The use of mercenaries is bad for a nation. Mercenaries are only loyal to their paycheck, not your country. The Roman empire fell because they switched their military to mercenaries.

1-The second world war taught us that there are no front lines. Even a guard at a war memorial is now a target of attack. 2-There is street cred in being a trained soldier. If you don't get that they have to pay more to attract the talent.

If we don't have jobs then we don't have money. No money means we don't buy anything. (I suppose we could have a subsistance/barter economy) No buying means the corporations go broke. (They still pay taxes so automation won't eliminate their costs) Bankrupt corporations means the Government nationalizes everything. (Yay! Entitlement society means free stuff!) Government can't run everything without money, so they conscript workers. (Communist Russia, here we come)

Quality of life consistently goes up with population density. People in the third world don't leave their farms for the big city because they like the smog.

If Americans wanted to help the Third World out, they could eliminate their agricultural subsidies. That would lift most of Africa out of poverty in a single year.

1- Ban Address spoofing. Every packet from your address will have your IP address overwritten (with correct number) by your ISP. Just being able to find the source of the problem would be huge. Would also stop most spam. 2- Require ISP's to investigate reports of abuse/spam. Not sure how you'd keep the recording companies from abusing this to take down The Pirate Bay. 3- Every ISP would have a banned IP address list. Hopefully there would be a method to get your address removed after you purge the botnet off your home pc.

Science is really bad at proving things. The way science works is you take an idea and try to disprove it. You want proof, go with math. Mathematics is all about proof.

Given the choice, choose Santa. He gives you stuff.

At what Security Classification level would such information be kept? Would some random IT tech have access to that knowledge?

A better question is "hasen't the NSA improved their VPN monitoring ability in four years?".

Working on the factory floor or a sweat shop is not the same as doing a job that involves person to person interaction.

More likely it's managements desire to see the workers, every single minute of the work day. It's a symbol of America's unwillingness to trust the workers.

Just because the airlines claim to be broke doesn't mean they are. Football teams in the USA also claim they lose money all the time.

A great deal of the internet traffic is streaming video. Once you de-dupe that it should drop down to manageable levels.

If the people who make updates for your OS want to access your encrypted communications I think they could.