yeah but then they come at you through 7 proxies and you're done for.

So please, explain to me how exactly your privacy is being violated. Because if you think it is, then you really need to actually read the government's explanation of the programs instead of getting it secondhand (you know, like sheep) from people who are grossly hyperbolizing the scope of what is being collected and used. They are not reading your email. They are not poring over your phone records. All they are doing is collecting the information so that, if a warrant is issued and they have probable cause to think that you might be involved in terrorism activities, they can come back later and evaluate the information to try to track down other possible terrorism suspects.

You call me a "sheep", yet it is you who is making baseless assumptions, not me. You're assuming that the people who are in charge of these programs are outright lying about the scope of them and the scrutiny and oversight they're subjected to. If Snowden had come out and said, "...and as proof that this program is being abused, the Slashdot poster Wookact is actually Joe Schmo in Walla Walla, Washington, and here are the contents of some of the private emails he's sent to people and some of the phone numbers he's called, even though I have no reason to suspect that he's involved in anything illegal," then your argument might hold water.

As it is, though, you're just throwing out baseless allegations that some hypothetical evil has been committed based on premises that I do not hold to be true, things like government is always evil, the people in charge of these programs are saying stuff that conflicts with your foregone conclusion therefore they must be lying, that there is no oversight of these programs and/or any oversight of them must be corrupt, etc. And by the way, last time I checked, people have in fact died from terrorist attacks. Also, last time I checked, several plots have been thwarted thanks to the hard work of the intelligence community, and there hasn't been an attack of the scale of 9/11 since, well, 9/11, so I have to think that something must be working pretty well and what you dismiss offhandedly as people being afraid is actually people taking some common sense precautions to not die by the thousands. It is in fact your fears of some hypothetical abuse for which there is no evidence that is warrantless. When you have some actual evidence that the programs are being abused and that their leadership is lying to us, try again and you'll make some more headway.

Is it hypothetically possible that such a program, under certain contrived circumstances, could be abused? Well, yeah, but in the sense that the fact that we have a nuclear arsenal could hypothetically be abused. Yet I don't sit around worrying all day about the possibility that a nuclear bomb might explode in my neighborhood, I have more important things to worry about and better things to do with my time.

So please, again, exactly what rights of yours have been violated? Some imaginary right to not have information about what you're doing collected by the government? If so, then do you drive a car? Then please stop reading these posts and immediately go to your local DMV and express your outrage over having to have a tag number that--gasp!--is actually retained on file that, if you commit a crime, can be used after the fact to track back to you. Have you ever worked? If so, then make sure to express outrage over the government keeping your Social Security Number and W2s on file so that if you commit tax evasion, they can find out about it and prosecute you instead of just sitting around saying, "Gosh, I sure wish we knew who this 714-89-3110 person was." Do you own a home? Make sure they don't have your address on file, because god knows that if someone calls 911 and reports gunshots at 123 Main Street, you don't want those bastards to be able to figure out that that's your house, that would be a gross violation of privacy!

Now here's the thing--I don't even believe that the government collecting all of this information is a good thing. I do not believe that it's being abused, but I do believe that there is the potential of it being abused at some point by less scrupulous people. But to be blunt, I'm not even a fraction as worried about the government abusing such power as I am private corporations with strong financial incentives to screw people over doing so, yet the vast majority of Americans don't give a shit about that happening, even being flaunted right in their faces. Also to be blunt, it's frustrating to me that we're just now all mad and upset about these programs when they were in place years ago under a different administration and the Libertarians and right-wing seemed to be perfectly fine with it then. And last but not least, to be blunt, it pisses me off that everyone's all upset about agencies and administrations exercising power that, I remind you again, was legally granted to them by the Patriot Act, acting as if, gosh, we didn't think they'd take it seriously!

Well, the reason that immediately comes to mind is because you and I might not be going to the same place.

I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion with the Slashdot crowd, but here goes anyway...

