What a complete logic fail. Your semantic processing is so myopic and shallow that you end up believing something exactly the opposite of reality. Here's your homework assignment: describe what a "socialized government" consists of; include especially its component parts such as the agents which enact its rules, maintain its structure, and execute its policies. Then tell me that you "assume the worst in people".

Or do you perhaps have citizenship in some heretofore unknown computer-operated Algorithm Nation?
Even if so, please describe the agents which write and implement your nation's algorithms.

Soylent green is people.

WHOOSH!! ...went the boilerplate/obligatory Slashdot humor.

Aw man, it's an obligatory Slashdot joke. Nothing personal.You know, it's just like when you and another PC-thermal-dissipation guru are at the batting cages practicing for your baseball team's upcoming game, and you make snarky deprecating comments about each other's swing. Or when you and a buddy are down at your boxing gym sparring with each other and trash talking each other. Or whatever other sports you and your many friends play. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

Sounds like a very well-thought out setup that you've fine-tuned over many hours of work. I bet it really impresses the girlfriends you bring over.

You're being too literal. The song is the psychological theme of the entire series -- the ship's crew are all in their own way voluntary rebels or involuntary outcasts who for one reason or another are only at home IN "the sky", that is, trawling through space visiting world after world with no solid ground, only the ship as "home" and only each other as "family/friend". They are ramblers and frontiersmen. The song isn't actually claiming that it is physically impossible to prevent them from seeing or entering "the sky". It's their creed; both a statement of defiance and a statement of purpose -- no matter what else each one of them may have lost, they are determined to preserve their freedom.

"The sky" isn't just the physical sky. The lyric is a metaphor.

Irrelevant, once his first couple calls to establish contact are accessed by the very people he is wanting to report on, he is arrested and jailed without legal representation under various "homeland security" protections before he can actually meet with the press to release any information.

You mean, the members of the press who Snowden, of all people, knew very well were being surveilled directly or indirectly by the people he sought to blow the whistle on?

Of the many horrible decisions made by President Obushma in the last 10 years, I think his most enduring political legacy might just be his excellent job of prosecuting/persecuting whistleblowers and stifling public review of how the governmental sausage-grinder works. By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, people will have been molded into an attitude of reflexive submission to their Overseers.

Exactly. The government goes out of its way to grant legal immunity to telecom/info companies for leaking private customer information to the government, because the government decrees that it has an unlimited "Need To Know" clearance on all its citizens actions, but of course when an individual leaks information about what the government is privately and illegally doing, the government decrees that the citizens have zero "Need to Know" on what their government is doing.

The liability/criminality arrows increasingly flow one way these days. Within 5-10 years any remaining vestiges of privacy will have been neatly sewn up. Just like the cliche that "the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it", well, the government's Big Data agencies view privacy as damage, and legislate around it.

In the future dystopia dominated by a few giant megalopolies, the company making your enhanced prostheses will also own the entertainment companies. Your RetinEyes implants will come hardwired with company-approved DRM which will automatically deactivate recording functions when presented with the subliminal QR command codes that flash every 10 seconds on the movie screen.

Thousands of DOD-contractor engineers over the past 60 years would disagree with you. Highly-credentialed scientists have been responsible for millions of deaths in the modern world.

This seems like dangerous advice if you care about the psychological well-being of those you leave behind. Look no further than the Schiavo case. If you have all your conceivably anticipated situations spelled out in legally sound documentation, then the context of your death becomes about your loved ones learning to cope with the reality that you are going to die -- which is a reality we all will face anyway. If you just leave it up to one person to do it, you create a situation where disagreements among loved ones might possibly destroy relationships or at least cause severe emotional pain as people have to deal with the natural tendency to contextualize your death as "my brother-in-law didn't love my sister enough to keep her alive and hope for a miracle".

I didn't say 40 years ago. I said three months ago. Obviously the systems which propel the world today are not the same systems which propelled human society in its early stages.

You didn't FIFM. You simply spoke again of trees when I addressed the forest. The whole is greater than merely the sum of its parts.

