape, or actually a rapist, is irrelevant to this discussion, he's still basically stuck in a cell), and Manning has 35 years in Leavenworth it's a lot easier for them to stop leaks in France. If Wikileaks gets Snowden out, OTOH, while Assange gets to be a Senator-in-exile, and the French-language media can be convinced that changing genders will allow Manning to avoid his 35 years...
Then make some explosive shells, and sit them out in the wilderness for 60 years. Weathering will make some of them look like rocks. You really shouldn't pick them up, or even touch them, due to 60 years of erosion screwing with the triggering mechanism; so you won't actually be able to use them for anything.
The US has so little clout in Italy that the Italians charged our station chief with kidnapping because of one extraordinary rendition. Convicted him, and 23 colleagues, including the guy who flew the plane, too. The countries you're thinking of are probably Poland and Canada, which did not block the Morales flight. Italy did. Extraordinary rendition proves my point. Italy does not give two shits about pleasing the US. They also do not give two shits about pleasing Spain or Portugal. Therefore the only options are that a) Italy decided Snowden sucks and just happened to do the same thing about it those other countries or b) the French co-iordinated everything.
It's kind of amazing that somebody who mistakes Poland for Italy is accusing me of being provincial.
BTW, before you talk about how great France really look at the timeline of Operation Turquoise. During the Rwandan genocide the UN did nothing, largely because the veto-wielding French assured everyone their school chums running Rwanda could not possibly be murdering 10% of the country with Chinese machetes. Then, after all the handy Tutsis and moderate Hutus were dead and the Tutsi-exile RPF troops were beating the Hutu-murdering Rwandan Government forces the French convinced everyone else to let them send 2.5k troops to enforce a cease-fire.
That's right, they waited until all possible victims were dead, then they sent troops to ensure nobody could remove the victimizers from power.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying anybody in the French government planned to be quite this evil, and I'll freely admit that following France's lead would have saved the US from a couple of recent disasters (Iraq and Vietnam were both wars the French really wanted us to not get involved in). I'm just saying that you have to go back a long way in US history to get a moral fuck-up of this magnitude, and we've probably already apologized for it. The French, OTOH, insist on justifying the genocide through their courts (they've actually charged Kagame with assassinating his predecessor, which is exactly like charging Ben-Gurion with the Reichstag fire), refuse to convict anyone on the pro-French Hutu side of anything (apparently 800k dead black people don;t count as evidence against a Francophone), and generally give former genocidaires excellent lives.
You do realize that throughout most of US History the government has blatantly ignored various Constitutional rights, and that it has almost never led to the federal government actually going up for sale to the highest bidder? Just ask a black guy. There's no bribe that would have convinced the Feds to force a state to let him vote until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The NSA will do things it can argue protect national Security. It will probably involve a lot of BS, and explaining away Constitutional rights, but both of those things are hallowed American traditions. It would not involve the RIAA without specific authorization from Congress, and/or a fairly convincing rationalization that ties piracy to their current mission.
You know one thing I fucking hate about all this NSA-talk? It assumes that the NSA is the driving force in all this. That's total BS. If this is a problem it's not caused by the NSA, or any single government.
Take the Presidential planes. There is no way for the NSA to make Italy deny Evo Morales the right to re-fuel in Italy. It provides no aid to Italy. It provides information to Italy, but the people who determine whether Italy gets said information are not in the NSA. Higher-level people in the US Government have some clout with the Italians, but not as much as you think. It's not like we spend $1.5 Billion a year maintaining the Italian Military. Which works so well against Egypt. Even if we had the power, why would we use it? It's not like Evo Moraleses stays up at night worrying about whether Barack Obama likes him.
I suspect what actually happened is that most of Europe is very uncomfortable with Wikileaks. Morales wasn't, because Wikileaks embarrasses the US and refuses to criticize Latin American leftists. Roughly the day of Morales being inconvenienced by Europe Snowden flew to Russia with Wikileaks help. A few calls fropm the French, and everyone is sending a message to Evo Morales: don't assume that helping a friend of wikleaks won't bite you on the ass in Europe.
One of the reasons the OP suspected the NSA is that NYC appears in server addresses on his trace-route.
Regardless, I can't think of a place where the NSA would have servers and sending data there to be scanned would add a significant amount of lag to his connection.
But this guy is in Peru. He's talking to the UK, not Boise, and the transatlantic cables to the UK run through places like NYC all the time. So the NYC servers don't exactly scream sub-optimal data path.