So honest question: What makes you believe that the government is doing "the wrong thing" now? I'm being serious here, because as far as I can tell, nothing that Snowden has said has proving that the NSA is abusing what it's been doing. If he had some documented evidence, for example, that the NSA had used its surveillance capabilities to spy on someone for non-terrorism political purposes, things might be different.

From what I can tell, the programs at the NSA are designed only to collect the data. It's specifically to avoid this situation:

Steve: Ha ha, you capitalist pigs, I've blown up buildings and killed hundreds of your citizens!
NSA: Hello, Verizon? We have a warrant, could you please pull Steve's phone records for the past five years so that we can see who he's been hanging out with, to see if maybe there's a mastermind here that we can take down?
Verizon: Gee, we wish we could help, but our data retention policy is that we purge those records after a year. Sorry, but here's what we've got, hope it helps.
NSA: Well, shit, we think that Steve was radicalized back in 2009, we could really use those records. Hey Google, any chance you've kept his emails?
Google: Sorry, nope. We can tell you that he sure does like My Little Pony and prefers Angel Soft brand toilet tissue, though.
Dan: Remember Steve? Well, I'm his buddy and now I have blown up buildings and killed hundreds more people, ha ha!
NSA: Fuck.

In other words, I don't think this is an inherently evil program, as long as it has proper oversight, assurances that it can't be abused, and that the oversight and legal framework under which it operates is transparent. That is, none of these secret laws that we have currently. There are some Congresscritters that are currently working to make those laws public, which is a Good Thing(tm). Assurances that it can't be abused would come in the form of auditing. This isn't unheard of, it's the same kind of auditing that, for example, holds credit card companies accountable for ensuring that the customer service person you talk to when you call their 800 number doesn't write your card number down and carry it out with them to go shopping with that night.

Of course, oversight is always the sticking point. When George W. Bush was in office, Democrats didn't trust him to carry out proper oversight of these programs, but Republicans simply brushed off criticism saying, "Just trust him, he's a nice guy, he wouldn't do that kind of evil stuff." Now that Barack Obama is in office, Republicans are crying foul. Oversight needs to be in the form of non-partisan courts and subject to multiple levels of scrutiny, and we the public need to be aware of what kind of system is in place to oversee this stuff.

Otherwise, you and everyone else decrying these programs are going to have to accept that without them, people WILL needlessly die, that we could have prevented it and deliberately chose not to. And when they do and there's an outcry over how awful it is that our intelligence organizations failed us so miserably, you're going to have to be on the front lines defending it, explaining to an angry and grieving public that those lives were simply the price we have to pay for freedom and privacy. And if you think that it's a small price to pay for freedom and privacy, then more power to you. But instead of getting all butt-sore about the NSA, PRISM, or the Bush and/or Obama administrations, the actual EFFECTIVE recourse is to lobby your Congresscritters to repeal or amend the USA PATRIOT act. Because for all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the organizations and administrations involved in these programs are merely exercising the legal authority that Congress granted them. And I'm not being facetious--go for it. Hell, you might be able to start a movement and convince enough people that it will happen.

But you'll also need to realize when you do that not everyone agrees with you. For all of the trite repetition of telling people that they deserve neither freedom nor liberty, most of us live out here in the practical world where we don't view the world as black and white as you do, so you might (probably, in my estimation) not get your way. And when that happens, instead of whining about how awful it is that we live in such oppressive times under such a tyrannical regime, consider that forcing your notion of "freedom" on a public that expresses through elections that they disagree with you is about as tyrannical as it gets, so what does that make you?

Anyway, I strongly suspect that I'll be modded down because of the knee-jerk "Oh noes, government surveillance is teh ebil!" leaning that Slashdot in general has, and I don't entirely disagree with the general ideal. But until more information comes out that this specific program has been abused in some non-hypothetical instance and exactly how, I'm willing to not jump to conclusions, to let it ride for a while and see where it ends up. And while I find the notion of persistent surveillance distasteful, I'm also practical enough to understand the shades of gray involved in these issues.

Wasn't there some scheme a few years ago someone came up with that used the concept of charging cars by putting magnets under the roads so that as the cars passed over them it would induce an electric current in coils contained in the undercarriage? Seems like that would be a lot safer and cost-effective than rolling out electric rails, and wouldn't require physical contact.

