"while you're accessing your data"

That's really the critical part, isn't it? If you're using this for backup you should never need to decrypt it. The only time you need it is if you have a local failure. Then you have to make a choice: give up the data or take a chance that they are at the server siphoning off your data as you request it.

For 99.999999999% of data, I'm going to say that the US government doesn't give a fuck and the chance that they're monitoring your account when your local copy fails and you are getting your data is going to be pretty darned near zero *unless* you happen to be the target of an investigation. If you are, I would suggest that you pay the extra money for something like SpiderOak, where all the encrypt/decrypt is done locally. Though, to be honest, if you're going to be watched by the Feds, a USB drive and a good fire safe is probably a better solution for backing up your "sensitive" data.

I thought it was a pretty good write up, without any particular spin on the marketing side (except, of course, it was on the BB site with the logo). There's no shame in presenting data that could be useful to those of us who don't have the opportunity (or budget) to buy a stack of drives and run them full out for 3 months. Though I'm sure I'm not the only person who thought it sounds kind of crazy to be adding a pod every day just to keep up with the data demands.

Um, because it's clearly not working? The whole "towards collapse" is simply a face-saving measure.

We deal with worse governments (in terms of "communism" or totalitarianism) every day, and they're our (nominal) allies. The whole Cuba thing is just a 50 year long pout. Nobody cares anymore. There's not some super-villian running Cuba that will destroy the American Way of Life if we join the rest of the world in trading with them.

We are pushing Russia because we disagree with their tactics in the Ukraine. From this year, not from 50 years ago. Totally different condition.

So then we all get to subscribe to $10-30/yr private DNSs which aren't poisoned, I presume. It's not like I'm using my ISP for my DNS.

Sadly, no. Nobody hires people they don't need. It's the fallacy of the idea that lower taxes create jobs. I say this as a business owner: If you don't need employees to do the work, you are not going to hire them. Full stop.

Earning more money after taxes means only that the federal government is effectively subsidizing the companies.

"you have more people available to learn new skills"

That's the biggest fallacy in the argument. Most people who talk about getting the chronically poor into a position where they can learn new skills and do more work to give them the chance to move up the ladder. Here's the dirty little secret: humans are no longer cost effective at any price which supports the modern concept of first world necessities (clean, healthy food; safe, energy efficient housing, basic transportation - personal or public, connectivity to others). \

These people aren't unemployed because they don't have the right training, they're unemployed because they're untrainable for jobs that will command a living wage. And I can guarantee that if you found out tomorrow that your job didn't pay you even 1/4 of what it would take to make rent and put food on the table, you would eventually stop going to work. (you would probably look for alternate ways to live, but you wouldn't give up 40-50 hours of every week and still go hungry).

The parent has been modded troll for the "modest proposal" tack taken to the surplus worker problem, but the basic tenet is true: we've either replaced the entry level jobs with automation or reduced them with efficiency. Calling them surplus is merely extending the word used for old factory equipment which has been superceded by more cost effective versions. It's not a judgement on the people, personally, but a simple value calculation that they do not/can not perform tasks more efficiently than machinery which has replaced them.

We've reached an interesting point where we don't really need all the people we have (by half!) what it takes to keep society fed and clothed. And yet our million-year-old value system requires that you perform some useful task for the herd in order to partake in the benefits of the herd production. It's going to get very interesting over the next century.

Yes, I know; the joke about SV having shit service, but...Colleges are well wired, the towns around them are often not. Virginia Tech - the "electronic village" - that was supposed to get 10bT to every home over a decade ago - STILL has ISP-by-address. If you're lucky you get Verizon 7/768 AND Comcast, but many places have a single provider. And there is basically no fiber. The only competition I've seen is from a rural telecom who stopped by one day while running new service to a select few, and they could get you T1-speed service (1.5/1.5) for the bargain price of $120/mo. AYFKM?

The town looked into high speed but decided it was too difficult to exercise their rights of way and didn't want to piss off Comcast, so they scuttled 100Mb fiber to everyone. I think they may still be meeting once a month to talk about "high speed internet" but they'll never get anything done about it.

"If Samsung were to create another version of their flagship phone, but with 4000mAh to 8000mAh batteries (to support the extra GHz and cores without draining the batteries too fast), they can make their phones twice to 4 times as fast, just by upping the Ghz, or the number of cores, or both."

See how easy that was? When it comes right down to it, the processors are on par within the total thermal/power envelope presented by the form factor and battery technology. If we've learning anything since the days of the 486, it's that clock speed and core count don't really matter when the input is a power envelope and the output is useful work done.

[cheapshot]What amazes me is that in all the years Apple has been making smartphones, it's still impossible to add a music file from email to itunes on the phone.[/cheapshot]

"...they actually toss out copies of their genetic mateiral (sic)..."

This is /.; we're familiar with the process.

Tell that to SpiderOak.

Yeah, I have several friends who will post/share things on their wall to "find later." Yeah, there's pretty much no way you're going to find that later unless you manually scroll through pages and pages of old posts. Finding stuff on FB is darned near impossible, with their "search" being woefully inadequate. I copy off to Evernote when I can, though FB has taken the genius step of disabling copy (and paste, for some odd reason) in Android, which means running FB in a mobile browser if I really want to archive something.

Of course, searching your own (or friends) history isn't the point of FB, but it seems like a pretty big miss if you want people to stay encapsulated in the system for marketing purposes.

Well, if somebody's paying $500 for dead cats, I'm willing to bounce my dead cat for that kind of money.

No, you just choose teachers who aren't vaccinated.

It's probably not cost effective to do so, though, so you may as well just prohibit them from attending public school if they're not vaccinated and call it a day.

You're playing games with words and statistics. To wit:

"children who haven't received DTaP vaccines are at least 8 times more likely to get pertussis"

There, you could stop right there. But your statistics belie the truth. If we expect that 16% of children are only partially vaccinated and 4% are unvaccinated, in a population of 100000 children, in which 0.1% get pertussis you get:

81 children out of 80,000 get pertussis, or a vaccinated infection rate of 0.01%
11 children out of 16,000 get pertussis, or 0.07%
8 children out of 4000 get pertussis, or 0.20%

In other words, it means that your child is 20x more likely to get pertussis in the event of an outbreak if her or she is unvaccinated vs being vaccinated. The linked studies you made actually prove the OP's point - a successful vaccine prevents transmission: you do not become s silent "carrier" unless you suffer from a successful infection. And in the case of the linked studies, the concern is over particular vaccines which are not as effective in producing a robust antibody reaction. They're saying you need more/better vaccines, not fewer.