Alternately 10 million people got a mental health day. That's $20 per person. That's probably less than the cost of going to the movies in NYC.

90F might not be but 70 is. Alternately, you could say that someone in the organization has anemia and likes the temp at 75 or 80. Either way, there is still likely to be a significant enough difference compared to the outside.

There will be plenty of bandwidth. It's just that the network monopolies will want to choke it off so that they can favor their own services.

I remember back when single CD blanks were $30 a pop and pirates still used them to copy games. I thought it was nuts then but people did it.

Don't assume that just because you are a luddite late adopter or intolerable cheap that the rest of us are too.

Even in Finance, they've done that. Look at PayPal. The only reason that it exists is that the banks and credit card companies dragged their feet with online payments. They're now doing free electronic person-to-person transfers, but it's still expensive to take credit card payments online.

Exactly. Go back a couple of hundred years and you even have well-off people saying 'I don't need to learn to write, I can afford to hire a scribe'. You had people saying 'not everyone needs to learn to read and write, there aren't enough jobs for that many scribes anyway'.

Before he retired, my stepfather was the head groundskeeper on a golf course. Not exactly the kind of job you think of as requiring coding skills. Except that they had a computerised irrigation system that could trigger sprinklers in response to various events (humidity sensors, motion sensors, time, and so on). It came with a partly-graphical domain-specific programming language for controlling it. It's going to be very hard in the next 50 years to find a job that doesn't require some programming to do it competently - even this kind of stereotypically low-tech job requires it now.

I used to pirate games and I used to buy games. I eventually couldn't be bothered with pirating and worrying about malware or with trying to jump through the hoops that the publishers wanted, so I stopped playing games altogether. Then gog.com launched and sold me games that I was nostalgic about, cheaply. Then they started selling newer games. I spent more with them last six months than I did on total on games in the five years since Steam was launched and the industry wend DRM-happy. I can download DRM-free installers for all of the games, often in OS X, Windows, and Linux versions.

It turns out that there's another answer to piracy that works: sell your product in a way that's easy to use at a reasonable price. Stop worrying about pirates and start worrying about customers. Someone who wouldn't buy your game anyway who pirates it is not a lost sale, but someone who can't be bothered to put up with your treating them like a criminal and so doesn't buy from you is. Buying a game from gog.com is easier than pirating and, if you factor in the cost of your time, probably cheaper as well.

Give me a product I want for a reasonable price and I will happily hand over my money, because I feel that I'm getting something valuable in return. Don't, and... well, computer games are not the only form of entertainment available.

I'd also like to plug the FFII for anyone in Europe. They have a few MEPs among their members and have had some important successes. Less relevant in this particular issue, but they have a lot of overlap with the EFF in other places.

The bulk of the laws involving surveillance pivoted on this "Close" work. It was hard to do, and it required some motive to be "worth the effort". So in the old days where you needed to intercept physical mail or actually enter a property to spy, the laws were in balance.

Of late the state has had a free ride, with the information being pumped into it at central stations and spycraft was just a click away. And the state has gotten fat and lazy, and with the decreased minimum effort the spying has become free. And the state, fat and happy, likes it that way.

But strong encryption would put the state back into the footrace. It would require the same work and effort as the old days. Boo farking hoo. It was _supposed_ to be hard to spy. The entire Big Brother 1984 idea was about the destructiveness of surveillance made too easy to bother being selective. The "just watch everybody" economy of effort leads to gluttony and abuse. We kwow that.

So Omand's "warning" is that of the plaintive child. But mom, then I'll have to _try_ and I want my participation trophy!

So Omand has made the case for why strong encryption should be universal so that the state cannot engage in universal surveillance.

Oh, that's rich right there...a representative of the fucking NSA trying to label civilians as the group screwing with people's right to privacy.

I can't tell what stench hanging in the air is winning Charlie Sheen style; Irony or Bullshit.

New technology will come and add to it, that's a given. But do you really think throwing out what we used for ages is a good idea? Can you point me to a new input medium aside of keyboard and mouse that offers better control in a desktop environment? And no, I don't give a shit about how great the new crap works on tablets and phones. I want a DESKTOP operating system. If something else works better on a tablet, do something else on a tablet. Simple as that. Even Apple was smart enough to know that one size fits all works in operating systems about as well as it does with underwear.

Initially, maybe. When the first barns get flattened by M1s, including whatever is inside, the resistance should falter pretty quickly.

Now the state the US is in makes a lot more sense.

The problem with these "emergency modes" is that they run infinitely. With censorship and martial law in place, how would you know that it's time to get back to a normal mode of operation if the powers that are don't want to return to it?

You want to use regular military against your own population?

History is not on your side when it comes to the question of their loyalty.