I agree that NSA employees should not be killed. But those that have abused this system should face justice if they have violated the law. We have at this point, irrefutable proof the James Clapper committed perjury. We know that other crimes have been committed within the NSA, an investigation needs to identify the parties responsible and they need to be brought to justice. It is also clear that there is rampant fraud, waste, and abuse in the forms of programs that have no value to US citizens and only serve to increase the power of the intelligence community. Those programs need to be shut down along with appropriate reductions in force.

The same could be said for attacking other nations. You may not care about the citizens of other countries, but our actions toward them have ramifications. Sometime in the form of blowback, sometimes in the form of direct cost to the tax payers. Right now, most of the NSA work appears to be motivated by politics or the hopes of the intelligence community to justify their own existence by getting lucky enough to stop a terror attack. The intelligence gathering arm is failing to produce anything of value and the cyber attack arm has cost the US a great deal of value by hurting many companies and giving every other country in the world the justfication needed to conduct cyber attacks against us. Our infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever to cyber attack, and the government agency that should be making sure our networks are secure is putting us all at greater risk, and for no apparent benefit.

It may be the NSA's job to spy on foreign goverments, but there has to be form of rationale behind it. It is good to have the capability when there is a need, but right now, it seems that the NSA's actions are not tied in any way to the needs of this countries citizens. Most of the spying appears to be politically motivated and done for the benefit of persons/politicians/companies that are part of the intelligence community. As far as economics go, who determines where the economic interests of the citizens lie? Should the NSA spy on BP for Exxon? Which companies employs more US citizens? does it matter that Exxon is headquartered in the US? In an era of huge multi-national companies, how can anybody make an unbiased decision on which "freind" should be subject to spying and which "freind" should receive a direct benefit?

The only way the the spying machine can function and provide value for the tax payers is if it is restrained with the correct set of checks and balances, transparency, and oversight.

I still think it is a stretch to characterize DDOS as computer hacking or whatever other legal term they are using that puts it on par with spreading malicious software and other things that involve defeating security measures and stealing data. Technically, these DDOS relies on the workings of the internet and if a company relies on the workings of the internet for its business, then angry DDOSers, are part of the cost of doing business on the internet. The government should not be involved in deciding what type of traffic is allowed or unallowed over these telecommunications networks.

Except you could have sued the phone company if Congress had not passed a retro-active law that stripped citizens of their rights to do so.

I think that they will need to repeal a lot more than just the Patriot Act at this point. Besides, it is not like operating outside the law has detered these organizations in the past. The only solution is to accept that no government office should be above scrutiny.

4X the cost? That seems rather high. I have purchased my last Arduino in the $20 range and if you are really cheap you can get the knockoffs on ebay for a lot less. The RasPi and Arduino were never meant to do the same things. Case in point, I have witnessed student teams tackle the same problem with real time sensing using the Pi and the Arduino. The Pi team ran a full linux distro and built their applications using python. The Arduino team used the Arduino. The systems ran on battery power. As you can imagine, the Arduino design was much more efficient and was actually developed just as quickly. On the other hand, I would not use an Arduino as a network router, fileserver, or media player.

In my opinion, the next cool thing for the electronics hobbyist is not in the ever increasing push for more FLASH/RAM and smaller size, but in improved, easy to implement, and secure connectivity. Something like pinocc.io

Police are not above the law. Their actions are not completely hiddent from the public eye. You have too much faith in your fellow man. If you give 90% of people the right mix of motivation, rationalization, personal benefit, and risk mitigation, then they will be more than wiling to look past their morals and do the wrong thing. In this case we can be 100% sure that the NSA capabilities are being used to spy on the interests and enemies of powerful individuals. This generally means that they are used to spy on other powerful individuals, like politicians in other countries, or CEOs of major companies. So you are right that most of us do not have to worry about this simply because we are not a threat to the those powerful individuals.

Similar experience here. It was not like the sequestration snuck up on everybody. Any program that was caught off gaurd by this was being severely mismanaged. In fact, I would say that the sequestration was a very good thing. It forced our organization to look at ways of improving operations. Our organization cut most travel and conferences. At the end of the year, not only had our division covered the budget cuts, but they actually ended up with an enormous surplus.

Not expending 100% of funds and taking on as much risk as possible is not even close to the same thing as having a "slush fund". And government auditors do not care if you fail to expend 100% of funds and money goes back to the taxpayer.

Music exists. It is sound, which is a pressure wave that causes an ear drum to vibrate. Treating this effect on the human body as a possessible, physical object requires imagination.

Which is why a neutered legislature in gridlock is probably the best thing that this country can hope for. Personally, I am ready to vote for the candidate that runs on the platform "I promise not to do or touch anything".

Even if they are not in the majority, they still have a responsibility to negotiate on behalf of the people that elected them. They cannot just bow out of every vote because they are in the minority. The grid-lock that is happening right now is exactly the way this system is supposed to work. It is by far preferrable to what normally goes on. There is a significant percentage of the voting populace that would not mind the debt ceiling being frozen and obama-care being stopped. So if you want to get more votes from the right, you might have to concede something like spending cuts or a delay in portions of obamacare. I personally think that a government shutdown is a great thing for this country to help it get its head around what government services are actually necessary and essential. I don't want to continue paying my governement to spy on me and my family.

Every US Government agency reports personnel shortfalls across all fields in every branch of the organization. This despite the fact that we are experiencing ever higher levels of government spending, particularly in the DoD. I gaurantee that they are already experiencing shortfalls in secretaries. Is it because there are not enough qualified individuals to perform secretary jobs or because people with the right experience hate the idea of working for the Federal Government where they would get excellent benefits and very small chance of ever being fired?

I don't think this "requires" the cloud. It is offered as a service, but can be run locally. I do think that the cloud will eventually be necessary to really make home automation appealing to the masses. People will need a system where they by their blender, scan the nfc tag or qr code, and immediately get that registered in the cloud system. I do not think that the brains for the day to day automation needs to be in the cloud, but the clould definitely has a role in helping automate parts of peoples lives.