Being serious for a moment... no, we wouldn't. And that would be a good thing in spite of its effect on public health, insect control, and having to constantly clean it all up. There would only be localized agriculture, much lower crop yields, no processed and junk food, drastically lower human population, less opportunities for concentration of wealth... you get the picture I expect.

The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.

That is at best an extreme exaggeration of the value of the cell phone records. I'm sure his data was in the database, and was probably accessed after he was discovered, but his plot was discovered as a result of monitoring that was (or easily would have been) warranted.

Wikipedia: Operation Pathway:

On November 9 2009 The Telegraph reported that the operation produced the tip that lead American security officials to place Najibullah Zazi under investigation. British security officials were reported to have intercepted an email from a Pakistani planner to Najibullah Zazi containing instructions on how to conduct his attack.

The Telegraph: British Spies / Zazi:

The alleged plot was unmasked after an email address that was being monitored as part of the abortive Operation Pathway was suddenly reactivated.

Operation Pathway was investigating an alleged UK terrorist cell but went awry after the then Met Police counter-terrorism head Bob Quick was pictured walking into Downing Street displaying top secret documents.

Eleven Pakistani suspects were arrested immediately after the gaffe but later released without charge.

However, security staff continued to monitor the email address which eventually yielded results.

Most women I've known are attracted more to a thick wallet. I've seldom seen one trade down, if you know what I mean. Often I've seen them leave the cute hunk once they get a few years of just getting by and land the ugly engineer. Just sayin'.

You raise a strong point. I think there's a function of age involved, at least in my observations. I have some friends who are DJs, and through them I have been friends with a number of very attractive women. When we became friends, they ranged from late 20's to mid 30's. They were very focused on guys with big pecs and sick abs. I was a little jealous, but hey, they're my friends, and they were having fun so I'm happy for them.

Now, as they're in their mid 30's to early 40's, most not yet having settled down, there is a great deal of reevaluation going on. The party boys they have been with haven't really made much of themselves. Now they're looking for more substance (success is a big part of it, but it's bigger than that).

And here's the part that is a bit painful to see in people I care about: They're realizing they are no longer the hot commodity. Having not spent too much time on their own educations or careers, they are wondering if their window is slipping past. Same can be said of some of the men I've known -- particularly those in young-mans careers (eg: I know some investment bankers).

Here's the truth that runs throughout it all though: The sooner a person comes to terms with reality and accepts themselves for who they are, the happier they are. By miles. The lies are poison.

While there are fewer 'booth babes' than in earlier shows (and while some are trying to bring balance by adding 'booth bros')

Now that is a solution I can get behind. I'm not a hot guy. But I'm not full of shit either -- I know that straight women like hot guys, just like straight men like hot women. There's a hundred thousand years of evolution behind it. Pretending it is not true is stupid. Women are naturally drawn to men with a pronounced V shape from their waist to their shoulders -- a trait I do not posess. And men are naturally drawn to big chests. That is reality.

You can argue that it is not sound economic policy, because it directs consumer spending in ways that are not reflective of product quality. Fine, let's talk about that, and maybe start by making advertising not count as a business expense for tax purposes. But if you are upset because it is objectification (or, more realistically, because you are, like me, not hot) -- you've got to get over it. Pretending it is not true is just lying to yourself. It will not change reality.

This could be done in such a way that it would be cryptographically impossible for anyone other than the customer, or holder of the destruct code, to brick the device. Will it be done this way? Of course not. Too many actors in the chain want that power, and customers are at the bottom of the totem pole. Being able to instantly deactivate phones is a dream of dictators and tyrants. We've already seen the government use available means to achieve this in the USA! They turned off cell stations in the mass transit stations during riots.

Hello,

The problem with the current crop of 802.11ac adapters is that most of them have USB 2.0 interfaces (Edimax and Zyxel each offer a USB 3.0 adapter, and Asus has a PCIe card). With 480Mbit/s of bandwidth (and that's theoretical, since it does not include serialization, 8b/10b conversions, other overhead from peripheral bus communications, etc.) no one is is going to be getting anything near a Gbit/s of bandwidth over the bus even if they do have a strong signal. They may get better data rates due to technological improvements over previous generations of Wi-Fi (fatter channels, more MIMO streams, beamforming, etc.)

