Weren't there huge complaints as a result of this?

Oh yes. And they were told, "elections have consequences".

This thing sort of sounds like a medis pc or s chrome cast with a monthly fee and a spiffy UI. Am i missing something?

http://xkcd.com/327/

I wonder if little bobby tables applied for a passport while this was going on?

You idiots also said that about TV's, music devices, homes etc...

No, they didn't.

But I'll say it right now: My house does not need to be on the Internet. My shoes do not need to be on the Internet.

Not this Internet, at least. Because every one of those connected "things" is going to require connecting to a web page to manage, and that web page is going to require you to create a profile, that is connected to your personal information. The Internet of Things is not designed for your benefit. Right now, in 2014, do you really need to be told that? Have you not noticed anything happening around you?

For a group of people who are supposed to be tech-savvy, a lot of techies really don't seem to get what the Internet is about. There is some fantasy from the 1980's that still seems to hang on in the minds of people. Maybe a fairy tale that is told from generation to generation. But it has nothing to do with the truth. That Internet we dreamed about decades ago never happened.

Not at all. It made the position of Islamist groups that were arguing from more moderate positions, and generally preferred a democratic transition to their goal (like Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots), much weaker. At the same time, it made the position of groups arguing for violent jihad much stronger - especially since, with foreign intervention in Muslim countries, they could declare jihad to be fard ayn (individually obligatory for any observant Muslim) on scriptural grounds. It also created lots of martyrs.

Think about where things were before the intervention, and where they are now. Taliban is rapidly regaining control over Afghanistan, and in the meantime Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are also rapidly Islamized by similar Salafist strains. In Pakistan, military and intelligence are stuffed with Taliban-friendly Islamists. In Iraq and Syria, large swaths are under control of an armed jihadi group that has officially declared itself to be the Caliphate, and which practices the version of Islam that even many other extremist Salafi organizations find too brutal - and they keep expanding territory and getting a steady influx of volunteers. Volunteers, I must add, that come from our own countries, and are in many cases not only our citizens by law, but are born and raised here within our culture - and yet falling under the influence of extremist preachers who convert them. Do you really think that we could see anything on that scale without the free (to them) advertising that the West gave to jihadis?

By this logic, a kid with paper and pencil passing notes secretly could be an organization of war and if he passed a secret note to a politicians, he would be levying war with his methods and tools of war. Why don't you try to stretch it a bit more and shoe horn something really silly into it.

Unless you believe that intelligence gathering is an act on war (in which case every single country on the face of Earth is at war with every other country, with the possible exception of some African countries and microstates), then, no, CIA is not an organization of war.

And as a libertarian, you should be ashamed of yourself - you're engaging in exact same kind of sophistry that you decry in your opponents the statists whenever they "creatively reinterpret" some constitutional provision, like in Wickard v. Filburn.

CIA is just one TLA out of many more that are part of the same problem. This mentality, that they can do whatever the hell they want, and fuck law, due process and constitution, so long as they catch the arbitrarily defined bad guys of the day, is pervasive throughout all government agencies that have anything even remotely to do with law enforcement or military. NSA and CIA spying are links of the same chain that includes DEA no-knock warrants, police departments buying MRAPs for bragging rights etc.

And yes, there are some agencies that should literally go to jail wholesale. For example, I don't see how you can be working for DEA and not be complicit in activities that, 50 years ago, would be decried as stereotypical police state jackboot thug activity - and all that violence for the sake of suppressing non-violent, consensual activity (well, at least nominally - in practice, these days, it's more often an excuse, and the actual goal is cashing in on asset forfeiture).

I don't understand why this has been modded as a troll. He took the words right out of my mouth.

My "things" don't need to be on the internet. I like the Internet being in a neat compartment where I can go when I want it. I don't want it following me around.

Seriously, what the fuck is so attractive, I mean, given that the Internet has become pretty much a combination of a low-rent shopping mall and the equivalent of having your boss, your government and your phone company looking up your ass every minute of the day, about an internet of things? Have people really gotten that bored with life? Can you really not live one single minute without the illusion that your measly existence matters one bit to the universe?

Can anyone be so dense as to not be able to see what this "internet of things" is really all about? And here's a hint: It's not about making your life better. For fuck's sake.

