Contractors.

Some of them also do independent work; but others (in terms of customer base and income) are basically federal employees in all but name and price.

Note to the press: "Hackers" doesn't mean what you think is means.

There are no false positives, comrade citizen, only people who harbor unpatriotic doubts about the accuracy of our Intelligence Community. Surely you aren't one of those?

Is it not more unreasonable that we have five million people (out of a total of just under 320 million, with labor force size ~155 million, unknown percentage of that with characteristics that make them getting a clearance rather unlikely) involved in Super Secret Uncle Sam Stuff?
br> I'm less interested in crying for the poor, poor, clearanceholders and more interested in why a touch over three percent of the US labor force spends its time pushing classified paper.

No, they're always fair. If our premise is that it's "fair" for corporations to extract the maximum amount of wealth from people, then surely it is also "fair" for people to extract the maximum amount of wealth from corporations.

It, again, comes down to willingness to pay. It is fair for the companies to raise prices as high as possible without scaring off their customer base. It is fair for government to raise taxes as high as possible without scaring off their tax base.

They check all that stuff before you're cleared, and every time your clearance is renewed. I find it hard to believe that this isn't already at least partially true already.

The one major difference between (contemporary) ethernet and wireless scenarios is that, now that switches have pretty much 100% replaced hubs, 'shared media' issues tend to occur only between a computer and its switch, so there really isn't as much pressure for research on elegant coexistence. Yeah, a bit of QoS algorithm tweaking; but 'How can we allow 1Gb, 100Mb, 10Mb, and 4800bps transmissions to coexist on a single hub and set of cables?' just isn't a relevant question. Everybody hates shared media, and switching got cheap, so we just skipped it.

With wireless, ye olde luminiferous aether is all you get, barring waveguides which are unlikely to be a big hit in the mobile device market. It isn't so much that Joe User's cellphone needs to be able to download super l33t fast, it's that there is a strong incentive to wring as much total bandwidth out of the spectrum available as we possibly can, not primarily to support silly stunts by single devices; but to get more devices with moderate performance running in the same area without falling in a screaming heap.

Especially on batteries, you hit diminishing returns pretty quickly as you increase data speed for any single device(a few oddballs with better power supplies and historical options that basically came down to 'bring an entire damn satellite uplink truck' probably do want realtime 4K streaming back to the studio...)

However, if the techniques used are suitably clever, technology that can be used to demonstrate impressive-but-irrelevant peak speeds is likely also of use to provide endurable speeds to ever more devices in the same area(and may specifically include, in addition to pure advances in signal-wrangling, more explicit definition and standardization of latency critical endpoints(voice mostly) vs. latency sensitive (cellular data cards) and lowest-cost latency insensitive (embedded sensor widgets dumping a chunk of data to HQ)).

They probably do want NSA fingerprints all over it. You don't think that they let us run the "Dagger Complex" right there in the open because they are still just that terrified of the commies, or their economy is desperately dependent on our foreign aid or something?

I don't see it as very creative, but otherwise I agree ;-)

Like most things Reagan, that works right up to the point where you actually have to implement it. Increasing water resources means increasing energy usage. Which is great when you have plentiful energy, except that we don't. Energy costs money, and clean energy (the kind that doesn't pollute the "free" clean water sources we have) costs even more money and takes even more energy to get moving.

Not using a resource always costs less than converting a non-usable resource into a usable one.

Ronald Reagan was a nice old man, a great people person, and a charismatic leader. And that counts for a lot when you're dealing with people and leaders. But he was dumber than a brick when it came to economics and technology.

I though most of it came from snow melt on the western half of the continental divide.

Exporting 100 billion gallons, is, of course, utter bullshit. The only water that gets actually exported is the water weight of the exports. There is additional water lost through evaporation due to agricultural irrigation, which exceeds the non-irrigated evaporation rate. That last one is the real target, and the concern of this veginazi.

Where, exactly, so you think your drinking water comes from? Animal breath, sweat, piss, and former animal breath/sweat/piss that has already been condensed into current bodies of water on the planet, or trapped in underground aquifers from ancient animals

Water "lost" to a region is that which is directly moved when the food is harvested and trucked out of the area, or evaporation due to agriculture which exceeds the natural evaporation rate and results in dispersion outside of the local climate area.

If you're worried about drinking water, you should lament the rain which falls in the ocean.

Closer to 10% wrong. Beef cattle are rarely fed alfalfa - I say this as a former "farmer" 30 years ago as a teen. Alfalfa is twice as expensive as timothy or field grass. It does, however contain calcium, which is great (necessary) for lactating cattle a goats, which is why it's used mcuh more for dairy animals. They pretty much all get grain, though, because the energy content is higher. For Dairy, that means more calories available for producing milk, and for beef it translates to a heavier animal, which in turn is a higher dollar yield at market.

The 100 billion gallons of water in exported alfalfa, I agree, is so stupid that it basically invalidates the entire article's credibility.

"Bitcoins are like cash."

I really REALLY wish people would stop saying this.
They're not. The way the Bitcoin system works, they're more like commodities.
Granted, some businesses have allowed you to pay for things with said fractional commodities, but still. At some point, an actual cash value has to be determined before you can actually SPEND them.