You didn't go far enough with #7. Not just no practical difference, we'll have no difference at all, because the executive branch will simply ignore the ruling, the same way Holder regularly does, and Reno and Ashcroft did before him (DOJ != Judiciary) ; The same way the FDA does when it doesn't "like" court orders to make certain drugs available without discrimination. The same way the entire intelligence community has done for years (*cough* guns to contras funded by running the international drug trade and all pardoned by former CIA directer Bush-the-Elder *cough*).
And we worry about some phone call tracking? We have an outright rogue government, not even pretending to give a shit about its citizens anymore, and we really care about the latest distraction over whether Snowden counts as a hero or a traitor?
However, there will be cases that deal with actual state secrets. For those, we need a court set up to deal with that sort of thing
No. We need a lack of state secrets. We need an open, transparent government that actually acts in the interests of its people rather than its CEOs. We need a court set up to try every breach of public trust as a capital offense.
A fence can keep people in or out. Just a matter of which way most people want to go. When the banking system really goes down in flames in the next decade, when SS collapses from all those little "loans" we've taken against it, when the welfare state starts requiring over a 100% tax rate on those actually earning a living to sustain itself - You can bet your ass that, just like US oil pipelines today, the direction those guns face will do a 180.
It's one of the big errors that scifi movies have with lasers in space combat (the other error being that laser pulses move slow enough to be seen
But combine those two errors, and we have a bit less of an error - Simply one of nomenclature rather than physics.
Pulses of light like we see in the movies would would more likely come from some sort of particle beam. It would travel slower than the speed of light, and most likely radiate energy during its trip (thus making it visible from the side).
Of course, I don't particularly expect that Hollywood grasps either point, they just like cool glowy weapons that also happen to make noise.
Let's complete the job and prohibit all speech. I mean, what the hell, right? It's all just a bunch of noise. I demand silence!
No, no, not all speech - Just corporate speech. Big difference there.
I'll accept that corporations have HUMAN rights when they can reflect on the death of their "children" in a Bhopal-like disaster, while rotting away inside a cage for "life". Until then, yes, I do demand silence from them.
Hey now, if they only inflicted their crazy on themselves, I would agree with you.
Unfortunately, they also seem to like raping Western female reporters. How many does this make in the past year? I can NAME three, and seem to recall a couple more. From "We want democracy, let's rape journalists!" to "yay, we won, let's rape journalists!", and now to "we don't like the self-imposed perversion of democracy we got, send more journalists for us to rape!"
But of course, they don't limit themselves to just reporters, oh goodness no! With an average of 23 rapes a fucking day (not sure if I meant that as a pun or not), in the middle of a crowded public place, well now - They'd soon run out of female reporters crazy enough to visit their little hellhole.
Rabid dogs don't deserve democracy, they deserve to have someone put them down for the good of us all.
1) Why does this not count as illegal collusion within an industry group? That they decided to announce it as a unified decision provides de facto proof that they conspired to deprive their customers of choice. If my itty bitty company made a similar joint announcement with one of our biggest competitors in the region, half a dozen state AGs would have us in court before the newsprint dried on the initial announcement.
2) I make use of these usurious parasites' services because it lets me conveniently move my money from place to place without worrying about the security of either cash or my real bank accounts, and I can essentially do all my spending with one tidy itemized monthly bill. If I can no longer use Visa to purchase the goods and services I want, I no longer have a reason to use Visa at all.
And a bonus thought, for good measure - For those talking about the NSA or Bitcoin - This involves regional protection of content, a favor to Hollywood, nothing more and nothing less. At least direct your vitriol in the right direction, folks.
In-car apps just plain suck. Please spare us the horror, Ford, and just give us a good flexible tablet dock in the middle of the console.
Buy a TomTom, or Garmin, or Magellan nav system. Clean, easy to use, minimalist while providing the information you need to drive (and usually the option to add lots more layers of info for non-driving use, if you really want it).
