Well, I didn't actually say anything about Senator McCarthy. It is true that there were communist infiltrators, and it is true that the Rosenbergs were guilty. I'm talking about J. Edgar Hoover, who had secret files on pretty much every person in power in America. Like that dangerous communist, John F. Kennedy, for example, who knew not to mess with J. Edgar because J. Edgar could prove that Jack was bedding two or three different women a week. How many current politicians know not to mess with the NSA, because they know the NSA could scuttle their careers?

Unfortunately, when it happens, the good things about the USA will fall with it. I admit, I enjoy being in a place where I can live on a nice suburban street with minimal immediate worries, drive a comfortable car with air conditioning, gas it up when necessary, and purchase as much food as I need at the grocery store whenever I need it. When the house of cards comes tumbling down, the WHOLE house of cards will come with it. Of course, our runaway spending will probably topple it before the iron fist of the NSA. But when it does happen, it will hardly matter what the most immediate exciting cause was.

No one, or almost no one, gets that high in the political machine without having some serious skeletons in the closet. And who knows where all those skeletons are hidden? Oh, yeah. The NSA. QED

Actually, the saying is, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." It was H.L. Mencken who said it.

I don't know about that. I'm sure it's been about as successful as J. Edgar Hoover's mid-century communism witch hunts, which had more to do with propping up Hoover's own personal empire than with catching communists.

Then you need to study the history of the 20th Century, and eugenics.

Perhaps the answer is to remember that "information wants to be free," and therefore it's a bad idea to beat up some random guy because he spilled beer on your girlfriend if that's not the kind of reputation you want to have. In the meantime, other people can consider whether this 20-year-old assault charge is or is not relevant to their particular circumstances. If I'm looking to hire somebody where overall emotional sobriety and self control are important, I'd at least want to find out if he'd cooled his temper in the past 20 years. If I'm interested in the guy's credit before I complete a financial transaction with him, I couldn't care less about his 20 year old assault charge.

Smartest guy I know wastes most of every day playing Xbox and smoking pot.

Dammit you swore not to tell! Now Daddy's gonna cut off my allowance. Next pizza's on you, pal

1. How do you find out about the band in the first place? Fact is, YouTube is the place for a lot of indies to make it big.

2. You haven't visited YouTube in a while, have you? Everybody has their official content there. You can even rent movies there.

"Don't be evil" is the Nobel Peace Prize of corporate slogans: It started out as a sincere, non-ironic effort, and then gradually morphed into the world's best parody of itself.

Your understanding of history is so terribly flawed that I don't even know where to start.

I myself don't have a single USB 3 host device.

I purposefully bought one of the cheap USB 3 Kingston keys after reading the reviews. Been very happy with it: It often operates at close to the theoretical USB 2.0 transfer rates, and there have been instances where my USB 2.0 host is plainly the bottleneck. It was the right drive for the right price on that particular day, perfectly in the corner of the price/performance curve.

Meanwhile, none of this is news: If you buy an ATA/66 hard drive in 1997, you already know that you don't necessarily get 66 megabytes per second from it because the spinning rust can only transfer things so fast. The speed of the physical interface has typically nothing to do with the rate at which data is transferred, and it never has.

The only thing new here is your own flawed perception.

Bicycle?

There was also a very interesting endurance test done on extremesystems.org. Very impressive stuff. I don't yet own an SSD, but I'll continue to consider buying one! Maybe next Black Friday. Just waiting for the right deal.

If you are implying that LUKS + dm-crypt is more secure in practice I might mention that hidden containers have not been implemented AFAIK.