In 2001, William Binney, an NSA investigator, began blowing the whistle on NSA warrantless surveillance. He went through official channels to his superiors, then to Congress, then to the major media. He was harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and ignored and maginalized by the major media. He has kept at it for the past thirteen years.

In 2010, Thomas Drake started blowing the whistle. He was also prosecuted, harrassed, ignored, and marginalized.

In 2011, Ron Wyden began warning the public about the secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, as loudly as he could without violating his clearance to be on the Intelligence Committee. The major media ignored him.

In 2013, when Snowden released his docs, the major media finally started listening to Binney, Drake, and Wyden. The establishment's treatment of Binney, Drake, and Wyden is why Snowden had to follow the path he did.

The President of the United States has said that these programs should change. Programs that Binney, Drake, and Wyden tried to warn us about through official channels. Programs that we still would not know about if Snowden had gone through official channels.

Education? ... Yes! Why it's great for education! In fact, it's the future of the classroom! And don't forget, Oculus Rift is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!

But seriously:

And if we can make virtual reality every bit as good as real reality in terms of communications and the sense of shared presence with others, you can now educate people in virtual classrooms, you can now educate people with virtual objects, and we can all be in a classroom together [virtually], we can all be present, we can have relationships and communication that are just as good as the real classroom

Classroom teaching is a bug, not a feature. It is a side effect of the fact that our earholes and eyeballs are connected to our skulls, and until recently we had to put them in the same meatspace where the teacher was talking and showing pictures. Once you step into the no-physical-presence-required realm of using a VR headset, you can release the restrictions imposed by the simultaneous physical presence requirement.

One simple example: Lecture halls, with their tiered seating -- those are designed that way because we can't see through each other, not because it is better to be sixty feet away and at a thirty degree angle from the teacher.

And how about discussions? Hierarchical, collaboratively moderated, store-and-forward discussion threads are much better than "realtime whoever gets the teacher's attention before the bell rings." We've been using the latter because that's the best we had for thousands of years.

It certainly less risky than walking around the streets with huge money clip

Did you not even read the links about Home Depot, Supervalu, and Albertson's? It is not certainly less risky. For example, it is more risky if you live in an area that has very little threat of mugging, or if you are perceived as a bad target for muggers. I generally have a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and have never been mugged; but my card is for sale on the Russian markets right now because I used Home Depot.

You are as stubbornly ignorant as people who say self-driving cars will automatically be safer. Computers aren't magically endowed with perfection. Believe me; I'm a software engineer, and I've seen some really heinous bugs. I'm not saying electronic payments (or autonomous vehicles) are bad -- I'm saying software and networks have risks just like meatware and meatspace.

in my kid's school in the USA the only way to pay for school lunch is to send a check once a month... no tracking

Interesting difference, there. There must be tracking in your kid's school's system, otherwise they wouldn't know who paid for lunch, but the tracking data probably doesn't get appropriated by an outside company. Presumably, this biometric company is not just making a buck on the scanners, software, and cloud-based management contract -- presumably they also have a plan for monetizing the data they are collecting about the kids.

The benefits are that pupils are less likely to lose [money stored in the fingerprint system than money carried in their pockets]

That is a spurious claim. The security on money stored in pockets and exchanged by physical transfer of a monetary token is fallible, but so is the security on the cafeteria electronic wallet system. Home Depot, Supervalu, and Albertson's are very recent examples of major compromises, and the number of small scale compromises is enormous.

Fingerprints can be faked, networks can be cracked, databases can crash. Merely moving from physical currency to electronic currency does not make it more secure -- just ask Mt. Gox.

from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service". here, there's no payment involved, therefore there is no contract of sale.

The correct legal term for payment is, "consideration." The user's relationship with Gmail does involve payment in the form of consideration, and they are customers.

As a counter-example; if you download Free Software, or Open Source Software, and use it without making any promises to the developer, you are not a customer. Possibly if Gmail had no ToS or AUP, they could argue that their users gave no consideration. I'd be interested to see that argued.

While I get what you are saying as far as "research" it's kind of like saying; "We can't know how to treat Agent Orange damage if we don't keep spraying Agent Orange -- there won't be enough data."

While I get what you are saying, I think you are using a charged metaphor. We know how bad Agent Orange is. We genuinely do not know how dangerous fracking is. Try replacing Agent Orange with, for example, "the search for the Higgs Boson", or "artificial intelligence", or some other thing that has unknown potential to be disastrous.

Fracking is a transition tech -- it's getting the last bits of natural gas and that's fine. But if we spent more money pushing the alternative energy -- which WILL EVENTUALLY be cheaper, we speed the day and time when it's more viable.

I agree, completely, though I think that's not a problem with fracking. I think the right place for that is a tax on fossil fuels to generate some friction on fossil fuel use. If you want, the collected revenue could be targeted to stimulate alternatives, but I tend to want to keep governments hands off the stimulus side (since they're so good at handing the money to their friends instead of the most promising technology) -- though I'd be more OK with the money going to government funded research, particularly if the results were put in the public domain -- like maybe cellulosic fiber biofuel research... but I digress. :)

The environment and mankind will be better off on alternative energy so why are we dragging our feet on that while making excuses for the BAD STUFF somehow getting better? It makes no sense and that's not being "entrenched" on a point of view. Solar and Wind are the future -- there is no good excuse to wait.

