Yeah, but the Pentagon already covered all avenues of escape. Occupy protest proved that.

Oh come on now. You act as if these humans haven't had multiple currencies before. Think about it: Let's say the US dollar is worth less than dirt tomorrow. The folks still capitalizing on you still have the means of production and the supply of goods to get you to work for it. The Jerry Garcia Guitallar will pick up right where the other currency left off, and the new bosses won't be same as the old boss, they will be the same old bosses. Not that communism is any better, it's not because it goes against the nature of evolution and competition. Look, those with more resources will always buy your government out from under you. You simply can't fix a technological problem with people. The only way to solve the problem is to make it so everyone has everything they want and so no one can corrupt them with greed. Your race won't be able to fix this problem until you live in a post-scarcity economy. Most species don't make it, those that do solve the Fermi Paradox.

Wake up and smell the gravity furnace! The Invisible Intangible Idea Machine Invasion is upon you. Didn't you get the damn Matrix memo? The legal and economic systems themselves are alive and they are fighting for their own survival. They've already gotten effective monopoly over the world's ideas and information duplication through copyright and patents. It's like you WANT to be Terminated. Hell, I don't even know which side I'm rooting for at this point. You're immune to allegory, and even direct Star Trek demonstrations only sink in as deep as the fans clothes and forehead makeup.

I need a vacation!

I would if I was under the delusion that voting actually mattered. Let me know when he wants to fix the rigged game called Gerrymandering.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just not insane. I'll throw in bitcoin but I realize that all this will do is demonstrate that the problem is deeper than you imagine. The government isn't influenced by the corporations, the government IS the corporations. They fight wars to deregulate and privatize national economies. USA isn't a capitalist country, the USA is capitalism.

"National security" means maintaining the social economic and political status quo despite the will of the people. The plutocratic media is in on it too. They pay what the market will bear, if there's a price war for congress critters the guys we're up against will just achieve their ends by putting more of their endless stream of money into the system. The sad thing is that not even a free market can fix things, because even they collude.

The sad thing is that people will actually do whatever it takes to survive, that means fighting over lower wages during and after the international corporations gut your nation. The founding fathers knew, "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." It's the natural cycle of history, until a decentralized system is in place to match the decentralized nature of life. Things WILL get worse before they get better, I've watched it play out over the last five decades in lots of other smaller places with less resources, it's just taking us a bit longer. 100% chance that this dumbass move will just make things worse, but bring it on, any change is better than nothing at this point. It's not like we didn't go into this crap fully knowing EXACTLY what we were doing: Eisenhower warned us about everything that has happened. IMO, It'll be a bit entertaining to raise the price so the smaller lobbyists can't compete...

On second thought, maybe I should fund a video game dev. At least I might get something enjoyable out of it, enjoy life's pleasures while they're enjoyable instead of lamenting them later. Cybernetics will show you that the disparity in system powers is so vastly different between us and them that the bigger system can't be changed except through natural entropic heat death, just like The USSR. You could learn a lot from a Russian: Keep your head down and survive until this batch of bullshit blows over again, it'll be winter soon, and it won't be the last one either.

There is gamer culture. There is comic culture. There is anime culture. There is hacker culture. There was a punk culture. There was a hippie culture. However, there never was Geek or Nerd culture, just like there was never Nigger culture. Geek, Nerd, and Nigger are disparaging terms. Without corporations appropriating the culture for the commodification thereof, there would not be a Geek or Nerd culture. The whole "Geek and Nerd" culture is just commodification, even here on Slashdot. "News for nerds" -- Whatever, Dork. Dork culture! Oh I'm such a Dweeb! Hey I know, "Gnus for Goobers, Stuff that Chatters!" It's not "Goober" culture is it? We don't run around calling each other Dorks and Dweebs right? That's what you sound like calling yourselves "Nerd" or "Geek" culture. That's very some fake bullshit there.

You can buy "Punk" clothes at hot topic... That's not punk at all! That's cultural commodification of the do-it-yourself anti-conformist punk culture. Thug culture started off as artists singing about making endsmeat to survive in the ghetto while being persecuted for your race. Now it's about being more violent, having more money, nicer cars, more "fresh" clothes, more "bling", and impressing women to have more sex than your peers -- This is a culture that has been commodified. Wearing bell bottom pants and floral print blouses and tie-died bandannas, etc? That style was a cultural construction of a "hippie", and had nothing to do with the free love, ride hitching, anti-establishment, communal counter culture.

