I wouldn't think so. That feels more like a promotional discount (like a coupon). You can't sell them, transfer them, or even use unless you're spending even more money through eBay. Taxing eBay bucks would be like taxing the use of the coupons they print out for you at the grocery store register - those are only "worth" something if you're in the store buying more goods later, at a slightly lower promotional rate.

I'm never clear on why people use the word "democracy" when making statements like that. You can have a democracy that votes, in a simple majority, to re-introduce slavery. Or to adopt Sharia law, etc.

Democracy has nothing to do with it. The US is a constitutionally chartered republic. It happens to use local democracy, in various formats, to elect representatives to participate in parts of that republic's systems of checks and balances.

Democracy isn't a goal, it's a grubby and frequently ugly thing that happens to be necessary in order to keep certain aspects of the republic working correctly. We should all be very, very glad that the country isn't run as a capital-D democracy. Save that for home owners' associations, the PTA, and the local rock climbing club.

False dichotomy. You're pretending that he can't be talking about stuff he does know about and had some access to and swore (under penalty of criminal prosecution) he wouldn't talk about, while also while not also being an Assange-like attention whore who is laying on a bunch of BS. He can be a reckless violator of his clearance and a delusional or fabricating BS-er at the same time. Which is looking more and more likely.

I didn't say the middle class was rich. I said that rich people pay most of the income tax.

Only about 53% percent of the public pays income taxes. Out of the rest, 17% are elderly or make almost no income, and the rest are let off the tax hook ... and 30% of those pay negative income taxes (which is so say, they get a check instead of paying taxes on their income, because of the EITC).

So let's pay attention to those 53% who actually pay income taxes: The top 10% of all earners pay over 70% of the income taxes. Would you call the top 10% middle class? How about the top 25% percent ... would you call those, what, the rich and the upper-upper-middle class? That top 25% pays over 87% of the income taxes. Which means that 75% of people with income pay only 13% of the income taxes, and half of the country is exempt from that, or actually get a check instead of paying.

No, I'm talking about people who file every year with the IRS, but who owe no income tax (or, typically, end up getting a check from the IRS instead - paying negative income taxes). Half of the people in the US who make money pay no federal income taxes on it.

Except, they pay almost all of the income taxes. You do understand that, right? Half the "taxpayers" pay no income taxes at all. Of the other half, a very small minority of them (the richest ones) pay almost all of it.

What? I'm not berating the minority of people who pay most of the income taxes. I'm simply pointing out that it's a minority of people who do pay the vast majority of the income taxes.

And they're gambling with money that has already been taxed at least once, and they have no tax recourse if they lose money on bad gambles. The idea is to get people to put money to work growing companies and the jobs and economic activity that comes with that .. which in turn generates way more tax revenue across the spectrum (locally, federally, etc).

But the Greek people have - for a long time - been demanding all sorts of things that obviously don't (and can't) work, and that's why they're in such a mess. Endless entitlement-minded demands from the Nanny State are self destructive, and ... Greece has indeed self destructed.

This isn't even close to correct.

The top 10% of earners pay over 70% of the income taxes.

The lower-earning entire HALF of the country pays just over 2%.

The top 25% percent pay close to 90% of the taxes. Are you saying that the middle class is actually just a few percent of the country?

Flash drives seem to be characterized by very high failure rates. Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation. All real drives -- the ones you use for your data -- would have to be external bricks.

Hard drives are also prone to high failure rates. If your "real data" lives only on a single magnetic disk (in a portable device, FFS) you're already asking to lose it.

No, a lot of the people already paying little or no income tax (like roughly half of the people in the US) will continue to pay little or no income taxes, while the minority of the people who pay essentially all of the taxes are told to pay even more, and hated for being the people who do so.

No, that is not the problem. Have you ever been to Greece?

Mostly because it's harmful for people working in compartmentalized roles in such areas to assume they can (never mind should) make a judgement about what should or shouldn't be considered sensitive. There's harm is in making it fashionable to ignore the obligations one takes on when working in a role that can involve the lives of others who work in dangerous settings. The next guy might also be in the "information wants to be free" mode, too, and think that dishing out private keys or credentials or whatever else is just as freedom-loving as dishing out hundreds of thousands of documents you haven't even bothered to read.

So it's not as much about some guy's anecdote or PowerPoint file shedding marginally more light on telco business record archiving - it's about what it means to take a paycheck from an agency as you promise not to make those kinds of calls on your own, ever.

Check out SpiderOak! I've been a happy customer for some time. Solid encryption, zero-knowledge cloud storage.

I dropped DropBox a long time ago other than for moving things around that only support DropBox.