That's exactly backwards from the question I might ask. The real question is, "Would the leaders of 30 years ago make the same decisions as the ones today?" The answer is, "Probably so, because they would be working within the bounds of the same system". It's all social engineering and choice architecture.

Which of course is beside the point. Millions of Millions of cells in your body now are not the same cells as three months ago. Yet "you" as a system persist. The genius of the political philosophers and statesmen of the 1700s and early 1800s was that they recognized government is a system which has certain inherent tendencies that lead to bad ends, and therefore we must build in limits to those tendencies. 200 years later this country is populated and run by their naive Eloi descendents, whose political philosophy no longer recognizes that Government is a system, and your policies should focus on the systemic effects first. Just because the individual workers in the belly of Leviathan change periodically doesn't mean we should ignore the Emergent Properties of governmental systems. Hitler made history, but History also made Hitler. Create a government and give it power, and individuals will arise to exercise that power. But modern people have a far less sophisticated political philosophy in which the government is perceived as little more than the lever in a Skinner box, and so all we do is vote for the outcomes we want to occur when we press that lever. There is no regard for what disastrous systemic tendencies we are enabling by insisting that government provide these outcomes.

Our collective intelligence vector now stands around saying, "But it's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!"

'Although you can never prove that correlation is equal to causation, certainly the most plausible explanation is that [the tremors] are related to the gas injection,' says Cliff Frohlich, a seismologist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics in Austin, who co-authored the study."

I would like to know what are the various possible explanations for the tremors, and the rubric used for evaluating the relative plausibility of those explanations, so that we can all evaluate Mr. Frohlich's opinion that gas injection is "certainly" the cause of the tremors.

So... why put a dollar figure on it? If the number is 4 trillion or 90 billion, what would be the difference in strategies that consumers and organizations should pursue in each case? Fey's language is so obviously just more marketdroid conjuration babble -- "Look! look over here at my right hand! Nothing in it at all! ."

The fact is, Mr. Fey, that the danger of security flaws isn't in the direct dollar amount of damage done by any single incursion, nor in the aggregate sum total of attacks to date. The danger of unsecured machines/networks is cost-neutral, because an unsecured machine/network necessarily implies an infinite relative cost to you -- that is, it is the state of being unsecured which is untenable, not the potential monetary loss. If your neighbor one night digs a trench through your yard and buries an extension cord spliced into your house's electrical power, does it really matter to you whether he is only plugging in his mp3 player to charge it once a week, versus running all his refrigerators and washing machines?

You cannot really put any dollar amount on someone else controlling part or all of your machine/network, because Access is not an object, it is a potentiality. A security hole is a hole is a hole. Patch it up regardless. If on September 10, 2001 some insurance actuary named Smith would have calculated the "loss" experienced in an airplane hijacking by determining the depreciated cost of the plane itself, any cargo it carried, the cost of compensatory marketing to restore consumer confidence, the earning potential of the passengers, etc. The next day, a bunch of black hat social engineering crackers capitalized on a long-unpatched security hole - Access to the cockpit - to pull off an exploit which had an eventual cost far exceeding our actuary's previous estimate by several factors of ten. (And that cost will continue to reverberate/multiply for decades to come.)

The focus on dollar value is simply Mr. Fey's way of opening the haggling process over how much his company wants to charge you. He knows that whatever number "industry experts" give will be quoted and repeated by our infotainment media and by other businesses/consultants wanting to stake their own claim in the network security gold rush. Once the notion enters public consciousness, well what's a $25,000/year enterprise license for software and security services to an individual company when faced with the "common sense" understanding that we're talking about great googly moogly-illions of dollars in Crime. So now he's simply been caught overestimating the number, which is expected in ANY good haggle. Now he's here to tell us "Okay, okay, because you're such a good friend, I'm going to roll it down to $300 billion -- special just for you!"

Don't constantly test and patch flaws because of some dollar amount reported by some "expert study" you read about. Constantly test and patch flaws because a good administrator takes care of business. The number is FUD, but your job is the same either way.