Moreover his idea isn't that the NSA is screwing with him personally, it's that the NSA is screwing with all VPNs on an entire continent.
I don't think it's technically possible for the NSA to intercept all VPNs from South America, and only VPNs from South America, in such a way that all VPNs from South America get throttled.
I don't think anyone's saying it's impossible the NSA is responsible for slowing down his VPN (and only his VPN). I think what they're saying is it doesn't make the Top 10 list of possible suspects because it would be fairly trivial for the NSA to get his VPN data without doing so (and thus tipping him off).
If he was Wikileaks/Snowden's guy in South America I'd believe the NSA could convince somebody to send his data through their servers, and that they might screw with him on purpose. But that's not what he said. What he said is "Could the NSA be slowing all VPNs to/from South America because of Snowden and Greenwald?"
I can't think of a scenario where the NSA convinces every ISP in the US to send all packets from a specific region through their servers. If they did the first clue wouldn't be one guy's VPN, it would be everyone's VPN.
The indoor tanning tax was implemented pretty much the day the law was signed (mid-2010). Final regulations on it took awhile (they were just issued this month), but everyone whose paid to use a tanning bed since 2010 has been required to pay the tax.
Lawyers are very good at thinking of credible-sounding BS. Many, man law school classes include a section where the prof presents a case, asks everyone to argue about it, and then makes the winner of the debate take the opposite side. This case is a bunch of very smart conservative lawyers grasping at straws to kill ObamaCare.
The started as a House Bill, HB 3590. Since origination is never defined in the Constitution these conservatives made up a definition that doesn't include it. Unfortunately for them nobody outside of their tiny anti-ObamaCare circle is gonna take their definition of "Origination" very seriously because it's just that: their definition. The people who actually matter in these things are the US House, which did not object to the Senate bill. Seperation of Powers means the Courts only intervene in the other branches interpretation of their particular Constitutional clauses in cases where those branches are seriously violating somebody's rights.
That's why nobody who paid the Tanning Tax sued on the basis ObamaCare was Senate-originated and therefore not allowed to have taxes in it. What's gonna happen is the District Court will refuse to rule, probably on the basis that the origination clause is only the Judicial branch's business if it's being abused to oppress religious minorities (First Amendment) or racial minorities (14th and 15th Amendments); they'll appeal to the Appeals Court, which will refuse to ruls on the basis of "Fuck you asshole," and then the Supremes will ignore them.
Re-read your source. They're not arguing the bill didn't start in the House. They're arguing it doesn't count as a "revenue bill Originating in the House" because the House bill it started as wasn't a Revenue Bill. They also aren't arguing that they'll win on the merits, they're arguing John Roberts will change his mind on the Constitutionality of the entire bill, and use this opportunity to knock it out.
There's a reason nobody made this argument, despite the fact that the Mandate-Tax was not the only tax in the bill. There's the Cadillac Tax, investment income tax hikes, Medicare payroll tax hikes, etc.
They're quite open that this isn;t a serious legal argument, it's a political effort to get Roberts to change his mind.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution.
Actually, I don't have to prove that the government is not justified. The government needs to prove that it is justified. A minor difference, but the onus is on the government.
True, but given that it's a list of powers, there isn't much difference there.
Somebody's gonna have to go through the list, one by one, eliminating things.
And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
The 9th and 10th (which some how I edited out of the original posting) were only needed because of the first 8 amendments. The founders wanted to be clear that enumerating rights for the people and the states in no way limited their rights to only those 8. Their primary focus was on limiting the power of the federal government itself.
I will admit the 9th isn't a total waste of space in theory. After all, theoretically somebody could think of a right that Englishman had that isn't on the list of the Bill of Rights. In practice it's been 224 years and nobody's thought of one. This argument (for example) is entirely based on the 4th Amendment, and the 9th has (to my knowledge) never been cited by any Court at any level for any reason.
The 10th is about as useful. So far it's been ruled a "truism" by the Supremes. It is cited in case law when the Feds try to force states to enforce Federal law, but that only happens once every 20-30 years.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all.
It's quite clear you are attributing statements that I did not make, and your strawman doesn't make your case either. This is my data, or a company's data. It's not government data in any way, shape, or form. The government doesn't generate it, doesn't operate on it, doesn't require it. The only thing they do is tax revenue flows. They do not need access to lower level data, ever, for any of those reasons. For other reasons, there are warrants which can grant them access when there is a need, along with a paper trail documenting that need.