Now compare that to any in-dash OEM GPS (not simply one licensed from the big three mentioned above). Oh, sure, they'll show your car moving on a map, but good luck doing something as advanced and obscure as, say, entering an address you want to go to, without taking the six-hour prep course and clicking through three or more "You must not use this while driving! You agree to not hold Chrysler responsible if you die in a horrible fiery wreck because the GPS lied to you! You will go to church this Sunday!" warning/disclaimer screens.
And don't even get me started on the actual "entertainment" part of their crapware. A $50 standalone DVD player blows the pants off the crap Detroit seems to think we want. Really, why shouldn't I have a 10-band equalizer on the steering wheel, but it makes me visually navigate a touch-menu to change the radio station?
/ Warning for the just-plain-impaired: This post may contain hyperbole and traces of nuts.
I really hate working with lazy stupid programmers who were hired only to fill out an HR racial preference checklist. Nothing is more demoralizing than working with a shiftless, smelly, untalented "winner" of the racial preference lottery.
Y'know, of all the jobs I see filled with useless people, I honestly have never seen that effect in programming.
I've met plenty of coders who the rest of us would all do better if they surfed for porn all day; I've met coders who, once they corner you somewhere will talk your ear off until you feel the need to stick a pencil through your (or their) skull; I've met plenty of coders who have no concept of 9-to-5 (and I can't claim I do so well at that one myself).
But overall, I've always seen programming as one of those fields that requires just too much rigor and discipline to even appeal to the "real" slackers. Love it or hate it, rock at it or suck at it, programming is hard.
I am sure you old-timers who predate this usage probably still complain about this. Frankly, you would serve the planet better if, instead of your pendantry over this one use of this word
No doubt you will have great success in explaining to that group of nice young Somalian men who just boarded your cruise ship that you have no issue with their unauthorized copying and distribution of your ship's manifest. They will certainly recognize your wisdom and give you a free pair of knock-off Nikes as compensation for your wit.
Visual Studio and other products have free versions now, so TechNet subscription is mostly outdated service.
Translation: "I have no clue what Technet does".
Visual studio? Try virtually every Microsoft product ever created, available for download and legal for running without further licensing so long as you use them for intentionally-vague "development" purposes.
Bad move all around, Microsoft. On the one hand, I don't really care, because I have the last 15 or so years worth of physically mailed MSDN discs, and if you cared about selling from your back-catalog, you'd still offer XP for retail. On the other hand - You want me giving the latest and greatest version of your toys a spin, because what amuses me to write my next internal app for today, my company will pick up a few hundred thousand in licenses to legally deploy it next year.
But hey, just keep pushing Win8 and the cloud, and pulling stunts like this, and then wonder why no one seems to write apps for your platforms anymore.
Personally, I don't care so much about the formal start menu - I use either shortcut keys or just Win-R the program name for just about everything I don't have as an icon on my desktop. I suspect most people pining for the start menu really don't care about it specifically, but rather, the whole set of known OS behaviors that came with it:
What do I (we?) want? I want the window manager to behave as a window manager. I want small, configurable iconic shortcuts that open programs for me in a window. I want a base desktop that doesn't look like Times Square at night (complete with its many flashing neon ads). I specifically do not want every program to open itself in a more-or-less-modal fullscreen style on my 30" WQXGA display. I have a monitor that big for a reason, and believe it or not, that reason has nothing to do with spending all day prettifying Word documents intended for a booklet layout. I want the "store" to mean I go to Amazon or Newegg in a non-MSIE browser. I do not, ever, want any attempt whatsoever at "upselling" by Microsoft, or worse, the few money-grubing OEM partners of theirs they haven't managed to alienate yet.
In short, I want Windows 7. And if five years from now that means I have to run Linux to get it, I damned well will.
but now Microsoft really needs to work on getting developers on board.
Come again? Unless they completely broke the OS from the cloud down, they already have somewhere around 80% of developers actively working in their environment.
Oh! Riiight - By "8.1", Microsoft doesn't mean "Win7-plus-1.1 and we fixed the useless bullshit we did in Windows-FisherPrice-edition", it means they gave their latest defective-by-design codebase a facelift so as to not completely alienate those of us who will use 7 until MS comes up with their next "real" OS.
