Why do you believe it is the job of government to regulate pleasure inducing substances?

I'm not sure of the exact odds but I would put a house fire at around the odds of being struck by lighting. It's going to vary based on how old your house is and the age of it's electrical system but house fires are extremely rare.

Not to mention the mold that would grow in such a moist environment. The fire safe (as is typical for the class) should be rated for 1500 degrees for 30minutes while keeping the inside temperature below that necessary to char paper. The walls are heavily insulated and the seals on the door in extreme heat melt and seal the interior completely.

That's the entire point of these safes, to store paper documents and firearms including ammunition the interior temperature can't exceed a threshold within the spec'd temperature and time limit. The submitter should be able to just stick drives in the safe and not be worried about a fire as long as there is a working fire department.

It's not hard to download the updates from a secure isolated computer burn them to disc and transfer them to an administration machine on the closed network. Ideally this machine would be locked down so heavily to be near unusable so its chance of compromising is reduced. Along with audits before and after downloading.

The NSA sets the DOD's policies on this stuff, and they wrote the book on compromising systems.

People that quote the data rate/sec ignore that the data generated is only generated for a few seconds at the most, the bulk of the data is in the first few milliseconds after the collision. It simply doesn't take long for the remains of the destroyed protons to disintegrate within the bubble chamber.

The world isn't black and white, your side and theirs. Only fools believe someone can only be one or the other. You appear to be one of those with us against us people.

I'm a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. I believe we need a safety net and I believe we need a national pension (social security partially fits this) and I believe we need a national health insurance.

But I also believe the social safety net shouldn't be a hammock. People need incentive to get out of the net or they will get comfortable. As I said I hold innocent individuals harmless, they deserve protection. This includes the disabled, the mentally ill and children. But healthy able bodies adults need to be encouraged to get out of the safety net. Under no circumstance should anyone be homeless, or without electricity or heat. But at the same time government shouldn't be paying for cable tv, or entertainment of any kind. I also have no problem reducing food stamps after a year of unemployment for able bodied adults that aren't caring for children, not till starvation sets in but at a level that will encourage wanting to be off.

I believe unemployment and food stamps needed to expand during the recession, but it shouldn't have been a blank check. I don't think they should have ended as abruptly as they did, they should have been staggered off at the state level depending on how much the state had recovered. Some states like my own were mostly recovered by 2012 and were on the mend as early as 2010.We had hundreds of thousands of people moving into the state between 2012 and 2014 to escape joblessness. There was no reason for the extended benefits here after 2012, but because it's all or nothing on the federal level it was run out longer here than it needed. I'm sure there are still areas and maybe even whole states that could still use the expanded benefits.

There is no inconsistency in my views. Only foolish people like yourself think that you can only be in the camp if you are all the way in on all issues. That's a position of inconsistency. I find the people at the extremes of the spectrum tend to hold this with us or against us view because they are extremists. I can be a fiscal conservative and social liberal, they are not inconsistent viewpoints. In fact the vast majority of independents, like myself, hold similar views. We want a balanced budget, and a viable safety net that doesn't see arbitrary reductions in spending because of a political attack by the extreme right. But I don't want a US that has the European problem of people being on the dole for 3 generations where people have never held a job.

Not everything is IT. Not all H1-B's work in IT. I personally have no issue with an increase in the number of H1-B's as long at the government is actually enforcing the law. If a US citizen is fired and replaced with an H1-B that is direct evidence the law has been broken. There needs to be HARSH penalties to the companies breaking the law, on the order of 3x the amount they "saved" in salaries and compounded at prime +1% interest from the day it happened. The company should also be liable to lawsuit from individual employees that were fired.

There's nothing wrong with the H1-B program as long as the law is enforced.

I'm about as Liberal as it comes when it comes to social support networks being the backbone of an effective country and economy. But government can't bear the entire burden of your unemployment, you bear some costs in that including having to draw down personal assets including possessions because you are an adult who bears responsibility for your employment. Families with children deserve extra benefits because the Kids are innocent victims in this with no ability to help themselves and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to give that family a little cash then seize the kids and put them in foster care.

