a drill is usually faster than zeroing out the drive and works for 99% of cases. Maybe not nsa, but it will even slow them down a bit.

Great service. It sounds suspiciously like a bank account... so their big breakthrough is you get a checking account with no checks?

Wait until apple offers a buyout. They have clearly been interested in gaming for years and have the cash to allow developers to keep working while the total fail that is wii u fades into memory. Nintendo just completely missed the mark. They had college students on the internet working on controller-less games that used the wii and instead of embracing the idea they let Microsoft hire these students to create the kinect and wasted their energy on a fat ugly tablet that is limited in function. If they were smart they would go after a kinect type controller-less system and offer a free app for iphone to act as a supplemental controller. The phones would make a great controller as they already have accelerometers, speakers, mic, etc in them and allow the full "family gaming experience" nintendo was shooting for originally.

No, I'm not saying that at all. In fact that is also against the NSA's mandate. They should be (according to their mandate) using this technology to detect and prevent military threats against the U.S. Whether that mandate is acceptable to the EU is a geopolitical question but falls within the construct of U.S. laws (protect your citizens from outside forces, don't go digging through their stuff unless there is a darn good and very specific reason) and thus if we are upsetting our neighbors in the EU we can "easily" change our laws and update their mandate to be something else like "help harden all electronic defenses to protect from foreign attack" but if they are ignoring the laws of their own country that means that there is no way to change their mandate as they just ignore it which undermines our system governing internally in the United States.

Well that is their mandate, whether or not I am ok with spying on others is irrelevant. Theoretically if a majority of Americans determine that this isn't ok we can disband the NSA altogether, but the problem with Spying on Americans is that spying on Americans in direct contradiction to their mandate and therefore there is no working check or balance on their power thus circumventing the Republican Democracy (under the argument that "we the people" empowered elected representatives to establish the NSA but demand that their powers are limited to external entities to insure they follow the rules of the Constitution). In this case it is being reported that they are doing their job, which is totally different as it is currently an acceptable behavior within the confines of the U.S. culture's social contract (which could be changed in theory through the constructs of the nation's laws and systems of governance).

Ok, so I get the whole whistle blower thing but isn't this what the NSA is supposed to be doing? Spying on Americans is ok to get fussy about but why was this leaked and why doesn't the NYT realize that this actually does set back U.S. intelligence? Are they also going to release a story detailing what the Chinese are doing to spy on US from leaked Chinese intelligence?

I think a review of the meaning of "attack surface" is due here. The idea here is to keep the bad guys out. If you can't physically secure your infrastructure (including some level of trust in your employees) you are guaranteed trouble. For that reason most networks are guaranteed trouble, but that aside a proper firewall does reduce the attack surface on the WAN by limiting traffic to what you want exiting and entering your network. Does a security guard also make a bank less secure because it increases the "robbery" surface?

Here at home we can't get any better here without shelling out 10k for a fiber run and 400/month or more for the link after, so we are stuck with crapy AT&T 3Mbps dsl. Netflix actually works fine surprisingly. Initial start on a video will be a bit blocky but it clears up quickly. Quality on other video sources varies wildly, so the service provider's technology clearly makes a big difference. Youtube is decent but has a long buffer time, videos from Aol's news or Fox news will hardly even play and take 10 minutes or more to buffer a 1 minute clip.

Yeah, like googling "electrical interference" and "fire code".

Well with http/2 using ssl by default why not just deliver all video over an encrypted channel. If it all looks the same it makes traffic shaping much harder (especially if you use your own dns).

Chrome updates are quite easy to control by using their ADM templates and deploying their enterprise msi via your favorite method. Just think of the smaller version increments as hotfixes. Microsoft pushes them all the time. At least with chrome it is more obvious what they are changing and what it might break by looking at the release notes versus digging through a million kb articles because the microsoft patch say "fixes a problem with internet explorer on some systems" or similar useless crap.

Clearly you have never tried to add a trusted root certificate for your internal domain to firefox. As someone who has, let me tell you firefox is not enterprise ready. Chrome at least uses the windows certificate store and has started adding group policy templates. That said, this is just a powergrab at trying to increase market share by forcing xp users to chrome.

While I concur about the general pricepoint, there are cheaper alternatives that are still perfectly good:
Ubiquiti: https://store.ubnt.com/unifi.html (all under $500)