Well, that and lying would require you knowing what you said was not the truth at the time you said it.

Incorrect facts is not lying. Your friend who thinks the game starts at 8pm only to find it was 7:30pm did not lie, he got his facts wrong. Now if you said that knowing the correct time, it would be a lie. Here it seems that the facts were corrected as soon as he was aware of it. I do not see lying coming from him (his staff and employees on the other hand).

I do not exactly see how an all powerful and intrusive spying regime is less government.

This story is the epitome of big government through and through. But not, the small government politicians do not seem to want to cut this down just like the big government politicians. Your argument seems frivolous on it's head.

They have it, and you helped them remove the things that prevented them from getting it before.

I know not RTFA is a badge of honor here, but you could at least have read the article summery. No one removed anything legally. Employees ignored a separation of limits or a firewall as the summery put it and even knowing they were not supposed to, they did anyways. No politician or political ideology allowed or helped in this. If anything, it would be the leading from behind and phoning it in that our leadership in government seems to be doing any more.

I see where you are coming from, and even admire it in a way, but I feel compelled to point out another side of the issue (one other side, there are probably 20 more). Online bullys don't usually just make speech involving insults and putdowns. There's a high degree of these being accompanied by false accusations that can easily count as libel, and by misinformation which is often damaging in other ways. (In fact, for cases where bullying goes on for over 3 months, the chance of one or more of these other actions approaches unity). We've seen cases where, for example, the bully has progressed to claiming that a victim is HIV+, and then giving out a lot of misinformation about HIV in general, falsely claiming to be a doctor or to have gotten the information from one, an/or claiming to having hacked their victim's medical information. These things are generally criminal in and of themselves, and/or have other negative impacts (such as triggering security audits of medical records keeping to make sure the bully's claim isn't genuine), Protecting teens against insults and put downs is a mixed bag, but when you add in protecting them from bad medical and legal advice, and false claims that they can't protect their records if they see a doctor, and so many other things, any sane society is going to opt for some limitations, at least with regard to minors.
          This form of bullying has many interrelated bad effects: Laws get passed, because existing laws don't seem to be stopping the problem behavior. Free speech becomes hard to protect when the test cases are such unsympathetic types - even the ACLU sometimes declines to take a case where the jury is likely to be looking for any chance to convict on anything remotely applicable. Even if a politician actually cares about free speech (I know, I know, but some of them actually do.). The ones that actually try to live up to the Constitution, the UN declaration of rights, or other such inspirational ideas are also the ones who really want to stop these other related abuses, so even they will look to compromise (and for the ones who are just pandering to whatever group will get them elected, that sort of compromise is a no-brainer). Let a creep get away with enough, and everybody wants to see some sort of blowback, and if it looks like that creep is just hiding behind a first amendment claim, then the first amendment starts to be called a "technicality".It takes more character than most have to defend Vlad Adolph McKnife-wielding-Psycho. That's why there are phrases such as "Online Stalker" - behavior analogous to real world stalking, not just insults.
        My feeling is, even if we should let kids naturally develop tougher skins and reognize that free speech includes just the sorts of speech we find ourselves half wishing there was a law against, there's too many real creeps on the net for it to happen. The best way to stop it would be for the laws against slander, libel, and impersonation to be enforced so the things that are not just speech are what we are regulating, but we don't seem to do that, so bad laws WILL get passed instead.

So if it's a representation of the community, why would you believe it has anything to do with affirmative action? The "point" of the GPP was that black people are "takin' ar jerbs".

Not unfeasible at all, unless they need actual identites. For example here in Norway all phone numbers must have an owner identified with our version of an SSN, even unlisted and prepaid numbers. So an easy way to have an "id" is to send a one time code to the cell during registration. That account is now linked to my phone number which links to my id. If they're hacked, all they have is phone numbers. Many discussion boards already do that to reduce spam and make bans more effective

Uh... no. If I wanted to play games, I would have invested in an actual decent FX card rather than the cheapest POC I could find that would allow me to run D3D. I use Windows for three small applications whose authors never bothered to write Linux software or ensure Wine compatibility. Two of the three are pieces of software that came bundled with specialty USB devices.

As for me being a "Linux whore," I don't pay for Linux, and Linux certainly doesn't pay me, so I think that analogy fails.