No. The standard embassy deal covers only embassy ground and certain agreed-upon diplomatic staff (ie, if war breaks out, both sides agree to let the ambassadors for the other go home safely). Assange is not diplomatic staff, and thus cannot be transported. Even if he was, good luck getting clearance to fly. Right now the situation is stalemate: Assange cannot leave, and the UK government cannot enter.

"Uninterested in facing U.S. justice..."

I do want to point out that Assange is not facing U.S. justice. What he is "uninterested in facing" is a return to Sweden to be questioned on rape charges.

He says that if he's sent to Sweden, Sweden will extradite him to the U.S.. There's no actual evidence for that, and no real reason to believe it.

Even in prison you are actually allowed to go outside. Presumably he prefers an internet connection to being able to see the sun? What he's got now is hardly better than it he was extradited to the USA and thrown in jail, except he doesn't get to be a martyr or fight a decent trial this way.

Last I checked he was willing to go to sweden for the questioning (no charges have been put forward at all to my knowledge yet) so long as he had a guarantee to not be extradited to the US while there.

Sweden refused.

If I were him I'd take that as intent to ship him off after he gets there.

use a ladder between the steps and the car door so you're not touching the ground?

Couldn't they then claim he was violating their airspace and shoot him down?

I started using Git last year for my personal projects. It's a fantastic platform for coding as a social-network. I love that I can grab code I need from other developers around the world, tweak it, and send it back with a few suggestions. I love that I can follow other projects without having to get involved. Git is awesome.

That being said, we still use SVN for our internal development. The WYSIWYG interface of Tortoise is simply really comprehensive. I realize that Git offers more options, but if those options aren't available with a simple right-click, then I don't have the time for them. Tortoise SVN makes everything readily available, while Git makes me run to the command line too often.

TortoiseGit?

Care to point to specific bugs? We've been using SVN for years and never seen these problems.

Moreover, since SVN is client-server, why would a buggy client cause datacorruption in the database? Are you implying there are major bugs in the svn server?

without backup, your claims are just FUD...

I'll just leave this here so people get to see a comparison that's actually useful.

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSvnComparison

Well, the good thing about camera sticks is they have a natural predator to keep their numbers in check.

Time to update the list of things that will let you automatically get a patent for something:

• - on a computer
• - on the internet
• - on a stick

Again proof the Patent office is a joke. this is simply attaching something to another thing.

I would like to patent the method of attaching things to other things in order to file a patent.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not how it works in nuclear nor in aviation..

One of the main reasons things are behind in those industries is paper trails. Rules and regulations. It takes forever and lots of money to get this gear certified. Once certified, it takes an act of God to change it.

A PDP-11 isn't much more reliable than any other system. It has unreliable old-style linear power supplies, unreliable backplane connectors and all parts do fail eventually. Just because they weigh a hundred times more doesn't mean they are a hundred times more reliable.

You seem to be equating this laundry list of things running at the same time with "need". Frankly, I'm not convinced that present-day "need" gets any more accomplished than was performed by what we had ten years ago in most businesses with the "needs" from then.

I don't measure productivity in the number of bits pushed or number of programs used. I measure it in how useful those bits were and how much was usefully accomplished by those programs. You're simply justifying bloat.

So? A "generation" is commonly held to be 30 years; the average child (note: not first-born) being born when the parents are approximately 30. Secondly, TFA specifies two generations "coming and going", which means two ENTIRE generations pass; not just one passing and the second one beginning.

That is 60 years, not 37 years. TFS, if not TFA, which I didn't read, is officially stupid.

Commonly by who?

In virtually all cases, generations are pegged at 20 years. The common "Gen X", "Gen Y", etc are all 20 year spans. In fact, virtually every named "generation" of the last century were equal or slightly less than 20 years.

Even if you go by the average age of first birth, in virtually all of the "1st world", its right around 25. The peak averages are barely 30, and globally its in the low 20's, depending on the source.

So by either definition, there's definitely time for two generations ... and if you're talking about the average time in a given position (which is a more meaningful generation when speaking about engineers), you're looking at more like 15 years -- or time for three.

