If we did it, it's cyberterrorism. If they do it, it's law enforcement.

Assholes.

These clowns are entirely willing to undermine the security of every computer on the planet to get their grubby fingers into everything.

We need products which keep these guys out, and these guys need a serious beat down in the courts to limit what they can do. A few of them probably should be hung for treason.

Morally, every black hat should be targeting these agencies to cause as much damage to them as possible -- because the damage they're doing to our freedoms is immeasurable.

Thanks, America, for leading the charge in fucking up the planet.

What makes you think they give a damn about the Constitution?

It's now a quaint notion, and every law enforcement agency is making the case that they shouldn't have follow that ... and until a court says otherwise and starts throwing these clowns in jail, do you really think you get a say in the matter?

The law doesn't apply to law enforcement -- which means it's only a matter of time before the outright corruption and shakedowns becomes like every other banana republic where the police can do whatever they choose.

As soon as the feds started teaching law enforcement to use parallel construction, and effectively commit perjury and bypass your Constitutional rights ... everyone was pretty much fucked, because "law enforcement" is now about what they can make stick, not what they can prove through legal means.

You now have a nascent stasi, only some people still cling to the belief that's not actually happening, or that at the very least it's for your own good and therefore OK.

Papers please, comrade -- if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

Let me simplify that alphabet soup for you ... USA.

XP was still for sale 24 months ago. People should not count support from launch but from end of sales IMHO.
It is the phone vendors and carriers that are not updating devices. It like blaming Linux for not updating a router that you rent from a cable company.
Google can not update those devices

And any pretense of the 4th amendment no longer being completely shat upon is pretty much gone.

They're pretty much just doing general warrants/blanket surveillance, without probable cause, just in case they find something.

You are not a free society. You think you are.

Someone will say how China actually censors, and the usual sputterings about how you're still free -- but the reality is, every damned thing you do it monitored, tracked, collated, cross-referenced, shared, and cataloged .. and then is dutifully shared across agencies so that if one of them wants to trump up charges on you they can.

With parallel construction, and massive government sharing ... they can incriminate you any number of ways, none of which involve the truth, probably cause, or proper court oversight. If you become troublesome, they'll just sift through the vast catalog of your life and try you for something they find.

Papers, please, comrade.

Western society is pretty much fucked ... the only difference is if those in power will force us to pray, or keep us quiet with American Idol. But "security" is every bit the threat to us as religious extremists.

But make no mistake about it, our freedoms and rights ended on 9/11, and the US is steadily making themselves, and everyone else on the planet, far less free.

America has now become the enemy of freedom and liberty of everybody on the fucking planet.

All too true. I should have said "traditionally, if Americans wanted video entertainment..." I can already see this with my kids. When they want entertainment, they turn to (generally in this order):

1) Video games (this includes WiiU and games on their tablets).

2) Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, or other online sources.

3) Cable TV shows that have been DVRed.

4) Live cable TV.

Live cable TV is a last resort and is often used as background noise while they do something else. My generation (born in the late 70's/early 80's) is the tipping point. We still turn to cable TV but are finding we're just as comfortable without it and using online sources. The generation before us mostly turns to cable TV but the cable companies can't bet on that group supporting them indefinitely. Unfortunately, a combination of short-term thinking (plan for next quarter, not ten years from now) and attempting to keep their status quo power will ensure that the cable companies will do everything they can to slow down Internet Videos takeover.

Actually in 1957 an all out nuclear war with the USSR would not have a Doomsday for the US.
The USSR had no effective way to deliver nuclear weapons to most of the US. The SS-6 rocket took days to launch and they only had like 6 of them. Their bombers lacked the range to hit many US targets in the South and the US actually had SAMs and fighters that defended major US cities.
Add that they would have had to fly over Canada as well to hit US targets and most would not make it. Did I mention that a lot of US interceptors carried nuclear armed air to air missiles?
So New York, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and maybe Washington DC might have been hit but Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Jacksonville, Atlanta, and many others would have been fine.
Today things are very different but at that time number of targets that USSR could hit in the US was very limited and we would have hours of warning.
Europe, Japan, and Korea would have been a much different story.

Programming tools are free and there are free programming tutorial websites.

Which is fairly meaningless.

Sure, I can check out a medical text from a library ... won't make me a doctor.

The fundamental basis of coding is applying logic, reasoning, problem solving, a lot of trial and error, and then refining it over the years.

