Many musical instruments are made of wood. So I guess they are all at risk if the owners come to the US.

Not to mention silk, cotton, and wool. Everybody get naked! All of a sudden I feel like going to the airport could be fun again. :)

'The Trustees of CBEBT and the management of Christian Brothers Services are dedicated to protecting the employers participating in the CBEBT from having to face the choice of violating their faith or violating the law'

I think they must misunderstand. The ACA does not require people who have a religious opposition to birth control to take the pill. Similarly, I'm sure the ACA does not require Jehova's Witnesses to accept blood transfusions, but an insurance company operated by Jehova's Witnesses and catering to them would still have to cover transfusions.

Less useful but still useful are command shells. These provide file management mostly.

Ohhh, baby. If you think ImageMagick is cool by itself (and it is), just wait 'til you start to grok how powerful those "less useful" command shells are for gluing those complex tools together. It will blow your hair back.

Say you have a directory tree with a few hundred images scattered through it, and you want to create thumbnails for all of the images in a parallel directory structure; ImageMagick will do the thumbnail part, CLI-Fu will handle the directory traversal and turn a three hour job in to a three minute one.

Learn these for starters:

sed - text parser and transformer, for mutating file names and munging commands
awk - ultra-terse programming language, great for building more complex commands than you would with sed
find - traverse a directory tree and list files with conditional matching
xargs - process a large list of things (like files found with find) in batches
grep - filter out elements of a list based on string pattern matching
egrep - enhanced grep, includes more advanced patterns and wildcards
sort - sort lists numerically or alphabetically
wc - count the elements of a list, words in a line, or other things
wget - download a URL
curl - read a URL to stdout

Seriously, when you start piping those things together with the more complex command line tools like ImageMagick and FFMpeg, you will be astonished at the mass data processing you can do with a few dozen characters on the command line.

It is also common in most Linux distros to store SSH private keys in ~/.ssh, which -- given you need root to read the wifi passwords -- can be accessed just as easily. Access credentials have to be stored in the clear somewhere on a live machine -- in memory during connect if nowhere else. Once you root the box, you get everything.

'I really don't know what problem we're trying to solve by changing how we do this,' he said.

We know you don't, pudding. Now go sit down and be quiet.

Of the untold numbers of spooks working in / for NSA, Ed Snowden is the only one who has the conscience and the courage to reveal the dastardly unconstitutional secrets of the NSA.

Actually, two other guys did; William Binney and Thomas Drake. Unfortunately, they went through official channels, so they got harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and without the massive trove of documents Snowden exfiltrated, they were ignored and marginalized by the major media. Their experience is what convinced Snowden that he had no choice but to go outside.

"I think there's an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it's treason,"

Fascinating, but irrelevant. How about a word that describes giving NSA secrets to the sovereigns (We The People) of the United States, when those secrets expose violations of The Constitution? I'd use "whistleblowing", something the POTUS promised to protect when he asked us to vote for him.

"we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."

Ahh, good, something we can agree on. You should have those tools. And you do have them, even without the dragnets. Here's how they work:

1. Pick the person who you believe wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies.
2. Start collecting surveillance.
3. Present to an appropriately skeptical judge the reasons that you believe that person wishes to do harm to the nation and its allies.
4. The judge will decide whether your evidence amounts to reasonable suspicion.
5. As long as the judge agrees, you can continue the surveillance.

It's a pretty cool system, really. It ensures that you get the surveillance on people who really do appear to be up to something, while protecting the vast majority of people who are innocent.

I've got to admit, I had a fairly shallow perception of your views early on, and you have shown me more depth and a different angle than I was expecting. I can't say I entirely agree with you, but you have made me reconsider my initial impressions.

Corporate taxes are ultimately passed on and paid by those who do business with the corporation.

See tax incidence. Corporate taxes fall, in part, on the stockholders in the form of reduced capital gains. Those stockholders may be overseas. In a purely domestic company (one which has all operations, employment, inputs, and sales inside the nation) that is publicly traded, the only way to export any of the tax burden is through corporate taxes. That's what makes corporate taxes attractive from a nationalistic policy perspective; they are one of the most effective policy tools for reducing the portion of the domestic budget that must come out of the GDP.

