I have often wondered if it would be worth building a new distribution. The existing ones all seem to make weird design decisions, none have conquered the desktop (I blame OSDL), they're nowhere near as high performance as they could/should be, and Linux Base is not necessarily the most secure layout. It's certainly problematic for multi-versioning.

Think you mis-spelled NSA.

The US are only allowed access to the SWIFT criminal database in Europe because Europe got fed up with the US hacking into it.

The US stands accused of unlawfully accessing Airbus commercially sensitive documents and selling them to Boeing, during the Echelon affair.

So, yes, they do believe they can break into any server at any time, for law enforcement purposes or financial gain through unlawful activity. I see no evidence of any serious attempt to keep this within any sort of reason. Indeed, the Manning Files and Snowden Files, together with the John Poindexter/Oliver North scandal and strong implications of CIA drug smuggling, suggest industrial espionage and economic crime are a mainstay of government activity.

I have no objections to espionage for genuine security, but accusations of CIA drug running when combined with the takedown of Silk Road sounds to be much less about anyone's security and much more about protecting market prices. If that is the case, then this isn't law enforcement but white collar crime. Further, Silk Road - whilst certainly a criminal enterprise - was not a matter of national or world security. It was also not a legally recognized context for extra-jurisdictional action.

This was a situation that could have been resolved lawfully and with integrity. The authorities chose neither, which is suggestive of them being incompetent or corrupt. Now, one should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, but corruption isn't really malice, it's just a perversion and everyone has at least one of those.

CAN networks are generally not very useful for hacking web servers.

I was unaware that the Fourth Amendment stipulated geographical boundaries. I was rather under the impression that the rules stating what the government and its agents shall not do were quite explicit about it being the actions that were prohibited, not where or to whom.

In fact, I see nothing in the Constitution that grants any exemptions for the government or its agents with regards to extraterritorial activities or the affairs of extranational citizens. Now, there are reasonable limits (well, there are supposed to be) on interpreting the Constitution. No rational person believes politicians should be free to say anything at all. But this isn't a claim of fair exception, but of inapplicability. Quite a different matter. The Constitution defines what the government may lawfully do. It does not say "except on weekends", it does not say "except on the Internet", it does not say "except when it's convenient". Reasonable situations are, by definition, reasonable. If you choose to argue reasonable situations do not exist, that is fine. Zero is still a number. But the government cannot simply argue (with any validity) that it can arbitrarily create entire classes of exemption with no reasonableness shown or claimed.

I'm purposefully ignoring the Silk Road aspect. If that isn't claimed as a legitimate exemption, then that is immaterial to the debate.

What will this project do for me? How do I get old, worn-out data files converted out of dead proprietary formats into something usable or useful? Or is this project only for certain types of researcher? (aka those with oodles of money)

The memorial service was deeply moving.

Is porn with some swords and sorcery. Which means you can't focus on either.

Then clearly there are problems.

A book isn't right merely by being published. It is always wise to be prudent about what you believe.

However, in this case, the Church Committee is known to have had strong views. It is also a matter of record that Echelon involved all of the Five Eyes members spying on electronic communications. Further, allegations at that time of other spying operations at that time (including telephonic and domestic wireless intercepts) are certainly mirrored by the Snowden Files.

These matters, and some horribly rudimentary inside information on the British army signals post in Cyprus in the 50s tells me the basics are accurate enough, regardless of the accuracy of the high adventure.

There have been past allegations about how Reagan won the election. If the claims are entirely legit, that might get revisited.

The birth certificate claim is troublesome. It means the President has no authority over the NSA. At all.

The moon.

Firefox is Netscrape.

Agreed about anecdotes. However, I can say that I have to reboot my Windows 7 PC weekly because of serious degradation in performance. I have installed a fair bit of software (the PATH can no longer be extended) but there's only about three games (Freeciv, Kerbal Space Program, Elite: Dangerous) and no apps, toolbars or junk. The rest of the software on there? MariaDB, Ingres, GRASS, QGIS (OSGEO is basically Cygwin, so I've now three incompatible Cygwin distros on Windows), HOL 4, Active Python, Active Perl, Erlang, Rust, Blender, PoVRay, BMRT - the sort of stuff you'd expect to find on any PC, nothing fancy.

And Netscape. Which is a horrible resource hog and is honestly not usable in its current form. I have abandoned all efforts to get Chrome usable. I'll probably deinstall both and switch to Amaya. Which barely does anything, but it does it tolerably.

You mean to tell me that the US doesn't even trust the other Five Eyes nations' spy agencies to be able to do this?*

*Yes, I know, to get round legal restrictions, it was very normal for the US to spy on the citizens of the other four and to exchange that data for information collected on US citizens by other members of Five Eyes. However, we now know all the agencies DO spy on their own citizens, routinely. So the US can ask GCHQ to wiretap British citizens in Britain, it doesn't need to spy on Britain itself. This behaviour suggests wheels within wheels.

You mean to tell me that the US isn't all caught up in the US-UK "Special Relationship" stuff?**

**Most Americans were unaware there even was one and get horribly confused when the British talk about it.

Linux is indeed better. Not because of Open Source (the code doesn't care) but because it has fewer bugs (about 0.1% of the bugs per kloc), non-intrusive strong security (rated EAL 5+ on conformant hardware, conforms to B2 Orange Book standards), superior multi-processor support, superior memory management and superior networking.

Graphics? Not an OS issue. That's a GUI issue. Never confuse how something gets data with what it then does with it. The GUI is not central to Windows (as demonstrated by console mode startup, but should be obvious to anyone running it as a headless server). The core OS functions are, and always have been, resource management, virtualization, security and stability. (Filesystems are virtual layers on top of physical disks, so are resource management and virtualization.)

Linux is better at the things an OS is meant to do. Windows has an adequate GUI, but the OS is abysmal. Besides sales, the only reason the game industry likes Windows is that it has useful libraries - DirectX (an alternative to the functions the GUI itself provides) and easy access to GPU functions (bypassing the OS altogether, running on bare metal).

The reason Linux doesn't have these? Look in the mirror. The face you see was quite capable of working on GGI, KGI or Linux Framebuffers, of helping in the Berlin project, of submitting patches for SDL or Avagadro, or even hacking Wine to improve support for DirectX, CUDA or other graphical features.

I'm no innocent myself, but I own up to my guilt, I don't blame the OS (which IS innocent).