federal employees = government employees.
government = elected government.
Therefore, elected government has control.*

*Now I did qualify if people don't vote then they are giving up their control. ;)

Truman complained he couldn't do anything about them, and every president since. JFK wanted to disband the CIA and wound up dead for his trouble.

Yea, well Trump isn't like those Presidents. I'm sure he could bring total chaos to the CIA. He could make Steven Seagal the Director of National Intelligence in a single tweet. :D

The US intelligence community is not elected but they ARE under the control of the democratically elected government. It's just that many US citizens have been neglect in their duties to vote. If the people wanted to they could completely change who was running the US intelligence community, besides many other tools like cut off funding for operations that aren't supported or have laws passed to reduce the amount/types of spying allowed or have more oversight. Those things are currently not possible in Russia and China.

Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed [Pushes the glass off the table. It shatter on the floor, and several small machines come out to clean it up.] Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life. You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business.

You are installing a VPN app on your phone. An app can do many things. Even at the simplest level... you've given it permission to handle network traffic b/c it's a VPN app. It could send malicious packets, do denial of service attacks, relay local traffic, be used as a way to exploit local machines on your network, etc. You and your phone might not contain anything you are worried about... but what about everything around you? Sorry, what am I missing? I'm not sure why this seems unclear. I'm not being sarcastic... I still don't know how that would NOT be bad.(?)

They may not come after you but they might come after your country or your business that you work for. What if China applies a little more pressure to one of these VPN companies to add a little more to their network code. Boom... your phone could be sending out malicious network packets on your local network, used in a denial of service attack, used to compromise other machines on your network. Maybe not your specific machine but it could affect the things and people around you. I feel like I'm talking to an anti-vaxer... "So what if my child isn't vaccinated?".

You are installing basically an 'untrusted' app voluntarily. They could use the app to compromise your phone, use it to spy on the things around you, use up your phone's resources, etc., etc.

I also never understood the acceptance of the false choices that people give on this... "I'm going to be pwned anyways. Might as well be pwned by China." ...er, what about not choosing to be pwned? Have you tried that? A laissez-faire attitude towards security never ends well.

Went to mark insightful and let go of the mouse button too soon. :P :P :P

Tervia UT2004 "... As one of the very few people who actually used ut2004stats.epicgames.com, it'll be sad to see it go. But fixing the recent player database error, whereby match kill scores are no longer available and players are unsearchable (which has been the case for the past month), might take more effort than it's worth." So much for pulling your last stats. :`(

...overspend and watch it all go to shit when the value drops???

...you grip it at the center with both hands and snap. This is talking about grabbing the ends to snap, not the middle.

Technically, that works for iPhones too... if you don't set your location to China. Honestly curious, change your location to China on your Android phones and try again. Also what Android versions are you running? This looks like a very recent change in the code base (latest version of iOS). I wonder if China has added some new requirements to phones operating in China and the next version of Android might have this 'requirement' too.

It's not just 1 hour... if they see you coming and trigger the SOS mode, you're screwed. So now you have to make sure you grab them when they are separated from their phone... so when the owner is asleep and the phone is charging, or shoot the owner I guess and grab the phone quickly, or hope to get them with their hands away from their phone and say hands-up/don't move.

That's where people watch hours of a day. If they made it a serious YouTube competitor, it's they only way it could work and meet their requirements. >>> Which they will not because it would take too much investment... and they are already in the hole after the merger. So... it's doomed.

...but he got shit done. (I didn't intend for that to line up, but I'm happy it did :D). He was also into the details and into consistency. Tim is a nice guy which is exactly why things are slipping. The elimination of the headphone port under Jobs would have been universal or at the very least consistent in a column (all iPads, iPods, iPhones for example) and the AirPods would be billed as THE solution. That with wireless power... "Wires? Where we are going, we don't need wires!"... cue commercials of people just grabbing their iPads etc. from the charging pad, throwing them into a bag or pocket, putting in their AirPods, music blasting, and heading out the door. Smooth, seamless, etc. Instead we've got mixed support for wireless audio / headphone jacks and wireless charging. Jobs would have squeezed to make sure they were all released together. Tim is more laid back about it and is like, "Don't worry about it. We'll release each of the parts when they are ready, staggered even. No big deal." I suspect the same is happening with the hardware. Combine that with delays on the Intel side... and you've got quite a wait. One good thing about Apple, once they do release something it is pretty well done (although that seems to be slipping too). :P