The Poindexter nerd stereotype was created by conflating social outcasts with intellectuals. This just never was the case. It's true that having the passion to create something that takes a lot of time means you'll likely be somewhat introverted, and less extroverted, placing less value on social life; However the socially awkward "geek" had nothing to do with intellectual pursuits. People will make fun of the outcast for having the wrong color backpack, or being "too" rich or poor, or for a variety of reasons. The bully doesn't really care that you like ancient 3D Unix file system explorers, it's just an excuse to pick on you. There's lot's of other folks getting picked on for being socially awkward introverts but they're not "geeks"? "Geek" culture was never really about D&D, hacking, videogames or any of the other things they shove under that umbrella. The media is just monetizing culture by selling you on the label of geek, including the sense of belonging to a fucking news website -- though, cut the Slashdot admins some slack, they're just newbies who can barely think for themselves and didn't know better when they bought into the cultural commodification themselves. Nerd culture never existed, it's fake. All Geek Girls are Fake because all Geek Guys are Fake too.

Read up about the typical hacker, and you'll get a very different idea than that portrayed in media, one that I suspect many here will match. Computer Hacker is a group identity that self assembled through a natural process and was not commercially constructed. The media hates this, and the powers that be fear hackers -- Those who could crack systems and reveal secrets are the feared worst enemy of the anti-activist governmental bodies, and so they make sure not to use the term in a positive light in mainstream media. Instead the naturally emerging "frisbie throwing, skateboarding, kung fu practicing, intensely abstracted, computer whiz kid" stereotype was quickly replaced with the undesirable, pimple faced, social outcast Poindexter who ineffectually rages against machines from the dark safety of his parent's basement.

Likewise, gamer culture was self emergent. Those card, paper and dice games which required extremely imaginative minds were the very antithesis of anti-socialites. They overcame their shyness to come together with strangers and cast spells, summon minions, battle dark wizards and craft amazing interactive narratives. Other folk may poke fun, but socializing is a key component, the truly introverted and awkward have a hard time even with D&D. Video game developers tend to share much in common with the table top gamer, and far less with the video game player community. The video game playing community was also self emergent, and very different.

Video gamers share some facets with the hacker culture in their ability to consume and leverage huge amounts of minutia and skillfully hone their game fu craft. However there are vastly more differences than similarities. "Geeks" though? Being social outcasts? Really? Hackers and Video Gamers? The latter being VERY mainstream, often brashly talking smack (an adaptation of bragging rights), and reveling in the graphic detail of even the most ridiculously sexualized and gorey scenes? There's a bit of 90's action hero in many devout competitive video gamers, and these proud snack munching chore-ignoring players are lumped in with socially awkward intellectually Poindexter "Nerd" or "Geek"? Really? Many video gamers are just as likely to be the bullies who actually picked on "nerds" and "geeks". Give me a fucking break.

The "nerd / geek" culture was constructed by the media to make money. At first the Revenge of the Nerds style Nerd / Geek was created for people to laugh at. The Steve Urkel, Screech, etc. Nerd or Geek side-kick painted intellectuals as awkward outcasts and objects of ridicule. The social justice brigade caught wind, and soon the characters were also made to be objects of sympathy, because bullying nerds is bad, you see. To sell parents on various bullshit books, invitro Mozart CDs, but primarily computers, the "Child Genius" identity was created. Kids weren't getting smarter, older adults just couldn't operate their VCR let alone operate a Personal computer. Media was fast to capitalize on the child genius, and shows like Dogie Howser M.D. featured a home PC at the end of every episode. The Wizard, Galactica (1980), Dexter's Labratory, Jimmy Neutron, Family Guy, and various other shows helped to construct and maintain the child prodigy identity. It's no mistake that the "Geek" identity has expensive hobbies, buying those comic books, imported anime, video games & consoles, computers, telescopes, etc. it's all OK now, you're a Geek! Geeks are in! What of the Shy Guy? "Oh, he's a creep, only nice to get in your pants, a potential rapist", I really wish I was exaggerating.

You see, now that it was your own child who was going to be the "Geek" or "Nerd" the media began to "take back" the geek identity they had already constructed so you wouldn't think twice about buying toys designed to "increase your infant's intelligence"; Don't shame your "geek" kid by telling them to go out and get some sun, allow them to indulge their minds with some expensive hobby kit (hey, I'm not saying all aspects of cultural commodification are senseless and corrupt, absolutist thinking like that is for fools). Meanwhile the socially awkward boy who got beaten up for having a pink backpack goes ignored, in fact, the school thinks he should have known better than "trigger the bullying". I'm not being hyperbolic. But if he was bullied over, say, computers, oh was it his fault for carrying SICP to class, triggering the bullies? That's why I hate "geek culture", because the actual outcasts are marginalized and overshadowed simply because they don't have an expensive "Nerdy" hobby. Where is the shy quiet bookworm's social introverted weird, freaky and geeky identity to belong to? It was appropriated by the media to sell you on "geek" culture. They left us with "spaz", we can have that, too close to shaming seizure sufferers to monetize, really. Point being: If you look at where this "geek" culture crap is coming from, you have to wonder where the other sub-cultures are, and why it's such a misrepresentation of the actual sub-cultures, or why it's not really reflective of anything but that which profits commercial interests plus a victim complex spin. You want me to identify with Felica Day? Popular attractive new media people? Really? That's a "Geek"?

