First, it doesn't explain Fermi's Paradox, it merely adds another term to it. In all of those various probabilities, apparently there is something like a 10% chance of not getting taken out by a gamma burst in half-a-billion years. I would also expect the odds to get better as a given galaxy "settles down", generating fewer big, hot stars and more smaller, calmer ones. Some neighborhoods are probably rougher too. I wouldn't wait around to settle Trantor, near the center of our galaxy.

Second, I wouldn't consider intergalactic contact in any serious way - the distances are bad enough for interstellar, do we really want to add a few more orders of magnitude?

Third, our presence establishes our galaxy as one of the more benign ones. There is at least one neighborhood that has been sufficiently peaceful for the last half-billion hears. Last I knew, there were no supernova candidates close enough to cause that kind of trouble any time soon, either.

Fourth, I'll focus on your word "silliness", which I think you meant as an understatement. There is conceivably a chance that we are under observation, and rank as "too silly" for any contact. The Earth has had an oxygen atmosphere for the last half-billion years, and we're on the verge of being able to detect other such atmospheres on other worlds such as Kepler has found. It's not a bad assumption that any civilization capable of interstellar travel is also better at planetary surveys than us. If they're there and within a few thousand light-years, they know something worth seeing is probably here.

At this point in physics we're stuck at the Standard Model. We have many theories that move beyond, but no facts to select among them, and many of the experiments would be incredibly expensive. But let's say one day we saw a "warp signature", it's quite possible that we could immediately discard half of those theories. (By "warp signature" I really mean physical evidence of truly advanced technology.) IF there were here watching us, and seeing our "silliness" as well as the scientific acumen of some, they would be especially careful that we see no such evidence.

Which is why I'm not offering you one :-)

They are so empowered in the same sense that I am empowered to take my neighbor's stereo. That is, I could do it if I had no ethics and the police probably wouldn't even send someone to look in to it.

I take it you have no counter argument so you have resorted to a childish ad-hominem?

Your assumption is only one person did an analysis.

Do you have any idea how many people have combed over glibc and either reported or exploited issues found?

Hell, read the article - THE PROBLEM WAS PATCHED before he found it. What we're talking about is some old distros are still distributing that code unpatched, and that's the real problem.

We can all jump to conclusions but, personally, I doubt the NSA have anywhere near the capabilities they (and you) suggest. These people are in the art of deception. They don't need to crack something, they just need to make you think they have.

In the grand scheme of things, any secure system is out of their reach anyway, whether it uses this code or not. The systems they're interested in are likely running under much more strict scrutiny and a single attempt to exploit such things would raise alarms and even accusations of initiating cyber-wars.

To be honest, I'll put my trust in a planet full of people checking open code casually than a select group of "experts" hunting out these flaws.

People are being paid, worldwide, to find and fix these flaws in major commercial companies and just as security researchers, in universities or for their own personal reputation.

Next, we'll be in the "acres of supercomputers" and "boxes in every ISP" bollocks. You know what? If I were the NSA, that's EXACTLY what I'd want you to think.

They're either incompetent (fucking up Elliptic Curves in public forums and being spotted instantly), or they're not (in which case you can't believe anything they say and likely won't know what the REAL trick is).

...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same kind of service from their incumbents. Who needs cable TV when you got gigabit service and can watch any show, any time over streaming without hitting any caps? That's what Google is selling, of course it's out of self-interest but for tech geeks I think they're on our side in this case.

Dude you better buy that shit, farm acrage around here is 5 to 6 times that, and 150 acres for sale that's contigous is very rare.

That's an entirely in-apt analogy unless you believe Ubisoft is a government agency empowered to confiscate goods imported w/o paying an import duty.

We may have to disagree on that one. It tends to be the conspicuous consumers that get hit first. The 30% isn't usually comfortable enough to consume too conspicuously.

I'm not saying that anyone would have a walk in the park during an uprising (not even those with the picthforks). But note that I was primarily calling out yet another temporarily embarrassed millionaire in his own mind.

And there we go, we're not talking about an income tax, we're talking about a draconian confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Furthermore why is NASA straying so far from aeronautics and space?

Over time, naturally. You do know how converging works, yes?

Consider Far Cry 3. Shipped 10 million copies, so that's $6 each for the development costs + $0.03 for the digital copy. That suggests the price to converge on is $6.03. Do you believe that has happened?

I'm fairly certain the NSA abuses couldn't have escaped his notice. The DEA is out of the bag now, let's see what happens...

Yes, but the news only reports on it if it is sports related. No Wall Street gate for example, even though the cheating is bigger, more blatant, more clearly deliberate, and does far more harm to the public.