Ever been to a Romano's Macaroni Grill? They sing almost the same thing, but they do it a bit better. I witnessed this in person once while I was eating, this waitress started singing, and it was like a friggin' opera in there, she had some pipes on her. Made me wonder if each restaurant has a singer ringer.

So are we, the public, supposed to now cheer him and and support him not getting arrested? Oh, hell no, I want all of those goodies released. I hope they arrest his ass, and the sooner, the better.

The Facebook Oregon datacenter doesn't 'have' air conditioning.

The building is an 'air conditioner'. Its an experimental design...

Do you actually know how the Facebook Oregon datacenter works?

It doesn't *have* HVAC. The building *is* HVAC: The entire building is one very very large HVAC unit.

HVAC units have 'efficiency of scale'; as you build them larger they get more efficient. Thats what Facebook was aiming at. Unfortunately its a relatively new development in building and datacenter design and clearly has some bugs to work out!

The point of a class action lawsuit isn't, unfortunately, to compensate the members of the class. The point of a class action lawsuit is that there are too many people who suffered minor damages to really be able to logistically handle that.

The primary point of a class action lawsuit isn't to "fight for the little guy," it is to punish companies that do wrong. If lawyers end up making $2 billion off a lawsuit, well, that's $2 billion out of the company's coffers. And before you go spouting off about how ultimately they pass that cost on to customers, maybe they do, but if so, that puts them at a disadvantage compared to other companies. Or put another way, if Domino's is giving their customers good quality pizza while Papa John's is skimping because they are trying to pass a $2 billion lawsuit judgment on to their customers, they'll lose market share. But I digress...

Anyway, I don't necessarily agree that the lawyers should make so much off of a class action lawsuit, although they really should make a lot, since they're handling the details of compensation which costs a lot more than most people think. What I'd like to see is some kind of public fund set up for money like this to go into, such as to build parks or something, so that the end effect of punishing the companies is maintained but the incredible amount of time, effort, and money that goes towards mailing a few people checks for a buck or two isn't wasted. At least that way, you also avoid the problem that class action payouts usually aren't that high since most eligible claimants won't bother to jump through the hoops to get their judgment.

So let's say that some numbers are "missing." Why would someone manipulate the exact same numbers to be missing across all of the exams? I mean, I could see bumping a 32, 33, or 34 (non-passing) up to a 35 to have pity on some poor schmuck who came really close to passing, but why would, say, someone change a 93? I mean, not just for one student, but all the way across the board? What possible motivation could someone have to say "That's got to be either a 92 or a 94, we can't have any 93s"?

I'm inclined to believe what the poster above said. They're simply rounding numbers based on the number of questions on the test to some nearby value in a way such that not necessarily every integer between 1 and 100 is represented. In other words, if there are 40 questions on the test, you'll have scores of 3 (rounded from 2.5), 5, 8 (rounded from 7.5), 10, etc. You will never have a score of 76 or 94 or 61. I strongly suspect that if he knew exactly how the test was scored, the "missing numbers" explanation would be pretty obvious.

Not 'Mount Gox'. Theres no such place.

Its Magic the Gathering Online exchange not Mt. Gox.

But even they refer to it as Mount Gox. Why? Are they trying to distance themselves from the card game?

In the UK they do even better; obviously someone planning a terrorist attack would benefit from knowing their rights. In the UK its illegal to possess ANY INFORMATION which could be useful to someone planning a terrorist attack. Therefore anyone interacting with the police in the UK who shows that they know their rights can be detained on terrorism charges.

A 3D printer can only make stuff out of plastic, right? Well there are plastic bullets and plastic explosives. I'm not seeing a problem!

I think character levels is one of the worst things to have in an MMO, the way Eve does it is good but the backstabbing psychopathy in Eve really puts me off (its not roleplaying, its people being dicks). What I'd like to see is a game that encourages RP rather than a game that merely pays lip service to the RP in MMORPG.