He wasn't being disrespectful because he thought my post was technically inaccurate, he was being disrespectful because a lot of people don't like me on slashdot because I have strong opinions and mercilessly club their favorite things, which they feel deserve special treatment. Whether it's mac, linux, windows, open source, copyright, left, right, obama, palin, tea partier, communist, and the list goes on... any opinion I state winds up pissing off some fanboy. That's why I put it as my tagline --

Not only do people downmod me for telling them their favorite band sucks, but they also upmod people who put down the evil heretic that is me. That's the only reason this guy got any points: It's GIT hate mail and a lot of lurker mods just eat it up.

And terrible news for encryption experts. Enabling TRIM tells your adversary which sectors contain data and which don't. It's a great asset to cryptanalysis and also destroys plausible deniability that there's a filesystem present on the drive, and how much data is present in it -- thus eliminating the "shadow volume" option of Truecrypt and others.

Bottom line is this: there is no longer a division between the corporate world and government. They are one in the same. They rely on each other and have no reason to take you into consideration.

This makes dealing with the problem as citizens ten times harder. Because if you attack one of the heads of this snake, the head at the other end comes around to bite you. And the current setup is sweet for both corporations and government so they've got no reason to want to change it.

Remember that "commercial" can sometimes also be a guarantee that you do not get fucked: screw with your customers and that kind of company will soon be out of business.

See, that's the theory, but it can not work in practice the way things are today..

Today, you will notice that an increasing number of business models reject the notion of "I'm the seller and you're the buyer". Most of the corporations with whom you do business don't really see you as the customer any more. For example. If you use Google, are you the customer or are the advertisers? If your data is compromised, that doesn't change anything about the relationship between the seller and the buyer. Same goes for banks, and for Microsoft, Apple, and most of the big tech corporations. While they may sell products to you, they have significant income streams that are deals with the government. In the next six years, Apple computers could have almost a trillion dollars in cash-on-hand. Are they a tech company or a bank? The money they make from their intellectual property doesn't come from you. The money they make from their "strategic partnerships" doesn't come from you.

You're going to buy their products regardless, so it's a lot more important to Apple that they have a good relationship with the government than with you. Because their beneficial sweetheart tax deals could bring in as much as the profit from selling consumer electronics.

Same goes for the telecommunications industry. When you've got telecoms involved in creating content, you're no longer the customer. You're not the consumer, you are the consumable.

This new relationship circumvents every aspect of the notion of "free market", at least any "free market" that involves you. And make no mistake: this new relationship where there is a third party that inserts itself between you and the company from whom you purchase an item is the model of the future. Video gaming, food, intellectual property (of course), transportation, right on down the line. You are being cut out of the equation. There is more profit in making the government happy than there is in making you happy.

I said software engineers, not software engineers at google. So you can knock about 10 grand off right there. And until you provide a citation about how much Google pays its employees, we're going with the state average. $95k a year comes out to $45.67 an hour. This is actually more than San Fransciso lists for the profession -- $40.66. We'll go with the more generous figure here.

So you're making $45.67 an hour. Woo! Big time money now. But Uncle Sam just showed up, and he wants his cut. Your biweekly was $1,826.80. Now it's $1,376.72 if you take a single deduction and are single. That's $688.36 per week net. As it turns out, taxes in California are a bitch.

MIT has created a Living Wage Calculator. I linked it directly to San Francisco for you.

They estimate that you need to net $1,929 to be above poverty. You're making about a third more than that. Coincidentally, most financial experts will tell you that having about 25-35% of your income as discretionary is the ideal case: Less and you can't really save any money for retirement, etc.

So as you can see, $95k might seem a princely sum to you, but it's not really. Especially when to get it you're working 80 hour weeks so your net per hour is about $8.60.

So no, if we're gonna mod people up or down on the basis of factual statements, you're going to -1 land, bud.

Oh, and that string of presidents who should be shamed, defamed, blamed and have their presidential libraries torn down to make basketball courts includes Ronald Wilson Reagan who was the first to throw a ton of money at the intelligence/technology/corporate/police state apparatus. He wasn't the first one to spy on Americans who were not suspected of any crime, but he was the one to turn it into a big money pot and then turn the corporate spooks loose to do whatever they want.