No one was proudly calling themselves Geek or Nerd, just like the blacks weren't calling themselves Niggers on their own. I don't call myself a Geek or Nerd except extremely ironically, and my friends who fought for civil rights don't call themselves Niggers or Nigga. IMO, "nigga" is the biggest troll of all. It's easy to capitalize on a disparaging name by granting it a righteous social justice sentiment: "Yeah, I'm persecuted, but not anymore! Let me call myself a disparaging remark as a reminder and badge of pride!" If it wasn't for the cultural commodification folks wouldn't be identifying themselves as a nerd or geek, fucking idiots.

"Just look at those Poindexters? Those smart people are so Dorky and Weird! You may be average, but at least you're not a Dweeb. Let's laugh at them!" And that's what the "The Big Bang Theory" is still doing, laughing at modern day Poindexters, a combination of many disparate cultural elements thrown in with the social outcast bullshit to construct a stereotypical social identity that appeals in some respects to many people, but never actually existed and isn't representative of anyone. When I look at those I'd consider intellectuals I don't see the "Geek" identity the media portrays, that doesn't mean they can't school most "geeks" at the things "geeks" like or do, it just means the portrayal is wrong. You know Wendy from The Wonder Years? Yeah, the literally famous and sexy girl... she's a "Math Nerd". Wil Wheaton? Yeah, apparently he's a "Gamer Geek". That's why this commercialized "Geek Culture" bullshit makes no fucking sense. I call it Dweeb Culture. What a bunch of Dorks. It's a show about Goobers and border line "Autistics". The name calling sounds stupid to you? Yeah, it should. That's the point: It just as bullshit as the way you use "Geek" or "Nerd".

Sorry, I don't care if the show hires Wil Wheaton, or Steven Hawking. I certainly care even less if the writers have to hire a scientific consultant just to keep the intellectuals or hobby enthusiasts in the audience from flaming them. I'm not going to buy into their Geek or Nerd culture bullshit any sooner than Neil Degrasse Tyson is going to start calling himself a Space Nigger.

If you want a show about intellectuals that even the common man can enjoy then go see Particle Fever.

Well, the problem is the same as in securing your hardware: Physical access = Game Over.

You've got folks running software on their hardware, they're going to be able to do whatever they want with that. I can see the ethics behind punishing people who cheat against other non consenting folk, but this statement bugs me:

I told Gibson that I found [repetitive cheating] behavior mind-boggling. He isn’t confused by it. He’s just angry. “Give me five minutes alone with a hacker or a hack writer,” he laughed. “That’s what I think about that mindset.”

If it wasn't for hacking and cheating in games I wouldn't have taught myself how to program as a child. In fact, the first thing I did when I got any new game was save the game, do some action, save it again and do a hex-diff to scan for the change, and edit the byte values to give myself more ammo or items or money, etc. I'd still take pride in beating the games without cheats, and in competitive servers I wouldn't cheat, but amongst other hacker friends, or on my own servers I see nothing wrong with cracking games. I've added new game modes, weapons, and levels to games via patching the EXE and data files.

Lots of folks bought Doom when they already had Duke3D and Quake just to play with new weapons I added to the game: Flame Thrower: Replace rocket launcher projectile with imp fire ball frames, limit its range by making it disappear after a duration [use the frame tables], increase ammo counts, reduce the damage and reload for VERY rapid fire, replace the projectile's death frame with Archvile flame attack, FIX the damn Archvile flame animation sequence so it animates smoothly. The sound effects preempted itself, so rapid fire would make a great whooshing sound as big beautiful gouts of fire shot out and went crackling up the walls. It was beautiful and all done with just a hex editor using in-game graphics, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine why the game makers didn't have it in the game already... High Explosive Ammo: Set the bullet puff / bleed frame to be the rocket launcher explosion, great fun in co-op w/ specially designed insane difficulty levels. Then there was the Tactical Force Gun: Plasma rifle bolts w/ no damage, high HP, partial invisibility, and high mass, but slow speed. You could make a time-limited wall of force by strafing. You could maintain a barricade, trap folks against walls or via encircle them, great for escape. BFG mines: Zero speed BGF blasts, without the bright bit set - they look small but have a big radius for hit-detection, and just twinkle as a little dot until someone walks into the detection range and they explode -- When these mines go off, invisible kill rays shoot from the "owning" player's current location even elsewhere in the map, but aimed in the original direction the blast was fired at (because that's how the BFG code worked, yep, the biggest and "best" weapon is/was fucking buggy as all hell, ruined would be a better word for it, come the fuck on Carmack, do you even algebra?). So, I'd do a binary diff and produce a binary patch that worked against a certain executable version to avoid distributing modded EXEs themselves so as not to break copyright. Soon DEHACKED came out, and even more folks were able to mod the EXEs. Thus when Doom2 just gave us one more shotgun barrel, everyone was fucking pissed! The hackers had shown off what the engine was capable of, so the game felt like a half-assed attempt to monetize the same game twice.

