Therefore, Congress will pass a law making itself exempt from CIA/NSA spying and the rest of the country be damned.

It's already illegal - you think the CIA is going to care about another law to ignore?

he'd have been fired on the spot for lying to his superiors for months and trying to cover up his own incompetence.

The boss can lie to his underlings all he wants. You seem to be going by book-learning on which is which here and ignoring the data.

Allowing the NSA, DHS and CIA (hell, even the IRS, for that matter) to continue to operate as they are allowed to will swallow up the last vestiges of America and its dream.

Don't forget the Fed, which funds all this.

The dystopia exists now but it's not too late to turn back.

It's actually the collapse of the Fed's product that will be the only thing that can scale it back. It could resolve nicely or turn into a nightmare - here's hoping for the best!

So why is lying to Congress not a punishable offense?

Congress used to keep those in contempt of Congress in jails in the old Guard rooms until they agreed to cooperate (or the session ended). The room that's now the House post office was last used in 1934 to hold a prisoner. Both the Legislature and the Judiciary have almost entirely abdicated their powers to the Executive Branch since then.

These days we have a sitting Attorney General who is convicted of Contempt of Congress (which carries a *minimum* one month jail sentence) and roams about freely and the Legislatures' intelligence committees are employed by the "intelligence community" directly (same as the Fed owns the banking committee). The Legislature really has no actual power to enforce its proceedings at this point.

See, this isn't a crime, it's just the employer checking up on his employees' work. I guess a couple of them thought they were due a raise and made a stink. A low-level employee was blamed and will probably be scapegoated/fired to make this all go away and then business will carry on as usual.

if the concept of private property is now only the province of libertarians

The way it's going, if you "still" believe in private property you're either a libertarian or you've given up on compulsory political systems entirely. All the other factions believe in some degree of community ownership of everything.

That makes the whole concept dead on arrival. Anything that requires a connection is no damn good, aside from a remote terminal, I suppose

How else do you plan to distribute a CRL? The firmware can get programmed with the updated certificate store when you have access to the CRL, but it can operate fine offline without it (accepting the enhanced risk).

Looking at the pictures of Skellig Michael [aside: didn't Michael Skelling used to be an NPR reporter?] it seems very likely that the stacked-stone huts will be used in the new films.

If this is a sign that there's no nexus around Tatooine, this thing might actually have legs!

They are a Finnish company and that fact is well known worldwide.

Most people knew them for their snow tires before their cell phones. He must not live in the snow belt. I'm glad they separated the two businesses - I still buy Nokian snow tires and I sure as hell don't want Microsoft involved in my winter traction!

The macro universe is also how the universe really works.

Only when it doesn't disagree with the quantum result.

People used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe, then some allowed that maybe the Sun might be the center of the universe, but really it was always about, and still is, the "me" being the center of the universe.

The approximations of reality that we sense with our ape-minds is really useful, but far from anything True(tm) or objective. What we feel to be "intuitive" is just a collection of rubrics that happen to work well to keep higher order animals alive. That we can even explore QED is a freaking miracle.

"Oh, but those entangled particles must be separate entities because they look like they are separate in our perception of space" is one of those. "But I have a ruler!"

That's how many people (mostly children) have died of malaria since the investigators knew they had a working vaccine in the mid-90's.

That vaccine might actually see the light of day this year, but the regulators are hinting that they might deny approval because it's not tremendously effective in infants.

Because, you know, IN FUCKING THEORY, somebody might get injured from the vaccine.

I'm sorry, the blood of ten million mostly-children on the hands of regulators gets me a bit worked up. And now they're staring at their naval because an investigator might also have a drinking problem? Oh, man, I better hit submit before I say something I might regret.

completely and utterly fuck over the RIAA and record labels in their war against the people.

In my dream world they go after these morons for barratry, baseless prosecution, and everything else they can find, get them all disbarred with the Copyright Office, and burn down their houses.

Well, no, in my dream world there's none of this "imaginary property" crap that tries to shackle real property, but as far as a happy medium, we could even negotiate the part about burning down their houses (always open bold).

So, pray tell, if writing your representative is worse than useless, what's the action that would actually work?

Working to obsolete that system.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

- R. Buckminster Fuller

Politics is an enormous opportunity cost that ought to be left to people who cannot participate in society in a more meaningful way. e.g. Libertarianism is an abject failure by every conceivable measure. Intent isn't important, it's results, and things have *not* gotten better. Yeah, 1 out of 10 battles are won, but any General can tell you how that war will go.

Right. See if it meets PCI requirements (you need to at least be able to reference them if you're in this line of work). If so, leave a note with the employer as to what might (will) happen and move on.

If every port on the VLAN is 802.1x certificate-authenticated you might not need to actually worry. Hahahaha, yeah, I'm sure it is....

sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers

That's not going to turn out well for them. After the first steaming pile, the subsequent two aren't even on my list. Even if the next two were great, what were we going to do, show our kids only the last half of the story (well, with other random crap thrown in)? It's not like they were going to go back and fix the first one.

Once the copyright fully expires, somebody will make a great TV miniseries of The Hobbit. The folks doing Pratchet's stories would do a good job, for instance.

Oh, and Jackson has blown his cred with everybody. Hope the contract with WB was airtight on this trilogy because that payment's gonna have to last for quite a while.

Yeah, it should be higher. People are so afraid of a credit rating problem these days that they will often pay off a "bad debt" that is fraudulent to get their score "fixed".

Creditors know this and are abusive because of it. I tell them to go suck a big one if they pull that crap. It's better to pay cash anyway, but I've actually had very few try to report bogus charges I refused to pay (90% or so are just bluffing).

Frankly I'd trust somebody with 'very good' credit more than somebody with 'perfect credit'.