how completely clueless it is. Let's see ...

(1) The NSA doesn't wiretap the US. For all the hysteria, the NSA is only looking at calls crossing the border. Inside the US its FBI, and the Feebies are very jealous of that.

  And it certainly doesn't wiretap the whole US, because there's so much ohone traffic and 0.999999 of it is uninteresting.

(2) Could the NSA hack -- could DoJ simply subpoena -- the contents of a hotmail account? You bet ... but which hotmail account? alQaedaDeathtoAmerica@hotmail.com? Or fluffibuni387? Or what?

(3) Now, with prepaid phone cards etc. If I'm getting this, you're saying NSA is bad because they can't get intel from something like a prepaid phone. Now think it through: Achmed al Boomaboom goes into WalMart, and buys condoms, a bag of Fritos, and a prepaid phone. He makes six "busines" calls, talking in code words, calls a hooker, and throws the phone away. How is the NSA supposed to figure out which phone it is, and capture the phone calls, before he pitches the phone.

More to the point, how can they intercept those phone calls without intercepting all calls, or at least all prepaid cell calls?

Okay, first of all, you can forget about the CO2 in the pressurization: that was collected from the atmosphere, and goes back, net carbon is zero. Similarly, since beer is made from plants, pretty well all the CO2 produced by making beer is absorbed again making next year's beer.

Just for fun, though, let's do a back-of-envelope calculation of how much there is. According to Wikipedia, humans brew about 133 gigaliters of beer a year, and we can assume it's about 5 percent alcohol, so that's (133×0.05)=6.7 gigaliters of alcohol. The specific gravity of ethanol is about 0.8 so that's 5.3 billion kilograms of ethanol per year. One mol Ethanol (CH3CH22OH) masses 45 grammmes. So that's 5600 billion grams of alcohol, 120 billion mols, and it turns out that there's 1 mol of CO2 per mol ethanol.

Thus we get 120 billion mol of CO2, a mol is 44 grammes, about 5.3 million tonnes. According to WikiAnswers, a car produces about 5.2 tonnes of CO2 per year, so all the world's beer production is about equivalent to a million cars.

So if it worries you, buy a couple CFL bulbs or soemthing. It's pretty small.

(PS. This would look better if /. allowed the sub tag.)

I wish journalists would do a little research. NSA has had the lead role in cybersecurity since before he term was invented, back to the National Computer Security Center when Bob Morris the Elder was Chief Scientist. Mid-80's, in other words. Communications security since Truman.

What this guy is complaining about is that he wasn't able to wrest control of cybersecurity away from NSA.

Actually, that could be better phrased as "idiots imagine those fees won't be passed on to the customers."

Yes, it's actually just you, because the number of dopes who think the White House doesn't have an IT staff is very small.

Now, for a little puzzle, ask yourself how long it would normally take to create hundreds of email accounts in a secured system?

And if you choose your metric carefully, you can get any answer out that you like.

A whip and a chair.