Sorry, Ballmer, but if you want developers, give us something worth developing for. Because if you really want to force the PC-vs-tablet issue, Android and iOS already won. Your move, though...
Web developers should continue to create websites that don't require javascript, and we shouldn't be in such a hurry to move away from that.
I see your point, but absolutely could not disagree more.
Since literally the Dawn of the Web, I have ranted against people calling themselves web "developers" for performing a task that involved little more than multimedia-enhanced digital typesetting. In the past few years, however, HTML5 and Javascript have finally made the web browser a legitimate, fully-functional platform we can develop for (and even on). I can finally have pixel-level control for 2d, WebGL support, AudioContexts, native gamepad input support... And all in a not-too-painfully-slow "native" language (not fast, but passable), that works on any device running a modern web browser, without needing to write custom plugins for every major OS and device I want to target.
And speaking of plugins, "native" web development now makes the entire concept obsolete. Flash? Java? PDF (or a million other media format) viewers? See ya, and good riddance!
The promise of the internet was accessibility, the ability to freely share information, and to connect everything together.
If you want Gopher, by all means use Gopher (hell, I still use IRC, which works perfectly well for plain-text communication). The "web", however, has become far, far more than merely static HTML2 pages served over HTTP.
Average salary of systems administrator in India - ~$4,000 US
Average salary of a systems administrator in Washington DC - ~$75,000 US
Availability of your systems administrator when the shit hits the fan:
Outsourced to India - ~The third Thursday after Monsoon season ends.
In-house in DC - ~Already waiting in your office with an apology and an action plan.
Which one do you want to explain to the board you hired to save $71k/year, while the company hemorrhages 10x that per day in downtime because of your savings?
Now in fairness, I've worked with Indian H1Bs, and they pretty much have the same skills profiles as Americans - Half can just about get the job done when nothing exciting comes up, a quarter suck, and a quarter rock. But despite that, outsourcing still simply doesn't work for one simple reason - Management views it as waving the magic green wand and making a pesky project someone else's problem; when in reality, outsourced work requires more careful management than traditional in-house development.
Any PHB who thinks coding something to spec means a job well done, has never actually looked at the craptastic quality of most real-world specs.
7.5 million over the 10 years the DNC has existed? Chump change compared to the profits.
Hell, it surprises me someone hasn't set up a company specifically using the DNC list as their "good leads" list, and budget for paltry fines like this as just part of the cost of doing business.
Even in this case, it sounds like the "lying through our teeth scamming veterans" had much more to do with the size of the fine than any actual impact on we mere humans who have time and again told companies to fuck right off.
Dear FTC: We want you to quit playing games and start jailing executives for such blatant violations. We want you to whack the casual, somewhat-repentant (to whatever extent you can call a sociopathic-by-design entity "repentant") offenders with the "only" 7.5M stick. Get the hint?
The suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year and authorities had recently detected 'an increased interest in explosives and model aircraft,' according to an unnamed security source quoted by a German news agency."
Whoah there, fellas! So basically you've admitted to spying on innocent people for years, in who-knows-how-big of a trolling operation, and you finally caught two small fish who so far have done nothing more than "shown an interest" in something that might count as illegal?
I realize the FP doesn't involve the US, but I also thought Germany had gotten rid of the whole Stasi thing back when the wall came down.
Evidently not.
Does anyone seriously not believe the famous numbers stations as already an ultra-low-throughput form of encrypted transmission?
Whether you send the data as electrical bits, RF, carrier pigeons, or a recording of Angelina Jolie saying "zero" and "one" over and over and over really has no relevance to the underlying meaning. Either it already breaks the law, or it doesn't.
In general, advocates of the humanities have done a poor job of explaining why they are necessary. Which is problematic given that one of the things one would hope that someone in the humanities could do was come up with excellent persuasive arguments about things.
"See, I used college as a time to get high and impress girls by quoting Nietzsche, and now I need to make a living; so, I teach the humanities, which you should really really take!"
On the flip side of that, you don't need to go far to demonstrate the value of a STEM education to anyone - $34,420 per year (as the median difference, not the total salary) - but those courses have the unfortunate down-side of requiring actual effort to pass.
