99% of the ATM's around here dont stand alone. they are in a small concrete building that has air vents. the other 1% are the little fake ATM's at liquor stores and shady party stores that nobody sane would insert their card into.

so no, I wont be seeing it around here.

The idea is that limiting police powers in order to safeguard freedoms (and with them, the balance of power between the individual and the government) is acknowledged as making the job of police harder. The polices' job being harder does, in fact, mean that some number of criminals will go free some of the time, criminals who otherwise would have been caught and prosecuted. This is why absolute security is the antithesis of absolute freedom, so the question then is how to balance the two. When you safeguard liberty as your first priority and assign a lower priority to the effectiveness of law enforcement, you understand that you are taking a higher risk that you yourself will be harmed by a criminal that law enforcement could have stopped.

That's why freedom is not for cowards. The problems you worry about are well known to people who understand and value freedom. They choose freedom anyway. They also realize that the danger with which you're so concerned has been overstated. You're much more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, and any factual inquiry into that based on facts would lead you to the same conclusion. Incidentally, you're also more likely to be injured by lightning. In the last 100 years, many, many more people were killed by their own governments than by any foreign enemy, so the credibility of this danger has been well established. Limited, transparent government is a time-tested manner of managing this danger.

As an aside, if terrorism is truly such a great problem and we want to reduce it in a real and effective manner, we should also stop giving excuses to the people who hate us. It's much easier for an enemy to justify their position, raise their troops' morale, and recruit new members into their brand of exteremism when they can point to concrete acts of ruthless domination the USA has actually committed. Law enforcement would certainly be more effective if its list of potential suspects could be reduced, facilitating a more focused approach on those that remain.

Anyway, the real spirit of freedom, the more value-based, individual, and courageous part that you and so many others keep failing to even recognize, let alone try to understand, is that those who understand freedom realize that a few more guilty men may go free. They consider that a small price to pay, an exchange of a finite quantity that numbers can describe in order go gain something priceless and worthwhile. It's yet another instance of failing to comprehend a viewpoint because you do not personally share it, therefore you get sidetracked by related but irrelevant issues because you have no idea how to articulate a meaningful response to it.

Actually, the social shunning/shaming of those who advocate positions that are detrimental to society does serve a useful and positive function. Consider the way most people would respond to someone who openly advocates racism, for example. The response such a person receives would not be a pleasant one and really would discourage them. This is a good thing and it's a service to everyone else.

The only difference between racist views and pro-authoritarian views is the method by which they damage society for everyone else. Honestly the idea that your safety is in terrible danger from terrorism, and that giving up freedom and privacy is an acceptable solution, is a form of cowardice. It enables tyranny and those who advocate it are enablers. It's also inconsistent with reality: you're more likely to be injured by lightning than by terrorists, and you're very much more likely to be harmed by police or other members of your own government than any terrorist. If you were truly interested in your safety you would religiously monitor weather reports and you would advocate that the federal government be reduced in size and power.

Meanwhile, it's a fact of life that not all opinions are equally valid. Some, like yours, are rooted in ignorance and cowardice and have proven extremely dangerous each time they are put into practice, as an honest reading of history would reveal to you. Yes, the USA is not the first nation to use the idea of a foreign threat as an excuse to curtail civil liberties. The delusional among us seem to believe that it does happen to be the very first nation that will do this without causing a complete disaster (which has always taken the form of a totalitarian government under which human life is without value). Neither an understanding of history nor of human nature could possibly support this delusion.

I'd like to leave you with two quotations that this conversation reminds me of. You see, we (collectively) keep rehashing these same old debates not realizing that great effort has already been poured into thinking about what are not new issues. The first is from C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The other is a dialog between Hermann Goring, a leading member of the Nazi Party, and a man named Gilbert, during an interview conduced in Goering's prison cell during the Nuremburg trials, on April 18, 1946:

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Goring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

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Something I hope you will consider.

"Hey, you notice some odd grammar, word choice, and spelling variance in this code?"
"Oh yeah, must be Maxo-Texas. That's his anonymization software."

Not mine, when I get up the prox card reader sees that I am not near the workstation and instantly locks, it will not even offer an unlock until I am within proximity again.

Really cheap to put in place less than $10K for the whole company. and increases security 80 fold. Problem is most IT departments are not savvy enough to do it nor convince management that it's more important than a new Jaguar for the Director of marketing. Heck my old Dell laptop supported it.

It is. Chrome OS, which is Linux is in wide spread use.

Yeah that doesnt work.

If it's sitting there on what looks like a normal login they will not hit CTL-ALT-DEL they will just type away. Hell it's hard to not get users to open up every single attachment no matter where it comes from or to not click on every pop up window they get.

they have that law in my state when driving a car, it does not stop people from plastering the phone up against their head anyways.

It creates a zone of protection from Tyranny...

Something that you guys have been known to practice. Clean up your act first, then come back and talk about encryption.

And WSPR is only the beginning, there are other modes coming down the pipeline that are almost magical/spooky. pulling useable information out of what seems to be background noise.

Exactly. A franchise fee is simply a legal "doing business kickback"

No it's to avoid people looking like idiots with a tablet against their head.
Problem is it seems that that is the trend lately with idiots having a tablet pressed to their head. Watched a low IQ woman driving down the road with a big ass Fad-let stuck to her head side swipe a pickup truck because she could not see past the stupidly large phone pasted against her head.

And as an owner of a Surface Pro... Microsoft failed at all of those even when they had a proper pen and proper setup.

It's not the OS or the UI available. It's the Applications. 90% of the applications I need on that Surface Pro suck to high hell in a touch environment. They are designed for keyboard+Mouse and that is how they work best. It's so overwhelming that all surface pro users typically always use the device with a keyboard and a mouse.

tablet use requires a dramatic shift in programming style and design. And almost no programmers for large productivity software suites are capable of it.

It is far better for video consumption and document reading. Which is what he was claiming it would be better at.