That will change as more adapters enter the market (probably in the form of MiniPCIe cards inside laptops), but consumers are not going to be much better off, bandwidth-wise, then going with 802.11n gear at home until the market for 802.11ac wireless adapters matures.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Holder says he was lying?! Eric Holder? The attorney general whose office is responsible for Too Big To Jail? Who will not prosecute bankers. Who oversaw the Fast and Furious debacle? Who hounded Aaron Swartz to his death?

Now I know Snowden was telling the truth.

This is what happens when you put professional spinmeisters in charge of professional workers: Dysfunction.

Imagine putting a PR team in charge of the Doctors dealing with an epidemic. A doctor would like to announce quarantine measure, or tell people the full risks, or advise those who are sick, etc. If you had a PR man in charge, the whole epidemic would be treated as a mild flu, no-one would be informed, contagion would spread rapidly and thousands would die. "No matter", says the PR man, "We can spin that too.". But this misses the point.

If you allow spin and the press office to dictate the running of an organisation, then the organisation effectively will not run at all. No professional can work properly with an unrelated lay person getting in his way 24/7.

It's time to call PR men what they really are: Political Officers.

Or maybe it has more to do with this: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55749

I think that this was all started by the Town hall protests, more specifically by the administration's reaction to it.

Shortly after the town hall meetings, and I think the birther campaigns, the Obama administration basically went on the offensive. They openly stated that they were going to call out and not stand idly by when similar things happened. The link, if it is true, sounds like an extension of that using the new Prussian apparatus set up over the last decade.

Let's see -- was that 99% serfs and 1% czars?
Where have I heard that number before...

what makes you worth tracking? ... do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason?

What makes you think collaborative filtering and similar analyses are done one person at a time? The state of the art is done with linear algebra and similar maths, and solves simultaneously for each individual in the sample set.

That's most of the SSD market then, isn't it? So the majority of SSD buyers should expect a 66% failure rate? Wow, that's a strong advertisement for it.

Not really the point. The controller of a platter drive is physically separated from the actual storage medium; historically people with dead logic boards on otherwise usable drives have been able to swap the boards and reanimate them, at least long enough to recover the contents. (I even tried that once myself, though there was a slight revision difference in the PCBs and it didn't work.) That's not even possible for an SSD because the controller logic is right there on the same PCB with the NAND Flash medium. Unless you have a dear friend who works in the production side of the mfr., you're screwed.

"And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they WILL give up user data in response to a court order"

I believe the correct statement would be:

"And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they HAVE GIVEN up user data in response to a court order"

in the same way that ham radio people are vastly behind the revolution in wireless communications.

You're on crack, sir!

Hams have always been at the leading edge of long-distance wireless communications technology. In early times, hams were largely the ones responsible for clever antenna design (which was something of a black art in those times) and improving the effectiveness of various types of radio circuits. They are constantly pushing the boundaries of doing more with less. A good ham can communicate with someone halfway around the world with a simple circuit and 9-volt battery, for instance. Nowadays, the bleeding edge is software-defined radio. You'd better believe hams are using, developing, experimenting, and field-testing right now, as we speak.

Imagine: 300baud modems-- that's what many hams are left with, wirelessly.

Hams have to work within the limits defined by both nature and the FCC. When there is only so much bandwidth available to legally use, and you need to send a message a great distance, 300 baud may be all you get. And in a lot of cases, it's all you need.

Aside from the physical limitations, hams are unlikely to get access to the kind of spectrum that cell phone providers enjoy for short-range high-speed digital communications simply because they don't have quite the same purchasing power as a mobile megacorp.

Aircraft technology changes much more slowly than automobile technology not because the members of one industry are more incompetent than the rest, but rather because the markets are vastly different. Anything that leaves the ground as part of the aircraft has to be FAA certified pretty much all the way around. It's safer for everyone involved to stick with proven designs, even when newer ones might make things easier on the pilot or more efficient for the plane. The stakes are just a wee bit higher in a plane than in a car of the engine stops. Aircraft have lifespans of many decades, whereas most people discard their cars when they're between 5 and 10 years old.