I don't blame the conspiracy theorists for coming up with nonsense, or on occasion, very valid questions.

We have for VERY GOOD REASON lost faith in our institutions like government and the media, because they have been dishonest with us.

By being more transparent and letting the public know MORE -- the Boston police and investigators got much better data than when they say; "report to us anything suspicious and we'll keep a database -- no need to tell us about yourself, we already know."

No but you see; "Google has promised NOT TO SUE FIRST, and the artist lives in a country that respects creative works and doesn't blindly fall at the feet of big money and the ownership society."

No, no. I've got to stop. I think I might pee myself if I make any more of these jokes.

... but I don't watch it. Not that I don't think it's good -- but I tend to watch these kinds of shows in a cluster. It's annoying to get into a story, and then wait 6 months for its resolution.

So I pay for it, and Honey Boo Boo, and thousands of other things I don't watch to get the few things I do.

So for me, as I'm sure it is for a lot of people; we already have a small portion of our budget set aside for "entertainment" -- and it's not going to go up, just because an exec somewhere wants 15% growth, or is upset that people don't pay $15 for a DVD anymore.

Dish Network has my $85 a month -- but I don't use their "service" to watch things any time, it stinks and I'd rather not use a bandwidth noisy, badly designed wifi to download back shows or overpriced new content - I already have the XBox for that and their network barely works as well.

Media is a "service" -- you pay for a stream, not a single show. If I paid "a la carte" I'd probably spend a lot less than $85 a month. The Media sellers want their cake and eat it too but they can't have it -- not unless they want to start actual journalistic news again and uncover the bank frauds, and all the other fat cat criminals who abuse the system.

Americans have lower wages. We have entertainment fees. So therefore, some of you are going to have to lose our money -- there's just less of it. If the Media wants more, they have to push for higher wages, and that means tariffs and higher taxes on the wealthy.

Or they can arrest people who barely have enough money for an internet connection for downloading crap that they charged me for but I didn't watch yet.

I have to agree.

What would be COOL, is if credit card debt were looked at the same way as you and I speculating on the stock market. In fact, the bank knows more about you than we know about some company we invest in.

If you and I pick wrong, we lose money on a stock -- so why can't we just say; if someone doesn't pay back a credit card, the only recourse of the credit card company is that they can NOT give them more credit. That would solve the situation where my dog gets 0 interest for 3 month offers with a page of lawyer type.

Nobody is forcing banks to give people credit -- so the banks should not be able to use the law to GET MONEY back from those they gave credit -- they already can club you with a bad credit rating, after all.

Either that, or we should get guaranteed stock performance - and the banks can pay if Apple or IBM shares lose 50% of value -- it's about the same racket they have going so it must be fair.

I just want to say; "Kudos, your thread was f-ing awesome."

There are a lot of ways to say that the system isn't necessarily fair -- but you hit the major points with clarity and not too much fluff.

How is this better and cheaper than a $35 microwave oven? Have you seen what these do to a CD or any other kind of disk?

And it's cost competitive with a bullet.

I can read that many slashdot posters are quite creative in finding cheaper and easier ways to destroy data -- so I can only suppose that the business model here is; "We make you look cooler so you can pad that giant budget."

Hex stochastic noise scrambling of a drive before repeated degaussing and then Regulation level 5 shredding just sounds more responsible on a budget than; "Chunked that thing in the microwave and watched the sparks, dude!"

I imagine as you say this, that there is froth and spittle being flecked all over the screen and keyboard you use.

I'm typing at this moment on a shiny proprietary OS based on open source core and bowser that have received huge improvements. I watch stupid anime shows at night, and likely, I've been sucked into this shiny hedonistic fly trap you so abhor.

Yet part of me notes that you forgot to mention how Android came to be slapped on top of someone else's JAVA, and I expect that Samsung will fork it, and then sue Google for copyright infringement because they didn't patent X, Y and Z in China ... any day now.

The week after that, well all be getting LINUX distress in Kanji, just to have drivers that work with all the Chinese components. Nobody will hear your screams about hapless free labor hobbyists over the sounds of pre-pubescent teen bands repurposing classic British rock songs but in cuter, more colorful ways. Led Zeppelin and rap fused with pink bows and a giggle.

