The "evil bad guys" are a subset of the "general public", so the collection of information on "the evil bad guys" necessitates the collection of information on the general public.

It's all just a matter of definition. "We have to collect data from Everyone because the bad guys are a part of Everyone." It's simple logistics, we can't just collect the data from the bad guys if we don't know who the bad guys are, and even when we do, the bad guys pretend to be part of the General Public and so we need to spy on the General Public in order to catch the bad guys.

Look, it's all really complicated and we can't expect just anyone to understand our motivations. We're really only looking for "the bad guys," we promise. We totally ignore all the rest of the data we get from the "good guys" and we certainly don't build dossiers in the event that "good guys" suddenly become "bad guys".

Listen, just chill the fuck out about all our surveillance, we're totally not looking at you, unless we are, in which case you deserve to be spied upon because we said you're bad. And our accusation of your badness will require a secret court to clear your name, but you can't know what that secret court has determined because it's secret and your a goddamned terrorist if you think otherwise.

A Warrant, in modern nomenclature is a License. You were presented with something akin to a EULA upon birth, and by agreeing to being born you agreed to grand an exclusive, unlimited license to the state to do whatever they want to you, whenever they feel like.

Welcome to Democracy 2.0. Please click Agree to the Constitution 2.0 EULA.

Not unless you include secret courts, in which you will have an impossible time proving that you have standing to sue. If the order to collect information about you is secret and you don't have clearance, good luck trying to prove that anything illegal is happening to you because you cannot access information which proves you're being harmed.

It's perfect: We obtain a secret order to spy on Bob, who cannot defend himself because he doesn't have clearance to prove that we're secretly spying on him. We'll just let him spin his wheels with the tin-foil and black helicopter crowd. LOL.

Let's just agree to call it what it is: License.

The government claims License to any and all communication that occurs within its jurisdiction, and as such has the right to do whatever it wants with said communication. You, as a "citizen" of a given state are owned by the government, and by virtue of being born in said state have given your implicit agreement to the collection of whatever data you may create within the duration of your citizenship. If you for any reason decline to allow such surveillance, you thereby agree to give up citizenship in said jurisdiction and thus are subject to the collection of surveillance pursuant to all legislative orders necessitating the collection of intelligence from non-state actors.

You literally cannot win.

Indeed, the concept of a warrant has been changed to mean License. That is, the surveillance state has an unlimited license to snoop on anything and everything, warranted by the fact that scary bad guys might possibly maybe do something bad eventually. You have nothing to fear, citizen, because you are not currently exhibiting behavior which matches against whatever specious criteria we currently define as terrorism. However, this license should not be understood to provide defense in the event that your behavior, at some future point, coincides with what is defined by the secret courts as terrorism.

TL;DR: You have nothing to fear, citizen. Unless you do. In which case, you should be tortured and jailed.

Let freedom ring!

That would be the American(tm) definition of socialism. As in the U.S.S.R. was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, therefore Socialism is completely equivalent with the Soviet system, and so it is anti-American(tm).

It's a really simple calculus: If you're a simple minded American(tm) Patriot(tm)(R) who is informed of world events solely by the one true Media: Fox News, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, then Socialism == USSR == Communism == Bad.

HTH.

Welcome to America. Please enjoy your stay!

Where have you been? It's all about "You're a cow. Cows say MOOOO!"

Sheesh, get with it.

P.S. I have no idea why the cow troll exists, it just is. If anyone can explain it, please do.

SHUT UP! THEY CAN ONLY DO ONE THING! AND THAT THING IS BEING AS INTRUSIVE AS POSSIBLE! LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!

iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting iamnotshouting

If you use a plugin like Stylish (available for Chrome & Firefox) you can add a stylesheet for slashdot.org with the following rule:

article#firehose-000 {
        display: none;
}

This will collapse the element containing the videos. I've also heard of people using their Adblock plugins to do the same thing by telling it to treat that element as an ad and collapse it.

An (untested) rule to hide the polls would be:

article.fhitem-poll {
        display: none;
}

PuTTy is already an incompatible mess all of it's own. It even has it's own special format for keys, so we get the joy of running every ssh key generated on a *nix system through puttygen.exe just to spit out some fugly PPK file. Oh, you need me to add your public key to authorized_keys? What's that you say? You used puttygen? Well fuck me, time to look up the command to convert that stupid shit again. Wonderful!

Not to mention the fractured disorganization of the configuration, the crap profile system and all the other reasons why PuTTy is a pain in the ass.

The fact that Microsoft is talking about using OpenSSH means at the very least the key files will be compatible. I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before, but it's about damn time! I'm looking forward to a version of PuTTy (or KiTTy, actually) that uses the native OpenSSH instead of the existing legacy PuTTy implementation of SSH. I'd love to delete all those PPK files and never see another one again as long as I live.

Exactly! It's so much better to have to pipe the output to something just to print to the console! Hurrah for objects! /s

FTFY.

Haven't you heard? Shiny is out, flat is in. Shiny is so old school ugly skeuomorphism bro. The new flatness is like, clean and modern. Like some wise old designer dude said, "A design is good once you've taken everything away; it's perfect." So true man, like less is more and stuff!