And there ain't nothing wrong with that.

After the hype it seems that story was overblown -- looked like less than 1% were compromised

That's good. I haven't been able to keep up on the story with the holidays and all.

I'm thinking that services like TOR (and others) are the one hope for having an internet in the future that is worth having.

Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.

That may be the single stupidest sentence in the history of stupid sentences on the Internet.

You won't share what you think because it's what you think. Everything you see and think and say and do reflects your own biases. If you decide not to share a single bit of data that is floating around in your head if it happens to reflect your biases, that means you will spend the rest of your life mute, which come to think of it might be best for everyone.

I've just re-read your entire comment and it doesn't seem to say anything at all about anything. Are you a Markov bot? If so, your maker forgot to put in the AI.

One way or another, you pay for your free Internet services.

It's not "one way or another". It's ONE WAY.

Where do I sign up to pay for Google and Twitter and other internet services directly instead of via my private data? I've been to Google thousands of times, and I've never seen a "subscribe" button.

No, there is no "one way or another". You can ONLY pay for your internet services by letting companies upskirt your private communications and personal data. That gives you some idea of just how valuable your private data really is.

Now we have that story of more than half of all TOR nodes being owned by some hacker group.

The Internet has been weaponized against us.

Don't worry, it won't. The very LAST thing an enemy in your asymmetric war would want is you to stop using them. They cost insane amounts of money to keep them flying. Every hour that thing is in the air is running for your enemy.

Again, the asymmetric war is not about killing Americans. It is about making them spend more money on its military than it can. Interestingly enough, exactly the same strategy the US employed against Russia in the cold war.

And we know how that ended.

As I explained above, the tests don't show whether the student is learning. The tests show whether the student understood the underlying system. I can honestly say that I don't have any clue about bookkeeping despite allegedly learning it for 5 years and passing with a B average.

Tests have a fundamental flaw that they are testing whether you can work as a sponge. Soak up any and all crap and reproduce it at request, without the need to retain anything of it for any longer period of time.

Well, the US (unlike the Reich) pretty much has to go high-tech with its army, simply because high losses would quickly mean that support for any kind of war would decline sharply. Not really a problem for a dictatorship, but certainly one in a democracy. So what the US strives for is a high-tech army that reduces the risk of losing personnel and instead favors spending money. Which would be a great thing if it was done with the main goal of protecting soldier lives rather than keeping home front war support up. But not the point right now.

So in general it's not a bad idea to use better technology instead of more manpower. The problem arises when your enemy can do the opposite with impunity as we see in asymmetric warfare. The US need a huge infrastructure and logistics apparatus to keep its military going, the overhead is incredible. It boggles the mind to ponder just what is necessary to get the average US soldier in the field supplied. With this in mind it can be successful to actually wage war against such a huge military machine, simply by spending a tiny fraction of its expenses and hence weighing it down under its own weight. If putting a gun in the hands of some fanatics is all you have to do to "force" the US to field aircraft carriers and deploy field HQs in some godforsaken corner of the planet (which both needs incredibly complicated logistics and tons of resources to keep running), you can get the international warfare equivalent of a reflected DDoS running: Invest minimal resources that forces your target to waste more resources than they can afford.

Oh! Now his whole build makes sense. He's not fat. He's just full of shit.

Without wanting to pull a Godwin here, but one of the things that brought the Third Reich down was the infighting between the various branches of the armed forces, always trying to one-up the other ones to get more funding...

It can be built far more cheaply and sold far more expensively.

Scum I can see, but human?

He's a politician. What the hell did you expect?

The governments lie, the media lie. That's normal. That's the same in dictatorships and democracies.

The difference is that in a functioning democracy, they tell different lies.

Not? Does he explode when he turns 40?