"Just because they weigh a hundred times more doesn't mean they are a hundred times more reliable."

But it is a hundred times more satisfying to shove it off a building when it misbehaves. At least, that's how it works with copiers.

If you want to get technical: the language was MACRO-11. Which is an example of an assembly language. I program in "C#", not in "compiler."

In the Digital world, the name "MACRO" stuck because there were very early assemblers for the PDP-1 that did not have macro capability. So "MACRO" was the name for the assembler that did. In subsequent machine generations, "the" assembler was usually called MACRO even though as far as I know there weren't any assemblers without macro capabilities.

And perhaps I should add: the reason that it's called assembly language is because of drum memory. The usage dates back AT LEAST to the IBM 650 and Symbolic Optimal Assembly Language (SOAP). "Assembly" was short for "optimal assembly." Each instruction contained within it the address of the next instruction--they weren't sequential--and "optimal assembly" was the process of calculating how long each instruction would take so that the next instruction could be placed at the right location on the drum that it would be almost under the head when the last instruction had completed. "Optimal assembly" was the memory placement aspect of it.

The symbolic optimal assembly program added to that the advanced capability of allowing programmers to refer to instruction codes by convenient, easy-to-remember mnemonics like UFA and STA, as well as the capability of giving your very own names to instruction locations.

For some reason, the category name got abbreviated to "assembler" rather than "symbol-" um... symbolizer? Symbolic? OK, maybe THAT reason... and it stuck, even after advanced computers like the IBM 704 started to have random-access memory.

It really depends what you are doing. For many projects, scripting with some OOP is good enough (all those web projects, RoR, etc.). Having short code in an expressive language leads to less bugs.

Static typing is extremely useful because it catches all mistakes of a certain class. However, other mistakes you still have to unit test for. So if you are unit&integration testing well, the benefit of static typing is small, and you are capturing more mistakes than static typing would.

For projects where you have contract-like, long-term stable interfaces/APIs, yes, use static typing. But don't pretend it's for every project.

oh well

Another programming language! Why do people keep reinventing the spoon?

Which spoon? The soup spoon? Teaspoon? Tablespoon? Dessert spoon? Wooden spoon?

The cloud computing business is purely a side business. The only reason they are in it at all is to monetize their infrastructure needs. Ever wonder why in the early years of EC2 is always slowed down at Christmas time? The infrastructure they were renting out was the excess capacity they need to add every Christmas season to meet demand. They started renting it out and then Christmas time came and they needed it all back, leaving EC2 customers in the lurch. They eventually grew it to the point where it is able to survive without affecting customers, but it is still simply renting excess capacity they don't need. I doubt it could survive without the retail sales business.

The only relevant things about Google's enterprise performance should be how seriously they treat those offerings. That they're playing around with driverless cars on the side really doesn't matter in the slightest.

If it does, then obviously people should be equally concerned that Microsoft is more focused on trying to sell phones and Xboxes than it is on what their enterprise customers are actually using (since they're sure as hell not using Windows 8).

...wondering if perhaps Google has simply become a master of advertising and marketing in its own right, rather than being just the middleman. All of these projects make Google seem cool and geek-friendly, and keep Google brand front-and-centre in a mostly positive light. With all of their slick-new-project churn they simply look less moribund and uncool than either Microsoft or Apple, even as they're becoming a more staid and conservative company. And with their seemingly limitless supply of dollars, the cost of these projects is probably chump change to them.

It's also possible that they've chosen to 'throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks'. There's something to be said for the experimental approach to learning what large numbers of people will pay for, and Google has always struck me as being much stronger strategically than tactically.

This article summary from a few decades ago:

Bell Labs' Crazy Lack of Focus -- Is it Serous about Telephones?
From semiconductors, to photovoltaics, to computer operatings systems, Bell Labs has wanders aimlessly from topic to topic. How will these ever apply to the copper lines strung across the world to carry our telephone conversations?? Doesn't Bell Labs know that it should only invest in ideas and technology that can pay off within 3 years?