I agree with where your sentiment is coming from, and I think it's a good place. But I'm not sure I completely agree that we, as a society, are entrenched and waiting. We have fossil fuel taxes in place, and we are doing stimulus of solar and wind. And it's going really well -- have you seen the prices of PV panels lately? They've dropped a lot -- when I first started looking in 2008, a 250 watt panel was about $1,000. Now you can get them for under $300.

And I'm not 100% against fracking -- I just recognize it as a stop gap measure.

Very agreed.

You'll notice that your "market failure" argument is completely based on a non-market "government chill-factor" driver?

No, I will not. The same short-term-orientation market failure would occur in a pure laissez-faire system. In that case, the failure to account for long-term risk combined with limited liability, bankruptcy, and shell corporations would result in the same public risk / private profit that is the primary economic failure with fracking now.

I will grant that it is exacerbated by the current government stance of "no regulation now, unknown-and-probably-stricter regulation in the future." Solving that hastening of the public risk, however, only requires that regulation remain approximately the same or become less strict over time. Combined with the fact that some level of regulation to offset public risk exposure (negative externality) is the GDP maximizing solution, starting with zero regulation is necessarily incorrect.

But what if doing the fracking causes irreversible damage? Maybe we need to make the mistake to realize it's one, but then it might be too late. Some countries apply the "Principle of precaution", that is, "if you're not sure of the effects of what you're doing, don't fucking do it."

Well played. :)

Here, let me do the iconic example of the other side:

'We can't have government jumping in and killing off entire industries just because the sky might be falling. There have been no major catastrophes as a direct result of fracking, and even the few relatively minor events that have been recorded turned out not to be caused by fracking, but by improper deep-well injection of effluent.'

do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?

That is an excellent question. What we need is an excellent answer. Unfortunately, right now, we only have some rather crude guesses, mostly made by people with entrenched preconceptions (on both sides of the issue). We don't know what the probable environmental cost of an additional $100m of fracking production is.

There are two reasons to continue fracking, while going easy on the rate of production; 1) the oil will still be there, it will probably continue to climb in value, and we are learning -- by doing -- more cost effective and safer approaches to extraction, and 2) because we need more data to improve the risk assessment model.

Not doing fracking won't get us the data we need, and would prevent us from developing the technology to get this stuff out cheaper and safer. Doing fracking as fast as we can will waste money and create additional damage by using current early-stage extraction processes, and it exposes us to poorly quantified risk.

The biggest problem right now is that the oil companies, in fear of regulation-to-come, are extracting as fast as they can to try to get the money out of the ground before the axe falls. That is pretty much the worst possible answer: It minimizes the profit margin on a finite resource while maximizing the risk. It is a textbook example of short-term orientation market failure.

See Freedom of the press in the United States.

That entry starts with a long exposition on the fact that corporations do not have more freedom of the press than citizens. I do not disagree with that. I think corporations should be treated more skeptically regarding their invocation of freedom of the press than should individual citizens.

All rights are inherent to individuals and when individuals organize, as in the formation of the LA Times, these rights are not lost.

No, the individuals do not lose their rights. But whether the corporation is allowed to engage in trade is a very different question. Paying people to write opinions which are pleasing to the corporation is very different than those people freely engaging in that activity. The entire point of the Declaration of Independence is that individuals can be trusted more than collectives, so The People must remain the sole sovereigns.

Citizens United was wrong. Paid speech is not free speech. Paid press is not free press. Corporations are not citizens.

What?!? I don't know which constitution you're referring to, but the Constitution of the United States of America certainly doesn't specify duties or obligations for citizens.

The LA Times is not a citizen. You can tell because it doesn't have nipples. It is the press. See the first amendment to the Constitution. For more info on why that specific industry gets special constitutional treatment, see fourth estate.

Let me see if I get your argument:

Their business model is failing, so it's understandable that they are shirking their Constitutionally specified duty, despite the legal privileges they enjoy in furtherance of that obligation.

I mean, I see what you're saying -- a dying animal bites its master -- but that's when you get out the dart gun full of tranquilizer and address the problem. You don't just shake your head and tsk-tsk, wrap your bloody arm in a t-shirt, and go get a rabies shot.

11:25 "Don't bring any proprietary software to this class." So which cell phone running free software should students be putting in their bags instead?

Depends what your primary objective is. If your primary objective is to have a cell phone with you, you sacrifice freedom. If your primary objective is to give no comfort to those who are harmful to that end, you sacrifice carrying a cell phone.

Me? I'm pretty serious about Free Software, but being connected is also important to me. So I have a CyanogenMod phone, and I'll keep going more Free as it becomes practical and as my budget allows.

12:48 "So how to help? Well you can write free software." So how would you go about feeding yourself while you write a free video game?

Depends what your higher priority is. If financial responsibility, to your lifestyle or to support your family, is most important to you, write proprietary video games. If freedom is most important, you can sell your games through Humble Bundle, have embedded ads and ask people not to disable them, ask for voluntary payments, use one of the crowdfunding systems, live a modest lifestyle and work some other job to pay the bills, or whatever you want; there's lots of ways to make a living while writing Free Software.

Me? I work a pay-the-bills job consulting, working less than full time, live a modest lifestyle, and work on pro-social projects the rest of the time (not Free Software for me at the moment, but with similar goals).

He's not telling you that you must always blindly obey the principles that lead to freedom. He's telling you what principles must be satisfied to be free. He says very clearly, early in the presentation, that being free requires sacrifices. Whether you choose freedom or convenience in any particular choice you make in life is up to you. Just make it with your eyes open; be aware of your personal opportunity cost and the cost to society.