It's not my fault you weren't clear that you were talking about personal data. It's not like there's a specific Constitutional clause that the government is allowed to collect any data, that's an implicit power.
For what the NSA say they do, they have warrants or don't need warrants because they're 51% sure the target is not a US Citizen. I don't think it's a particularly good idea for the NSA to troll the internet for evil Canadians, but this discussion isn't about what the NSA has a moral right to do, it;s about what the NSA has a legal right to do. And the Courts have very consistently ruled that if an officer of the law is pretty sure he doesn't need a warrant, based on evidence that would convince a reasonable person he probably doesn't need a warrant, he doesn't need a warrant.
It's possible Snowden's right and they're lying. But most of Snowden's most outrageous accusations have already been shown to be false. He could not access data directly from google's servers, he could not read your email in real-time, etc. IMO it's 50-50 who is full of shit on this one.
This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply ana
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You don't seem yo understand how hard this is.
The reason we have a months-long budgeting process is that Congress is basically two Committees with more then 500 members, and they aren't run under Robert's Rules of Order. They are run under two different sets of rules, which are completely unique. When one of the Houses decides to delay things there isn't a lot you can do.
The issue in this case is that the Speaker is dictator of what the House of Representatives gets to vote on. He can only be over-ridden by a) firing him, or b) get a lar ge proportion of the House to sign a Discharge Petition. But discharge petitions on bills you just wrote on Monday, because you were convinced that nobody would shut the government down, CAN'T be considered until 30 days after Monday. Discharge petitions on older bills are possible, but when the Democrats tried one the 20 or so Republicans who claimed they'd support a "clean bill" decreed that this discharge petition didn't count as a clean bill.
The problem seems to be the GOP members are convinced that if they don't support the Speaker in every way that matters the Tea Party will murder them in the next primary. Since ethics rules exist, Obama can't just say "Dude, if you vote for this bill Apple board member Al Gore will totally take care of you."
Moreover most of them actually believe that shutting the government down is the Right Thing to do because a) they actually believe ObamaCare is Evil, and b) they actually think that they'll convince enough Democrats to support a delay of ObamaCare to delay ObamaCare. To them trading a few months of government services for a delay of ObamaCare is just common sense.. OTOH the Democrats are equally adamant that ObamaCare is a Great Thing Which Will Save America, that delaying it is Evil, and that getting no government for three months in exchange for not delaying ObamaCare for a year is a great idea. And if anybody was willing to give on either of these points he wouldn't have made it through a Primary.
Yes and no.
The so-called Hastert Rule has been broken in the sense that most Republicans ended up voting against a proposal on the floor, but it has not been broken in the sense that most House Republicans actually opposed bringing said proposals to a vote. Conservatives are quite happy to go on Fox bitching about how they opposed {inevitable policy} with every tool at their disposal, despite the fact that they clearly didn't. One tool at their disposal is firing Boehner, and they didn't firew Boehner.
It's really easy for them to say that because they know it's not coming to a vote. Most House Republicans have decided that the Hastert Rule is appropriate for this mess, therefore Boehner cannot put it up for a vote until most House Republicans want it up for a vote, therefore it 20-30 House Republicans can get on TV loudly proclaiming none of this is their fault and jack-squat will happen.
This study is silly.
Military equipment has always been anthropomorphized by the troops. Ships are actually named by the government. Historically tanks and aircraft were named, frequently with the name painted on the nose. This is partly because top-of-the-line military hardware pushed to the edge of it's performance envelope (ie: training) usually has a personality (ie: some idiot over-tightened a bolt on Tank A by 2%, so when exactly these three things happen there's a rattle just to the gunner's left, but on Tank B that bolt is 1% loose and the rattle happens all the damn time), but mostly it's because when your entire job is to work with something for 8 hours a day you anthropomorphize the damn thing. Your monkey-brain just won't accept anything this complex is simply a tool, therefore your soul is convinced Tank A rattles at the gunner because it doesn't like it when you do those three things, but Tank B is a cantankerous schmuck. And when the Nazis blow up Tank B you miss it. For like 30 seconds. Then you'll jump for joy because the replacement, Tank C, is a newer model with a bigger gun and you haven't figured out what makes it rattle yet.
This is something that everyone deals with. Us geeks get irrationally attached to computers. Normal people get attached to cell phones and cars.
It's kinda interesting that it's happening to robots now, too, but it's not exactly surprising.