... while in its current form it is slow and in need to be tethered, I see no reason for that to stay that way as technology advances.

Imagining that one day tech improves to the point when these things are as fast and nimble as a cat, and can last at least a few days in power, you could stick explosives on them and have them track targets. Or have them stay hidden then lunge at high speed when someone gets too close.

Like a mine that will chase after you before it explodes. Considering how fast my cat can run, and how nimble it is, in future these things could be quite terrifying, especially if they are released in large batches. Probably the only weapon that may save you is a shotgun (short of some futuristic, directed, hand held, EMP cannon).

Makes me imagine of the head crabs in half life, or the replicators in stargate.

The article makes little sense. The site of the DEEP project is more useful. It has the look of an EU publicly funded boondoggle. Those have a long history; see Plan Calcul, the 1966 plan to create a major European computing industry. That didn't do too well.

The trouble with supercomputers is that only governments buy them. When they do, they tend not to use them very effectively. The US has pork programs like the Alabama Supercomputer Center. One of their main activities is providing the censorware for Alabama schools.

There's something to be said for trying to come up with better ways of making sequential computation more parallel. But the track record of failures is discouraging. The game industry beat their head against the wall for five years trying to get the Cell processors in the PS3 to do useful work. Sony has given up; the PS4 is an ordinary shared-memory multiprocessor. So are all the XBox machines.

It's encouraging to see how much useful work people are getting out of GPUs, though.

Demand Surges for Supercomputers

Do Supercomputers Still Matter?

Oil giant Total builds "world's largest commercial supercomputer"

"Xeon Phi = unavailable vaporware"

You know, I wrote a paper on SpMV for Xeon Phi and I got quite a lot of people from all over the world asking me for clarification and for code. So it seems to be quite widespread. You can actually buy some online, Google points to several vendors.

"in order to discourage folks from porting big science applications to CUDA"

There are two things wrong with this statement. First of all, I do not think scientist are discourage from giving a shot to CUDA. Just check any scientific conference and you'll see GPU and CUDA everywhere. Actually we see so much GPU programming that it is getting boring.
Also porting to CUDA is difficult and alien for most people. If we can get similar performance using programming model people are used to, how is that not a good thing? What is so good about CUDA? It is just pretty much the only way to get good performance out of NVIDIA gpus.

The tradeoff between performance, hardware cost and developper cost is a difficult tradeoff. I say let's throw them all in the arena and see what stands.

Disclaimer: my research is supported by both Intel and NVIDIA.

Amdahl's Law still stands. TFA is about changing the assumptions that Amdahl's Law is based on; instead of homogenous parallel processing, you stick a few big grunty processors in for the serial components of your task, and a huge pile of basic processors for the embaressingly parallel components. You're still limited by the fastest processing of non-parellel tasks, but by using a heterogenous mix of processors you're not wasting CPU time (and thus power and money) leaving processors idle.

No, I said it was music!

..., but it would be too much work and expense for the average ripper.

Until someone writes a program for it, so the average ripper only has to push a button.

I think that map makers have been doing this for a century or more.

I remember a pub guide with 1,200 pub reviews including three fake ones, and a newspaper copied (and slightly rearranged the words) of ten of their reviews and managed to copy one of the fake ones. Good fun.

There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type

I didn't read the article because I had seen it earlier in another news source, so I don't if this is mentioned in the one mentioned here, but proofreading may not do it in this case. The source I read mentioned two specific types of change that do not introduce any typos (I'm choosing the exampled myself):
- One of them was reordering of nouns when the order does not matter, e.g. "Peter and John went for lunch" vs "John and Peter went for lunch";
- The other was playing with negatives: e.g. "something is unclear" vs "something is not clear"

Since there are no actual typos, it's hard to spot the identifying bits. You'd have to change the text substantially, in order to have a good chance of being free from discovery. Adding your own typos may not serve any purpose, since the company selling can focus just on the changes they made, not looking for other changes introduced after.

