We can't over-react to every random incident where someone decided to cause a lot of other harm either. Look at how badly that worked out for terrorism.

In Europe workers do have a certain expectation of privacy at work. For example, your employer can't read your private emails even if you use a company computer to access them at lunch time.

Exactly where you draw the line isn't entirely clear. I'd have thought that an aircraft's cockpit would be a reasonable place to put a camera. I imagine the main objection from the union is that the airline will be looking over their shoulders the whole time, which could be dealt with by making it a rule that the recording only be in the black box and only accessible in case of an accident.

The one reason I ever bother using Twitter is to communicate with companies with whom I have a problem. If I get bad service I write about it on Twitter. Having to do customer support in public usually encourages a faster, better response in my experience.

So far British Airways is the only one that has not responded well to tweets, although they did at least respond.

Actually GamerGate is a perfect example of what the GP is talking about. Aside from the people who committed actual crimes in support of GG, some number of people got sucked in to the rubbish about ethics in journalism and #NotYourSheild. If they tied their accounts to their real identities somehow when people google them they are going to see that they fell for that scam or worse actually condoned what was happening with full knowledge.

They predicted it perfectly, in terms of the amount of energy involved. What was a surprise was that much of it was absorbed by the oceans instead of the atmosphere, but the amount of warming was correct. Calling it a hiatus is incorrect, the earth is still warming.

Some people won't be happy until we build another control earth and repeat the experiment a few times, just to be sure.

You are just defeating your own argument there. Why should nuclear be so heavily subsidised and not be liable for the massive costs that oil is? If BP can be on the hook for $43bn why can't nuclear? It's because the maximum cost is actually an order of magnitude or two more than $43bn, and the government set the rate a long time ago and never changed it.

If all the subsidies were cut I'd be happy, because no-one would build any more nuclear plants anyway.

Because, like most nuclear power, they were build long ago and would never be allowed in such close proximity today. If they are allowed, it is simply because there is no way people can force them not to be, not because they are "happy" to have them there.

If that were true it would be the fault of the plant operators for not upgrading their systems to be more safe. If they really are that dangerous today then it's a failure of the regulator to shut them down or demand they are replaced. They won't be replaced or heavily upgraded though because it costs too much money.

Actually nuclear has around a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate. Of around 450 commercial reactors built, 6 have gone into meltdown. If you include other serious failures that number is even higher.

When the cost of a catastrophic failure is so high a 1.3% failure rate is unacceptable. The only reason people are still willing to even consider investing in it is that when things do go wrong the government always picks up the tab.

It's actually worse than that. The nuclear industry basically owns the regulator. Barack Obama, when running for president in 2007, said that the NRC had become "captive of the industries that it regulates". Entergy lied under oath about the existence of pipes leaking contaminated material under the Vermont Yankee station, which the NRC claims they didn't even know were there.

Most damning of all the NRC has been used to help sell US technology to other countries. Since their job is to find flaws in that technology it seems like a conflict of interest to also be the salesman for it.

Out of interest, do you have any evidence that they are tracking people's every move online? I think it would be a big scandal if it were true.

For example, obviously they scan Gmail accounts to deliver targeted advertising, but do you have evidence that if you use a Yahoo email account they monitor the content of your email?

What about your Facebook posts, do they read those? Or your online banking sessions, do they track them?

Or did you mean something else by "tracking your kids' every move"?

He should just come out and say what he really means, to show that he is at least honest about what he wants us to submit to. He wants to violate our privacy. He wants to take away privacy in exchange for some small amount of security.

Say that, and at least some people will respect you.

I'm actually surprised he mentioned communications, although I suppose man chat apps do use encryption now which is probably more of a concern than email. The main issue law enforcement tends to have is with encrypted data on storage devices. In the past once they had your phone or computer they could datarape it effortlessly, nowadays it's often completely impenetrable, or at least as hard to crack as the user's password.

I'm gonna pretend you're actually interested in the answer, but let's face it, we're really talking past each other, to our fellow Slashdotters. Thank you for smoking.

The reason for the mass move to encryption -- like Wikipedia and Google moving to default HTTPS, and people like me working on making encryption more approachable by the masses -- was the revelation that non-suspects were being monitored. That is why there is now a haystack within which to hide the needles, and that is why the encryption is now too strong for the intelligence agencies to break when we really want them to be able to.

Moreover, while I'm here, and since I want terrorists to get caught, let me add this: The solution is not increasing the level of distrust between citizens and government. The solution is restoring the reasonable, moderated, level of trust that we used to have in the executive branch. That starts with the ones who created the rift, and that is not the people who were sending all their traffic in the clear; it is the assholes who recorded it all and denied they were doing it.

"It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore."

You backed us into a corner by monitoring non-suspects.

It's your fault.

Dickhead.