Simple as pie, you wait for a crime to occure. No Law enforcement action, including the gathering of evidence can ever be allowed to occure before the crime.

No, they are claiming that they use statistical methods to attempt to exclude american citizens, but expect to collect their data anyway. additionally they implement policies that make american citizens fair game if there is any associational link to a foreign national with less than 3 degrees of seperation. this standard includes the vast majority of the american people. Programs XKeyScore and Nebulus (the program that notices when you say 'bomb' on the phone) can't establish the nationality of the parties even if they wanted to.

the biggest issue however, is that NSA analysts have been giving the data to domestic law enforcement agencies with no warrent, and that data is being introduced in non-terror prosecutions of american citizens, per the last batch of data that DNI released (declassified FISC findings).

When a power is used for specific elevated conditions for a period of time, law enforcement and the judicary become comfortable with it, and over time, the bar to use those elevated powers lowers. For instance, in London, after installing hundreds of CCTV cameras, which had no impact on serious crime, local town councils started using these terror-justified feeds to start prosecuting locals for not picking up after their dogs.

Allowing this program to continue, gaurentees that the liberties I knew as a child will be gone forever.

so you are saying that having a competitive advantage over other nations espionage programs is paramount to having your government acknowledge and protect your liberties?

The cost of freedom is that you must acknowledge that you must remain vulnerable to attack. Otherwise you destroy the freedom you are supposedly trying to protect.

In this case, that the job exists at all is the problem. That makes the solution simple and elegant. The only remaining issue, is accepting that everytime somthing bad happens, we are necessarilly limited in our ability prevent it.

The government cannot ever make me safe. all they can do is protect my liberties, and over the last 12 years they have been doing a piss-poor job of it.

they were likely worried that the archive had scraped ISOHunt the way ArchiveTeam did.

Quite true. additionally our economy can only support so many super-profitable acts. There could only be one Elvis, and at the time there were only a handful of popular/profitable musical groups. Now they try to manufacture a thousand Elvis's, but don't want to subdivide the pie. You can have one king, or you can have dozens of dukes, but you can't have both, and you certainly can't have thousands of different acts and still expect any of them to make decent money.

So a guy who got rich by assuming illegitimate rights over peoples personal info, is mad that another entity is trying to get rich by assuming illegitimate rights over a process that appears to sell that personal info. Mafioso's all around.

The author and I have had a almost oppositionally different experience with the platforms I've had. Visual studio, for all its flaws, feels smooth and solid, with prompt code assistance features and a generally good approach to code organization. It has its share of issues, but it seems to be clearer and more directed.

Eclipse however just feels generally clunky. I pause for 20+ seconds just to get code completion prompting to come up in python or java, and half the time its in the wrong context. the perspectives is also really annoying. everytime I go to debug, it halts everything to tell me it wants to switch, and then gives me a 2inch high window for viewing the code, anchoring is weak, and it always seems like I never get back the space I should when I dock a sub-window. Personally I really don't care how extensible my IDE is. any given ide is not going to be able to support all langagues and technologies, so why try to shoehorn it in?

Clappers office has previously released a statement that his answer was "least untruthful" he could make it, because the program was classified. this clearly implies that he was aware that the statement was false at the time he made it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130610/09473723393/clapper-my-answer-to-wydens-beating-your-wife-question-data-surveillance-was-least-untruthful-answer.shtml

Today the statement is, "I misunderstood", implying that at the time, he believed the statement he made was factual.

So, which is it? These statements appear contradictory

with all the horrible patents coming around today, automatically rejecting everything would be a boon for society in general.

Have you looked at these solutions? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization

Though I have no idea regarding the RF tx concerns, I can speak a little about the privacy implications. first a little reading, Here is a link to the NIST-IR 7628, which describes guidelines for smartgrid security. Volume 2 focuses on privacy impact. http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/focus-on-countries/north-and-south-america-and-the-caribbean/united-states/trends-and-issues-united-states/information-and-communications-technology-united-states/cyber-security-united-states/nistir-7628-guidelines-for-smart-grid-cyber-security.html

it is already possible with analog meters to identify devices inside a home, simply by sampling the signal at the meter at an interval of less than 2 minutes. the faster the sample the more accurate. by comparing the signals to a database of common electrical devices researchers were able to profile device usage as early as 1992. obviously, up till now, most utilities coudn't afford the staff to sample most lines at that interval however.

The smart grid exacerbates this privacy issue, because it allows and in fact requires high speed sampling to accommodate Time-Of-Use billing, and because the meters can send usage information to the utility head end effortlessly with no additional cost.

the real issue with privacy however will not come for a few years: smart appliances. Several EDUs are already selling internet service through their smart meters, but there is effectively no option to firewall this connection as it travels over the power lines and any interference would be felony meter tampering.

So, imagine 5 years from now, you are buying a new TV. you don;t care about internet connectivity, but the device comes with it embedded, and there are very few options in the TVs menus for configuring it. It uses powerline networking, so in order to just turn it on, you have already connected it to the Internet. At this point, you basically have to trust your TV manufacturer to not report to advertisers what you watch, including stuff like pr0n. with SMART devices you have to trust the manufacture implicitly..

Another big focus for the smartgrid is Electric Vehicles. The plan at present is to have the car identify itself to the power network, along with its owners billing info, so that wherever you plug in to get a recharge, it appears on your monthly bill. this can easily be used to track you over long periods of time.

SG meter data can also be used to uncover hidden sources of power generation within your property, so if you hide your usage to maintain your privacy, that will likely be accessible to any adversarial party that requests it.

So, a well monitored smart meter can be used to tell your schedule, the size of your family, when you are home, when you are away, your approximate worth, enumerate your devices, log how/when/where (in your house) you use them, track your internet usage, how far you travel each day (and possibly where you went), the day of the week you go to the grocery, and what ever any device you plug in decides to send to third parties, all with no indication that anything is happening.

This is exactly why I use noscript. I persistently block googleadservices.com, doubleclick.net, etc, but I like that Noscripts protects me from the 3rd party listeners by default but in a granular way.

PhotoRec is capable of carving .zip files, so I would use GNU DDRescue to create an image of the disk, and then photorec or testdisk to recover the file or the partition respectively. you can find all these utilities on this nice bootable livecd: http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/

to be honest, the best possible outcome, is that every business in AU and NZ does nothing, and when they all get sued/charged, then the courts and the legislature will deal with their own mess, instead of passing it on to you, like they tried to do with this law.