It's a bit stronger then that. You work with a tool, as your primary tool, 8 hours a day for a couple years and you get attached to it. Not so attached that you get irrational, but attached enough that you go "aww, I liked that robot" and sulk for 30 seconds when it dies. And then you're fine.
Most slashdotters would probably be excessively pissed off if somebody stole their computer, even if they knew the insurance company was gonna give them a new one with better specs in 24 hours. This is pretty much the same thing.
Agreed.
Tankers get attached to their tanks. AF Pilots know which plane in the squadron they like best. Infantrymen get attached to their weapons. Officially none of these tools is allowed to be named, but a) that doesn't stop people from thinking of Serial #XNF370952 as "the one that saved my ass," b) Navy ships are actually named, and c) back when they were allowed to name vehicles things the Army Air Corps functioned fine.
They shed a tear when it gets blown up, then they patiently wait for a new one.
I hope they get fined something. Screwing consumers is not supposed to be a painless business strategy even if it makes sense.
It'll almost certainly be a rounding error in context of a company with $140 billion in revenue annually, but it will be something.
I think you're over-simplifying business a lot when you claim "every business ever" sucks money from other businesses. Economic growth is a thing that exists. Apple really takes advantage of this by putting together new ideas (granted, frequently those ideas don't originate in Cupertino) into new products and creating sectors. They frequently end up putting people out of business, but generally the people who get put out-of-business aren't their direct competitors. They're either in completely different sectors (ie: graphics people who didn't switch to computers in the 80s), or sell to a different slice of the market (RIM, Palm, etc.). Amazon is much different then Apple in that all of us can name a major, Fortune-500, US Company that went out-of-business mostly due to it's inability to compete with Amazon: Borders. All of us have heard of another direct Amazon competitor that is blaming some of it's recent troubles on competition from Amazon: Walmart. That's not bad business, illegal, or even unethical behavior on Amazon's part; but it definitely reduces consumer choice if the only bookstore in town goes out of business.
I never said Apple should not be punished, that the Judge has punished Apple enough, or that Amazon should be punished. What I said was that I am very troubled by the level of market-power Amazon is acquiring. Apple's response to this market-power was illegal, and did deserve to be punished.
I wouldn't mind if the Judge had ordered Apple to let Amazon/BN/etc. sell eBooks in their iPad apps without the 30% Apple Tax, but a lot of the crap the government was asking for just seemed to be incredibly stupid from an anti-trust standpoint. eBooks online right now are Amazon/Apple/BN/Kobo. There is no other option. BN is hobbled by it's physical stores. If Apple gets hobbled by a judgement then eBooks become de facto a competition between Amazon and Kobo, which basically means an Amazon monopoly. Online video is subscription streaming services (aka: Netflix plus a bunch of coalitions of content producers), Amazon, and Apple. I can't stand streaming video services. Gut Apple's ability to negotiate price deals with studios and then my market choice is reduced to Amazon, Amazon, and Amazon.
Keep in mind that the fines penalty phase of the trial hasn't happened yet. According to a commentator on Ars technica's thread the footnotes of the decision indicate the financial penalty phase will be in May. As for Apple currently doing this with other content, it's unlikely it would work with other content because other content-producers aren't going to agree to increase retail profit margins at their own expense to screw some third party. It's not like the movie studios are paranoid that Netflix will drop their products if they fail to kiss the ring. Music retailers might, but the third party they'd want to screw is Apple. Moreover if Apple does try any of these things within the next one to five years there will be a government nabob sitting in on the board meeting where they agree to do this, which will make it very hard for them to do so.
As for "carefully organized screwing over of consumers," that's what the DoJ thought it convicted Apple of. But the Judge seems to be more convinced Apple carefully organized a screwing of Amazon, which had the extremely illegal side-effect of screwing consumers. And if that's the case the way you prevent future occurrences isn't by gutting Apple, it's by ensuring there's a guy at the Board Meeting who can say "Morons, if you do this business move it will screw consumers and I will tell the Judge to fine you $8 Billion."
BTW, I sincerely doubt Apple's fine will be as high as you'd like. Apple has more revenue in a quarter then consumers spend on books in a year, a lot of that revenue is profit, and they're sitting on most of the profit. Only a fraction of the book-revenue is from eBooks, and a fairly large proportion of what consumers paid for those eBooks would have been paid anyway because even Amazon insisted on charging $9.99 for books. Since any fine has to be proportional to the extra money consumers paid, it's likely the fine will be closer to $250 million then $2.5 Billion.
