LOL. Really. As if these assholes ran on a platform of ruining America and making laws in accordance with campaign contributions.

Get real.

All of your points are valid in one sense. What you miss is that the price of oil was engineered to be low specifically to smack Russia. That makes your timeline less believable. Prices will rise when America decides that hurting Russia in this way is not viable any longer. Will that be Memorial Day? Could be. No idea.

The conspiracy nut inside of me says that Microsoft has finally found a way to destroy Linux....

Unfortunately, this is all too perfect. There is no way Microsoft could coordinate all this without any evidence showing up that they were doing it. I would have to guess that it is really all just human madness.

Honestly, I should read the rest of your comment, but this really ... irked me:

Following the money is a stupid idea. Do you know when they started making money? When they started offering a powerful and usable Unix based computer. People, like me, wanted that. Do you know when they started making INSANE amounts of money? When they offered a device that would replace multiple devices: the iPhone. Why did I buy one? It was a phone, which I needed, and a music player, which I wanted. It could also do a few other neat things at the time but nothing to write home about.

Chasing the money? They lost mine. The things that maximize their profits are not the things I want or need. I am the one who was giving them money. Now, I am not. They are not making things that I want or need. Sure, there is some value in maximizing your revenue but the focus needs to be on providing something that customers want to give you money for. DRM, lock-in, buggy software, etc are not things that customers want or need. It will only maximize profits in the short term; although Microsoft seems to have done fairly well monetarily speaking. Hm. I guess Microsoft is the counterpoint to my argument. Fuck it. I am done. When evil wins, we all lose.

And people ridicule me for staying on Snow Leopard.

I am sorry but that was as far along the road as I was willing to go. Honestly, Tiger (IIRC) was the last improvement in overall speed and efficiency. Everything else slowed OS X down and then on Snow Leopard, they forced their store into the OS itself. Yuck.

Never is a mighty long time. Mighty long. Life has been evolving from protein chains for billions of years... and that is a drop in the bucket to forever. Never is longer than forever.

What the fuck dude? The Nazis implemented lots of social programs: Free train privileges. Free dental. Free medical (Mengele was a real advocate here). Free showers. A very spirited jobs program (Schindler dampened the spirit a bit but oh well). Free funerary services. Social services abounded under the Nazis during World War 2.

And the Jews complain. Pshaw. Nobody is ever satisfied.

(too soon?)

And what good will that do when it is the non-elected bureaucracy that has their hands directly on the levers?

Sure, you can elect a brand new group of senators, representatives, governors, etc. There is even a slight chance that could all be lily-white innocent. Let's hope for the best and assume they are.

Then what?

The non-elected bureaucrats already have all of the data they need to put pressure on all of these purely innocent brand new elected officials. What do you think is going to happen now?

The politicians absolutely DO need to be cleaned out, but that is not sufficient. The system is already rigged.

Hm. Back when I decided to build my own Linux based computer from source code, I did a lot of tweaking to the sources for a lot of the software that I decided to run. It was not terribly hard and it made the entire user experience amazingly awesome.

Now I am just pissed off. What with the removal of the ability to ctl-alt-backspace out of X (yes, i can add it back in) and "systemD integration" (yes, I can currently avoid it entirely) and other such nonsense like Gnome going off the deep end (nothing I can do about that but fork it), why even bother with Linux anymore? There is way too much to tweak and fix now. Stuff that should NOT NEED to be tweaked and fixed when it was already working.

ROFLMAO. I could go on and on for hours about how pathetic Microsoft Security is but instead, I will not bore you and just talk about the one that is the largest pain in my rear right now: It is titled Windows Credential Theft.

Yes, the geniuses at Microsoft decided that leaving Domain Admin credentials laying about on any average workstation is not a huge problem. It is not like just anyone has access to the computer after all and it is not like having your entire domain compromised is a huge deal...

Seriously. Caching Domain Admin credentials. On a workstation... Serious about security? It is to laugh. These clowns would not know security if it walked up and introduced itself.

To make ubiquitous interception of all traffic less feasible.

Sure, there is nothing here other than people voicing their opinions which will likely get them put on some watch-list, but that is not what is important.

What is important is improving the security of communication overall, not just any one specific communication.

Why is everyone talking about stringed instruments lately? Is it the spell-checker feature gone mad? Turn it off and viola! Everything is fixed?

Voila my friend. Voila. :)

No no no, unless you mean that Science assumes that flying spaghetti monsters don't exist as well as pink unicorns and leprechauns.

No Science just does not include anything until it is proven. Science does not exclude anything until it is disproved (why isn't disproven a word?).

I pretty much agreed with most of what you said; however, the little gem I quoted above is something I have a problem with:

There are no rules or other obligations concerning non-US groups and/or entities from spying on me, collating data, or building profiles; therefore, I fully expect such behavior, even from supposedly friendly entities. I would even hope that the NSA and other American entities would be helping to protect me against such nastiness. Instead, what we have here is the NSA not only NOT helping me, they are doing it themselves! WTF, over.

You would think that this is when they would have realized that they had overstepped their mandate.