What an absolutely useless article and report. Scaremongering at its best, with no actionable content. Which plugins have vulnerabilities? Can they be mitigated through configuration changes or do they need to be disabled/uninstalled? What is the potential exposure? Those are the sort of things a computer professional needs. Where are the damned CVEs?

Climate change -- no more snow. See -- this is what climate change brings. Touchscreen laptops. Now you know who to blame.

None of those things will help you. To the NSA, the content of your email may be less important than with whom you are communicating. Yes, the care about the content of some emails, but their dragnet appears to be for network analysis -- sender, recipients, date, time, etc. The NSA almost certainly catalogs every DNS lookup you do. This is the stuff that is erroneously being referred to as metadata.

One possibly surprising way to keep your communications private is to read/post your communications to a very public forum. That way the intended recipient is difficult to determine. Keep the communication slightly covert -- a little steganography goes a long way if you can fly under the radar. Just don't trust others with your privacy.

Our rights are inalienable -- but only if we use them.

So essentially "trust the drone" to avoid collisions with planes carrying a transponder?

If you didn't see it immediately upon following the link, then I guess you will find the bullshit deeper than most.

Right.... because no insurgent would ever choose to put their hang out near a civilian airport. Someplace nice and safe from those pesky drones. Nope... that would never, ever happen.

No one is cheapening the word -- it's its usage in this form predates your absurdist politically correct world view.

Google, tell us what "democratizing" means.

If drones were equipped with automatic collision prevention systems, would those same systems not be used by opposition forces to detect the presence of these drones? The whole point of most of these drones is stealthy surveillance and/or attack.

Model I and "Creative Computing" books/magazines for me. Amazing that these books are available in eBook format now. Search for "David Ahl" on Amazon. Also here: http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/

Had loads of fun with Lunar Lander, Hunt the Wumpus, Super Star Trek, and many others.

They have an end-of-the-world complex? Citation please? I'm only familiar with the doomsday preppers here in the U.S. Something similar going on in Iran?

Build it. We have cars that fly. They are called airplanes. J. Random Citizen cannot just buy a plane and fly it. In the early days of aviation they could. But it quickly became clear that some form of training and licensing was required. If it is anything like your analogy, sure -- not everyone will be qualified. And they may put other people in danger. But we have laws to protect us from the most egregious idiocy and the regulatory framework, if needed, will be put in place quickly enough. (I say that and yet believe that we should have already instituted a "port 25" license, a "port 80" license, an "amateur internet operator license", and a "white hat security" license.)

Politically?? My Dear Sir, we do not limit our corruption to just government and politics in this fine city. What do you take us for? Amateurs?

Of course he is! http://wikiality.wikia.com/Dr._Stephen_T._Colbert,_D.F.A.

That's the only thing about this story that caught my attention.