OTOH, the Judge may decide that since he was so nice to them in their business practices he has no choice but to be a major hard-ass in terms of the fine.
The price advantage limited run books have is more supply-and-demand then a judgement on the quality of the books. The Complete Works of Shakespeare has been been published thousands of times, so there are probably hundreds of millions of copies floating around, which means it's fairly easy to find one. A first-run copy of an obscure title from a specialty publisher in a niche field probably only had a couple thousand copies printed, many of which are off the market (they're hiding in an attic, library, destroyed, etc.), which means that if you want a copy you're gonna be paying cash for it.
For example, I have a book on what to do if your early Mac spits out an error at you instead of starting up. It has detailed info on what chips to replace. I paid a lot more for that then I would any book on a topic of interest to people who have never dabbled in that particular obscure hobby, simply because nobody has made any new copies since the mid-80s and early 90s.
I actually suspect self-published non-fiction books might be of more interest to an expert in any field then the ones real publishers put out. With self-published books you get exactly what you're looking for, with publisher-published books you probably get better writing/editing but you are getting the book the publisher thought you might like, not the book you actually want.
As for Amazon, my complaint was more that Amazon was on the verge of engaging in anticompetitive practices by leveraging their monopsony in the wholesale market to destroy the publishers, which would, in turn, boost their own self-published eBooks business.
You mean, Amazon was guilty of precrime? It wasn't what they had done, it was what you feared they might do.
Pretty much.
Granted the way you put it makesw\ it seem silly. But I simply haven't thought of another reason for Wall Street to shower cash on a company that is basically breaking even (their Q1 profit margin was 0.5%) on the basis that "aggressive sales growth in new markets is expensive" unless Wall Street is convinced that as soon as Amazon hits a certain point in said markets it will jack up prices. Since they do not create new markets they are taking sales from somebody, which means they are driving their competition out of business.
Which would be highly illegal, and very difficult to un-do. I don't know that Bezos is actually gonna do anything quite this unethical/illegal, but I'm not entirely comfortable just trusting him to not be evil. I'd rather have over-aggressive cartels breaking up his potential monopolies before they start, and then getting slaps on the wrist from the Fed, then being forced to start referring to him as My Benevolent Overlord.
Keep in mind that prior to being dicks ALL monopolies are good for consumers. They become monopolies by pleasing their customers so much that said customers fire their competitors. In many cases they actually continue to cultivate consumers long after they become monopolies, by screwing everyone else in their industry. For example, if Amazon sells all the stuff it wants to sell it will have a huge proportion of the of the shipping market in the country it could easily drive either UPS or FedEx out of business, so it can demand massive price cuts from them. If Amazon passes some of that price cuts onto consumers then Amazon has helped consumers of it's products, entrenched it's market-dominating position (as their competitors can't force down their shipping prices this way), and increased it's profits.
For the record, the Mac model he's claiming to use is 16. It is incapable of running any version of OS X. Which means he's running Mac OS Classic, probably some version of Mac OS 8 or System 7, but possibly as new as OS 9. In any of those cases his version of of the OS has a shitty version of multitasking which isn't preemptive multitasking, largely because Mac System 1 had to fit a full GUI and all it's bell and whistles into 128kb of RAM and when you do that you don't get many bells and whistles like preemptive multitasking. You also don't get an architecture flexible enough to support new bells and whistles (ie: real multitasking) when the 90s hit and people stop thinking of multitasking as a bell-and/or-whistle and start thinking of it as a core feature. Mac OS Classic has cooperative multitasking, which requires every program to agree to give up processor cycles. And this guy was trying to convince the OS to give up processor cycles to multiple programs while it was in the middle of an apparently failed file transfer. That was not gonna work. He had to kill the transfer, pray it didn't fail due to disk corruption, and try again.
The experience he's talking about apparently did happen to a guy back in Nov. '98, but that version compares the Mac to a Pentium 200 running NT 4. Back in '98 NT 4 had the most bells and whistles of any OS except Linuxen, BSD, and minor commercial OSes (BeOS, NeXT, etc.). Since these bells-and-whistles included preemptive multitasking his non-copy processes probably woulda worked fine on that box. I never used NT so I have no clue how well it handled file transfers gone bad, so it's possible he woulda got distracted by slashdot or something and come back a half-hour later to notice his file's still hadn't transferred.