Not to say, BTW, that college should in any way turn into a knowledge-industry version of the "trade school"; but if you get a BS/BA and don't have the qualifications for a "real" job, congrats, you got screwed (and probably thanked $deity for the sweet, sweet vaseline of easy credits the whole way through, sadly enough).
Assuming this policy making board gets what they want...
The foundation physically cannot comply with the request, and CA knows that.
Sure, the foundation could jump through the hoops, pay the right people off, and get itself registered as requested. And then what? How exactly do you file a CTR, as required by law, against an anonymous[*] trading partner for amounts over USD$10k (equivalent)? How do you report taxable investment income or file a 1099 for that rent-a-coder expense over $600 payable to "d33znu75", last known address "31uwXjtqEbMgnnebBvupShBdwfXhVT5Mnb"?
What exactly do they think is going to happen if the foundation is shut down? That the software will stop being used or that nobody will be distributing Bitcoin clients? For something published under the GPL?
Nothing more or less than driving the use and possession of Bitcoins underground. Right now, you and I can, more-or-less comfortably, talk about using Bitcoin for a variety of purposes. We wouldn't (unless completely stupid) so cavalierly discuss large-scale drugs or arms deals in a public forum. The government can't stop Bitcoin any more than it can win the war on drugs or stop people from speeding, but it can at least force those things to keep a low profile so the government gets to look like it has a clue.
/ Yes, we all know Bitcoin lacks "true" privacy, but it works pretty damned well for the kind most of us care about (you can find every bitpenny I have on the blockchain, yet still wouldn't know my IRL identity). And governments - no paranoid conspiracy theories required - Hate the sort of privacy that matters. They don't want traceability, they want taxability.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't go far enough with #7. Not just no practical difference, we'll have no difference at all, because the executive branch will simply ignore the ruling, the same way Holder regularly does, and Reno and Ashcroft did before him (DOJ != Judiciary) ; The same way the FDA does when it doesn't "like" court orders to make certain drugs available without discrimination. The same way the entire intelligence community has done for years (*cough* guns to contras funded by running the international drug trade and all pardoned by former CIA directer Bush-the-Elder *cough*).
And we worry about some phone call tracking? We have an outright rogue government, not even pretending to give a shit about its citizens anymore, and we really care about the latest distraction over whether Snowden counts as a hero or a traitor?
However, there will be cases that deal with actual state secrets. For those, we need a court set up to deal with that sort of thing
No. We need a lack of state secrets. We need an open, transparent government that actually acts in the interests of its people rather than its CEOs. We need a court set up to try every breach of public trust as a capital offense.
We need an asteroid.
Sorry, I do not see the machine gun nests set up around the American border
Not looking very hard...
with the intent to KEEP PEOPLE IN
A fence can keep people in or out. Just a matter of which way most people want to go. When the banking system really goes down in flames in the next decade, when SS collapses from all those little "loans" we've taken against it, when the welfare state starts requiring over a 100% tax rate on those actually earning a living to sustain itself - You can bet your ass that, just like US oil pipelines today, the direction those guns face will do a 180.
Can you spell out why that is socially desirable?
Because some people don't approve of robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
Simple as that.
It's one of the big errors that scifi movies have with lasers in space combat (the other error being that laser pulses move slow enough to be seen
But combine those two errors, and we have a bit less of an error - Simply one of nomenclature rather than physics.
Pulses of light like we see in the movies would would more likely come from some sort of particle beam. It would travel slower than the speed of light, and most likely radiate energy during its trip (thus making it visible from the side).
Of course, I don't particularly expect that Hollywood grasps either point, they just like cool glowy weapons that also happen to make noise.
Let's complete the job and prohibit all speech. I mean, what the hell, right? It's all just a bunch of noise. I demand silence!
No, no, not all speech - Just corporate speech. Big difference there.
I'll accept that corporations have HUMAN rights when they can reflect on the death of their "children" in a Bhopal-like disaster, while rotting away inside a cage for "life". Until then, yes, I do demand silence from them.
Hey now, if they only inflicted their crazy on themselves, I would agree with you.
