This article is from a mainstream source, USA Today, which might be the most widely circulated periodical in the nation... and this "Hayden" says what?

They'll poll damn well after the next attack

Reacting reflexively to irrational human impulses is not good leadership. What Hayden is talking about is called "taking advantage of the public to further political goals."

there have been no abuses

Bullshit. A flat out lie. Most of the data collection the NSA does is an abuse simply by its nature, and that's ignoring the blatant abuses we already know about.

almost all the court decisions on this program have held that it's constitutional

What? All one out of two cases? Another flat out lie.

This is a propaganda piece, plain and simple. Grease the peons for the next move no matter how toxic the lubrication. Enzensberger said the "consent industry" was the most important of the twentieth century. And so it is in the twenty-first as well.

If you have a brain and a proper education, you will see through this swill immediately. Unfortunately, the nature of the media machine and the ignorance of the masses will mean this story gets eaten up by many of our more gullible brothers. Consider the peons greased.

Some people like that stuff.

Other people read slashdot.

This phenomenon is not new. The signal to noise ratio has been poor for millennia. I recall an adage: "Believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see." The Internet has merely made this truth more apparent.

If you think about it, the Internet might actually give us an advantage over our ancestors in this regard--fact-checking and cross-referencing are easier now than ever before.

Of course, none of that excuses charlatan media corporations that publish bullshit stories in order to generate hits.

On the other hand, they are only tarnishing their own credibility, and if they continue to do so they will eventually be viewed as sleazy tabloids. And if that's the image they want to project, there isn't much we can do about it. Some people like that stuff.

I'll spy on your citizens if you spy on mine!

Wait. So, prohibition is bad. But the one drug that is no longer prohibited is now the worst offender of all? Me thinks you need to rethink that argument.

You obviously don't understand what GP is getting at. The argument you present above is nonsense.

GP posits two separate points:

• 1. Alcohol use causes more damage than the use of other drugs.
• 2. Prohibition is bad.

These points are related only insofar as alcohol is a drug and drugs are prohibited.

What you missed: alcohol caused our society even more trouble than it currently does under prohibition. There are many reasons for this, but the chief issue is that prohibition simply doesn't work. People will do what people want to do, and under prohibition of alcohol they did. There was demand for booze and because there was no legal supply, a black market emerged to meet that demand.

GP is pointing out that this black market still exists for other drugs, and that many of the problems society faces in relation to those drugs is a direct result of prohibitionist policy.

The fact that alcohol use is more damaging than the use of other drugs illustrates how silly it is that we continue to prohibit other substances, even as the black markets and prisoner costs created by the prohibition continue to compound the problems that we face.

Why the fuck is it that we the people allow our government to participate in this kind of secret talk at all? We might as well be bending over and asking for it!

On a related note, when will the public finally demand that communications which pass encrypted through a third party still retain an reasonable expectation of privacy (rendering them pen register order-resistant)?

Fuck that! We should demand that all of our communications remain private! Why limit our demands only to those communications that are encrypted and routed through a proxy? Why should we put up with any of this nonsense for an instant?

The fourth amendment states: "Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions." So our papers are electronic today, but it's plain to see that the spirit of this basic right translates directly to electronic papers.

The NSA's actions are egregious and ri-goddamn-diculous! The bastards should be made to stand at the pillory until they rot! What the fuck is wrong with everybody?

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas have done this already. This book contains the universal truths of programming, from a high-level perspective. It addresses analysis, coding, dealing with management, planning for the inevitable shitstorm, and even keeping yourself sharp as a programmer. Their book is the one book I would recommend to any programmer, from novice to expert. Further, I would recommend that you buy it, keep it, and reread it every couple of years. The concepts therein will be applicable to any programming you will do in any language and in any environment.

While interesting, this was known decades ago. Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" tv series, produced in 1978, has a segment specifically devoted to Einstein's brain. Sagan talks about Einstein's abnormally thick corpus callosum and suggests that it might somehow be related to his genius. Whoever authored this paper is not making a novel hypothesis.

If you are trying to alienate your user base, congratulations. Do you even understand what kind of person reads Slashdot? If this beta peek is any indication, you are utterly clueless.

The homepage layout style on Slashdot for the last 10 years sells all the best aspects of Slashdot to those who might find a home here. It reflects our collective personality. If this new homepage is implemented, the site will fail to appeal to others that resonate with that personality as we do. "Hip and clueless," which seems to be the new design theme, will attract the wrong sort of person to the site and will have a negative impact on the community.

We want content, not glitz. We want function, and form only to support that function. We are techies, engineers, nerds. We don't have any use for the "fancy" wordpresspukevomitblog styling du jour. Give us dense, concise access to the information.

Truly, I sit in awe. It's almost like... you want us to leave Slashdot and never look back. That's how far from the mark you are with this.

I agree with your assessment. I'd call your scenario and my scenario varying degrees of the same phenomenon.

This is really about porn and video games... these two things can by themselves provide the brain with enough entertainment, reward, and pleasure to make the real world unnecessary.

First, there is a trauma: he fails to live up to parents expectations regarding education or career, has a heartbreak, loses his job, or whatever. Then he consoles himself with porn and video games. They feel good and he doesn't have to worry about his problems for a little while. If this goes on for long enough and he doesn't receive the right kind of social support, he may become addicted to both and lose the drive to do anything else.

What really happens is he becomes trapped by the dopamine pathways (reward system) in his brain. He is incapacitated by fear and social anxiety when dealing with others because his brain's reward system has been overpowered by the artificial stimulation of porn and video games. The dopamine normally produced by his brain during social interactions doesn't have nature's intended positive reinforcement effects for him because his dopamine tolerance is so high thanks to his addictions.

He becomes further and further withdrawn and does the only thing he knows how to do to feel "normal:" feed his addiction.

This has become a serious issue for young men in other parts of the world as well. It is ultimately made possible by technology, in particular the Internet.

Never seen "Office Space?"

Don't hold your breath on that one...

I agree that a cultural shift toward thinking of individuals as having character and responsibility would be very good for our society. However, the media is in the business of selling fear, uncertainty and doubt--and the public eats it up. Such a grim picture of humanity will therefore not easily cease to infect the minds of the impressionable. Not for a long time coming.

Unfortunately, p0p0, anti-competitive practices have become somewhat of a tradition among telecommunications companies in the USA. It's too bad that the rule of law is dead in this country--there are laws a hundred years old that explicitly forbid the kind of collusion and consumer strong-arming that AT&T and Apple are practicing right now. These companies have become so large and powerful that they have purchased the government and the feds now enable them to maintain their monopolistic practices.

The government should be protecting the competitive marketplace rather than protecting the corporations.

"Proud to be an American?" Hahaha what a joke. Nationalism, if it is to have any value, can only be secondary to rationalism, and no rational American can be proud of this.