Of course, if there is a concerted effort to release documents, all pirates would need to do would be buying a few copies and diffing the documents. You may not get the original back, but if the changes are randomly put in a specific set of words, you certainly can end up with something close to the original than any of the sold copies and still free from pirate identification.

Either Nvidia commits to building SoCs that are all things to all people

That is what Project Denver was supposed to be. This announcement probably confirms that Project Denver is a failure that will never see the light of day. Denver was supposed to be the companies salvation after HPC, Tegra and everything else failed to meet the projections they set with wall street.

Intel isn't going to buy or license nVidia stuff. They already have a license to use all their patents through a cross license deal that excluded a large chunk of Intel patents and IP. Intel is 100% focused on power consumption at this point and nVidia tech would do nothing but hurt them on this front. Haswell includes a GPU that's almost as good at the nVidia 650 and uses less power than Icy Bridge. It's also cheaper for the OEM/ODM's and provides better total power use.

It's trivially easy for Intel to just keep advancing the GPU with each processor generation. As people have been saying for years nVidia's biggest problem is that as Intel keeps raising the low end with integrated processors that don't suck they erode significant revenue from nVidia. The reason prices for top end nVidia parts keep going up is because they are continuing to lose margin on the middle end and have lost the low end. Better than half the computers sold no longer even include a discrete GPU. As Intel continues it's slow advance they will continue to eat more and more of the discrete market place. Considering the newest consoles are going to be only marginally better than the current consoles we're probably looking at another 7 years of gaming stagnation which in the long run will damage nVidia more as fewer games require more resources than integrated GPUs. I seriously doubt nVidia can go much higher than the current $1100 Titan and expect to sell anything at all. I expect over the next two years for nVidia to see consecutive quarterly declines in revenue. They've already eroded margin and they can't push price much higher.

They bet their lunch on HPC, and didn't even come close to their projections on sales. Then they bet the farm on Tegra, they sold none of Tegra1, had just short of no sales on Tegra2, did ok but only with tablets for Tegra3 and have announced not a single win for Tegra4. Project Denver was supposed to be the long term break with Intel that would provide the company the opportunity to move forward as a total service SOC company. Denver is supposed to be a custom designed 64bit ARM processor with integrated nVidia GPU. It was projected for the end of 2012. After missing 2012 they claimed end of 2013, this announcement makes be personally believe project denver has been canceled. Things haven't looked good for nVidia ever since Intel integrated GPU's and blocked them from the chipset market. They won't be selling to Intel because Intel doesn't want them. The other SOC vendors appear to be satisfied with PowerVR products (which focus on power use) except for qualacom which has the old AMD mobile cores to work with. I can't help but believe that this is as other have said, an attempt to go total IP and try to litigate a profit. This is probably the begining of a long slow slide into oblivion. nVidia's CEO has already sold most of his holdings (except for unexecuted options, also a very bad sign).

Which is why I sell AMD exclusively, because I hate insider douchebaggery and Intel is king of the douchebags. And ya know what? I have yet to hear a single complaint that their system is too slow, not one. And I put my money where my mouth is, I have an AMD hexacore that just chews through games and transcoding (and does so at the same time if I want) and cost me at $105 shipped less than a Pentium Dual. So unless a person is in one of those rare fields where they need every possible cycle they can squeeze out of a machine they really are just pissing money away. And as a bonus the money I saved let me get a nicer gaming board, twice the memory i would have gotten otherwise, and plenty of upgrade options down the road if I want to go even faster or get the octo-core.

But that still don't explain why in the fuck Intel don't get busted, after all Apple and Linux were around when the DoJ busted MSFT's ass and if anything Intel has a tighter lock on the market than MSFT ever did. so I want to know who is cashing the checks, who is getting paid off, as i smell some dirty dealing which as we saw with the kickback scandal is SOP for Intel.