Unfortunately, they also seem to like raping Western female reporters. How many does this make in the past year? I can NAME three, and seem to recall a couple more. From "We want democracy, let's rape journalists!" to "yay, we won, let's rape journalists!", and now to "we don't like the self-imposed perversion of democracy we got, send more journalists for us to rape!"
But of course, they don't limit themselves to just reporters, oh goodness no! With an average of 23 rapes a fucking day (not sure if I meant that as a pun or not), in the middle of a crowded public place, well now - They'd soon run out of female reporters crazy enough to visit their little hellhole.
Rabid dogs don't deserve democracy, they deserve to have someone put them down for the good of us all.
1) Why does this not count as illegal collusion within an industry group? That they decided to announce it as a unified decision provides de facto proof that they conspired to deprive their customers of choice. If my itty bitty company made a similar joint announcement with one of our biggest competitors in the region, half a dozen state AGs would have us in court before the newsprint dried on the initial announcement.
2) I make use of these usurious parasites' services because it lets me conveniently move my money from place to place without worrying about the security of either cash or my real bank accounts, and I can essentially do all my spending with one tidy itemized monthly bill. If I can no longer use Visa to purchase the goods and services I want, I no longer have a reason to use Visa at all.
And a bonus thought, for good measure - For those talking about the NSA or Bitcoin - This involves regional protection of content, a favor to Hollywood, nothing more and nothing less. At least direct your vitriol in the right direction, folks.
Snowden didn't make you look bad by revealing your little games both at home and abroad. You made us look bad by pulling this shit in the first place.
Cut it out and give Snowden the hero's welcome home he deserves.
In-car apps just plain suck. Please spare us the horror, Ford, and just give us a good flexible tablet dock in the middle of the console.
Buy a TomTom, or Garmin, or Magellan nav system. Clean, easy to use, minimalist while providing the information you need to drive (and usually the option to add lots more layers of info for non-driving use, if you really want it).
Now compare that to any in-dash OEM GPS (not simply one licensed from the big three mentioned above). Oh, sure, they'll show your car moving on a map, but good luck doing something as advanced and obscure as, say, entering an address you want to go to, without taking the six-hour prep course and clicking through three or more "You must not use this while driving! You agree to not hold Chrysler responsible if you die in a horrible fiery wreck because the GPS lied to you! You will go to church this Sunday!" warning/disclaimer screens.
And don't even get me started on the actual "entertainment" part of their crapware. A $50 standalone DVD player blows the pants off the crap Detroit seems to think we want. Really, why shouldn't I have a 10-band equalizer on the steering wheel, but it makes me visually navigate a touch-menu to change the radio station?
/ Warning for the just-plain-impaired: This post may contain hyperbole and traces of nuts.
I really hate working with lazy stupid programmers who were hired only to fill out an HR racial preference checklist. Nothing is more demoralizing than working with a shiftless, smelly, untalented "winner" of the racial preference lottery.
Y'know, of all the jobs I see filled with useless people, I honestly have never seen that effect in programming.
I've met plenty of coders who the rest of us would all do better if they surfed for porn all day; I've met coders who, once they corner you somewhere will talk your ear off until you feel the need to stick a pencil through your (or their) skull; I've met plenty of coders who have no concept of 9-to-5 (and I can't claim I do so well at that one myself).
But overall, I've always seen programming as one of those fields that requires just too much rigor and discipline to even appeal to the "real" slackers. Love it or hate it, rock at it or suck at it, programming is hard.
I'm pretty sure the ads come free of charge.
Sweet! Where do I sign up to have them display my ads on your desktop for free?
Note: Sometimes "free" still means "less than zero".
Didn't even RTFS, eh?
I am sure you old-timers who predate this usage probably still complain about this. Frankly, you would serve the planet better if, instead of your pendantry over this one use of this word
No doubt you will have great success in explaining to that group of nice young Somalian men who just boarded your cruise ship that you have no issue with their unauthorized copying and distribution of your ship's manifest. They will certainly recognize your wisdom and give you a free pair of knock-off Nikes as compensation for your wit.
