Wow, quite the twist at the end there. I thought this quote was going to be from Dick Chaney.

:: shrug :: I've been touch typing since the 80s (Yeah, I'm most likely a youngin to you) but I find backlit keyboards to be the most indispensable improvement made to keyboards. I want mechanical, backlit keyboard. No one but my gf comes over, so it's not a matter of being "cool" (I have a guitar for that). It might be from the callouses on my fingertips (see guitar), but I often fumble looking for the nubs on f and j, and a quick glance at the keyboard puts me straight. Does this mean I'm not a power user? I'll cry myself to sleep about that later.

Of course Do Not Track is meaningless.

It has always been meaningless. It's a voluntary thing which says nothing at all, and isn't legally binding. It's complete drivel. It's something the industry put out to give the illusion of giving a shit about what we want.

Want to prevent tracking? Don't let the packets happen in the first place. Use things like NoScript, Request Policy and HTTP Switchboard to deny the access entirely.

Treat this stuff like the shit that it is ... intrusive advertising and tracking about everything you do.

The only way to win is block as much of this crap from your browser as you can. You don't owe these companies this data, and the less you provide to them the better.

And when they whine and bitch about their revenue stream and their terms of service ... well, too damned bad. You aren't required to pull in any packets you don't wish to.

Once you start using these blocking plugins, you'll be amazed at just how much crap is actually embedded in most every page. One some sites, literally dozens of 3rd parties ... none of whom give a shit about your Do Not Track setting. So just block them entirely.

If we do it, Sony is one of the companies who helped pay for the law which says you and I would have to pay massive amounts of statutory damages, with additional punitive damages for having done it on purpose.

I want Sony to receive the same magnitude of punishment as they would insist we receive.

Because I really despise multinationals when they argue both sides of the same legal argument as it benefits them.

So, once again, if we do this we get crushed under the heel of a team of lawyers.

But a multinational like Sony does it and I bet they'll just dicker and claim some bullshit like fair use they routinely deny exists.

I sincerely hope Sony has to pay a massive fine for this ... something on par with what we'd get beat down with.

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...