I use a chainsaw.

That reflects my experience. I work in academia now. It has advantages over the other two in many ways, but the squabbles seem to be over more petty issues (joke: why are academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low). When I worked in a government research lab, there was a high degree of camaraderie, especially among the science and tech folks. There was definitely dead wood in the bureaucracy, but there's plenty of that in corporate world. There was essentially no dead wood in the labs that I worked in. YMMV. When I was in startups, the principals seemed to be dedicated to the making the organization work, but to much of the rest of the crew, it was just a job.

Next CNN editorial: Does watching TV programs on the internet cause brain damage?

CNN makes their money from cable. Is it all that surprising that they would have an editorial bashing the competition: video games and looking at junk on the net? I wonder if they ever had an editorial asking if watching TV news makes you paranoid?

Yes, if I only had to pay for the 3 channels that I actually watch instead of 250 that I don't watch in order to get those 3 channels.

WTF? No matter what the story is about, over the past couple of weeks an AC makes one of the first posts decrying the evil done by Google. Slashdot headline: "Bad People Kick Kittens." First post: Slashdot cares about kicking kittens, but what about Google driving around taking photos of kittens? Is someone paying to trash Google on /., or does some lone guy just hate Google and lurk on /. all day just to bad mouth them?

It used to be that the magic words were "abracadbra" or "presto chango", but now the new magic words are "national security". Those words hypnotize judges into giving the government anything it wants. It seems to even work on corporations: Google, ATT etc.The NSA is the Fight Club. The first rule of the NSA is you don't talk about the NSA

It leaves me wondering exactly what kind of security system we really have. It seems to be some unholy tangle of secret government combined with corporate indifference to laws and civic responsibility. Ike warned about the military-industrial complex. Today he would probably be warning us about the national security-corporate alliance that has taken root in the US. We pay for the NSA, but we don't get to ask about what they do. Our representatives oversee them in secret, give them money in secret (we can't see the "black budget"), and don't talk about what they oversee. Is the money worth it? Who knows? You and I will never find out. Is the NSA spying on US citizens? You and I won't get a straight answer. Does the government issue death warrants for US citizens without due process? You bet, but we are not privy to those decisions until CNN announces it. Is Google assisting the NSA? My guess is yes. And I'll bet everyone else, ATT, Microsoft, etc., at the top of the food chain is also. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain for both sides. Customers and stockholders don't care and you can't prove it because the government will invoke the magic words.

I wish you hadn't posted that link. I just wasted 10 minutes looking at pictures of bad tattoos. BUT, it's still better than wasting 20 seconds every time I watch a DVD

The ad and TV industry only has itself to blame. The amount of advertising minutes in typical hour show keeps increasing. Flip around channels at random and you have a much higher chance of landing on an ad than program content. I pay Netflix and Amazon to watch shows rather than put up with constant interruption at key dramatic moments by loud and annoying ads. Dish seems to want to give their customers what the customers want. Maybe the ad and TV industries should try and treat viewers with a bit more respect and they would get a bit more respect in return.

This country is awash in guns. What good has that done? Brains in the heads of citizens would do much more.

It could place providers in the position of requiring warrants for all law enforcement requests.

That's the point. It's not that hard to get a warrant. The idea is that another branch of government should be reviewing police actions. Law enforcement should not be getting a free hand to obtain anything they want. The intent of the 4th amendment was that citizens should be allowed to conduct their lives without fear of government intrusion except when that intrusion was justified, reviewed by other branches of the government, and the action were open to the view of citizens. Too bad if that's an inconvenience for law enforcement and the phone company. I'm sorry if my rights are a bit of an inconvenience.

The thing that really gets me about all of this is that the US federal government, states, and localities already have tremendous power to do all of the snooping, spying, and arresting people for online activities that could need. They just need to take care of a few bothersome details like warrants. The new laws they want simply remove any judicial or administrative oversight so the various governments can do what they please without any questions being asked: DMCA is too much trouble - gosh, we have to send a letter; a warrant is too much trouble - golly, we have to ask a judge to rubber stamp this application. It's tyranny by the lazy and people indifferent to citizen's rights.

I like how he said "that Hollywood and the technology industry 'need to come to an understanding' about new copyright legislation." Hollywood and industry? We peasants don't get a say I guess.

I'm not so sure things were better when the Europeans were running the show. The last 400 years of the history of sub-Saharan Africa was largely a world war against the local populations. The extent that some of the locals haven't gotten their act together in the last 50 to form stable governments can probably be traced to that history.