The VPN exit IP will still be available, so your information would be available by subpoena if your VPN host keeps logs. I'm not sure if they're mandated to by law, but it sounds like a law the MPAA would have bought from Congress by now.

Over 400,000 federal laws and regulations (even government agencies can't come up with a solid number). Then there are the state, county, and municipal laws. It's a common joke in law school that ever person over the age of 18 is guilty of some federal crime. This is why the NSA mass data gathering and archival is an issue, out of control legislators have created a joke of a legal system, representative of anything but a free society, wherein a database of everything on a person can probably produce something to threaten them with if they become interesting.

Lamarr Smith (R-TX) said he would continue until it was all enacted, and I'm sure there were others who had benefited from the $100 million "donation" campaign that backed it. He did try the Envoy Act, adding new federal employees at every embassy to pursue copyright infringement on behalf of the MPAA.

What are they investigating, who was behind it? Are these all new Congressmen that weren't there when every major tech CEO was visiting Congress, bemoaning the lack of educated workers in America? When people doing phone support in call centers were making $40k it was inevitable that they would want to crush that labor market, and they did, with the assistance of Congress.

It's not all in the past either, Gates was there just a year or two ago and walked out with another H1B increase, followed by a Foundation announcement of $20 million for schools in India.

Anything that is accessible over the internet is a potential target for hackers. Does this guy really want an easy kill-switch sitting there?
Perhaps he believes US government networks unbreakable, in which case he is entirely unqualified for his position.

Barring having billions to "donate" to a campaign, there isn't a lot that can be done. I voted for Johnson last time, I didn't vote for Barr the time before because he came across as a GOP washout just looking for a home to me so I skipped that ballot choice since NOTA is not there.

I voted against every incumbent in other national races, with the belief that whatever those in office were doing now was wrong or at least not enough to change anything and it was time for something different.

They have VLS, and now that Russia has scrapped the IR weapons treaties, there's no reason they couldn't carry tactical nukes, like the TLAM-N as the LA class used to.

Having 11 carrier battle groups seems a bit excessive to me, there's force projection, then there's trying to cover the globe as if there are no capable allies.

That's not always true, there were designs 60 years ago that could run without coolant pumps. The USS Narwhal had such a plant in the 60's, and the Ohio class also has natural circulation. It just takes large pipes for water density differences to be enough to provide flow.

In the old Wired article about the NSA archives and eventual decryption of everything they could gather, they mentioned seeing every stock trade and business deal. Lots of insider information to be had by public employees. If they get their way as they have with server access, they could watch everything without even logging their presence, leaving no trail to explain their futures market or stock trade wizardry.

Mac administration is different, since the network administration you refer to isn't there, but they have their upsides.
Nothing beats target booting and other simple functions like just copying a system drive from one machine to another without needing other software. In a lab, one machine down can be reimaged with just a firewire cable connected to a working Mac.

I found it pretty easy to maintain several hundred, though they were still the minority of the workstations and I didn't like them so much as to buy one myself.

I don't know if European countries are any better for the self employed, but they do have far better privacy laws and don't seem quite as susceptible to lobbyist "donations" for proposing new laws.

On the positive side, Comcast doubled speeds to many customers in response to growing fiber coverage in the Portland market. Competition might keep them a bit in line, they can't match gigabit offerings over fiber.

You wouldn't want people studying Calculus in 2014 from a 1998 book. It would obviously be outdated with all that has changed.
I mean there was the... umm.. and the...

Really though, the last ethics class I took required an e-book with a 3 use license and six month expiration that cost $130. So, after six months, there is no access to the material at all, like a returned library book without even the value of a paper-bound book that could be burned for warmth.

Border patrol in Washington has been using 10,000-pound Predator-B unmanned aircraft with 950-mile coverage ranges for a while, perhaps they don't need to be certified like the insignificant masses. The northern border patrolled from Washington to North Dakota was the claim in Congress in 2012. I only remembered because of a story that farmers were getting annoyed by the low-flying drones with lights and noises disturbing their cattle at night.