That would deal with a lot of my objections.
I'd still disagree about the odds the unnamed US Government Agency was actually at fault. It's certainly possible he's pissed off the CIA or somebody similar, and I don't doubt that if he had done so serious skullduggery could be happening.
But the odds are much better his ISP is a) incompetent, and hasn't negotiated the bandwidth it needs, or b) intentionally screwing him because they have a ridiculous and secret anti-VPN policy.
Two points:
First you're mistaken if you think there's been any proven NSA involvement in the MegaUpload case. It's been proven that the US Government used something very similar to what the NSA uses, but that doesn't prove the NSA did it. Arguing otherwise is exactly like arguing that [insert attack from US warplanes] must have been carried out by the US Marines because you just read the wiki page on the Hawker Harrier. Don't act like you would be surprised if a) the FBI built it's own copy of PRISM at great expense, or b) the FBI and NSA actually share PRISM. To conflate the entire US IT Surveillance state with a small part of that state is just sloppy thinking.
Second, nobody has claimed his story is impossible; just that it's highly unlikely given that a) VPN slowdowns are something ISPs love to do, b) there're a lot of connections between Peru and the UK that could cause such a slowdown, c) nobody else seems to be claiming a VPN slowdown, and d) why would the NSA tip off Wikileaks that they're analyzing South American data real close?
I am saying the French have a lot more control of Italian politics then the US. And if you paid any attention to Europe at all you'd say the exact same thing. There was a whole conference where the French and Germans had veto power over the entire Italian budget in 2011, and recent Italian budgets have avoided a new conference by the skin of their teeth. Italy pisses off Hollande the French might insist on a new conference and new austerity measures the Italians hate, Italy pisses off the Bolivians and nobody gives a shit because Bolivia is a long way away.
As for why the French would do this, you're clearly anglo-something. France doesn't divide the world into allies and enemies as simplistically as the Americans, Brits, and our Anglo cousins do. They will support the US in some issues (ie: they're in NATO, and they have 1,400 troops in Afghanistan), and oppose on others (ie: they spent most of the Cold War outside of NATO). In this case they don't give a shit that they're helping the US position by screwing with Snowden, his friends from Bolivia, and their allies Wikileaks. The US position is not totally irrelevant (if they'd caught Snowden you can bet they'd insist Obama owed them a favor), but if they didn't think they had a "compelling national interest" in supporting the US position they wouldn't do it.
What they give a shit about is Wikileaks. Wikileaks is dedicated to extreme transparency. Extreme transparency is exactly the type of thing you want to avoid if you're France. They want their people to see French troops on the ground in Mali defending Malian freedom, they do not want the French people to know whether said troops have their hands full keeping so-called "black" Malians from massacring Tueregs. They want nobody in France to ever hear the word "Rwanda."
If Snowden can be kept trapped in Moscow (where the information that gay people aren't insane is banned), while Assange is trapped in London (whether he's falsely accused of rape, or actually a rapist, is irrelevant to this discussion, he's still basically stuck in a cell), and Manning has 35 years in Leavenworth it's a lot easier for them to stop leaks in France. If Wikileaks gets Snowden out, OTOH, while Assange gets to be a Senator-in-exile, and the French-language media can be convinced that changing genders will allow Manning to avoid his 35 years...
That is a nightmare for France.
Then make some explosive shells, and sit them out in the wilderness for 60 years. Weathering will make some of them look like rocks. You really shouldn't pick them up, or even touch them, due to 60 years of erosion screwing with the triggering mechanism; so you won't actually be able to use them for anything.
But you'll have exploding rocks.
Dude,
The US has so little clout in Italy that the Italians charged our station chief with kidnapping because of one extraordinary rendition. Convicted him, and 23 colleagues, including the guy who flew the plane, too. The countries you're thinking of are probably Poland and Canada, which did not block the Morales flight. Italy did. Extraordinary rendition proves my point. Italy does not give two shits about pleasing the US. They also do not give two shits about pleasing Spain or Portugal. Therefore the only options are that a) Italy decided Snowden sucks and just happened to do the same thing about it those other countries or b) the French co-iordinated everything.
It's kind of amazing that somebody who mistakes Poland for Italy is accusing me of being provincial.