I'm not arguing good versus bad with you (I actually lean toward eliminating corporate taxation, but for reasons different from yours). I'm passing on inforrmation you pick up when you study public finance in college.

A better solution would be for Italy to simply lower their taxes until it did NOT make business sense to go through such contortions to avoid them anymore.

The reason corporate taxes make sense, ultimately (in a purely nationalist sense), is to export a portion of your tax base. Take the United States as an example: Suppose a pure US-based company that is publicly traded; all its payroll taxes and all the income taxes of its employees come out of US pockets. The capital gains taxes that we collect are only on US-based stockholders. But the corporate taxes, those come out of all stockholders -- whether they are US-based or abroad. Corporate taxes are the most effective way to export our tax burden.

So that's the nationalist reason to have corporate taxes. The alternative is for domestic taxes to be higher. So if you just hate those nasty taxes, you should be in favor of domestic corporate taxation in whatever country you live -- it's the most effective way to shift your government budget service off-shore.

Not that I fully support that view from a global economist perspective, but you sound like one of those "Taxes are bad!" people; I thought you might want to know how corporate taxes in your nation actually reduce the portion of the total tax bill that you and your fellow citizens have to pay.

There is no "right" to use the govt to force one group of people to economically support another group.

That is a tricky hypothesis, because it implies that government force in an economic context equals one group supporting another group. Not always the case. When laissez-faire does not result in long-run GDP growth rate maximization relative to a well regulated market, it is the laissez-faire case that is more accurately described as one group economically supporting another.

An example of an unregulated market distortion resulting in one group economically supporting another is pharmaceuticals. Aggregate customer demand is highly inelastic (price tolerant), time sensitive, and poorly informed. The profit maximizing behavior for the pharmaceutical industry is to misrepresent the product and collude to raise prices. Government regulation forbidding such misrepresentation and price fixing increases market efficiency and hence increases long-run GDP growth. The relative increase in long-run GDP growth under the regulated market case is the measure of reduction in the incidence of sick people economically supporting pharmaceutical stockholders under the laissez-faire case.

That is just one example, there are many cases where a well regulated market results in faster sustainable GDP growth than does laissez-faire. In such instances, the long-run outcome for all market segments is greater in the long-run under the well-regulated case, and hence laissez-faire is nothing short of theft.

"I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future," he said. "This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11 and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened."'

OK, let's take your utterly preposterous claim at face value. Let's say that this program would have prevented 9/11, and would prevent another 9/11 tomorrow, and has done fuck-all in between. That means we'd save 3,000 American lives every 12 years. Call it 3,600 to make the math easy. That's 300 lives per year. Against the 4th amendment. How does that price measure up against some of our other freedoms?

To retain the right to drive automobiles, we spend 34,000 lives per year.

To retain the right to drink alcohol, we spend 34,000 to 75,000 lives per year (depending on how you count alcohol-related accidents).

To retain the right to use tobacco, we spend 440,000 lives per year.

To retain the second amendment, we spend 30,000 lives per year.

To retain the right to be obese, we spend 300,000 lives per year.

With the possible exception of tobacco, I support the retention of all those rights. Three hundred per year for The Fourth Amendment (and the chilling effect on The First)? Even if his preposterous supposition were true, it would be a bargain at ten times the price compared to some of the other rights we hold dear.

The sum of money does seem low, but when an agency like the NSA comes calling, I have a feeling that it they make you a proposal you cannot refuse.

For putting it in, fine. But you don't take the blood money then claim you had no choice. Comply if you have no alternative, but once you take payment from a traitor you are the enemy.

[Google] wants you to have the ability to make the choice not to provide your data. To anyone, if that's what you want.

So why did they cut the Android privacy tool? When will it be restored?

Why did they subvert the Safari privacy preference?

Why do they use supercookies when the most probable intent of a person with cookies disabled is to not be tracked?

Does Google really hold the right to choose privacy sacred? Or do they serve other masters first? Know them by their actions, not their words.