I'll remember that it all started here with someone on a blog, championing the efforts of rag tag free labor hobbyists who became pawns in this epic struggle. Not realizing that there were deeper, darker forces at play than Apple and it's devil-spawned walled gardens.

They "break the law" in order to follow their agenda and 'get the bad guys'. Only -- who really are the bad guys? A few hackers out there who annoy banks? More likely, mobsters who routinely extort these companies for their own databases and get paid off without the public knowing.

But who protects us from a DOJ that knows everything, but doesn't arrest bankers and Wall Street crooks -- and meanwhile, they arrest people protesting this massive corruption for loitering in parks or on trumped up charges?

Who protects us from an NSA that knows everything, and inevitably sells the data on Americans to private companies, who then sell this data to whatever foreign government or company that wants it?

So many of these agencies demand less public oversight and more access to private data -- what exactly, is this army of security obsessed people really providing? Their future energy is going to be spent merely going after anyone who threatens their own power -- the original purpose of why they were "cutting corners for justice" will be long forgotten.

I'm not sure here if the damage was based on "AT&T's reputation" -- meaning, it hurts their income for people to know you don't need to hack them.

OR

Over 100,000 people now have their reputation's damaged for being associated by email to AT&T.

You know that only 300,000 of AT&T's closest advertisers, spammers and script kiddies have these email addresses.

Is the going rate 2 pennies an email to buy as an advertiser or am I being too pricey here?

is a compelling theory.

However, the "modern" person has more to cope with, than just the loss of nomadic freedom.

Now we've got long forms, complex investments, licensing fees. Most of us aren't farming or doing the things that the herders turned farmers had to cope with.

So perhaps we now use ritalin and oxycontin to "cope" with the coping for our new, non-nomadic technical lifestyle.

I'm not sure however, so I'll tweet the idea to my friends and take another anti-depressant.

Ironically, a lot of douchebags today figure dream of a future where society breaks down. In the dream, they all survive -- figuring nobody else will think to use a gun. They also don't dream about the time and energy it takes to procure and process food -- as it doesn't befit their glamorous notions of survival.

Douchebags are allowed to survive and thrive because of society, and thus society is in jeopardy if too many douchebags are allowed to survive. Truly, they are the seeds of our own undoing.

Well brewing Beer is kind of a resource intensive process if all you wanted to do was kill bacteria.

What is forgotten here is that the "earlier form of beer" was more of a Meade. It's a high protein, high carb health drink in comparison to today's beer.

So the "Meade" allowed nomadic tribes to convert grains into more available proteins -- whatever it did socially, just from the dietary basis the production of "Meade" made a lot of sense for a stationary society.

I get your point, but I think you and Slashdot have to come to terms with the fact that "nano" is now buzz-word compliant. It's like how "Sanitation Engineer" started making everyone an engineer.

"Nano" actually now means "small" to the press. I'm sorry it isn't technically correct, but you are going to have to get used to it.

Now, I've got some bad news to tell you about "quantum" as well...

I don't think you could be sure that the US isn't the #1 snoop on the planet.

They've been building a MASSIVE data center -- I believe in Colorado (after the one in Utah). It could well be "private company" run, as that would make it "legal" with a few hand washing exercises.

We learned that AT&T sought and received indemnity for copying their entire pipe to the NSA during some internal spying investigations.

So no -- the only reason they can't list where the US is on the list of "spying on citizens" is because they are way more sophisticated than Saudi Arabia.

Though they must be tone deaf because it's a major source of anger amongst internet savvy blogizens. They need more security due to the existence of their security. And they can't trust their citizens anymore because we can't trust them.

So true.

Not being in Bradley Mannings head -- I can only go from my own thoughts on the matter. And if I had information that I felt the world needed to know, but it upset the status quo, NYT or any of the leading rags wouldn't even be on my radar.

Wikileaks is the only group, outside of a few internet blogs, who I know would get the information out.

The other PLUS is that presumably, they don't even know who sends them the information - and it's likely the Government caught Manning using techniques that would have been illegal before Bush suspended our Constitution until further notice.