They're asserting that they *don't* track everything. Metadata is important, but you're not going to roll up a plot hatched by previously unknown participants with it, there's not enough information for that. The metadata can provide connections between known terrorist operatives and previously unknown individuals, however. When those connections are established, then they obtain warrants for wiretap/content.

Point being, everyone is suggesting that they are operating a panopticon except for the NSA itself. And now you're suggesting that they have failed to stop domestic plots by using capabilities that they don't even admit to having. Next, someone is going to ask why the NSA hasn't proactively stopped all crime based on their omniscience.

Don't mistake being regularly "religious" for being a candidate for terrorism. Most of these "jihadis" become full-on religious only fairly late in the process. I'm less worried about the regular mosque-goers than I am about fairly recent converts or the kids brought up Islamic, but who didn't care about it until they were lured in by extremist recruiters. The more you are educated about a particular religion, the less chance they can pull the wool over your eyes with their radicalized version of that religion.

Is anyone actually being held back by this, though? The fact that you might be a crack addict who sleeps with interns while hanging out with crime lords is something that can easily be found out by the news media anyway. If you are that sort of person to begin with, perhaps you shouldn't be in government.

What information is the NSA going to provide that is going to cause problems for legitimately non-criminal candidates? You don't need the NSA to frame someone.

So your assertion is that terrorist plots that originated in the US were not stopped by the NSA, who themselves assert that they do not track domestic traffic expect maybe metadata, so we are no more safe?

Your beef is with the FBI, not the NSA. The NSA, like the other intelligence agencies, is only collecting data, usually for foreign initiated situations. The metadata that they collect is not supposed to be for domestic consumption unless some law enforcement agency like the FBI requests it.

They can use their existing money and assets to buy into nuclear plants. The reason the Koch Brothers, and every rich person who didn't inherit it, has and keeps their money is because they move it where there is more money to be made. Right now it is oil and pipelines, but killing pipelines will not kill people like that. It's not entirely certain if silver or garlic will either.

Eh. Spying on foreigners is certainly not legal in their country, but everyone does it to everyone else. It would be nice and all to stop doing that, but I can name a few countries that have no plans to stop doing that and wouldn't suddenly "see the light" if we did so unilaterally. I don't find the cessation of intelligence gathering to be realistic.

And as much as privacy is a good thing, simply collecting information itself doesn't hurt anyone. The question is what you do with it. I'm much more concerned with that.

Now *inside* the US there are laws that need to be obeyed. If those aren't being obeyed, they need to be. If they are, and we still don't like them, we need to get the laws changed. We also have to not send mixed messages to legislators. For instance, if they follow the Constitution to the letter and make sure that they avoid anything that may even be ambiguously unconstitutional, they *will* miss opportunities to catch people. The real question is how much risk does that add, and how much risk do we tolerate as a citizenry. We need to accept that our Constitution has a price tag on it. "Freedom isn't free" isn't just talking about soldiers. You let people have certain liberties, those liberties can be taken advantage of. We need to learn that and become okay with the resulting risk or we're doomed to fail eventually.

I always wondered what the point was with considering panspermia. If life could have appeared anywhere in order to make it to Earth, it could have just as easily originated on Earth to begin with. There's nothing miraculous about Earth, but there is nothing sub-standard about it either.

It would be interesting to know if terrestrial life started elsewhere, but what problems does that hypothesis solve? The only one I can think of is why all almost all Star Trek aliens look like humans with different foreheads.

The government can "take over" by passing laws that make it illegal to use or exchange bitcoins unless they are registered or have some other control feature. Private money is not illegal in the US, but it doesn't have to stay that way. That wouldn't stop the illegal usage of bitcoins, of course, but having the government go from indifferent or passively hostile all the way to actively hostile will be a serious problem. Even drug traffickers need to get their eventual profits into state-sponsored money for it to be useful for them. If they didn't, they would have created their own monetary system decades ago.

I wholeheartedly agree that the employee rating system needs to be less about competing with your co-workers and more about competing with your actual competitors.

While there does need to be some accounting for people who are not performing, you don't create a system that tries to find that out at the cost of completely undercutting your own teams.

I've met people who are shitty at their jobs, but excellent at backstabbing. MS already has too much of that. Hopefully they pick a CEO who changes that, but that will be an uphill battle, to say the least. It's already cultural.

I was just talking to my seven year old nephew about math and I described to him a Linear Algebra problem. He didn't understand it. What are they putting in the water these days to make kids so dumb? It's probably all dem vaccines. And sugar.

If it's on the Internet, it's true. Didn't you learn anything in public school?

Fire has been used by humans for 1.9 million years or so. It is very useful for killing people painfully. I'm still pretty happy with fire.

Linux has been used from the early nineties, and now its going to kill people. I'm still pretty happy with Linux.

Granted, I'm not going to brag about that aspect, but I wouldn't go so far to say it is a ghastly aspect. Modern militaries use everything from brooms to paperclips in support of their mission to kill stuff. That's because militaries use systems to accomplish their tasks, just like everything else does. If you create a system to move food around the globe, you also create a system that moves food between war zones.

I'd be proud that Linux is deemed capable of underlying a mission critical system, even if I don't like the results of said system.

On the other hand, one of the best generals on the Continental side was Major General Benedict Arnold. He pretty much won the Battle of Saratoga and therefore, the contributed considerably to the winning the whole war.

He was so good that he actually has one or two memorials: one at Saratoga and one at West Point. They don't actually have his name on them. Too bad about his later career.

As a tactician, Washington was not one of the great captains of history, in the sense that Napoleon or Hannibal could crush their enemies in battle after battle, but he was a very good Commander-in-Chief in the sense that he was able to hold together a fractious alliance and maintain an army in the field. He also was very much lacking the gigantic ego that the other generals, like Arnold, had. That one feature is a significant reason we have a United States today that is more or less a functioning democracy, as opposed to a string of dictatorships and juntas.

All that said, Washington was probably not going to pull a Cannae on the British, but it isn't like the British weren't trying to win. They certainly tried to stop Washington and failed.

I see your point, and I am actually not sure one way or another if you're right. I will say, however, that you shouldn't discount even raw bandwidth as something that could drive jobs. The more software online there is, the more bandwidth is needed. A 10MBps line that would have been massive for a small company in the 90s is incredibly insufficient now. Now we need 100Mbps or something like that.

The more fiber there is, the more fiber gets laid, and the more fiber gets cut. Is it the same as churning out new cars? I don't know, and there may well be other products that are moving into the space as well.

The original Luddites feared for their jobs, not because they were all stupid, but because there was an entire paradigm shift. It would be putting a machine in a soccer goal net instead of a goalie. You'd be putting all goalies out of a job, but you'd probably have to hire twice as many people to operate the goaltender machine.

That said, perhaps this digital revolution really IS different. Perhaps we do need to consider a world were we no longer determine what a person earns by what "value" they provide. I'd say it would be a good thought exercise either way.

That's the United States of Heinz. That's somewhere in Europe. Near Andorra.