You're confusing transport encryption with message encryption.

HIPPA doesn't require that you use S/MIME or PGP or some other technology to encrypt the content of your mail at rest. But if you're transporting between systems, you need to ensure that privileged data is protected in transit. There are a variety of techniques that allow you to do that, with a range of advantages and disadvantages.

At the end of the day, Bradley Manning was a mental trainwreck in a myriad of ways. This wasn't a secret -- he was in the process of being drummed out of the military before his arrest. Seems to me that the human half of the system failed -- someone in Manning's state of crisis should have been cutoff from access to weapons or critical information at some point.

Sure, or it could be someone like you assuming that a maternity leave equates to not "keep up-to-date on their skill sets" or that you should give a promotion to good old Bob, since even though he's as dumb as a box of rocks, he's supporting the little woman and kids at home.

Huh?

An LTO-5 tape drive is like $2,500.

A 1.5 TB tape is like $50.

100 TB = $6,000.

If you are actually generating 200 TB per day, you're not going to use some cheapo DAS box to hold all of your backups.

Social Security surpluses are just spent in the general federal budget, because the "Social Security Trust Fund" is just a special class of non-marketable treasury bonds. When the surplus goes away in a few years, that money will no longer be flowing into the treasury AND the government will have to start repaying its debt to the system out of other Federal receipts and new debt.

None of this is news or sourced from Fox News. It's fact that can be found in the report issued in 1983 by Senator Moynihan, who was not a "right winger" by any standard and was an advocate for the system. Unfortunately, we have done little to address the problems in the last 30 years.

What microscopic proportion of the Social Security budget is mailing a few statements?

The program is bankrupting the nation. Frankly, mailing statements will save money compared to launching some giant IT project with Oracle, SAIC, Lockheed and the other cast of Federal contracting characters. How many 80 year olds are going to be able to deal with an electronic statement anyway? And how will you identity-proof them?

Wait a minute... IBM sells crap by playing golf with the CEO. 2-3 times a year they fly in 50 people from 10 countries to pitch some stupid product, we pick another one, and get "encouraged" to take another look at Big Blue.

I know that Watson mastered jeopardy, but how will it kiss the boss's butt?

From a practical point of view, an end-user won't be aware of a SSL MITM attack if you re-encrypt using a certificate issued by a trusted CA.

Where I work, for example, we centrally decrypt all traffic and re-encrypt with an cert that we issue and put on each workstation.

Kaku educates the public about where to find his books. That's about it.

Listen to Kaku's radio show sometime if it is still on the air. It's two hours long, about 40% of the show is an advertisement for his book/tv appearance/book signing. There is usually an interview with someone interesting, who gets cut off mid-sentence so Kaku can talk about his book and cut to the radio station's commercials.

This is the hype of the dot-com era coming back to actually roost. This isn't "socialism", it's cutting out the middleman. The actual author is making more money and has more (ie. complete) editorial control over his art.

Cutting out the middleman means returning things like writing to a craft rather than of an afterthought that is part of an industrial process of creating books. Instead needing an army of buyers, marketers, retail placement specialists, etc, you return to the artist and his craft.