timdev2

Evidently, only if you fail to do it regularly.

This is a threaded discussion platform. If you're going to make an impassioned "me too" sort of reply, it's best to respect the context and make that clear.

After all, this is the internet.

> Do we know for sure that the charges he is alleging are actually illegal?

No. We don't know their legality. As far as I can tell, there have been pseudo-legal rulings on the subject. But the existence, never-mind the substance, of those rulings are classified. Some people have a problem with that.

>> hey, non-US citizen here.

> That is YOUR hard earned tax money at work AGAINST YOU.

The guy you're yelling at is a non-US citizen who's point is "for the love of god, you ignorant american, how did you not see what's been happening until now?"

It's completely stupid that this is even a topic on HN, but the worst part is the amount of mindless shitposting going on. I mean, you just replied to a person who starts off with a disclaimer about being a not-american, and your response culimates in righteous but misplaced indignation.

Fooey.

> Every time a document like this is released, the logic is to assume that the document applies to all Verizon customers (which it does not), then to assume that all telecom companies have been given similar documents, then to assume that the government actually acts on this and randomly spies on people, then to assume that they are using that data for malicious purposes, and suddenly the government is evil.

The thing about that is that the government did those sorts of things in the past. When those became public, measures were put into place to check those powers. Some people feel that since 9/11/2001, many of those checks have been continually eroded.

More specifically:

> the logic is to assume that the document applies to all Verizon customers

Given the breadth of this order, it appears that there's no particular thing being investigated. It's just "fishing", ostensibly for national security purposes.

> then to assume that all telecom companies have been given similar documents

Once the government is asking "everything" from a particular company, using national security (as opposed to particularized criminal investigation) as the reason, what reason is there to assume they haven't ordered everyone else to do the same. Don't forget this is a secret order, the subject of which (a Verizon subsidiary) is legally barred from discussing with anyone. The document making the news here was leaked, and the leaker has committed a felony by doing so.

> ... then to assume that they are using that data for malicious purposes

I'm not sure anyone is arguing that they're doing anything malicious ... yet. But history as shown that this particular slippery slope isn't always a fallacy.

> Perhaps the country with the most powerful government in the world should have a little trust in it now and then?

One can, conversely, argue that the citizens of that country have a moral obligation to the rest of the world to keep their government's power in check precisely because it's so powerful.

Honestly, you can say that about a lot of popular music. Disco, anyone?

At some point, probably in the 70s, Frank Zappa began obsessively multi-tracking nearly-all performances (at significant cost back then). This led to a bunch of interesting output, including things like compositions based on an improvised guitar solo, separated from it's original backing, and placed in a completely different harmonic context. Also, lots of straight-up live compilations (with some overdubs), chiefly the You Can't Do That On Stage Any More (YCDTOSA) series, which is a six volume set of double-CDs.

For most people, back in those days, getting a sufficiently high-quality recording of a live show was prohibitively expensive.

Like Phish, Zappa was very much a cottage industry, unmolested by mainstream music industry stuff after the very early days.

> By passing text to something that replaces new lines with br the implication is that it is now safe to drop into HTML

I don't see how that's implied at all. After all, the function is named nl2br, not html2text.

tier != product

"regular personal gmail can handle sending out email with a different from address"

for now

After two decades, it (still) doesn't suck.

Surely you're oversimplifying and playing a bit dumb. The fact that an in-state business has to collect sales tax, and an out-of-state entity doesn't, coupled with the fact that it's not feasible to enforce sales/use tax against individuals, means that out-of-state merchants get an relative price advantage.

At the end of the day, it's a lot like what's happened to the recording industry. The internet disrupted a long-established model that had been built up around physical artifacts. In the case of sales tax, consumers used to spend most of their money with merchants in their own state. This made it easy to establish and enforce sales and use taxes, because the state government had jurisdiction on both parties to the sale, so they could devise a collection mechanism based around the relatively small number of merchants (as opposed to trying to track the relatively larger number of individual consumers).

In the past 1.N decades, a lot of that economic activity that used to be intra-state has become inter-state. And this has, predictably, caused a very real problem for state governments who depend heavily on those sales/use tax revenues.

Tax reform is absolutely necessary. In this case, the smartest thing is probably to abandon sales taxes in favor of higher state income taxes. The benefit there is that income taxes are more progressive anyway. But the states need to weigh the risk of capital flight.

The other, less palatable, option, is federal intervention. Unlike Colorado, the Federal government does possess the power to regulate inter-state commerce. It's possible that a bunch of states-other-than-california could get federal laws passed that would force merchants in any state to collect and disburse funds to satisfy the sales tax statutes in the purchasers' states.

That latter option would probably end up leading to bad unintended consequences.

I'd rather see the states find ways to replace the lost revenue by abandoning the sales tax and increasing income taxes.

I suppose the argument is that taking phone or postal orders should count, but never has, because it wasn't worth it to try to collect those taxes.

My father was an EE who for some years ran his own 1-man shop. His cards said "VP Engineering". His reasoning was that he mostly used the cards at trade shows, "VP" made it look like a bigger company, and while it made him appear senior, "VP Engineering" suggested more technical credibility than "President"

Validity is completely orthogonal to utility. It's trivial to craft a broken page with an invisible buy button that validates. I don't know of any major ecommerce site that validates.

But as the article mentioned:

"Prosecutors in this case have stressed that they don't actually require the passphrase itself, and today's order appears to permit Fricosu to type it in and unlock the files without anyone looking over her shoulder."

So the state is arguing that they're not demanding the password, only the plaintext.

Still seems fishy, but it's not clear that it's testimonial.

I suppose one could argue that it's more akin to a judge demanding that you produce the corpse the police have so far been unable to locate.

Better still, as someone else said, it's like the police demanding that you translate notes you wrote down in your own made-up-and-known-only-to-you language.

I think that's kind of the point, isn't it? Make elected office unattractive to those motivated by the thought of megabux.

Of course, such lavish pensions would still create gravity for the self-serving types who just don't think as big.