Visual Studio and other products have free versions now, so TechNet subscription is mostly outdated service.
Translation: "I have no clue what Technet does".
Visual studio? Try virtually every Microsoft product ever created, available for download and legal for running without further licensing so long as you use them for intentionally-vague "development" purposes.
Bad move all around, Microsoft. On the one hand, I don't really care, because I have the last 15 or so years worth of physically mailed MSDN discs, and if you cared about selling from your back-catalog, you'd still offer XP for retail. On the other hand - You want me giving the latest and greatest version of your toys a spin, because what amuses me to write my next internal app for today, my company will pick up a few hundred thousand in licenses to legally deploy it next year.
But hey, just keep pushing Win8 and the cloud, and pulling stunts like this, and then wonder why no one seems to write apps for your platforms anymore.
What exactly do you want the start menu back for?
Personally, I don't care so much about the formal start menu - I use either shortcut keys or just Win-R the program name for just about everything I don't have as an icon on my desktop. I suspect most people pining for the start menu really don't care about it specifically, but rather, the whole set of known OS behaviors that came with it:
What do I (we?) want? I want the window manager to behave as a window manager. I want small, configurable iconic shortcuts that open programs for me in a window. I want a base desktop that doesn't look like Times Square at night (complete with its many flashing neon ads). I specifically do not want every program to open itself in a more-or-less-modal fullscreen style on my 30" WQXGA display. I have a monitor that big for a reason, and believe it or not, that reason has nothing to do with spending all day prettifying Word documents intended for a booklet layout. I want the "store" to mean I go to Amazon or Newegg in a non-MSIE browser. I do not, ever, want any attempt whatsoever at "upselling" by Microsoft, or worse, the few money-grubing OEM partners of theirs they haven't managed to alienate yet.
In short, I want Windows 7. And if five years from now that means I have to run Linux to get it, I damned well will.
but now Microsoft really needs to work on getting developers on board.
Come again? Unless they completely broke the OS from the cloud down, they already have somewhere around 80% of developers actively working in their environment.
Oh! Riiight - By "8.1", Microsoft doesn't mean "Win7-plus-1.1 and we fixed the useless bullshit we did in Windows-FisherPrice-edition", it means they gave their latest defective-by-design codebase a facelift so as to not completely alienate those of us who will use 7 until MS comes up with their next "real" OS.
Sorry, Ballmer, but if you want developers, give us something worth developing for. Because if you really want to force the PC-vs-tablet issue, Android and iOS already won. Your move, though...
Web developers should continue to create websites that don't require javascript, and we shouldn't be in such a hurry to move away from that.
I see your point, but absolutely could not disagree more.
Since literally the Dawn of the Web, I have ranted against people calling themselves web "developers" for performing a task that involved little more than multimedia-enhanced digital typesetting. In the past few years, however, HTML5 and Javascript have finally made the web browser a legitimate, fully-functional platform we can develop for (and even on). I can finally have pixel-level control for 2d, WebGL support, AudioContexts, native gamepad input support... And all in a not-too-painfully-slow "native" language (not fast, but passable), that works on any device running a modern web browser, without needing to write custom plugins for every major OS and device I want to target.
And speaking of plugins, "native" web development now makes the entire concept obsolete. Flash? Java? PDF (or a million other media format) viewers? See ya, and good riddance!
The promise of the internet was accessibility, the ability to freely share information, and to connect everything together.
If you want Gopher, by all means use Gopher (hell, I still use IRC, which works perfectly well for plain-text communication). The "web", however, has become far, far more than merely static HTML2 pages served over HTTP.
Average salary of systems administrator in India - ~$4,000 US
Average salary of a systems administrator in Washington DC - ~$75,000 US
Availability of your systems administrator when the shit hits the fan:
Outsourced to India - ~The third Thursday after Monsoon season ends.
In-house in DC - ~Already waiting in your office with an apology and an action plan.
Which one do you want to explain to the board you hired to save $71k/year, while the company hemorrhages 10x that per day in downtime because of your savings?
