GP was probably referring to Federal discretionary spending. Defense spending was roughly 18% as of FY2013, and non-Defense discretionary spending was roughly 17%. The rest was Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Interest and other Mandatory spending.

The point is more that surveys have shown that the public tends to perceive certain things (Foreign aid for instance) as being much, much larger a share of discretionary spending than they really are.

That would be a reasonable suggestion for candidates for the House of Representatives, but it still wouldn't have changed anything for Cruz, who's a Senator, as those seats are allocated directly based on the state boundaries.

If anything though, Cruz's constituency is overly large, meaning that he represents more people, and therefore likely had more raw votes, than most of his Senate counterparts - Texas's population is somewhere on the order of 25-26 million, easily more than the 10 least populous states. In the 2012 election, he received 4.4 million votes out of about 7.8 million or so

Overall though, the Senate is grossly disproportionate in a lot of ways. Large states like Texas are grossly underrepresented, not only because all those people who voted for him don't have the same influence as a state less than 10% the population of Texas, but also because the number of people who voted for his Democratic opponent alone (3.1 million), nevermind 3rd party candidates, is larger than the full population of something like 20 states, and larger than the average number of Senate votes in many more than that. Those people get absolutely zero representation in the Senate.

To illustrate just how far off it can get, the 26 least populous states have somewhere around 56 million residents (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population). You could elect a Senate majority with half that, and if we go by the national voter turnout rate from the 2014 election of 36.3%, and not considering how many of those individuals are ineligible to vote (due to citizenship status, age, etc) you'd only need about 10 million votes, in a country of roughly 320 million people to have full control of the Senate.

Now, that's a bit of an extreme example, and it discounts that some of those smaller states lean left (VT, DE, RI) while others lean right (WY, AK, ND/SD), just as the same is true for some of the very populous states (CA, TX), but it serves to illustrate just how skewed and disproportionate the Senate can be in terms of representation.

Agent Smith: "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops an equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet; you are a plague and we are the cure."

I think you may be misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm in full agreement that abuses by the FBI/etc are a serious problem, my point is that it's the abuses that are the issue, not them sharing information. Stop the abuses, and all that's left is the stuff we'd want them to be sharing.

The FBI, the NSA, the CIA and others all have legally established roles and responsibilities that they were created to fulfill. When the FBI arrests an interstate kidnapper, or someone who was spying on the US for Russia/China/etc, they're doing their job. When the CIA spies on Kim Jong-un or the North Korean military, they're doing their job. I've yet to hear anyone, even Edward Snowden, suggest that any of that is inherently unconstitutional.

The problems arise when agencies like that exceed their purview, or use unconstitutional means to achieve their legitimate goals. For instance, if the FBI starts reading everyone's mail in order to find out if someone is spying for Putin, or decides to search someone's house without bothering to get a warrant from a judge to do so. As I said, the problem is not inherently that these agencies are sharing information. If the CIA or NSA learns, through legitimate means, that Country X has a mole in the Department of Redundancy, and tells that to the FBI, so the FBI can start an investigation, then that's perfectly fine.

Why do I make such a big deal about this distinction? Because it doesn't help the argument against the illegitimate activity if we allow the two to be conflated. The entire point of the argument is that they do not need to do any of these things in order to accomplish their goal - that we are no "less safe", or at the very least that the tradeoff is not worth the liberty that we would have to give up.

If I remember, didn't Obama run on a platform that included implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission? The same 9/11 Commission that concluded the attacks happened because the FBI and the various intelligence agencies weren't talking to each other and sharing information?

And there's nothing inherently bad about that. The problem isn't that the agencies are sharing information, it's that they're sharing information that's outside their lane. And that occurs not because they're sharing information, but because they're outside their lanes to begin with. I'd much rather have agencies that are focused on not sifting through every American's data, than ones that do that but don't share it with each other.

Rich people have been spending incomprehensible sums of money on luxury goods for a long, long time. The only difference is that now some of the geeks are among the rich, and have tastes that extend into obscure and rare video games, rather than the classics like jewelry, yachts, planes, or supercars.

Or perhaps you meant "us" as in the western world? I can assure you that the elites in any given impoverished country are busy wasting wealth, too (though they tend to prefer the classics, as well). I've walked through some of Saddam's old palaces, and the amount of money he probably wasted on that stuff while the rest of the country rotted is just staggering.

Well, but if you don't vote for a lizard, then the wrong lizard might get elected.

Shouldn't that be "unleash the doges of war?"

You hit the nail on the head. The vendors don't care because their customers don't care. Security is an added cost, and even to the degree they take it seriously, my experience has been that the moment security runs into anything else - cost, ease of use, etc - it's security that gets cut. When their customers start demanding secure ICS/SCADA (actually reasonably secure, not just slapping AV onto it or something), only then will you see the vendor market respond to it. Unfortunately I don't think the customers will start doing that until they're forced to.

I don't think increased compliance standards are the solution. They're not necessarily a bad thing, but compliance isn't security, it's setting a minimum standard that tends to be way too low and too general, with a 'check the box' mentality.

Unfortunately, I think it won't be before a lot more high profile breaches occur, and companies start going bankrupt because of the losses. When CEOs start getting fired, their counterparts will start taking security seriously.

I would hope the NSA makes full use of things like this to spy on North Korea, because that's their _actual_ job.

If anything, departmental empire building would argue for them blaming Anonymous/criminals/etc. The FBI doesn't have primary authority for dealing with North Korean hackers. At best it shares parts of that with NSA, CIA, DHS, etc. It's in criminal matters that they would have priority.

This isn't to say that North Korea did it, or that the FBI isn't wrong, just that the incentives for them to hype the criminal threat are certainly not inconsequential.

In all fairness, the ability to access the data isn't necessarily the same as knowing what to look for. If I tell the world how I caught you breaking into my network, you also potentially know where you screwed up so you can avoid making the same mistake in the future. That's not to say they shouldn't tell us why, or provide enough reasonable evidence without tipping their entire hand. In some ways it mirrors other problems of disclosure in the network security realm. The hackers read the same stuff we do. That doesn't mean you never disclose, you just don't do so unthinkingly.

I do hope they cough up more information though. I'm curious to know why he's so confident, since high confidence attribution is normally very difficult from a given breach/incident.

This. IIRC, under U.S. law, only uniformed military have legal authority to use military force (Title 10 USC).

Yes - all three religions come from the similar root, and are considered to be "Abrahamic faiths". The main differences are whom you consider to be a prophet, what books and teachings from those prophets that you include, and whether or not you believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

It's like an Open Source project with lots of forks and variances in what libraries its creators and maintainers chose to include, and everyone insisting that their version is the One True Answer.

The goal of the Japanese Militarists was about extending Japanese economic control, and seizing both raw materials and markets for goods. They didn't care if people converted to their religion or not. Religion is not why they fought.

Rather, religion was used as a tool to legitimize and justify the actions that they wanted to take anyway. This is hardly an unusual case, because humans have been doing this since pretty much the invention of society. It's certainly not the only excuse - See also Spreading Civilization, Spreading Communism, Spreading Democracy, or any number of other past justifications for aggressive conquest or intervention that we as humans have come up with in the era since the West decided religious wars were probably not such a hot idea anymore. All of it had a strong tendency to coincide with other more material (i.e. economic) interests.

That's not to say that people can't or don't murder solely based on insane ideological reasons, whether it's a religious or secular ideology, but the larger the scale, the less likely it is to actually be caused directly by that, and the more likely it is to be about other things.