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Zune Man!

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

Yes, no, and no, in order.

With proper representation, taxation would not be so odious. But the will of the people is being soundly ignored at every possible turn...

What I actually want is weak central government. I don't know that we need less government (well, in certain areas we certainly do, like military) but what we certainly need is less centralization. Pare the feds back to handling disputes and actually defending the country, making treaties.

I also want representative democracy, and for the people to ratify bills directly. If that makes it harder to pass laws, OK. We have too many already. Let's get rid of some before we make more.

I'm more likely to get my unicorn.

Right, and with government "protection", you also get fucked. They take our money and then spend it oppressing us. I don't know that getting secure banking out of it is all that great a trade.

Sure, theoretically. But is the currency you're getting worth the currency you're getting? And are you actually getting equal protection?

If there's missing millions then there's missing fraction-of-millions in taxes. So there's a motivation to go looking for it right there. And then, also, once it's in their hot little hands they can always decide to keep it. Even if all they do is sit on it for a while and then eventually cough it up, it can make them money.

No rush.

It means I'm fat, kind of like you're a bit of a douchebag.

That's odd. Everyone who took it had a 100% chance of dying at some point.

Double selection bias. People who are good at walking will tend to continue to do it for fun into older age. Meanwhile, while you're hiking, you tend to meet people who hike. Walking is of course great exercise, however. I have asthma and I'm a bit heavy but I'm a good walker, I can walk all day as long as the way isn't too steep.

Everyone knows about the evil bit. That's what prompted me to write the bracket remark. But it's not quite the same as a "we're from the NSA, nothing to see here" flag.

What's with the clickbait headlines? By itself, the headline is total BS. The actual statement made, however, is spot on. The hole in your security doesn't care who exploits it. There's no "good guy" flag in IP headers (though I'm sure some April 1st RFC will soon introduce it).

What worries me most is that we could win this fight, if it weren't for our own governments deciding to betray us. There are vastly more people interested in secure communication and other people not being able to spy on or subvert our computers and mobile devices than there are people interested in compromised communications and systems (basically only criminals and some deluded, criminal-if-the-laws-were-right elements of governments).

There is just one problem to Bruce's argument: The largest and most powerful spy agency in the world disagrees with his fundamental assumption. We often forget that the NSA has two missions, and they are exactly the two things that Bruce argues cannot co-exist: To secure the computing infrastructure of the US against foreign espionage, and to provide espionage on foreign communication.
The NSA believes, and/or is tasked with exactly these two things that Bruce says (and I agree) are mutually exclusive. No surprise they've gone rogue, their very mission statement is a recipe for a mental breakdown through cognitive dissonance.

Dunald Trump has been trying to prevent Scotland from building an offshore wind farm because he says they would ruin the view from a golf course he's building on a protected area of sand dunes. Trump also thinks that wind farms cause something called Wind Turbine Syndrome.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what you refactor, when and how?

I have 3 year old code that I would like to refactor because I've since switched framework (from CodeIgniter to Symfony 2) and it would bring it in line with all my other projects, allowing me more easy code-reuse and not maintaining two frameworks both on servers and in my mind. But it's largely a convenience factor and I would agree that it will probably not improve code quality very much.

But I also have 12+ year old code written in plain PHP with my own simple database abstraction layer. I'm quite certain that refactoring that would do a world of good.

If you're a climate scientist who says there's no Anthropogenic Climate Change, there are lots of Fossil Fuel groups that will shower you with money - much like Tobacco companies would to any Scientists that said Smoking doesn't cause Cancer.

And predictably its often the very same "scientists" who where tobacco "experts" in the 80s saying that tobacco is harmless who now are "atmospheric scientists" claiming that CO2 violates physics and doesn't heat up when exposed to infrared light.