90 miles is frankly pathetic. That's a best case scenario 45 miles there and back; less with frequent starting and stopping. And 45 miles by road is probably not like 35 miles as the crow flies. Imagine a 35 mile radius around your home. You cannot get any further than that without recharging. And that's supposed to be good mileage? I wouldn't hesitate for a second betting a comfortable majority of drivers rarely, if ever, drive more than 90 miles in a day. Heck, I'd be pretty confident that a fairly large proportion (say, between 25% and 50%) rarely exceed 50 miles in a day.

It seems like a lot of the high bandwidth claims related to the NSA and other spooks indicate they want an iSCSI connection or other high speed, low-latency access to their sources to make for more efficient and cheaper connections. Why bother recording everything when that's already done by the telcos? My inner spook just wants a fast connection to data that is already on disk.

You make good points... Encryption hopefully works as I've implemented for me :) I went to a wifi radio mfg event for resellers recently and some of the resellers were really concerned that Apple's MAC randomization (which doesn't really work yet) was going to hurt their location tracking abilities... It's not terribly hard to figure out I surf with a device with a certain mac address... and many of these muni wifi systems require you to login... directly, thru google, thru Facebook, etc before you get access... I love free WiFi but I'm cynical, and I think some muni's are doing bad things; I wouldn't be surprised if some are doing automated MITM attacks.

Can be a lot cheaper than other ways of spying; Associate a person with wireless MAC's or shudder their Facebook account and you've got NSA class intel, and better location data.

"When I ask my other tech friends what they would do, they simply suggest changing ISPs. Nobody likes Comcast, but I don't have a choice here. I'm two years into a three-year contract. So, moving is not an option"

Moving is always an option. But you have to eat the cost of one year of Comcast. Sorry, but that's your solution.

Hypothetically, let's say the NSA captures everything they can about the members of the 3 branches of the federal government, and analyzes it well... wouldn't it be pretty easy to control them?

You consider this article positive? Troll logic astounds me!

Slashdot is the Fox News of the open source world. If you aren't blaming Microsoft for everything from Ebola to your dog's farts, you're a paid shill.

Here ya go :) I think it's limited to 4 digit pass codes though. A snipped from their FAQ: How can I get a list of what devices you support? We will gladly supply a full list of supported devices and also specifically what can and cannot be recovered from each one to any legitimate enquiry. Just email us, explaining your business need for the information and we will be delighted to assist you once we have verified your identity.

The financial collapse was a result of mistakes, not crimes.

They may not have been crimes, but do not try and say the financial collapse was a result of "mistakes".

They do not have the same equal opportunity TO SUCCEED, nobody does.

The point is to set a reasonable baseline.

They have the same equal opportunity TO TRY to succeed and not be discriminated against by the government, be treated equally under law.

No, they don't.

Your society destroyed that concept.

Bullshit. "My" society _created_ the fucking concept.

You have left-wing, progressive politics to thank for everything you cherish, from property rights through freedom of speech to the ability to vote.

The world is going neither "right" nor "left", it's going more authoritarian on an orthogonal axis.

Rubbish. We've had thirty years of tax reductions, deregulation and shrinking public services.

The world is most assuredly moving "right"wards.

We have been watching these sorts of things come out of Australia for years. The labor government was at least as bad about it with their black lists and various censorship schemes. In the article also notice that the bill has the support of both the conservative government and the labor establishment. So blaming this on the conservatives seems questionable.

New Labor have been just another conservative party for over a decade now.

As for as I can see there is no party, other than the greens, who are really against this stuff in Australia.

That is because the Greens are the only left-wing party of any size.

We have the same problem in the US.

In fact, the whole Anglosphere has the same problem. The steady march of selfish, greedy, narcissistic right-wing politics that has been taking over since Thatcher and Reagan kicked it off, has all but eliminated left-wing politics and brought with it the destru

Yes, well the devil's in the details. My definition of 'fair' is not the same as the left's. Mine is keep what you earn (or at least 90% of it or so), and allow the meritocracy to operate more naturally.

Right. So you favour increasingly concentrated wealth, the power it wields, and the inevitable corruption it breeds.

Theirs boils down to insistence on equal outcome, everywhere, even at the cost of liberty and bonafide justice.

Completely false.

The "insistence" is on equal opportunities.

The comical fantasy promulgated by the Right, however, is that everyone born into a western democracy inherently has equal opportunities. That the black child born to a drug addicted single mother has the same opportunities in life as the white child born to two high-earning professionals, because both were born in America. Undoubtedly, they will be able to trot out a couple of cherry-picked examples of such disadvantaged children who have, against all odds, escaped their demographic destiny. They might even produce some similar cherry-picked examples of rich white kids whose parents abandoned them after one too many low-level drug charges or car crashes and have sunk into desperate poverty.

But it's just ideological bullshit. Statistics, data and history show the truth. Wealth breeds increasingly more wealth and poverty more poverty, in feedback loops. The best society springs from both of those ends of the scale being curtailed to build a strong middle class. The period of human history with the greatest increase in wealth, productivity and living standards were the few decades post-WW2 - with its high taxes, strong regulations and comprehensive welfare systems - before Thatcher, Reagan and their acolytes' neoliberal cancer started destroying western democracies from within in the name of greed, selfishness, and free-market fundamentalism.