Free access is meaningless, unless people are motivated to do it, and have the aptitude for it, and probably have some guidance. Very few people can teach themselves programming from soup to nuts and really grasp all of it -- I've known a few who did, but they were exceptions.

Unless things have changed, programming tends to have a double-tassel distribution -- you get it or you don't. Is this a fault in teaching method or available tools? Or is this a limitation on human brains? I honestly can't say, but I've definitely seen it.

I can tell you not everybody will do well with programming, and some will utterly fail at it -- and how you make it accessible to everybody, I don't know.

There's more grokking involved than most people are willing to admit. There is some aspect of it which actually is art.

Everybody says "programming is just math". Math might have conceived of programming, but I've known brilliant mathematicians who suck at programming. And I've know brilliant coders who suck at math. I don't believe they're one and the same.

I don't think coding is some secret voodoo to be held among the elite. But I don't think everybody is capable of doing it either.

Because it's not really how most people think and do stuff, and because historically, that double tassel is a real thing no matter what people want to believe.

At it's core, coding is problem solving, and relies on logic and reasoning to use the tools you have to solve a problem.

Debugging is thinking through logically what has gone wrong, examining the code, and possibly taking some educated guesses (hypotheses) about what might be the problem and what you might need to fix it (depending on the nature of the problem).

So, sure, teach coding.

But don't think you can do this with people who haven't got a good grasp of problem solving, applying logic and reasoning, formulating a hypothesis, and refining your knowledge based on some experimentation -- which over time grows into a body of knowledge.

Do they still teach any of those in schools?

I would love for the free market approach to work with Comcast. Really, I would. Sadly, Comcast has taken the free market, bent it over, and is currently doing some unspeakable things to it

I would love for the free market approach to work if it weren't a lie. Really, I would. Sadly, everybody always has taken the free market, bent it over, and have always been doing some unspeakable things to it.

Just like always.

All of those nice simplifying assumptions about people being honest, playing by the rules, not willing to swindle to get ahead, not willing to collude to cheat everybody else, and not outright paying bribes ...

See, all of that stuff is precisely why, exactly like communism , any economic theory which assumes the honesty of humans to adhere to your perfect system and achieve perfect outcomes ... is a complete fucking lie.

The assumptions of laissez-faire Capitalism are impossible to have hold true. So everything ascribed to what 'the market' should accomplish is a fairy tale, because humans don't play according to your ideology.

There is no free market. Never has been. Never will be.

This is precisely why all of those people who bray about deregulation and the free market are either deluded, or in on the scam

In many cases, the free market approach works in theory, but not in practice because theory little things like buying influence, gobbling up companies to make local monopolies, dividing territory to make local monopolies, etc don't exist. The folks who keep saying "the market will fix everything" look at the theory and ignore that the theory also includes a public with access to enough data to make an informed decision (no hiding charges below the fold - i.e. advertising $50 a month and then adding in $30 in "fees and taxes") and with enough choices to be able to vote with their wallets.

I would love for the free market approach to work with Comcast. Really, I would. Sadly, Comcast has taken the free market, bent it over, and is currently doing some unspeakable things to it while saying they need to buy out Time Warner Cable so they can "serve the customer better." (I think "serve the customer" is cable-speak and I don't think I want what they really plan on "serving" us!)

They can also promise a nice, cushy lobbyist position after the Congressman retires from public office. So you act like a good little politician and parrot just what your corporate masters tell you to say so that when you decide to step down you will be paid a good wage to sit around doing nothing with the occasional passing corporate "requests" on to your old colleagues.

Like it or not, the corporations have more or less rigged the game.

There is no chance in hell we get what we want, because the politicians have all quite literally been bought and paid for, and are little more than corporate shills.

This is precisely why all of those people who bray about deregulation and the free market are either deluded, or in on the scam -- because these systems will always become horribly corrupt, and be sold to the highest bidder. And it's a lie to believe that system is self correcting -- because the system is rigged.

American politics (and, indeed, much of the world) is a cesspool of cronyism, and rich assholes cutting through the laws which prevent other rich assholes from raping the system.

Corporate lawyers and lobbyists have far more clout than "the people".

Welcome to the dystopian future where the corporations and the surveillance state work hand in hand, but the state is on the corporate payroll -- at least, the ones who hold any real power.

This is the reason why the bankers who ripped us all off in the housing meltdown never saw any charges -- because they all advise the fucking presidents on economic policy.

It really is time to eat the rich, because they're not in the least concerned about us in this equation.