My most successful hack was when I finally managed to fix the BFG in Doom2.exe by having the rays shoot out from the blast instead of the player and gave the ray direction the reflection vector of the surface it struck or reversed it if it was a player. This required reverse engineering the fixed point math format, and I had to find some unused area for my machine code to be inserted -- which was easy because Carmack's off by one error left 512 bytes of PLAYPAL unused #1 (red,pain colors) and #9 (yellow, item pickup), and COLORMAP #33 was another 256 byte palette-maps that was completely unused in the engine (was light-amp effect in an alpha). This enabled me to create a generic plugin system for my patches by jumping to those PLAYPAL and COLORMAP based offsets in memory, thus new functionality could be loaded by PWAD file instead of by additional patches to the EXE. This fix granted so much more flexibility in "hacks" and made the BFG so awesomely usable and more balanced (banking its damage around corners, kills the person that fired unless you dodge it's blast -- folks would hilariously Kamikaze if they heard the blast about to go off, killing the BFG holder who immune to the unfixed blast). It became a mandatory requirement to install my hacked patch on all of my town's competitive network BBSs (IPX network simulator = 4 player deathmatch pre-Internet), and they wouldn't move to the newer doom.exe versions until after I had a new patch out for it out. It's not like Doom wasn't rev'd several times, why not fix the retarded BFG bug that fires out your ass from the other side of the level that the blast is on? It's not like players didn't complain...

And that was just one game, there were dozens of others over the years we kept adding new life to. I got free access to several local BBSs and free Internet access though their gateways by making exclusive mods for their tournaments. Point being: Us "hackers" (modders) were giving new life to the games and lots of folks were buying the games just to play the "hacked" versions (game mods). Many people would go buy a game because they could use "hack" making tools with it to create their own mods. One of the main things that made Doom and other FPSs so profitable was that they were so hackable. To this day folks still buy the original game to use the new source ports and new mods and mod tools which function with the original assets. The same goes for Quake, Descent, Tribes, and many other games.

That Gibson is angry at the "hackers" or "hack writers" is just fucking daft. Be mad at the cheaters who cheat. You don't get mad at Smith or Wesson when someone gets shot, you go after the shooter not the gun maker or bullets. Ugh. He wants to be in a room for 5 minutes alone? Bring it on Gibson, lots of us real hackers know martial arts. You'd be down and out in 5 seconds if tried anything on me. Control-fuckery is the main reason I stopped playing games that don't have custom / private servers -- It's not the whole game if you don't get the server too. Folks police their own servers like hawks, I'll even remote-console from my smart phone if enough complaints hit the server when I'm out. The basics to user management are simple: Ability to record in-game demos on the server side, let players report said demos as evidence to server admins, and let folks report servers for abuse too (I've seen virus servers in Quake and TF2 servers). Vote-kick temp-ban helps but it can be abused. Server operators can circulate a time-limited IP blacklist (because permaban hurts legit users, some people actually do learn their lesson, and it's just a game folks). You can't fix people problems with software. DRM servers put needless death sentences on games.

For my next game project I've been experimenting with a tiered architecture approach: Authentic Servers - up to date servers ran by makers of the game, require an account to connect; Recommended Servers - private servers in good standing with the community, running no more that a few versions behind, authenticate by proxy to enforce author's banlist, and may have additional requirements, mods, and bans; Outlaw Servers - The wild west territories with their own rules, running whatever version, on modding, cheating, banlists, maybe not having any rules or authentication at all. The server listing system is decentralized so the outlaws are listed on the master server list, but hidden by default in the client. Let the users filter by the type of experience they want to play. This way newbs have a decent experience, and the unruly hackers and flamers who get banned can still play the game, just not in the respectable parts. Unfortunately, it's my experience that opening the source code of games greatly increases the cheaters, and it only takes one bad apple to spoil a bunch of games. I've seen open sourced games go back closed source and watched the cheating plummet too. So, I want to test out whether opening the source code to older versions of the game could be a valid middle ground. A BSD license approach will let new client / servers be released closed and after sufficient changes have been made the older versions can be open sourced, allowing the community to really go wild with mods and even help fix and secure upstream game code. Bonus: When the central auth server shuts down, dedicated players can run their own, so the game needn't ever die. If you want to play with the nice community of approved servers, you'll need to have an account, and that means folks in the approved servers are paying customers. Pirates can hang out with the outlaws.

Leaderboards have a big problem with cheating too, but IMO, it's a solvable issue: Tournament matches with in-game refs / moderators on approved servers. The average player doesn't compete with the top players anyway, so it's not like every match needs to be ranked. The drama over voting in refs, moderators, and which servers and mods should be community approved can't be avoided, so why not leverage it to bolster the community cohesion. Anything is better than being banned for no reason, or worse: curiosity, and having no way to play the game you bought. ugh.