Single adults on the other hand need to take some responsibility for themselves, you should be encouraged to find other work, if even you think the work is beneath you, by giving you a financial incentive to put some effort into it including moving across the country if needed. That incentive is not to give you enough support to be comfortable. You should be struggling, forced to draw down your assets and even missing a meal every now and then, though you shouldn't be made homeless. That very pain is what will inspire you to find some kind of employment.

I do sympathize with you though, I just don't think it's the role of government to protect able bodied single adults beyond minimal assistance to prevent homelessness and starvation but I draw the line at anything that would make government assistance comfortable or easy for any adult. Families deserve some additional protection precisely because there are innocent victims involved no matter how much you disparage it.

The guy that writes Dilbert worked for a Utility for 20 years, PG&E IIRC. His cartoons are based on the facts of his workplace while at the utility.

NCLB may have sounded good but is' the worst thing they could ever have done to education in the US. Bush and the republican congress that passed it should rot in hell for it.

And how would you feel if you found out your wife was being paid 12% less than the male colleagues that do the exact same job as her and some of those being paid more are not as good of workers?

That's what women face in most workplaces, doing the same work and even being better but being paid less.

Baloney. They were concerned about security, they were shutting down a security related project. The logical "explanation" is to point people at the other solutions that exist to provide the same functionality. Like most logical people they probably figured people would take them at their word and not play pseudo conspiracy theory with why they quit. But like most logical people they failed to take into account the wacko's like you that would read a conspiracy theory into a clean shutdown.

What you suggested as an "answer" is reaching so far into tin foil land that I'm not surprised you don't see it. What you suggest isn't legal and the NSA is very very adept at following the law, the problem for all of us is the law and courts allow them to do a lot of things people don't like but that doesn't change the fact that what you suggest is illegal and no court would allow it. You probably want to point at Lavabit but that wasn't the NSA, it was the FBI being all club fisted. See the entire problem with your conspiracy theory is that they could have just did what Lavabit did and shut everything down and announced why. There is absolutely nothing that would have prevented them from saying why they shut it down after all they were anonymous and might not even be Americans. There is no legitimate explanation, that isn't in tin foil land, for why they wouldn't say they were doing it because it was compromised if it had been.

The NSA isn't out to get Truecrypt. They probably didn't even care about it because they had already researched and found the vulnerabilities that the audit project found and knew with certainty that they could exploit it if needed. That's how the NSA works, they find vulnerabilities then don't tell anyone about them. It's all over the Snowden revelations. But you tune that out because it doesn't fit your conspiracy theory.

You are right out there wearing your tinfoil hat. Deny it all you want but you've created a completely illogical explanation that's extremely complex to explain something that isn't that complex. Your answer simply doesn't meet Occams razor, deal with it. Accept that you want this to be a conspiracy and move on.

Most of the time the simplest answer is the correct one.

We have a project that hadn't seen an update in years, all development effort had stopped and the people behind it were basically gone.

On one hand you have a claim of an order to backdoor the software that hasn't seen an update in ages. An order that contrary to your claim would NOT be legal.

On the other hand you have a claim that the software developers basically realized that unmaintained software is more dangerous than no software because it implies trust that isn't there. So being the responsible group they are they shutdown the project so people don't rely on code and servers that's probably exploitable (and the audit shows it was) because they aren't working on it anymore.

Of those two answers the simplest is not the illegal order to backdoor the software. But feel free to keep your tinfoil hat on while you sling shit around.

There is a legitimate argument that the real authors won't step forward and enforce their copyright because they would reveal their identity.

I think that is a pretty good chance personally as long as no one is making money. But if one of these companies tries to make money on this I think there is pretty high odds the original developers will step out of the shadows with their hand out.

It doesn't need to be murder to be a crime. There are in fact many kinds of murder, and even if the officer isn't charged with it because he was simply the weapon used doesn't mean a murder didn't occur.