When we walk through traffic and hear cars coming up on us, or know people's position in a room from the direction and magnitude of their voice. It's no surprise that someone lacking an important sense like sight will have much better developed echolocation ability.
That's hardly echo location. That's just stereo hearing. The best example I have of that is when I'm skiing - I process where people skiing behind me are by using 2 ears, so that I don't suddenly turn in front of them. No sound generation or echos required....
Spies should respect laws and constitutions, at the very least those of their own country. If they don't, everyone - including those who ordered the illegal spying - should be punished severely. We already know this is not happening.
Freedom is far more important than a spy's ability to do whatever they "need" to do.
But now the NSA and GCHQ have positioned themselves as apex predators at the top of the information food chain. They can spy on anyone, but no one is allowed to spy on them. There might be some king of notional "oversight" commitee for window dressing. So who might potentially be able to investigate the security services and hold them to account? That would be journalists and lawyers.....
Firstly we have the perennial problem that the security services are allowed to spy on anyone with very little oversight. If they want to spy on someone they should be required to get a court order, and that court order should be made public so that everyone can see what they are doing. If the court order cannot be immediately made public for legitimate security reasons then it should be made public as soon as possible (i.e. certainly within a year, preferably sooner). Furthermore, information gathering should not start until that court order is issued - i.e. there should be no requirement for ISPs/telcos to log and retain traffic "just in case" it is needed at a later date.
So given that we already have this problem, further extending the powers of the seucrity services seems like a bad plan.
Futhermore, this stuff is always justified as "to stop a serious threat", and yet there seems to be very little evidence that there are lots of "serious threats" that need stopping. And as always, this stuff is always spun as "to stop the criminals" and attention is diverted from the fact that not everyone who uses a lawyer is a criminal.
This.... What keeps getting forgotten is that in a democracy, the powers that the police and security services enjoy are a privilege granted by the people via our elected government. These privileges require our consent, and to consent we need to know what is being done, by who, to who. If we don't know then we can't consent, and any powers that the security services (ab)use that we haven't consented to are illegitimate.
Disclaimer: I haven't used KMail for years
Well I have, and I'm sorry to say that kmail is probably the worst of the core kde applications. And I say that as someone who generally loves kde and have used it for 10+ years (and I didn't even moan during the kde3>4 switch). Strangely, I keep on using kmail in the forlorn hope that it will eventually get fixed and stop being a slow and unresponsive resource hog. The latest glimmer of hope I cling to is that the kde devs are finally getting rid of the nepomuk/strigi mess......
Yep. I used Linux almost exclusively for many years at university. Back when I had the time and desire to fix things when they broke. Eventually I was worn down by the endless cycle of update break fix that you get in Linux. When you can't even safely update to the next version the system is broken.
And windows update is always flawless and never breaks anything, and every in-situ upgrade between windows versions is always a complete success...
Ubuntu 14.04 user here. Every time I login I am greeted with a stack of "System problem detected" warnings. Both Firefox and Thunderbird are extremely unstable. Firefox crashes a few times a week. Thunderbird does so twice a week (about). Now and then the whole system hangs when doing a rsync to an external disk (hangs, not busy).
Kubuntu 14.04 user here. Firefox crashes maybe once every 3 months, kmail maybe once every 2 months, which is no worse than my windows experience of browsers and mail clients. Never had any hangs or crashes when doing an rsync.
Oh, I am sure Linux apologists blame me, my hardware, etc. But I've been running 10.04 for years on the same hardware
Time to upgrade?
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.