Also, the trickle of new content in today's AAA locked-down no mod DLC only games is fucking pathetic. Not allowing modders to monetize mods? Man, you're missing out on a HUGE piece of pie. $5.00 for a couple of new multi-player levels? That's asinine. We've got folks still making total conversions of Quake and Doom games for free. You could let modders sell their user generated content in your game's mod store, and take a cut of the proceeds. Content creators get some cash for their efforts, the really good ones probably become gamedevs, maybe you higher the best to make new content for the game, and you get free money, a lot more than it takes to keep the servers online.

Wait, what? That's all it takes to create the AC? The last time I checked the accepted theory involved a stork.
What's motivating all those cowards to turn the car wheels? I feel like I'm missing something...
Perhaps a Unix analogy?

Sure, now just don't have any errors in any of your user space code, or don't allow multiple programs to share code (all static links) -- Every program will need its own image decoding software, no two programs will interact, so the camera app won't be able to pass off an image to the QR code app which passes the data to your browser or price checking, or etc. apps, etc. So long as you keep the bits of each program in 100% (virtualized) isolation from each other, and NEVER allow outside data in to exploit them then you'll be ALMOST protected against getting viruses.

One the problems I ran into when porting my OS to ARM is that ARM only gives you a single bit of execution permission level. That means monolithic kernel only, which is just stupid. Only having user-space or kernel space means no driver-space between kernel or users, and no agent-space for plugins below user space. x86 gives me 2 bits (4 execution permission ring levels), in addition to hypervisory mode, which is essentially another bit of execution ring level. So, you have either trusted or untrusted code running in the OS, but that's daft. With at least one more layer between root and code you download and run in your browser, you could actually have hardware supported sandboxing.

Fast, Cheap, Convenient, or Secure. Pick Only Two.

The monolithic kernel design isn't designed for security, it's just the quickest and dirtiest design (read: dumbest). Compare this with 16bit DOSes unified memory space where any program can fuck with any other part of memory... Any kernel module can screw with any other part of the kernel, same problem different level. Since everyone's using the dumb monolithic kernel design the (ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, etc) hardware vendors do not give us the required additional security features in hardware (see: ARM's User Mode, Supervisor Mode [, and interrupt modes, but that's not where the bulk of your OS code is]). Restricted memory access does a lot to isolate processes, but the fact is that the way we are using software and OSs is not in line with the current hardware capabilities (which are lacking in some areas, and under utilized in others, e.g., hypervisor).

Contrary to popular belief software and hardware are inexorably linked. Features in hardware (or lack thereof) can enable, promote, prevent, or suppress certain types of program constructs, primarily those to do with security. I do not JIT compile JS into machine code and execute it in user space, that would be daft, but there you are.

You may be joking, but that's the answer. The problem of "who will watch the watchers" has long been solved: Everyone. Those concerned about the watchers behavior should be allowed to watch the behaviors of the watchers with their own independent watching group. This is the basic fundamental principal of accountability, and it can only be corrupted if secrecy is allowed. Personally, instead of drones, I would use a simple image recognition system hooked up to a couple of telescopes and a mesh of at least three software defined radio scanners overlapping amongst neighbors (for triangulation and initial aiming of the amateur telescopes / webcams + lenses). Simple image recognition lets me automate shooting star and back-yard bird watching, minus the radio triangulation. Such a setup is relatively cheap, so if drones become common I suspect amateur astronomy / neighborhood watch / police scanner folks will use Google Maps or Open Streetmap and enable you to pull up a map of drone paths in your area over time and even watch them zooming around on your Internet connected device (another reason why remote kill switches should never be accepted). I'm not the only one with the know how to produce drone surveillance mesh network nodes, but if no one else does, and the drones become common, then I'll simply make production of automated drone watching gizmos the target of my robotics hobby.

It is not the watching that is the primary problem, but the secrecy -- Disallowing the watching of certain activities. Governments should be afforded no secrecy in the governance of their own population. A government oversight committee for the secret watchers only moves the problem of secrecy around. It's not like we need secrecy in government. We brashly do whatever we want and announce it to the world as we do so. Who needs any secrecy if you frequently thumb your nose at the world and do as you please despite reprimands and condemnations? Any who are at comparable technological capability are already watching each other quite effectively, it is only the less powerful citizenry who are excluded from making informed decisions via government secrecy. The idea that secrecy is needed is refuted by the existence of spies and/or double agents. Even a lowly IT contractor like Snowden proves that our systems are certainly leaking all of the data about our citizens to our enemies. Might as well open the info up to the public -- Ah, but then we'd use it to stay up to date on the activities of our government officials.

