They are not so much ignorant, as they are pursuing their own agenda. Don't think for a second that they don't have an army of tech-savy advisors and specialists that are at their beck and call, should they need a detailed explanation about how it works. But they benefit from pretending they don't know and targeting the general public that doesn't know either in order to pursue their own goals.

But the point is not to catch real criminals, the point is to dig up dirt on anyone and everyone, so when the time is right - you could use it to your advantage.

"Don't you see it's for your own protection, and for your children, protecting all of your from pedophiles, terrorists and the scary monster in your closet. And if you don't buy this argument, then obviously you are an enemy of the state, because if you don't have anything to hide - you have nothing to fear. Oh, and don't forget - arbeit macht frei."

Snooping agencies will fight tooth and nail to keep their snooping powers because they don't give a rat's behind about the read bad muthus out there - because that's entirely different playing field, you can't go after them directly, they are well protected and shifting balance includes a lot of political play, but the smaller fishes can be caught with a wider net, and to get leverage all you need is a right to snoop on anyone at any point in time. It's too convenient to give up.

>> If we're outside the scrutiny of others
We're not. We're monitored at our workplaces (by performance and endresult in smart companies, by process in the rest). Whenever someone get's some power (puts on a cop uniform, gets keys to server room, etc), he is being monitored more closely while in power, as with power comes accountability. When you go home - noone is trusting you with any power, so no monitoring is necessary, so your comment does not apply. CIA, NSA, FBI, all the alphabet agencies are working for the country, the people, no matter how much cynicism you want to demonstrate - this is how it should be, this is the goal, so they should be held accountable and closely monitored, especially if they are having the power to snoop on entire world.

If they uncover criminal activity isn't it their duty to inform the victim?

>>Could you imagine a prospective employee showing up to an interview with a P.O.S chromebook instead of a macbook?

Depends on the job person is applying to. If in the course of work his only tool is browser - then chromebook is a sign that this person knows his stuff and doesn't feel uncontrollable compultion to buy bling-bling stuff just because it's trendy and cool.

Yeah, and sometimes Enterprise docks to restock on photon torpedoes. You got your assumption that "Chinese already have a space station in orbit" from the movie "Gravity", didn't you?

This fortunately means that there will be a large political body interested in not allowing NSA to get their hooks into OSS.

Hei, Russia doesn't have second amendment, explicitly bans guns and yet, for some unknown reason they too have roving street gangs, political assasinations, gangs slaughtering entire households, but I'm pretty sure that if US were to cancel the second amendment and prohibit gun ownership, then school massacres and roving street gangs would dissapear. I mean, how can you buy a gun, if you are prohibited to own it. Gangs would be forced to use baseball bats and harsh language.

Or, perhaps, it's not about gun ownership at all and much deeper problems are in play and prohibiting gun ownership is like slapping a plaster on a leper?

>> Effectively this is a way of saying 'Free For Personal Use', without impacting on retail sales to much.

Where have they said anything of the sorts? It's like seeing a free Windows 7 iso download and running around screaming "OMG, MICROSOFT JUST MADE WINDOWS FREE". They will most likely push a 30 day trial as they always have, so you can upgrade a pirated windows, you can use it for 30 days and then BAM, you have to buy a license.

>> No - They've given you an amnesty license.

No they haven't. They said you'd be able to upgrade, but windows will still bug you will "you might be a victim of software counterfiting", "your windows is not genuine" after a 30 day drial period. In another word Microsoft has just said that they won't specifically check for a license during upgrade. They will check after the upgrade, though.

>> It's already half way there with the ntpd name for the daemon.

FYI most linux daemon names end up with a d, which stands for, surprise-surprise, "daemon".

Not to protect douchebag apple guys, but even if developers who contacted the "NTP dad" wanted Apple to throw a donation, then it would be real hard to push by the accounting. If they, on the other hand would be billed for "3rd party expert services" - noone would blink an eye, so, yes, if a large corporation contacts you asking to help fix something - send them a bill first.

If you have access to cert storage you can do all kind of tricks like adding CA-s or removing them. So "adding to blocklist" is like frying ants with 50megawatt laser.

Hei, cross platform dude. It's only cross platform in a sense that you can run phone apps on a TV and PC. Try to push anything more serious and you end up developing two apps for the price of one. Phone ecosystem in windows phone is nearly non-existant, same for tablets. But don't let that stop you from flashing the "the apps are cross platform now" banner in order to hide, that those platforms will require different approach to interface, energy saving, available power and memory management.

And what would that " greater things this country has produced" be? Crappy internet or TelCos gunning to extort money from big players and customers alike? Gee, what a nice service you have their, would be damn shame if we would let only 1% of the bandwidth the user has already paid us to provide and would use the rest of 99% bandwidth as a reserved lane for our magestic competing service that only costs twice as much.