I've never watched it, either, but it's this...

La la la la, I can't hear you!.

Seriously, I stopped reading when I saw that you were about to tell me about duck dynasty.

Not going to do it. We're arguing about something stupid while a surveillance state is being set up to take away our privacy forever.

I don't care what your politics are. If you're against the government doing surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans without warrants, we are on the same side. There is no other issue. No other problem in our society can ever get seriously better until that one is dealt with. We could end poverty tomorrow and have free markets and jobs for everyone and universal health care and teach biblical creation in grammar schools and cure cancer and stop abortion and free the gays and (am I leaving anything out?) and put God in the Constitution and take God out of the courthouse and stop gun violence and have less income inequality and kill all the liberals and kill all the right wing nutjobs and end terrorism and have immigration amnesty and close the borders up tighter than Sarah Palin's mind but nothing gets really better until the surveillance state has been taken down, broken in pieces and forced to be transparent.

I am now a single-issue, single-minded voter who believes the president should be impeached and the one before that imprisoned and the one before that put in the stocks and the one before that... all because they contributed to this surveillance state

I'm discussing what? December 21, afternoon, and I still don't know what a "duck dynasty" is.

I'm not sure it was due to political orientation so much as the more basic "There's more people in these here hills, and we ought to have representatives for them to talk to less than a week away by horse."

That isn't to say your premise is invalid -- those people's interests are going unrepresented and splitting them off may better address those needs. But to be honest, New York and California both need to be punched in the face repeatedly by the feds, then bent over and hammered in the ass until they stop trying to force the rest of the country to acceed to their fucked up laws.

How about c) you're using a false dichotomy after already having your pants dropped over the use of circular logic. Don't double down on stupid -- there's more than two ways to approach the problem. Pop open your wallet. Flip over the dollar you got in there. What does it say on the back?

E Pluribus Unum.

That is not latin for "Roll over and play dead."

There's a simpler explanation than bribery: What's the average age of a US Senator? 57 years old. Average. Google to them is like space aged rocket science. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. A lot of the government's actions can be explained by simple senility -- these people aren't just out of touch with society, in many cases they're in a phase of life marked by significant decline in cognitive reasoning, and studies have been done suggesting that the elderly are far more trusting than they should be due to biochemical changes in the brain. Put another way: They're easily suckered.

This is an exceedingly obvious thing to have to point out, but it seems to be forgotten all the time by people who, were they to just divorce themselves from their own political views for a minute and contemplate the problem objectively, they'd realize that there is an organic element to the problem which far better explains the current circumstances than the radical ideas of conspiracies, bribery, and back room deals. I'm sure those happen, but they are far into the minority...

Of course not. Then we'd both be wrong.

Circular logic works because circular logic works because...

Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens... maybe then I wouldn't have to spoon feed the truth to people and they could infer from the quote the course of action needed. Or, I don't know, maybe just not falling asleep in civics class...

Replace "tech guru" with "cotton plantation owner" and suddenly it all makes sense.

Wrong. Thomas Jefferson, please excuse me waking you from your long nap, but I need an opinion. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Thank you Mr. Jefferson. You can now go lay down again. "Brrraaaaiiinnnss...." Yeah, I know. I miss 'em too, sir.

I can make damn sure he doesn't leave without military and/or police assistance. Give me ten people dedicated to the cause of bottling Sir Richy McDouchebag in his castle, and a blatant disregard of the law, and I can stuff him in his mansion for a good month before they catch my team and put the fear of God permanently into his self-entitled ass and make him shell out hundreds of millions for body guards, armed escorts, and bullet proof everythings.

But that's neither here nor there, and I don't feel terrorism is an effective deterrent anyway. You don't have to do any of that to get your point across; Simply dropping leaflets all over the neighborhood in bulk so everyone's lawn and mailbox is covered with and stuffed in them like it's election season is sufficiently effective and doesn't require any gross transgression of the law.

The point is to be persistent, patient, and on target. Don't go after the people who are just working there because it's a job. Recruit them, don't pull a Gandalf on their morning ride. Democracy works, but it takes persistence and a strength of will, not taking out your sexual frustrations on the 9 into downtown.