They're wearing out. Yes. Nuclear warheads have a lifespan, even if they sit around unused. There is a lot of radioactive decay to them.

Not only are the warheads not working, we also have launch facilities that don't secure. The airforce has a silo where they have to prop open a blast door with a crowbar. The weapons maintenance facilities are even in worse shape. The NYT article talks about a Tennessee facility so decrepit, its roof is caving in and they have people wear hard hats to stay relatively safe. Not exactly the place I want spent nuclear materials to be reprocessed in.

Ironically, it is precisely because we're not on hair-trigger alert for nuclear war, that we've let things get so bad. We just kind of forgot about it. But just because we're no longer worried doesn't mean the stuff is safe. We need to spend money to keep it that way.

We've been working on a very involved website redo, including service oriented architecture, RESTful interfaces, responsive design on the front end, a number of integrated Hadoop clusters on the back end, etc., and it's been nearly two years, and it still isn't done.

One of our directors said, "I just hope when we finally get this thing open for business, it's at least as good as Healthcare.gov".

He wasn't being ironic.

Slashdot has gone terribly downhill. Apparently instead of software engineers, it's filled with partisan morons who only know how to cut-and-paste spin and blatant falsehoods cribbed from FOX, or on the other side, absurd cynicism because their radical-left vision of unicorns and rainbows isn't possible in the real world. Neither seems to have any appreciation, or intellectual capability, to understand the complexities of large-scale architecture and systems design, much less able to offer any cogent commentary on it.

I agree, and it's sad. All I'm reading is uninformed juvenile snark based off some middle-NSA manager's "vision" that is, frankly, technically impossible. And probably was dropped a long time ago - not that this doesn't sell newspapers, of course.

So the government is basically conceding for this to fail.

Police are given wide discretion by the courts. There is no reason to believe that anyone will be auditing them for failure to write up a citation.

This is more to prevent them from beating the ever-loving-crap out of a black guy for driving in the wrong neighborhood. *Ahem* Sorry: "resisting arrest".

It worked to keep cellphones jailbreakable. http://www.onthemedia.org/stor...

The deal came in the wake of a consumer rebellion over the policy of locking cellphones to a carrier. A petition that garnered more than 114,000 signatures landed at the White House, and the Obama administration sided with the petitioners.

We elect Presidents in the United States, not dictators. These are enforced by laws made by the individual States, not the Federal government, much less the President, who can only work within the limited leeway that previous Congresses have granted him via laws.

Presidents, not dictators. With a user id so low, you simply can't be that young. How could you possibly not know this?

Not only was this stuff going on in the mid-90s, it was worse in the 2000s than it is today. In 2008, the Democratic House under Pelosi reined the NSA in. Maybe not enough for some people, but still it was done.

The only reason this is a "scandal" is because scandal-addicts have been starved for one. How desperate are they? These days, they've got their panties in a knot about bringing a U.S. POW home.

This is what makes modern day slashdot worthless. Reading through 100+ comments of misinformed libertarian ranting screaming that "Obama betrayyyyyyyyyyyeeeeed ussss!!!!!" Except the EFF document says absolutely nothing about who was pressuring who to do what, much less tell the other side of the story, which also might be interesting to read.

Um, no. The Whiskey Rebellion had nothing to do with "shitting on veterans". Veterans rallied around George Washington to put down the rebels.

George Washington was a millionaire at the time because he owned some extremely popular Whiskey distilleries, so when he imposed the first taxes of the nation (largely to pay our war debts), the first thing he did was put on a tax that hit himself hardest. This was considered fair. Even in those days, it was well known that alcohol came with severe social consequences, so this Sin Tax was generally accepted as the best way to raise national funds.

So what drove the Whiskey Rebellion? Largely it was early Borderlander (Scott/Irish) culture, one of the american nations, which simply wanted all the benefits of living the United States without having to pay a dime for its upkeep. This attitude, by the way, still completely dominates in these regions 200 years later, driving much of our politics: right wingers who pretend to "speak for the veterans" while at the same time refusing to pay for their benefits. Clyde Bundy is a poster child for borderlander culture

Thinking about it, I suppose you could say that "shitting on veterans" was the point of the revolution - it was just the rebels who were trying to do the shitting.

Here's a crazy thought: How about you stop starting wars, being the unwanted world-police, and generally just conclude that the world doesn't need your dictation.

Every time the U.S. tries to stop being the world policeman and something bad happens (like the genocide in Rwanda), the world asks "where was the U.S.? Why didn't you stop it?"

I know this is a "hate on the US for having signal intelligence spies, like every other major nation has, and has always had" thread, but exactly like how everybody hates traffic cops, just try to live in a world without them.

This is a completely untrue myth. Much closer to the truth is that the government has massively slashed taxes on the mega-wealthy without dropping its spending nearly enough to pay for the overwhelming cut. If taxes on the wealthy simply returned to the levels we had in the 1960s, the deficit would go massively negative, and the debt would be paid off in approximately two decades.

Fat chance that will ever get through Congress though.

Before they can get a lawyer to represent them? This wasn't an arrest. It was a subpoena.There was plenty of time to lawyer-up.

Seriously guy, all you're doing is making stuff up.

Oh, and while we're on the topic, this is not "warrantless wiretapping". It was a narrowly tailored subpoena issued because the Federal prosecutors convinced the court that there was reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed. This is exactly the way the system is supposed to work. And if you think that people who commit fraud, engage in money laundering, and a host of other schemes that hurt people, should all have an absolute right to keep their crimes secret, well sorry - you live in a first world country.