If your public policy is the same as your actions then you need no secrecy. If back-room arms deals with native warlords are required to save lives then the citizenry will understand, but only if the information to understand the nuances of the situation are allowed. Because power corrupts, citizens should be able to prove their government is not acting against them. They can not do this if secrecy prevents them from watching the watchers. One of the things a watcher of watchers will note is the Cost vs Benefit analysis. If we spend a bunch of money to have more drones flying about, or more TSA agents (who fail to prevent any terrorism, or even keep stowaways out of landing gear), etc. and that expense is not beneficial (lack of crime, no significant benefit vs cheaper neighborhood watch, passengers themselves being the detector and deterrent to terrorism now, etc), then the budget for the watchers can be cut to appropriate levels.

What we need is not absolute security, but spending proportionate to the actual threat. Heart disease and accidents kill more people than 400 9/11's every year, yet we are not banning cars and French fries; You're 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning than by terrorists, so anti-terrorism budget should be 1/4th of what our government spends on subsidizing lighting rods and rubberized suits. The public shouldn't be paying for services they do not need or want, and therefore the "government" label should be excluded from services the public are not paying for (a large majority of black-ops are investment funded, possibly in violation of insider trading, which would be great use for PRISM). If we're not paying for a service, or fully informed of the actions of the service, then it should not be considered a government service, since we have no peaceful way of shutting it down if we don't want or need the Pentagon's extreme tin-foil hattery and anti-activism programs.

Indeed, we should be able to call on our Army to uphold the constitution they are sworn to protect from enemies both foreign and domestic -- Considering these secret agencies as "government programs" prevents our troops from doing their duty, and shutting down the NSA servers by force for unconstitutional actions against the populace, until their actions are judged by the other branches of government.

The more power one has the less secrecy and more accountability the actions of wielding said power should be afforded. The branches of government were designed to watch each the other watchers. The requirement of meetings with scribes who record minutes, court room activities, and outcomes of congress votes, etc. were expressly designed to provide the citizens watching behavior. Personally, I believe the 2nd amendment should be changed such that "weapons" and "arms" be merely considered "technology". We need the right to bear technology enshrined in the constitution, that includes computing power, solar panels, encryption, radios, drones, etc.

And all that paper and ink is only cheap enough to mail because of the cost we're deferring to our unborn descendants.

I sure hope 3D printed organs extend human life by a few hundred years soon so that folks will actually have to live with the consequences of their actions.
Otherwise this rampant short-term mentality of greed might just end the whole species, and then some.

You're plainly ignorant. I don't have any threshold triggers in any of my neural networks. Cells have complex protein behaviors, so what? The cybernetic models can be Turing complete. This means that if I really wanted to waste CPU power instead of understanding the fundamental principals of cognition, I could build a neural network that emulated the molecular action of cellular proteins, and if our rate of computer advancements holds that machine intelligence would be able to emulate the molecules that make up human neuron proteins, and eventually an entire human head right down to the molecular level. Artificial neural networks can yield every bit as much complexity as anything else in nature. Did you forget that electrons are made of quantum particles or something? Now, we're shooting for determinism and thus applying quantifications in most cases, but in the future we'll harness things like eddy currents once our n.net model methodologies have nailed down and abstracted more of the key components that emerge of complex behaviors efficiently.

Nor do the artificial neurons need to have anything to do with organic ones except very basic fundamental properties which produce the complexity of response and thus intelligence. I suppose next you'll be telling me that without putting a human brain in the boxen we won't be able to make personal computers do mathematics.

You are what I call an organic chauvinist. What's so damn special about the precise chemical functionality of organic brain operations? If the organic chemputers were such a grand and complex design in need of exact duplication to achieve any degree of similar intelligence, then why are dumb computing machines even able to revolutionize computation? How are digital cameras doing facial recognition with far less computation power than human brains require? It's true that organic neurons have more internal state and some of the details of the process by which neurons operate are still undiscovered; However, we don't need to achieve the exact nuanced behavior of human neurons or even the same human brain neuron capacity scale or even its same connectivity types in order to produce intelligent behaviors. There are some general principals at work that any complex system will exhibit in order to achieve a given behavior, and those are worth emulating in an optimized fashion. Nature has converged upon solutions randomly using trial and error and going with the first working attempt the entropy gives her whether it is optimal or not. Replicating every detail of said accidental functionality exactly is not essential any more than it is essential for creatures to have 4 legs in order to walk.

It's already been proven that complexity yields intelligence. The more neurons the smarter the entity. In fact, we have been determining the minimal degree of complexity required to solve various problems, and nearly universally we can solve the same problems with far less complexity than the equivalent solution in nature, since organisms weren't intelligently designed. There is no binary dichotomy: An interaction does not reach some threshold and then magically becomes intelligent. Instead, there is an intelligence gradient: All systems exhibit some degree of "intelligence" AKA processing power, and the amount scales with complexity. Even a run of dominoes has some small degree of intelligence. Human brains have a lot of neurons doing stuff that isn't even required to produce sentience (thermal regulation, breath control, motor skills, etc). In fact, you can take whatever estimate your cognitive neuroscience prof claims the human brain has as a yardstick for the complexity requirement of sentience and slash it by half at the very least. Nature is very inefficient, we intelligent designers can do far more with less -- Intelligence wouldn't even exists otherwise.