BTW, before you talk about how great France really look at the timeline of Operation Turquoise. During the Rwandan genocide the UN did nothing, largely because the veto-wielding French assured everyone their school chums running Rwanda could not possibly be murdering 10% of the country with Chinese machetes. Then, after all the handy Tutsis and moderate Hutus were dead and the Tutsi-exile RPF troops were beating the Hutu-murdering Rwandan Government forces the French convinced everyone else to let them send 2.5k troops to enforce a cease-fire.
That's right, they waited until all possible victims were dead, then they sent troops to ensure nobody could remove the victimizers from power.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying anybody in the French government planned to be quite this evil, and I'll freely admit that following France's lead would have saved the US from a couple of recent disasters (Iraq and Vietnam were both wars the French really wanted us to not get involved in). I'm just saying that you have to go back a long way in US history to get a moral fuck-up of this magnitude, and we've probably already apologized for it. The French, OTOH, insist on justifying the genocide through their courts (they've actually charged Kagame with assassinating his predecessor, which is exactly like charging Ben-Gurion with the Reichstag fire), refuse to convict anyone on the pro-French Hutu side of anything (apparently 800k dead black people don;t count as evidence against a Francophone), and generally give former genocidaires excellent lives.
You do realize that throughout most of US History the government has blatantly ignored various Constitutional rights, and that it has almost never led to the federal government actually going up for sale to the highest bidder? Just ask a black guy. There's no bribe that would have convinced the Feds to force a state to let him vote until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The NSA will do things it can argue protect national Security. It will probably involve a lot of BS, and explaining away Constitutional rights, but both of those things are hallowed American traditions. It would not involve the RIAA without specific authorization from Congress, and/or a fairly convincing rationalization that ties piracy to their current mission.
You know one thing I fucking hate about all this NSA-talk? It assumes that the NSA is the driving force in all this. That's total BS. If this is a problem it's not caused by the NSA, or any single government.
Take the Presidential planes. There is no way for the NSA to make Italy deny Evo Morales the right to re-fuel in Italy. It provides no aid to Italy. It provides information to Italy, but the people who determine whether Italy gets said information are not in the NSA. Higher-level people in the US Government have some clout with the Italians, but not as much as you think. It's not like we spend $1.5 Billion a year maintaining the Italian Military. Which works so well against Egypt. Even if we had the power, why would we use it? It's not like Evo Moraleses stays up at night worrying about whether Barack Obama likes him.
The logical conclusion is clearly not that Obama or the NSA arranged for Morales plane to be delayed, for the simple reason that Obama and the NSA just don't have that kind of clout. The people who do have that kind of clout are the French, who have to approve any Italian budget (and also the budgets of Portugal and Spain). They also have a long tradition of telling their public whatever BS looks good, and then having said public buy it. The US can tolerate something like Wikileaks, the French can't because it's hard to convince your masses you're the good guys when everyone reads the internal documents Opération Turquoise generated.
I suspect what actually happened is that most of Europe is very uncomfortable with Wikileaks. Morales wasn't, because Wikileaks embarrasses the US and refuses to criticize Latin American leftists. Roughly the day of Morales being inconvenienced by Europe Snowden flew to Russia with Wikileaks help. A few calls fropm the French, and everyone is sending a message to Evo Morales: don't assume that helping a friend of wikleaks won't bite you on the ass in Europe.
One of the reasons the OP suspected the NSA is that NYC appears in server addresses on his trace-route.
Regardless, I can't think of a place where the NSA would have servers and sending data there to be scanned would add a significant amount of lag to his connection.
But this guy is in Peru. He's talking to the UK, not Boise, and the transatlantic cables to the UK run through places like NYC all the time. So the NYC servers don't exactly scream sub-optimal data path.
Moreover his idea isn't that the NSA is screwing with him personally, it's that the NSA is screwing with all VPNs on an entire continent.
I don't think it's technically possible for the NSA to intercept all VPNs from South America, and only VPNs from South America, in such a way that all VPNs from South America get throttled.
I don't think anyone's saying it's impossible the NSA is responsible for slowing down his VPN (and only his VPN). I think what they're saying is it doesn't make the Top 10 list of possible suspects because it would be fairly trivial for the NSA to get his VPN data without doing so (and thus tipping him off).
If he was Wikileaks/Snowden's guy in South America I'd believe the NSA could convince somebody to send his data through their servers, and that they might screw with him on purpose. But that's not what he said. What he said is "Could the NSA be slowing all VPNs to/from South America because of Snowden and Greenwald?"
I can't think of a scenario where the NSA convinces every ISP in the US to send all packets from a specific region through their servers. If they did the first clue wouldn't be one guy's VPN, it would be everyone's VPN.
