For the sake of our privacy, let's all hope so!

Raw phone audio traffic/data, at least on cellular which makes up the vast majority of telephone traffic these days, is already heavily compressed at the air interface level to allow companies to maximize the voice traffic they can carry across a channel without increasing physical capacity. It would be hard to compress it much further and still be audible. Hell, on Verizon Wireless's network it is already practically inaudible due to the compression.
 
You'd basically just have to dump it to disk which wouldn't be processor intensive whatsoever nor would it take much disk. 8k EVRC is a common audio codec, which you could store roughly 30 years of phone calls on a 1TB disk at 8kbps. More reading on EVRC

You expect anyone in the media to actually be able to figure out how to reply to someone when it's more involved than just clicking the reply button at the top of the web page they check their email on?

 
Then you really, really haven't been paying attention for the last 15-odd years or so. Where are the apologies from all of the nay-saying bootlickers who branded those of us who have been pointing these things out since the early-90's "tinfoil hat nutters" or "right-wing conspiracy theorists" or just plain old "kooks"?
 
I'm not happy to be proven right (I was always hoping to be proven wrong), I'm just sad that we had to let it get to this point before people started paying attention.

Nondescript sedan with blackwall tires? Weren't those the days...

Howabouts a no-knock raid on your next door neighbor's house (since the jackboots can't be assed to get the house number right in most cases) where they shoot his dog and break his grandma's nose with the butt of the rifle for telling them to fuck off?

Ever heard of a Stingray? The police have been using them like hotcakes all over the country. The feds even went as far as to raid a police station who was going to release a FOIA request about their use. Long story short, they emulate a cell phone tower and trick the "target" handset into connecting to it. It's a hardware MITM over the cell network. Highly illegal, violates a number of laws and FCC regulations. Of course, those are perfectly fine since it's the power elite using them against YOU. You want a cell-phone free zone in your museum or church? PIRATERRORISM, of course.

the powerful of the world use their confiscated wealth (via taxes) to harness technology to spy on everyone else. really how surprising.

move along, there is nothing to see here...

Putting a cable box on the sequencer is a bad idea. Almost all STBs will lose all of their guide data, which can take hours to repopulate, in addition to taking forever to boot up. Occasionally they will even lose their subscription information if you are out of town/country for a few weeks. I wouldn't recommend it.

You can't read well. I just spelled out, in a post you replied to, exactly what the switched-AC passthrough port that is on the back of many STBs was originally designed for (which was for powering on an old-fashioned CRT television set). No, modern DVRs like TiVo probably DON'T have them (they also aren't rated for 500W), but many of your Motorola/GI/SA boxes DO in fact, have the switched power passthrough on the back. Stop trying to stir up bullshit.

Which is it? 500 watts or 35 watts? This summary and title are completely ridiculous, I can think of plenty of other things that are using more power in my home than a cable box. Refrigerator, freezer, washer, dryer, hair blow dryer, desktop computer, television, central heating/air conditioning, range (if it's electric), power tools/garage, home theatre system, the list goes on and on.
 
The reason the "500 Watts!!!" is disingenuous, is because many cable boxes have a switched outlet that allow you to plug in a television set to the back of it. Back in the good ol' days, you could click on the cable box and the TV would turn on as well, if it was plugged into the back. That CRT might draw as much as 500 watts, so that's what it's rated for. With the advent of universal remotes, electronic controls in sets that forget the last power setting and the need for constant power to keep settings and "quick-on" for many sets, this is now an antiquated port that's just a hold over from the olden days of cable TV.
 
The STB might be the 2nd biggest energy user in many homes, but I wouldn't bet on *most* homes.

and thus...the sell-off-slash-rebranding.

that's all this is, of course...when a brand as big as Time-Warner start being reviled by its customers, it's simply "time" to hit the ctrl-alt-delete and reboot things.

It's simplistic on purpose. Because as far as the general public and people who are loyal to the Constitution, rather than the secret police, are concerned, he gave us concrete evidence that we're being systematically denied our basic human rights by the wicked authoritarian regime that's risen to power out of the dark depths of the intelligence community and that's all that matters is that we are getting fucked.
 
I guess I could expand my analogy to say that not only is the husband a womanizer, he's also a slimy scumbag with a history of questionable activities, murder, and shady business deals. So to cross him, you'd better be ready to go all in. At that point, you can't just stop with telling his wife how she's getting fucked, you tell everyone he's fucking the whole world over what he's up to.
 
Otherwise you risk opening yourself up to his wrath. If Snowden just leaked a document or two about the light, fluffy things the secret police are doing to the public, he would have faded into obscurity and then permanently "disappeared" by the powers that be. You know what I mean by that. His only choice was to leak every, single document he had and keep himself in the public eye in order to keep safe.
 
    Again, was it right? Possibly not, again that all depends on where your priorities lie. If you are the general public, you aren't real concerned with what the spooks are doing overseas, you care what they are doing to you right here at home. I'm just explaining why everyone *does* think he's a hero, just as the wife in my "simplistic" analogy above probably wouldn't care too much about how her murdering scum husband's dirty laundry was aired, neither does anyone care what happens to the NSA at this point.

Imagine a hypothetical situation:

You are cheating on your wife, and have been doing so for some time now. A good friend of hers finds out about what you're doing and tells your her. At this point, people are going to be pissed off at one of two people. People loyal to you are going to be pissed off at your wife's friend for ratting you out. People loyal to her are going to be pissed off at you, and see your wife's friend as a hero. That's just the way things work. So you can always tell where someone's loyalties really lie by determining whom they are pissed off at.

In this situation, the secret police/military complex/power elite/establishment is effectively screwing over the general public and the Constitution (the highest law of that land, for those that are unfamiliar), and has been doing so for some time now. Someone finds out about what they're really doing and tells us. At this point, people are pissed off at one of two people (or groups of people). People who are loyal to the secret police/military complex/power elite/establishment are pissed off at Snowden for ratting them out. People loyal to the general public and Constitution are pissed off at the people screwing them, and see him as a hero.

I'm not trying to scream "shill" to every person who wants Snowden's head on a pike, but you'd better believe that any prominent figure who is crying traitor day in and day out in the public media, well, you know where their loyalties lie is all I'm saying. It's not too hard to figure it out.

You understand wrong. A few carriers petitioned the ITU to allow them to market their advanced HSPA+ networks as "4G". This was because they had no LTE network and Verizon was rolling one out. All of the carriers that were marketing HSPA+ as 4G now run LTE networks, however.