Actual translation "Intel fucked us in the ass more than AMD that at least got a billion plus for their ass reaming, all we got was the curb. Now we are just gonna have to become patent trolls because with AMD owning ATI and Intel going their own way we missed the boat...damn we should have bought Via". (...) Oh and for Nvidia fans...sorry but I could have told ya so. AMD [has been so much smarter]

Yes, because AMD has totally been flowers and sunshine ever since. In their Q1 2013 finances stockholder's equity was down to $415 million, one more total disaster quarter like Q4 2012 with a $473 million loss and they're filing for bankruptcy. Meanwhile nVidia's market cap is more than twice as big as AMD (and that is after AMD's stock recovered, it was 5x a little while there) and they're making money, this is not a back-against-the-wall move. It's the realization that building a complete SoC is complicated and just having good graphics is not enough, better to play the PowerVR game (who are not productless IP trolls) and be other SoCs than to be nowhere at all.

They can waste their mod points all they want they can't show me a SINGLE CASE, not one, where the GPL foundation was able to keep a company from changing the license to their own products. And I never said anything about retroactive, which is why I said you can fork the last GPL version and they can't do shit because if you tried to retroactively change a license you would be laughed out of court.

Kinda fucking sad that only the proprietary guy has actually read the fricking GPL, but show me anywhere where the FSF can control FUTURE licenses because its NOT IN THERE. all the GPL does is makes sure that particular release that was done under GPL then STAYS under GPL, they can change the license at any. time.they.want. and it does not matter because the version that is ALREADY GPL STAYS GPL, which was the whole fucking point, that you wouldn't come to depend on a piece of FOSS and have them pull the rug out from under you by pulling a switch.

But that does NOT give you the right to everything a company makes from that moment on, or even every single version of a particular software that they make because it is THEIR PROPERTY and if they want to make it GPL,MPL, if they want to say you have to do a fricking rain dance to get a copy of the latest version? they can do that. what they CAN'T DO is take what was already GPL and wave a magic wand and make it proprietary, it just does not work that way and no case law that I'm aware of lets a company change a license retroactively from whenever they feel like it. If the court allowed that then there wouldn't be any licenses, because you could never know if the deal you made today would be upheld tomorrow.

So its nothing to get your panties in a twist over guys, you can decide to be a dumbass and trust old Monty again (seriously guys look at the MariaDB license again, old Monty has it set up so all the code belongs to him, no reason he can't sell it out from under you again) or you can go to one of the other SQL variants or hell, if you want you and some other devs can take the last GPL version of MySQL and fork it and make something better. Make it belong to the actual community so it can't be sold and get behind that like you did with Libre office, why not do that? But this is a tempest in a teapot, who cares, you have options galore.

IBM isn't known for dumb moves

Your memory of IBM differs from my own.

I don't think the existence of MariaDB lets Oracle off the hook for a couple of reasons:

MariaDB doesn't change the fact that Oracle is reneging on its [implied] promises.

The harm is real. If a developer/company continues development on mysql (e.g. spends real money) continuing with mysql, based upon the assurances, vs. pulling the plug on all such devel activity immediately [when Oracle first acquired Sun].

In absence of the Oracle roadmap, the other company's choice might have been to spend that [wasted] capital on doing a Postgres port right away. Not only money wasted, but time as well, and business decisions about what markets to stay in/get out of. All of these could affect a company's competitiveness, market share, and profitability. Hence the harm.

If Oracle had said at time of acquisition that mysql was being closed [made no public promises to the contrary], there would be nothing to litigate about. Others are correct about being able to change licensing in general.

But, if Oracle had said that then [people were plenty steamed up], there would have been an immediate code fork [ala LibreOffice] or mass migration to Postgres [IIRC, MariaDB didn't exist then]. So, if Oracle had this latest action in mind all along [after the brouhaha dies down], then they seem truly duplicitous [and vulnerable in a court of law].

Yes, it is. The job of the ISP is to provide their paying customers access to 'TheInternet'. That is still the promise they make, and still their obligation. If they can't meet that obligation they should go do something else.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving. So fuck them.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving.

That is the heart of the matter. They're so used to huge profits for next to no effort that the notion of giving customers value for their money never enters their mind. And they'd laugh at the suggestion of "invest in your own network".

