Or, beware your audience. Though on the topic, while it's not the most concise construction, signposting something you find interesting so that the reader pays extra attention (or even just a different kind of attention) to it is certainly common. I don't know if that makes it acceptable, but I tend to think it does.

A thought that made me laugh, how does one say "Patience is a virtue" in the original Klingon?

It's a small part, but it's a part. I think Snowden has done his fair share of trying to inform laymen and stir up giving-a-fuck. If he wants to switch to working on tech, he could accomplish nothing and still come out far ahead of the rest of us. ;-)

The existence of a decent open-source router can't do much against a U.S. National Security Letter.

While we certain should care enough to force our government to stop being our adversary, there will always nevertheless be adversaries. You have to work on the tech, too. Even if you totally fixed the US government, Americans would still have to worry about other governments (and non-government parties, such as common criminals, nosey snoops, etc), where you have no vote at all. You will never, ever have a total social/civic solution which relies on, say, 4th Amendment enforcement to keep your privacy. I'm not saying your chances are slim; I'm saying they're literally 0%.

Furthermore, getting our tech more acceptable to layment acually would correct some of the problems inherent with NSLs, improving the situation even in a we-still-don't-give-a-fuck society. If you do things right, then the person they send the NSL to, is the surveillance target. The reason NSLs (coercion with silence) works is that people unnecessarily put too much trust into the wrong places.

For example, Bob sends plaintext love letters to Alice, so anyone who delivers or stores the love letters, can be coerced into giving up the contents. OTOH if they did email right, then if someone wanted to read the email Bob sent to Alice, they'd have to visit Bob or Alice. That squashes the most egregious part of NSLs, where the victim doesn't even get to know they're under attack.

That's true whether we're talking about email, or even if Bob and Alice get secure routers and VPN to each other. One of them gets the NSL ordering them to install malware on their router.

A nice step ahead would be the establishment of a new set of root certificates...

The lesson of CA failure is that there shouldn't be root authorities. Users (or the people who set things up for them, in the case of novices) should be deciding whom they trust and how much, and certificates should be signed by many different parties, in the hopes that some of them are trusted by the person who uses it.

If you want to catch up to ~1990 tech, then you need to remove the "A" in "CA."

Clicked (thought submitter screwed up the link and linked to a page that links to the article, rather than linking to the article), expecting to find a story about a forgotten A2000: maybe someone walked into an office in 2014 and saw that one was in use. Or someone knocked down a wall in 2014 and found one bricked up but still powered up. Instead, found a page telling everyone what A2000s are. Duh. Where's the "forgotten" part? All that I can tell that was forgotten, is that the writer forgot his elementary school spelling and punctuation lessons.

Users agree: adding a progress bar makes a thing faster.

Those virgins every holy warrior gets in the end cost a lot of money and aren't really contributing much to the cause themselves.

Surely, we could automate virginity?

Why is there a debate at all?

Because people want it. Suppose (just hypothetically) you were getting a subsidy from the public, and that the subsidy served no useful purpose. Then suppose someone said, "Hey, this is getting expensive and unless we change the rules for how we compute your subsidy, it's going to get more expensive in the future."

You would call for debate. Why wouldn't you? What've you got to lose?

Futhermore, if you lost that debate, and then people started saying, "Let's change the rules for your subsidy, either eliminating or reducing it," you would call for debate, because since your subsidy serves no useful purpose, the rational course of action is going to be to eliminate your subsidy.

I think we're pretty much now at the stage, where we should start seeing some some great arguments for how pollution reduces crime (and pollution solves some other social problems as well), and that if you want to be tough on crime (and address other social ills), then we need to increase pollution. (That'll be the liberal argument, put forth by Republicans.)

This will be countered by the argument that increasing pollution just makes industries become dependent upon pollution, cleaning up the pollution is needlessly expensive, and industries that pollute could be just as productive without the pollution. (That's the conservative argument, put forth by Democrats.)

That's why I think internet speed should be measured in Gigabytes per month. Seriously. About once per week I get snailspam from CenturyLink, wanting me to upgrade from 7 bullshit units to 20 bullshit units. Except each "plan" is the same number of Gigabytes per month. So how it is an "upgrade?" Oh, if I give you more money, I'll be able to hit my cap faster? That's silly.

Now if you're telling me my cap will change from 200GB to 571GB, that is an upgrade I might be willing to pay for. Because then you'd be talking actually-relevant numbers.

What I don't want to see are solutions that are dependent on outside resources

This is totally understandable but TFA is about a tech, not a product. Relax. I think the whole point of this is that people will be able to build stuff out of this. i.e. you'll google "arduino thread" and instead of just seeing programmers talk about concurrency, you'll also see some networking stuff in your search re--

Fuck. Guys, why did you have to call it "Thread?" WTF were you thinking? I declare: strike one.

You cannot serve warrents to search property in other countries.

You can if it's controlled by someone in your country. When point a gun at someone's face who is in the same room as you, all kinds of things are possible.

If they say no or "hard drive crashed" then you do something, and then ask "who had been the second largest stockholder? You're now the largest (after us)."

It would actually be easy enough for Walmart to switch to paper debit cards that had the amount of the card printed on the front. When you used that card, the cashier simply gave you lower-denomination of cards (say, a $5 debit card when you paid for a 5 dollar item with a $10 debit card).

Once this practice became pervasive enough, unfortunately the government would have to step in to create rules and regulations as to how all the printing would appear, and to prevent fraud. I suggest they mandate the use of engraved printing plates; green magnetic ink; and heavy cotton rag for the card. Oh, and to certain security features like holograms, watermarks, embedded plastic strips, etc.

My god, the level of convenience we'd enjoy would blow away any other form of paying for goods and services literally overnight.

Peasant Han: "Honest officer! Our child was sold into slavery over a year ago!"

Officer Zau kicks over the wood stove, lifts open a patch of the tile floor and shines his light into the darkness below. A dozen eyes shine back.

Officer Zau (screaming): Zui cha. Chaqu. Yongyuan!

Officer Zau unholsters her Type 15 pistol, takes aim at Han and puts her finger on the trigger.

(fade to black)

Is there any other kind?</snark>

I recall an old Science Fiction story along the same lines, back in the early 80s.

The protagonist was a young man in a third-world middle-eastern shitehole. He was tired of war, of losing friends and families, when he had a revelation: the "Blue Hats" (UN) were neutral, so if he joined their "army" he'd be relatively safe and wouldn't have to fight any more.

So, he obtains a discarded steel pot and paints it blue. Reveling in his newfound "immunity," he convinces his friends and neighbors to do the same. Even the other side starts doing it until everyone is a Blue Hat -- and peace breaks out for the first time in living memory.

I forget how it ended, but the gist was that the First-World was using the Third-World as a "live culture" of warfare, to keep the former's own troops trained and budgets justified. The old sides were eventually convinced to go back to fighting one another.