Welcome to Oregon, it rains a lot.

Not to mention internal human rights or freedom of speech, freedom of thought...

I think he meant it more in the sense of The Onion's Drugs Win Drugs War.... When you go to war against something, you can lose to it even if the thing doesn't care about winning.

In this case, we went to war with "terror" and we have succeeded in terrorizing ourselves, thus it has won.

No, re-read his comments. He only mentions that they are recording all voice traffic, not all data. He goes on to say that all digital communications is insecure, but not that they're actively recording all data traffic.

Voice comms is very low in bitrate, and it hasn't scaled up exponentially like general internet traffic, so I have no doubt that the technical capability to do what he says exists. Whether they are actually doing it is a separate question.

I am not a economist, but I am related to one...

While it's technically true to say that "Currency is only worth what people think it's worth" and that it's a socailly-constructed value, you are ignoring the underlying economic reasons why people assign greater value to one than the other.

The value of a US dollar is based on the power and stability of the US economy and Federal Government. No matter how bad things may seem right now for the US economy, it is much better than trusting a random internet craze, and no one doubts that it will be around in 100 years, hence people buy 100 year bonds. Even the currency of a small country like Sweden is a better bet than bitcoin.

I've looked into bitcoin, and while I think the idea is cryptographically sound, there is one problem with the concept: While there are built-in limits to inflation within bitcoin, there is nothing preventing someone else from building "Bitcoin 2" or "Crypto-coins" with the same concept but different keys. If merchants are willing to take bitcoin, what is to prevent them from also accepting any other crypto currency, thus devaluing the whole pool?

The value of currency as an investment is dependent on how much it will be worth in the long run, and while I am sure "bitcoins" will be around in 10 years, what will its value be? Will be around in 100 years?

And this is ignoring the issue this article bring up, that with a newly-consructed pool of currency with much fewer users, it is much more prone to currency manipulation than dollars or euros.

The counter-argument to that would be that when John Brown attempted an insurrection against the country, they tried him in a court and executed him. When a individual or some conspirators attempt to fight the country, that is well within the bounds of the regular law enforcement.

It's when you have entire governments and literally tens of thousands of men forming an insurrection that you bring out the canons.

Bro, do you ecen code?

Not a military member, but from what I understand, the military doles out ass-chewings like that behind closed doors, not in front of the public. Dressing down people in front of the men/women they command or the public is frowned upon because it leads to undermining the chain of command.

Punishments that are viewed by the public, like court-martials have a much more professional air to them. I don't see why Linus couldn't do that, or do his ranting and raving in a personal email to the man instead of a public forum.

After many long years on Slashdot, can I be the first one to actually confirm that FreeBSD is dead?

Does your mom count? Because that's the one that said it to me.

I guess we didn't learn anything from when 9-11 happened and we created the TSA, a group of intrusive busybodies at best and molestors at worst.

Or organized all federal law enforcement under the DHS without actually thinking about how it would coordinate things so we have another layer of government that is busy trying to justify their existence by going after random stuff. I hear they do copyright enforcement now?

I suppose we are set to see a Cybersecurity Agency with powers to monitor everything and permaban people from the internet based on anonymous accusations like the no-flight lists? What's the worst that could happen?

I often hear of "Russian hackers" and the hacker scene is supposedly pretty big, and I've always wondered to what extent the government there had a hand in that. Anyone here have any experience with the Russian scene?

And why is the hacker scene so big there?

I know Amazon is trying to get everone to store everything in the cloud, but I really hope they put a media slot (micro or regular SD) on the new Kindle.

I'm seriously considering the nook tablet over the Kindle or Nexus 7, because I can't imagine doing anything on a tablet that really pushes the CPU/GPU, but I can see needing more than 16gb of storage. And not having a nearby wifi spot for the cloud, or the patience to download everything over wifi instead of swapping out a memory card.

I remember in the '90s overhearing a conversation between two RPGers at my college, waiting for the bus. There was a business-major looking guy in a suit next to them reading a newspaper.

The two nerds are talking about how the Cyber Adepts created the internet to control the world, so it's ironic that the internet is actually diluting their power.

I don't play RPGs, but most of my friends do so I recognize the talk as being about a game. The guy next to them, however, obviously does not know so he seems slightly worried about the apparently crazy people next to him.

Then the nerds start talking about wraiths as if they're real, and then casually mention "It's a good thing we nuked the wraith centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" and the suit guy's eyes go wide and he comically moves his newspaper up to cover his face. This whole time the nerds are oblivious to how their talk sounds to non-nerds around them.

Hide your powerlevels, guys. Normals are not going to understand.