There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms. Threaten to do to them what was done to AT&T decades ago. You'd see service improve everywhere in a big hurry.

lf l were an ISP, Netflix would "get" to install hardware in my network over my dead body - simply because l DO NOT TRUST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE l HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

lF YOU'RE AN lSP THEN lNSTALLlNG RANDOM SHlT ONTO YOUR NETWORK lS WHAT YOU GET PAlD TO DO. SUCK lT UP AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

Verizon chooses not too. Obviously, they cannot think their customers do not value Netflix. Clearly, they don't care much about their customers -- or there's an alterior motive; or just plain ignorance, blindness, and stupidity.

No Verizon chooses not to because they can't charge $100 a month for cable video in a free market with actual competition. Thus they stop delivering other video service over the internet eliminating the competition.

There is a good chance it's more complicated than just this. Remember this is Cogent we are taking about here and they are famous for trying to get downstream isps to pay the entire cost of peering upgrades and have also been known to actively cut back on peering points with other providers.

They are also famous for causing most of the IPv6 routing problems that affect day to day useage.

The dev kit version already has latency tackled very well, so it's not really much of an issue. The HD prototype even further reduced it as well as adding the high res and removal of the screen door effect of the dev kit versions (due to low res display) that would exacerbate the issue.

Though understand that a lot of the motion sickness comes from the sudden, jarring and quick motions that are common with games nowadays. Games and demos being developed for the Rift are being designed with slower movement in mind to alleviate strain that the eyes may have. It really comes down not so much to the Rift itself but the developers and how they decide to design their games. Rift would work a whole lot better with Halo than it would Unreal Tournament.

The most successful early adopter of technology has historically been the porn industry.

There you go.

No shit, just go to a site like HuffPo and see how many of them will, cheer and make excuses no matter how jackbooted Obama gets because "he is OUR guy". Its fucking ballclub mentality and frankly is what is killing this country.

As for his bit about "censoring trolls"? I have found faaaar too often the word troll means "I do not agree with you". Its the same as shill which means "You like something I don't like". in both cases its total bullshit, and it works to promote groupthink which is great if all you want is a room full of yes men, again go to something like Fox or HuffPo to see a group that trips all over each other to agree.

The problem in that case is that it's not the government's land. The problem there is the government thinking it is their land, rather than them being employed by the people to enforce their (those peoples') rights to that land.

Someone exercising their rights over their own property is perfectly fine. Someone else attempting to claim rights over someone else's property is a problem. Government censorship is a problem in principle (consequential problems aside) because it claims a right for the government to control what other people can do with their own property.

Freedom of speech does not mean I must provide you with a microphone. Moderating forums and mailing lists is not censorship.

Seriously, what would the government do if Google just went ahead and released the information?

Uh...put people in Jail for breaking the law? There is no legal defense--so unless you want to move to China, you beg for permission to speak.

Let me give you an example of what sorts of things they can do.

I worked for a bank, once. Banks are closely monitored by the Federal Government.

One of our obligations was to feed everyone and everything to a Federal database of terrorists, drug dealers, money launders and other suck ilk. Including, at one point, the entire duly-elected Palestinian government.

The requirements were so all-encompassing that I used to joke that if you so much as walked your dog past the building, both you and your dog were supposed to be checked against it.

Failure to comply in a satisfactory manner could result in:

o Severe fines and penalties
o Revocation of the bank's charter
o Extensive prison sentences for both corporate management and the board of directors
o Ditto for the CIO, my boss and me/co-workers
o Ditto also, I think for the corporate legal department

We once went into a major panic because someone had opened an account and their (fairly common) name didn't come up as a "hit" against a money-laundering Mexican travel agency. Other people with that name have made national news just trying to buy a new car, which is why Federal databases can be so dangerous.

Google may not be a bank, but considering their size, I'm sure that there are more than a few things that come under government scrutiny and/or regulation. So I don't think they're likely to go "lone wolf" here.