Well, as a cybernetician my studies reach deep into cognitive neuroscience, information theory, thermodynamics, business processes, behavioral sciences, CS, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and more. You see: Nature draws no dividing lines between the sciences. There are general principals in one "field" which apply to many others if you only try to determine how they apply. IMO, nerosciences and cybernetics and philosophy go hand in hand, they should all be taking cues from each other for which areas to investigate. It seems to me that you are simply extremely ignorant of the field of cybernetics, not that cyberneticians are ignorant of neurology: The "threshold triggering" AI (perceptron) by itself is sort of like a diode. One can use it to perform some basic mathematics, since it's essentially it's a simplistic binary classification machine. It's not the type of neuron used in the vast majority of neural nets. The more complex internal state of the organic neuron can be simulated by multiple simpler artificial neurons -- otherwise organic neurons would be indivisible atomically. Besides, you act as if our artificial neurons aren't already performing some of the tasks that brains do in living creatures, or vise versa.

The sigmoid function typically used in neural nets is a form of logistic curve, which can provide continuous output: As the inputs scale up or down the curve causes the output to ramp up quickly towards a fully active state. There are many curves, but non linearity is a required component to achieve complexity and solve certain classes of problems -- note that a mesh of MANY perceptrons connected in a disorganized bidirectional self intersecting mesh can approximate any curve, though the outputs will be in discrete steps. The sigmoid calculation reduces the number of neurons required greatly while keeping the simpler feed forward design (point being that even the simple perceptron is sufficient given enough complexity). Axon coefficients allow various inputs to a neuron to have fine tuned or subtle effects upon output ranges instead of just ramping up fully. Negative axon coefficients mean that individual neurons can perform the task of both excitatory neuron and inhibitory neuron, and have a full range of activation strength across any of its output axons. That means a single neuron can fire off at multiple energy levels, including "negative" energies (which do not exist in nature) which is a HUGE optimization over nature's method of dedicated neurons with inhibitory neurotransmitter chemistry.

"Hidden" layers of a feed forward n.net is basically a brute force approach which allows multiple inputs to be considered against each other and achieve an output. That approach can solve many problems, but probably won't yield the sort of dynamism a sentient intelligence has because the inputs flow towards outputs in a very simple way, and often have a very high number of axon connections vs the optimal solution. Fortunately, feed forward is not the only network design, it is just one easy to compute structure which can quickly solve many problems of the same complexity class, such as basic pattern recognition, OCR, etc. Structurally unorganized or arbitrarily arrangeable meshes have a much higher order of complexity since they can feed back within themselves many times before producing an output. The complexity level of bidirectional connection graph yields the ability to perceive the passage of time and compare a current collection of input events with one or more prior events, unlike a strictly feed forward n.net. This means temporary memory is formed.

With this time consideration in play one can then treat the n.net more like a brain, and collect its output over time. Instead of requiring the output after calculating the entire network in just one pass: The next output may depend on state stored via the prior input without changing the axon weights or connectivity. Unlike a flat feed forward neural network, the multi-directional interconnected n.net may take multiple pulses of the same input to cause the output to resolve into the prior trained output -- It may have to think about the input for a moment. When one examines these systems closely the prior cognitive state is cleared in patches over time and becomes the next cognitive state in steps, frequently classifying and routing activity caused by similar input classes to "cognitive centers" of the n.net in stages, much the same way the organic brains do. Feedback loops can cause prior partial classifications due to inputs to linger for quite some time, and multiple feedback loops can allow the neural network to ruminate on several different categories of input events.

The more I study my cybernetic simulations the more "human" or "organic" life like behaviors I identify them as able to produce in their simulated environments. The evolutionary approach of applying genetic algorithms produces commonalities in behaviors, similar to animal instincts -- This is a form of lower resoultion information about survival encoded in the structure of the brains and represented in the serialization passed down through the generations. These genetic memories are essentially "rules of thumb" which selection has proven beneficial responses on the average. Meanwhile adaptive learning cognitive processes allow a degree of "rationality" by leaning from the environment directly over time -- An instinctual impulse due to structural bias can be tempered or eliminated by learned behaviors.