Now in fairness, I've worked with Indian H1Bs, and they pretty much have the same skills profiles as Americans - Half can just about get the job done when nothing exciting comes up, a quarter suck, and a quarter rock. But despite that, outsourcing still simply doesn't work for one simple reason - Management views it as waving the magic green wand and making a pesky project someone else's problem; when in reality, outsourced work requires more careful management than traditional in-house development.
Any PHB who thinks coding something to spec means a job well done, has never actually looked at the craptastic quality of most real-world specs.
Some people don't have one
Get one.
Done in one.
7.5 million over the 10 years the DNC has existed? Chump change compared to the profits.
Hell, it surprises me someone hasn't set up a company specifically using the DNC list as their "good leads" list, and budget for paltry fines like this as just part of the cost of doing business.
Even in this case, it sounds like the "lying through our teeth scamming veterans" had much more to do with the size of the fine than any actual impact on we mere humans who have time and again told companies to fuck right off.
Dear FTC: We want you to quit playing games and start jailing executives for such blatant violations. We want you to whack the casual, somewhat-repentant (to whatever extent you can call a sociopathic-by-design entity "repentant") offenders with the "only" 7.5M stick. Get the hint?
The suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year and authorities had recently detected 'an increased interest in explosives and model aircraft,' according to an unnamed security source quoted by a German news agency."
Whoah there, fellas! So basically you've admitted to spying on innocent people for years, in who-knows-how-big of a trolling operation, and you finally caught two small fish who so far have done nothing more than "shown an interest" in something that might count as illegal?
I realize the FP doesn't involve the US, but I also thought Germany had gotten rid of the whole Stasi thing back when the wall came down.
Evidently not.
Does anyone seriously not believe the famous numbers stations as already an ultra-low-throughput form of encrypted transmission?
Whether you send the data as electrical bits, RF, carrier pigeons, or a recording of Angelina Jolie saying "zero" and "one" over and over and over really has no relevance to the underlying meaning. Either it already breaks the law, or it doesn't.
In general, advocates of the humanities have done a poor job of explaining why they are necessary. Which is problematic given that one of the things one would hope that someone in the humanities could do was come up with excellent persuasive arguments about things.
"See, I used college as a time to get high and impress girls by quoting Nietzsche, and now I need to make a living; so, I teach the humanities, which you should really really take!"
On the flip side of that, you don't need to go far to demonstrate the value of a STEM education to anyone - $34,420 per year (as the median difference, not the total salary) - but those courses have the unfortunate down-side of requiring actual effort to pass.
Not to say, BTW, that college should in any way turn into a knowledge-industry version of the "trade school"; but if you get a BS/BA and don't have the qualifications for a "real" job, congrats, you got screwed (and probably thanked $deity for the sweet, sweet vaseline of easy credits the whole way through, sadly enough).
Assuming this policy making board gets what they want...
The foundation physically cannot comply with the request, and CA knows that.
Sure, the foundation could jump through the hoops, pay the right people off, and get itself registered as requested. And then what? How exactly do you file a CTR, as required by law, against an anonymous[*] trading partner for amounts over USD$10k (equivalent)? How do you report taxable investment income or file a 1099 for that rent-a-coder expense over $600 payable to "d33znu75", last known address "31uwXjtqEbMgnnebBvupShBdwfXhVT5Mnb"?
What exactly do they think is going to happen if the foundation is shut down? That the software will stop being used or that nobody will be distributing Bitcoin clients? For something published under the GPL?
Nothing more or less than driving the use and possession of Bitcoins underground. Right now, you and I can, more-or-less comfortably, talk about using Bitcoin for a variety of purposes. We wouldn't (unless completely stupid) so cavalierly discuss large-scale drugs or arms deals in a public forum. The government can't stop Bitcoin any more than it can win the war on drugs or stop people from speeding, but it can at least force those things to keep a low profile so the government gets to look like it has a clue.
/ Yes, we all know Bitcoin lacks "true" privacy, but it works pretty damned well for the kind most of us care about (you can find every bitpenny I have on the blockchain, yet still wouldn't know my IRL identity). And governments - no paranoid conspiracy theories required - Hate the sort of privacy that matters. They don't want traceability, they want taxability.