One of the most fundamental parts of democracy is that no-one has too much power, and certainly never absolute power. There always has to be a balance.

Seems like using the manual override once in a blue moon to ventilate and stay warm would be less effort than using it every day for regular climate control. That's why most people have a programmable central heating system in western Europe, with override buttons for the rare occasions they are needed.

If you really know what you are doing then setting up your own server is the best option, because the security services prefer to target large providers where they can compromise millions of accounts in bulk instead of doing after individual systems with varied security.

If you are not capable of setting up something really secure yourself you are better off trusting someone who can.

That's what we have the European Declaration of Human Rights and the associated courts for. To stop governments doing shit like this and taking us back down that path.

Those would be the rose-tinted spectacles that the GP was talking about. Transformers: The Movie was primarily designed to sell some new toys. To that end, all the characters we loved and which had been built up over two seasons of the cartoon were killed off with meaningless, lame deaths in the first 20 minutes. The battle between Prime and Megatron was short and anti-climactic, and then the rest of the movie was about a bunch of losers no-one cared about.

You clearly have no idea how the psychology of abuse works then. Most people think of their bodies and belonging to them and as being something they need to protect by not allowing others access. Abuse victims have had those ideas shattered, and even if consciously they understand them at a subconscious level it's all screwed up. No amount of therapy can completely fix it.

Mental illness is often like that. People with depression can interact pretty much normally most of the time, but it doesn't mean they are not suffering from a genuine and debilitating illness. Hopefully more people will come to recognize how serious mental illness actually is, and get past the largely incorrect stereotypes that lead them to views like yours.

It's easy to say that as a westerner with no serious psychological issues. Not all cultures and people are like that.

Besides, where do you draw the line? Are people who get mugged and beaten up partially responsible for not learning some martial arts skills to defend themselves? What if they have health problems that make fighting back difficult or impossible? Just because one is a physical limitation and the other is a psychological one doesn't make them different - mental illness and limitations are just as real as physical ones.

Personal responsibility is a good thing, but having your illness exploited by an intelligent and devious criminal is not something we should be blaming people for.

Companies need to ensure employees take plenty of paid sick days and are not penalized in any way for them if they want to prevent the spread of disease. People need to stay home and ride the disease out, plus a couple of days to make sure it is really cleared up. Taking medication often just masks the symptoms, but the person is still infectious.

I know some Japanese companies do it, but I can't see it ever being adopted in America.

I imagine it will be resolved the same way that fights over the TV and computer work. Either you compromise, or buy two.

Cue joke about two houses being kinda expensive...

I don't think the assemble the code by hand any more.

The NSA installed the backdoor, can't blame others for wanting to find it. That way they can protect themselves, exploit it for their own use and pick up some hints on the sort of techniques that the NSA likes to use.

That sort of thing is a sacking offence at many places - damaging company equipment after being warned not to.

In any case, it sounds like IT was incompetent. There were a couple of good options. They could simply disable the ability for her to run any apps except the ones they whitelisted. Can't install anything if you can't even run the installer. Another option was a little dongle that plugged into a PCI slot and prevented permanent changes being made to the system. After every reboot the OS would reset to the saved state, like a VM snapshot. They were popular with internet cafes and pretty much bullet proof.

It's an attempt to pre-empt the decades, centuries of arguments over the US constitution's limits. For example, you have free speech, but documents can be classified and made illegal to reprint or to read out in public. You can't legally name protected witnesses or victims of certain crimes if due legal process says so. There are a whole number of restrictions that had to be decided by the Supreme Court.

I don't like the exceptions either, although even with them the benefits have been huge. It's also worth noting that the European Court of Human Rights, which has ultimate say over these matters, tends to be very strict when it comes allowing exceptions for things like national security or protection of morals. It's not quite the gaping hole it appears to be, but it is still unfortunate.

Perhaps true, but such transparent filtering proxies have also been in use for a long time. Around 1998 my university had one for ad filtering - Privoxy was it? In any case, the fact that there is substitution doesn't seem to affect the arguments being made here, it's the interception that is in question.

I signed up soon after G+ started and didn't use my real name... The policy was not very well enforced. Since they removed all restrictions I just use my first name and a non-printing zero-width unicode space as my last name.

There is a lot of good stuff on G+. Good technical content that you can't get elsewhere. People post their work-in-progress ideas and projects in an informal setting where they don't need to spend time making it pretty, and often this means you get a lot more insight and a view of the process as well as the result.