The indoor tanning tax was implemented pretty much the day the law was signed (mid-2010). Final regulations on it took awhile (they were just issued this month), but everyone whose paid to use a tanning bed since 2010 has been required to pay the tax.
Lawyers are very good at thinking of credible-sounding BS. Many, man law school classes include a section where the prof presents a case, asks everyone to argue about it, and then makes the winner of the debate take the opposite side. This case is a bunch of very smart conservative lawyers grasping at straws to kill ObamaCare.
The started as a House Bill, HB 3590. Since origination is never defined in the Constitution these conservatives made up a definition that doesn't include it. Unfortunately for them nobody outside of their tiny anti-ObamaCare circle is gonna take their definition of "Origination" very seriously because it's just that: their definition. The people who actually matter in these things are the US House, which did not object to the Senate bill. Seperation of Powers means the Courts only intervene in the other branches interpretation of their particular Constitutional clauses in cases where those branches are seriously violating somebody's rights.
That's why nobody who paid the Tanning Tax sued on the basis ObamaCare was Senate-originated and therefore not allowed to have taxes in it. What's gonna happen is the District Court will refuse to rule, probably on the basis that the origination clause is only the Judicial branch's business if it's being abused to oppress religious minorities (First Amendment) or racial minorities (14th and 15th Amendments); they'll appeal to the Appeals Court, which will refuse to ruls on the basis of "Fuck you asshole," and then the Supremes will ignore them.
Re-read your source. They're not arguing the bill didn't start in the House. They're arguing it doesn't count as a "revenue bill Originating in the House" because the House bill it started as wasn't a Revenue Bill. They also aren't arguing that they'll win on the merits, they're arguing John Roberts will change his mind on the Constitutionality of the entire bill, and use this opportunity to knock it out.
There's a reason nobody made this argument, despite the fact that the Mandate-Tax was not the only tax in the bill. There's the Cadillac Tax, investment income tax hikes, Medicare payroll tax hikes, etc.
They're quite open that this isn;t a serious legal argument, it's a political effort to get Roberts to change his mind.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution.
Actually, I don't have to prove that the government is not justified. The government needs to prove that it is justified. A minor difference, but the onus is on the government.
True, but given that it's a list of powers, there isn't much difference there.
Somebody's gonna have to go through the list, one by one, eliminating things.
And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
The 9th and 10th (which some how I edited out of the original posting) were only needed because of the first 8 amendments. The founders wanted to be clear that enumerating rights for the people and the states in no way limited their rights to only those 8. Their primary focus was on limiting the power of the federal government itself.
I will admit the 9th isn't a total waste of space in theory. After all, theoretically somebody could think of a right that Englishman had that isn't on the list of the Bill of Rights. In practice it's been 224 years and nobody's thought of one. This argument (for example) is entirely based on the 4th Amendment, and the 9th has (to my knowledge) never been cited by any Court at any level for any reason.
The 10th is about as useful. So far it's been ruled a "truism" by the Supremes. It is cited in case law when the Feds try to force states to enforce Federal law, but that only happens once every 20-30 years.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all.
It's quite clear you are attributing statements that I did not make, and your strawman doesn't make your case either. This is my data, or a company's data. It's not government data in any way, shape, or form. The government doesn't generate it, doesn't operate on it, doesn't require it. The only thing they do is tax revenue flows. They do not need access to lower level data, ever, for any of those reasons. For other reasons, there are warrants which can grant them access when there is a need, along with a paper trail documenting that need.
It's not my fault you weren't clear that you were talking about personal data. It's not like there's a specific Constitutional clause that the government is allowed to collect any data, that's an implicit power.
For what the NSA say they do, they have warrants or don't need warrants because they're 51% sure the target is not a US Citizen. I don't think it's a particularly good idea for the NSA to troll the internet for evil Canadians, but this discussion isn't about what the NSA has a moral right to do, it;s about what the NSA has a legal right to do. And the Courts have very consistently ruled that if an officer of the law is pretty sure he doesn't need a warrant, based on evidence that would convince a reasonable person he probably doesn't need a warrant, he doesn't need a warrant.
It's possible Snowden's right and they're lying. But most of Snowden's most outrageous accusations have already been shown to be false. He could not access data directly from google's servers, he could not read your email in real-time, etc. IMO it's 50-50 who is full of shit on this one.
This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply ana