I use a simple approach whereby the base configuration of neurons is arranged via genetic program, and during the course of the sim generation neurons send out new axons in a random direction, but are guided towards other neurons with a similar activity gradient over time. Though there are no initial connections, the structure of the n.net biases the connections that will occur strongly enough to allow instincts to propagate genetically, while also allowing learning experience to override bias or more directly connect distant neuron clusters that would take longer to fire off by a more circuitous route. In this way more optimal solutions to problems are found. This sometimes connects seemingly unrelated neuron clusters that may have fired off purely coincidentally in a temporal frame which lead to "confirmation bias" like assumptions where correlation is seen as causation; However, it also allows serendipitous "invention" of new solutions by associating events over time with a causation -- Essentially this is a form of observation and prediction: If one occurs, then the other is likely, and so let us trigger the behavior for the other event before it even occurs.

So, you're going to have a VERY hard time "curing" me of the machine intelligence bug, since my increasingly complex simulations are able to achieve more and more intelligence and emerge more complex behaviors. We've NOT hit a dead end by any means, in fact our machine complexity is increasing at an exponential rate! Thanks to us, machine life is achieving capabilities in decades that took organic life billions of years to emerge. We only see new promising result after new promising result. You'd sooner have "cured" the CERN researchers of "Particle Fever", and the attempt to dissuade interested CS folk from becoming cyberneticians would be equally as foolish as decommissioning the Large Hadron Collider before discovering the Higgs boson.

Screen was one of the reasons our shop converted to *nix back in the day. Just so much more useful than expensive KVM switches. I honestly can't imagine remote administration without it.

Yep. It's great for that. But if the machines have screens on the same desk or around the room, then for copy/paste and input sharing I'll also have Synergy.

Go blow that smoke up someone else's ass. If that was true then the NSA would "usually" publish the black-market zero day exploits they purchase as ammo for their Ferret Cannon exploit launching system. But they don't, ever. They just use them till someone else finds and fixes it.

Those fuckers don't need our shit to be secure at all. They don't want it to be so either. They don't even use the same networks we do for secure coms. Hell, that's what the Number Stations are all about. Every once in a while my scanner will catch one of my favorite broadcasts: Old school, just a monotonous series of digits. I'll fall asleep listening to them droning on and on -- no doubt only decipherable by one-time pads. You know, because public key crypto just moves the key-sharing problem of authentication around -- The endpoints still have to exchange the public keys, just like they'd have to exchange one-time pads (hundreds of Gigs of pad can fit in a micro SD card now). The CA system just moves the authentication problem from "which is their public key" to "which CA are they using" and adds: "Which CA can be trusted?" (none).

Look, if it was so damn important that the SSL systems were secure then the VERY BROKEN CA system would have been fixed a long time ago. As it stands now it's just a collection of single points of failure and any one compromised CA brings the whole thing down (see: Diginotar Debacle). SSL has NEVER provided security, ever. At least with pre-arranged / pre-shared keys if you do manage to transmit the key out of band (in person, at your bank, etc) no one can ever MITM the connection. All TLS / PKI did was ensure that all SSL connections had a potential MITM via the CA. No competent security researcher would design a system like that. You have American, Iranian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, and etc. root certs trusted in your browser. If they compromise any router between you and your destination they can MITM the connection, you'll see a big green bar too. Even if you did examine the cert chain, you'd have no way to know if the endpoint switched to a new CA, since any CA can create any cert for any domain, you have to trust ALL of them.

Web security is a laughing stock, and any "black-hat" group that was relying on SSL for any coms is probably just a CIA front, because EVERYONE with any snap has known that shit is not safe since its inception. Would YOU trust a CA to sign certs if they also sell information interception services to governments? Why did you then? We already have accounts and pre-arranged secrets with all the places we need secure so just take your existing HTTP-Auth proof of knowledge hash and feed it to the damn stream cipher and you're done. Well, and remove the basic auth bullshit, that's not needed, since we have cookies and web forms already. Point being: It's trivial to fix the CA system, but they don't do so, thus it's apparent that no government wants this shit to be secure or we wouldn't have the CA system, and they all wouldn't be able to spy on us. If you ask me that's collusion with the enemy against the citizens: Treason.

Missing option: Make a deal with some "new-media" folk who already have some experience and give them adequate funding in return for a cut of profits from improved quality episodes of their non-rerun "comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers".

How moronic is it that folks at a search company can't use said search features? It's not like this is a final frontier, or a space that's unexplored.

Only the most "advanced" apes are under the delusion that there is a time called being "grown up", or experience a resultant "mid-life crisis" by becoming disillusioned. The other species have avoided being duped through embracing the throwing of shit at others, becoming super-sexual "experimenters", and etc "immature" behaviors.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must correct an "anthropomorphic pan-sexual xenomorph fetishist" who is confused as to which Microsoft CEO tosses chairs and which leaps over them.

If all the other canon is now Legend, then what's left is just generic Sci-Fi universe. Without the name recognition I wouldn't know or care that the story was "of Star Wars". IMO, it would be just as much of a "Star Wars" flick if they changed the universe out from under the characters instead of the other way around.

I leave you with: Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager in a Galaxy Not so Far Away.