Dude, do you know anything about DARPA? They fund the far out there project. Some of them work, and some of them don't. They are directly responsible for the current research into self driving cars. A big success, though I'd imagine you're freaking out about that too. News flash, any new technology has military applications.

Spaceplanes aren't even a new idea. Hell, the Pegasus Rocket is able to lift nearly a thousand pounds into orbit. What they really seem to be pushing is scramjet technology. The demonstrators so far flew for a few minutes or less before being crashed into the ocean. Even worse, they used solid rockets to get it up to speed before the scramjet could start working. It's like Chuck Yeager's first flight all over again. First they started with solid rockets to get it up to speed, now they're working on doing it using an air breathing engine.

No, just legal ones. Though the play store has so many permissions you might as well grant Google, and by extension the NSA, root access when you install the thing.

Copyright means Google can set whatever terms they want when it comes to companies installing or people using the play store.

Whoops, forgot the sarcasm tag on that first sentence. Remember that in a dystopian future like Deus Ex, dissidents dying is a bonus, not a bad thing. It actually looks worse when a crowd is fired upon vs quietly rounding up dissidents, and then them dying of "natural causes." <-- Not actually advocating this (more snark)

As for everything else you said. I see that we are on the opposite side of things like the Snowden leaks and yelling back and forth will not solve anything. Though, I'm more likely to believe that 8% of people are trolls or were mismarked answers, rather than them actually believe in lizard men.

Yeah, I'll bet it's "Put dissidents in FEMA internment camps." Just like in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

More seriously. While you're probably correct, classifying things for political reasons is almost always a bad thing. This kind of mindset, that normal people can't handle the truth, is what leads to an unaccountable government. Government accountability can only happen with transparency.

No, they haven't had the required audit.
Which, given the revelations about how bad their data security is, they would have failed anyways.

They still don't know what Snowden took. Forget secrets or blackmailing politicians, if he wanted to Snowden could just use the data to steal a ridiculous amount of money. Thank goodness he seems to be a good person. The scary thing is somebody else might have done just that, and no one knows about it.

Here's a good example of this very thing: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/startups/articles/20130228/00041522145/kickstarter-projects-that-dont-meet-their-goal-are-not-failures-they-help-people-avoid-failures.shtml

Please tell us what distro you're using so we can start a flame war. :D

On a more serious note, How do you know it's a kernel panic? Is it in the logs? Does it drop to a terminal saying it? Except for the kernel panic part, I'd say that most of these things seem to be GUI and sound related. Have you checked the nice values for those systems. It could be that their "process priority" is the same as everything else. Most distros try to make sure that essential user mode processes and drivers are running with high priority, and background tasks run with low priority. Though apparently systemd uses cgroups to do that stuff, instead of process ids.

Just some food for thought. In a nutshell it sounds like X11 is a piece of crap.

Hmm, DEA or IRS. That choice entirely depends on how much money you have to throw at the problem. The IRS will often just take a check, and it's all nice and legal. The DEA on the other hand will tell you just how much you're going to spend on the half way house. You really thought the government paid for those? All the while, they'll be mentioning how much cheaper it is for you to just cooperate with them. Pay a "fine" right then and there. Cash only, no lawyers.

Read a little closer. This is the metadata that everyone is so worried about. It's not the actual conversation that's recorded, but the number called, call duration, and locations the cell phone was in for the duration of the call. The only new thing added to this list since the last half century is location data.

The scary thing about this is AT&T never deletes your call data. EVER. There's a reason why some EU privacy directives have a retention limit. Which is ironically in direct contrast to the mandatory retention policies for law enforcement use in those very same countries.

In the US, it seems like most people can't tell the difference between Engineers, Scientists, and Wizards. So as far as most people are concerned, he might as well be.

You haven't been keeping up with all the news have you. It's understandable, considering how much is out there.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130805/10035024070/dea-not-only-gets-intelligence-data-then-is-instructed-to-cover-up-where-it-gets-info.shtml

Short summary: The NSA gives DEA agents "anonymous tips" on which vehicles to "randomly" stop. This is never mentioned in court.

Here's another one.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130829/16135324356/court-says-feds-dont-have-to-reveal-secret-evidence-it-gathered-against-terror-suspect-using-fisa.shtml

This time it's the courts saying that they don't have to show the evidence to the defendant or his lawyers. Not exactly the justice they taught in high school civics.

My favorite password policy prevented you from using any letter in your username, and only 3 letters from your real name. Or something like that. Plus everything you said. It made it nearly impossible to remember the password. If I didn't have LastPass I would have had to write it down.

At least the University didn't follow up with the rest of the policy. Can't reuse the last ten passwords, and have to change the password relatively frequently.

See here for my rant about it. NOTE: Just realized the server's down. I'm going to have to re image that thing.

The US doesn't care about negative publicity, plus cell companies/The FCC actually does give certain licenses for special events. See OpenBTS at Burning Man.

This isn't the US, so the rules are different. I would love it if the US had a rule along the lines of "You have first choice to this spectrum, but if you aren't servicing the area then anyone can be granted a license for that locale. If you want to use that frequency there, then you have 6 months to set up towers."

First come first served has disadvantages, but it's much more fair than the current auction system. Right now, the largest cause of the small number of cell providers is government regulation. For example, despite what I said in the first paragraph, this would never work in the US.

Hey, that sounds awesome. Except for the nuclear part. Haven't you heard, nuclear is out and natural gas is in. Other than that, write it up and send it. The fossil fuel companies can pretend their helping and politicians stop looking stupid for denying the obvious.

We can even call the project "Panchaea."

Precisely. The other thing is "perfect forward secrecy." It's not perfect, but what it means is the key used to encrypt the traffic is randomly generated. Man in the middle attacks are still an issue, especially if people are dumb enough to use as US based cert authority, but the NSA can never decrypt the traffic after the fact. That still relies on the protocol being secure, and given the amount of money and talent the NSA is throwing at breaking it.... Well, there's a reason why even the US government uses a completely different network for classified info.

Keeping private information in house is almost always a good practice. The always is because it's possible to shift liability to third parties. I sure don't trust my security enough to handle storing Credit Card numbers, and it's cheaper to outsource it. That company even has insurance if they ever has a security breach.

Still, this isn't going to be a popular move in India. The number one reason why people use Gmail is how good it is. Unfortunately, nothing else has the capability that Gmail's labels do. Neither is their web interface as easy to use. Especially in search and creating filters. Seriously, try using Thunderbird and easily edit an E-Mail in multiple folders without it creating completely separate copies for each folder. It also beat the pants off the 7MB E-Mail limit my university had before letting Google handle E-Mail for them.