djackson's comments

The economic consequences of non-compete agreements are interesting, to say the least.

I'm curious to see what happens to average salaries for programmers over the next few years if this investigation results in more competition. I'd also like to see if programmers care enough to bounce back and forth even more for salary bumps, but that's harder to measure.

At least one of those activities is blacking out his website on SOPA blackout day.

I think the point is a bit clearer if you imagine each song having its own market.

I am not a member of the market for dubstep. I am a cheapskate in the market for Taylor Swift songs - I'd never pay full price, but I could be tempted if they were twenty cents each. I am a paying customer in the market for old blues albums.

So any one consumer is not always a cheapskate or always a paying customer. Every consumer is a cheapskate in most markets.

> and a greater challenge for SSDs trying to catch up with the amount of storage on offer.

This technology is pretty much exclusively for backups, no? Not really the competitive space for SSDs. With only a single read/write head and 18TB of information on a drive, you're looking at an enormous performance bottleneck.

> Or before they sell it all to markters

They do this now...

*irreplaceable

succinct

It's not about what they eat, it's about what it becomes in the digestive system.

One of his supporting arguments cuts both ways.

Apple's patent on "hand scaling velocity" simply gives a mathematical formula for the sentence: "scale at a speed proportional to how fast the fingers are moving."

There is nothing groundbreaking or advanced about the math here, or the idea behind it. Anyone implementing a multi-touch screen is likely to come to discover that a fixed scaling speed sometimes feels sluggish or awkwardly fast, and so that speed should adjust based on user input. And now, without realizing it, they've infringed on Apple's IP and are open to being sued.

He's just removing the right-most letter/number swap in each iteration.

Don't you end up eating the digestive system of the bug along with the rest of it? The sticking point for me is not that the animal is a bug, but that I am eating its waste. Never having eaten bugs, I'm not sure how exactly this works out.

When eating shrimp and lobster, you are typically eating the processed muscle mass (and shell, if you are into that), rather than the whole animal in one bite.

The screenshot looks remarkably similar to the Google wave layout.

Will be interesting to see how many people take advantage of this.

If you killed someone, I want them to win the case against you.

They have the information. They have your hard drive. You have a key, or they can brute force the information out with decryption software. This is not a Fifth Amendment case. They don't want or care about the password itself. They can't use the information you provide (the password) to incriminate you, no matter what the password is.

This case is not about rights, it's about a specific entity, the Department of Justice of the United States of America, having a specific investigative power, namely, that they don't have to keep a horde of expensive consultants on retainer to decrypt people's boring, completely legally irrelevant documents. On the off-chance that they lose that power, they'll still get whatever it is they want from your laptop, it'll just take longer and cost more.

Nobody is revising the Bill of Rights, the Fourth or Fifth Amendments.

I don't think that in the case that someone has your laptop in hand you can still plead the fifth. If there is evidence pertinent to the case on the physical drive obtained by the government, then they already are in possession of the container holding that evidence. Beyond that, it's a matter of litigation expense to crack it. It's up to you, at that point - unlock the laptop and allow a search or force them to hire a consultant (lawyers and cops are shitty hackers) to dig into it for them.

The hand-written note argument doesn't hold water, in my eyes, because it is the encryption of all of the evidence, not any one document, that is at issue. As was mentioned, the government has compelled people to open safes.

I don't think you understand what a subpoena is.

A subpoena is a compulsory order to produce all documents related to a matter, whether the government knows they exist or not. So yes, if you believe in subpoena power, you agree that you should have to produce that box.

Nobody has the right to avoid a reasonable search in the United States. You are protected by the fourth amendment from unreasonable searches, but you aren't going to convince me that a detective has no right, with a warrant in hand, to search a suspect's home for a murder weapon.

Similarly, you aren't going to convince me that a prosecutor, warrant in hand, has no right to search a computer for evidence of credit card fraud.

Do you think the government should have subpoena power in order to collect evidence? Do you think they should be able to search a murderer's home for the weapon? I'm not saying they should have this power without a warrant, but nobody has the protection from a _reasonable_ search.