I'm not surprised by this. I have a friend whose an activist / environmentalist and he keeps telling me about how awful the world has become and how the Govt is taking away heritage listed rainforest for it's own financial desire. My response to him was clear. Go to the open forums that are held discussing the future of certain lands and ask the hard questions to the face of the people who are taking active part in the corruptive activities. See I have a theory why things are the way they are.

It isn't that world has "become" a bad place and all these shady goings on have started, oh no, the world "is" a bad place and it's because nobody knows what they are doing is wrong. Consider what the internet has done here with the whole Snowden situation. The internet is shining a light on the dark crevices on our society and we are seeing all the huddled groups of cockroaches who are used to the darkness step into the light for first time.

Isn't it better to assume that Google's employees simply followed the rules of their predecessors as their predecessors perhaps thought (being patriotic and all) that what they were doing at the time was the best thing and had the best of intentions?

What Snowden did was ask the tough questions and Google answered those tough questions with a "Golly you're right!". Don't crucify Google for having a moral sense when asked because those who are in positions of power that steal only do so because they get away with it, no one questions it and therefore "it's obviously okay to do". When they find out it's not 99% of the time they back peddle, usually without any argument.

That's what THEY want you to believe! Wake up sheeple!

Well the reasons for them doing it are simple: Self Preservation. If you had your E-Mail, Social Contacts/Pictures etc. in a system that was regularly tapped by the NSA and the FBI, then you might think twice about using those services. Google's freely available services that you can use but while you're using them, we'll mine every piece of information out of you that we can. They're a commercial NSA and when the real NSA steps on their toes, possibly driving users away that's not good for business. Facebook and Microsoft have the same problem, hell all free cloud based services have a problem now with this "215" section of the law. Yes, Google is an 800lb Gorilla and so is Microsoft, well 650lb now and Facebook, meh, 400lb. If they start pushing on those idiots like Feinbitch who as chairwomen of the Senate Intelligence Committee (boy there's an oxymoron for you) stating that the NSA has access to your phone conversations, when they want. If they start pushing on DC and getting all the masses lined up, maybe things will change. The EFF and ACLU have some pretty sharp lawyers as well and they haven't had much luck in cracking all of the intrusions into our privacy and the secrecy of why the government needs this information. Feinstein and others with her mentality in DC are the reason we have this mess to begin with, now the feign ignorance and shock or coyishly say "well it has thwarted terrorism." Funding comes from congress, there is no way in hell that She and members of her committee didn't have direct knowledge of what was going on, much less every member of the House and Senate for the past decade. They've written the laws that allow the secrecy and the pulling of information without warrants and because of that and the nature of the legal process in this country, lower courts bar cases from moving forward on "National Security" reasons. This is an affront to the 4th amendment yet alone the 1st amendment as Google is claiming. Like I said, good luck because those Federal Judges have to look at the law as written and do you think that stooge Holder isn't going to appeal his way up to the Supreme Court if an "activist" judge somehow rules against the Government?

Also anybody out here should remember back in 2007 there was an uproar because of the warrantless wiretapping going on. What happened then? Well the cases dragged on and then congress gave the telecomms immunity in a new piece of legislation.

Oh and the only case that is still moving forward since 2007 (it is 2013 now after all) is being held up by the Justice Department and that retard Clapper..

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=190892480

James Clapper, director of national intelligence, personally urged U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White to throw out the remaining lawsuit. Clapper wrote the judge in September that the government risks "exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" if forced to fight the lawsuit.

That case has EFF lawyers behind it, think they'll be successful?

So the constitution and out privacy violated in the names of National Security. Shit, Woz hit it on the mark the other day.
http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/06/apple-inc-aapl-co-founder-steve-wozniak-rethinks-america/

In Wozniak’s view, the Patriot Act started things going downhill, and he said there isn’t even “a free open court anymore.” He compared the U.S. government to a king who rounds up people and kills them or puts them in prison. He said when reading the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he doesn’t see how the things that are happening now are actually allowed to happen.

He also compared the U.S. to Russia. He said that when he was growing up, the Russian government would follow people around, s