These guys filled hospitals with people who had their limbs blown off. And they shot cops willy nilly. The fact that only a few people are dead is small comfort. These were some of the most dangerous people in the entire country, comparing their danger to the danger of industry or automobile transit is just silly. Those are very different problems with very different solutions.

The Bush administration systematically created a legal netherworld for people they captured on suspicion of terrorism -- people usually referred to as "enemy combatants". They weren't arrested per se, so they weren't entitled to a trial, lawyers, or even the basic rights we associate with a criminal trial such as protection against self-incrimination (i.e. the right to remain silent). On the other hand, the administration argued they weren't prisoners of war either, so the Geneva Convention didn't apply to them.

By defining enemy combatants in this negative way -- in terms of what they are not -- the Bush administration pushed enemy combatant status into a grey area where no pre-existing legal rules seemed to apply. That's how they argued that torture was legal: they said that laws prohibiting torture only applied to prisoners of war or people charged with crimes, and that because enemy combatants weren't either of those things, they could legally be tortured.

If they had read this guy his Miranda rights, the Obama administration would have made it clear that they would treat his future as a police matter and that they were rejecting the enemy combatant framework in this case. They failed to do that, and I think it's a wasted opportunity.

(By the way, when justifying drone strikes and the courtroom procedures at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has continued the enemy combatant framework that Bush's lawyers established.)

Unfortunately, too many people conceive of the 4th and 5th amendment protections entirely as roadblocks to hinder police for the sake of hindering the police, instead of the targeted checks on police behavior that they are. In doing so they read important parts of the amendments (e.g. "unreasonable" or precisely what a protection applies to, or precisely what sorts of activity a protection prohibits) completely out of the text of the Constitution.

My sense has been that their customers are predominately those bound by things like HIPPA or PCI, who want to use cloud services, but can't do it with a straight face unless they can say they're "encrypting" their data.

What their customers want isn't security; it's the minimum required that will allow them to use salesforce.com. Incriminating details on StackExchange aren't a problem because their customers don't already know CipherCloud is insecure, they're a problem because it would make it harder for customers to say they're in compliance with a straight face.

Here's what we know happened before the lockdown:

- These two suspects allegedly planted two bombs that killed three and injured over 170 others.

- These two suspects allegedly killed an MIT police officer.

- These two suspects allegedly carjacked an SUV and held its driver captive for some time.

- During a chase with police, these suspects allegedly threw homemade explosive devices at law enforcement.

What we don't seem to know yet (and definitely didn't at the time):

- Did they have more explosives? There's certainly reason to believe they may have.

- Did they have other attacks planned? We don't know one way or the other, and that's sort of the point.

I really don't think it's unreasonable that given what we knew, and especially what we didn't, residents of Boston (myself included) were asked to stay indoors while authorities attempted to locate suspect #2. Remember, they didn't lock the city down immediately after the bombing. They did it after what the Boston police commissioner is calling the "execution" of an MIT police officer, a carjacking, multiple IED detonations (or attempted detonations, I'm not totally clear), and a shootout with police in a residential neighborhood.

Background checks are already required for almost all gun sales, including ones at gun-shows. This whole discussion is a red-herring. And what the f%!# good do you think a "database for guns" is going to do? You think the terrorists buy their guns over the counter, with legit IDs and happily register them with the authorities? You expect the terrorists to register their pressure cookers? Maybe we should have background checks for buying those?

And then what? Background checks for buying nichrome wire, because it can be used as a bridgewire in a detonator? A database of Arduinos, since they can be used as timers for bombs?

Or how about a national database of people who guy gasoline, Drano, nails, ball-bearings, lithium-ion batteries, soldering irons, solder...

Better still, let's implement a Great Firewall of America to keep people from accessing subversive content like Inspire magazine, the Unabomber manifesto, the writings of Timothy McVeigh, the Koran, Cryptome, Wikileaks, Paladin Press, Justin Bieber songs, Anarchist's cookbook, Poor Man's James Bond or the Federalist Papers...

Cheers

I realized I probably "wasted" three hours following the story. Because at the end of the day, I gained nothing I couldn't have gotten in reading an article at 11pm for five minutes.

I swear, it's like a drug. It's exciting at the time, but afterwards you think, well, that was a stupid waste of my time.

Putting a very powerful (if archaic) tool in the hands of people without the experience or understanding to use it effectively and then passing around the results for editing by other people with similarly (or differently) deficient ability with the program is the problem.

The tool is simply too flexible to be used for many of the things it's doing by many of the people who are using it. This is one of the good reasons that we (application developers) do our best to gather requirements: Excel is usually good at what it does, but it does so many things that understanding what it does that you don't need it to do, or how and why it does things you've accidentally done or need to watch out for, has become as -- if not more -- important as/than understanding what it was you wanted to do in the first place.

So yes... Excel plays a role in some very bad things. But no, it's not Excel's fault.

The product you are actually buying is non-existent. You are the product. People pay good money in order to manipulate your social drive to keep you as viewers.

I said this to some friends on FB yesterday, but it bears repeating. Of all the players in this terrible tragedy, the terrorists, the police, the news media, the administration, the politicians, the security-industrial complex and so forth -- it's in everybody's interest to create and sustain some huge public spectacle. That's not a good thing for a democracy or the continuation of a free society. </rant>

edit: I guess only 1 cop was killed?

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, but I also do not like to sugar-coat things.

Steve Jobs was mentally ill. A lot of people don't like to say that, but that is what he was. I cannot diagnose his exact condition, but he shared many traits of the common sociopath -- all except that he was never very charming, generally speaking. [0] Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the right people (Steve would have been an absolute nobody if he had never met Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he probably would have turned out to be a homeless person (if you had met him at Atari, you would have thought so). Steve was a bag of ideas -- ideas that were not original but, to his blessing, very consistent. And as most of us agree, ideas are only worth the quality of their execution. A lot of people look up to Steve for this reason - he was a non-engineer who came to rule the tech world. If he could do it, so could they.

I have no real agenda against Jobs, and I would definitely say that his life was filled with interesting accomplishments (even if the only accomplishment was only swindling the world to pay 2x as much for his products). But this is one man I would never place on a pedestal, because he is not a model human being.

The only heros I have know humility. Steve Jobs, even in the face of death, never learned that.

[0] http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

-Benjamin Franklin

[0]http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/18/graaarh-ph...