He's a crank. Sure, it might be possible that some things are not all as they seem but he's on a roll that everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag operation. Nothing is as simple as crazy religious fundamentalists shooting up an easy low-security target for huge publicity and terror factor.

Google Fiber doesn't.

Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25 I don't think most of the world has "internet access" the way you define internet access. Good luck in your quest to redefine it.

I disagree. Strongly.

My company (Google) uses videoconferencing extensively; every conference room is a video conference room with high-quality screens and cameras, and every meeting that involves people in multiple sites is a video conference. The VC system (which is the same tech in Google Hangouts, er, Video Chats) integrates with the calendaring and room booking system so everything gets linked up automatically. Anyone can project their screen to the VC with a few keystrokes. The result is extremely productive, especially when combined with Google Docs.

However, I still fly to remote sites to meet physically with the teams I collaborate with, and do it on a regular basis. A couple of times per year to overseas locations, and at least quarterly to the nearer sites, and drinking and dining boondoggles have nothing to do with it (I abhor business dinners). Why, then? And why does the company gladly fund and even encourage these trips?

Because they're necessary. VC is great for exchanging information, but very bad for building personal relationships. Meeting someone in person, even if all you do is have exactly the same meeting you would have via VC, dramatically improves the working relationship -- even if it was good to begin with.

Why this is, I don't really know. I do notice that physical co-location reduces the formality of the interaction in subtle ways. I think part of it might be the unnoticeable but still present latency in VC communications. The lag may only be 30 ms, but I think that 30 ms matters in the spontaneity of interaction. I think most of it is probably just that people become more real to you when you shake their hand and smell their BO (or, hopefully, lack thereof). Whatever the basis, the fact is that it's hard to make a human connection with an image on a screen.

And, much as I hate it, a night or two out socializing and discussing things completely unrelated to work (bringing spouses along really helps to ensure that) does a great deal to cement those relationships.

Once you've made those human connections, VCs are great vehicles for communication. But until you have a sense of the people on the other end, VCs are inherently less effective even in the best of times, and when things become stressful and have the potential to become antagonistic, the human connections are what make collaboration possible.

Bah. You have no idea what you're talking about.

First of all, a house can have power lines and still be solar powered. Many solar-powered homes use the grid as their storage facility. Most of them actually generate more power than they consume, net, but the grid tie is still very valuable.

Second, if you get out in the sticks (there are a lot of mountain homes), there are many houses which are not connected to the grid at all. Not that they wouldn't like to be able to use grid storage, but it's simply not available without paying tens of thousands of dollars to run lines out to them. These homes use large banks of batteries for storage.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It's not exactly an accident that the NSA legitimized their mass surveillance through the PATRIOT act.

So it's a tall order but the NSA doesn't have infinite resources nor infinite clout particularly not outside of US jurisdiction. Infiltrators are always possible but also high-risk endeavors with huge political consequences. You can at least try to make the risk/reward ratio seem unappealing. After all, the current standards were made when strong encryption was neither computationally feasible nor publicly available. The main downside is that people don't want to carry around their encryption keys so I think you'd have to define at least three security levels:

1) The server does the decryption for you, trust the server
2) You download the encrypted message and your encrypted private key and must input a secure password (read: long) to decrypt, either once (stored on device) or every time.
3) You bring the encryption key yourself.

Honestly, already just the first one would be pretty damn good.... I want to email john.doe@example.com, the server asks example.com for his public key and verifies through DNSSEC that I'm actually talking to example.com then provides his public key back to my local client/javascipt webclient. I can verify the fingerprint, message is encrypted client side and sent to server. The server transports it over SSL to the destination server, not even metadata snooping unless you 0wn any of the servers or SSL itself. That's my side secure, the rest is up to the recipient and how paranoid he is. For example a corporation might feel their corporate email server and internal network is secure enough, there's no need to have personal passwords for every employee. The mail server at yourcorporation.com receives it, decrypts it and you collect it the old way.

The problem is getting the network effect kicked in, email has value because everyone else has email. If nobody has a clients or servers that talk the new protocol it won't go anywhere.

Well, we've never tried deciphering a language that anyone has made a genuine effort to make it so. Math has some really simple patterns that make it easy to distinguish from noise like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 or in binary
000
101 000
10101 000
101010101 000
1010101010101 000
101010101010101010101 000
1010101010101010101010101 000
From there I'd probably just repeat [x,y,pictogram of x*y bits] with silence to space them. I'd probably start with "illustrated math" to show like
1 + 1 = 2
. + . = ..
2 + 1 = 3
.. + . = ...
I think the pattern should be fairly obvious no matter what kind of math they use. After we finish basic math then basic elements as pictograms, the "shell configuration" of electrons should be easily recognizable and universal. After that maybe try to derive the SI units (like kilo = hydrogen atom * big number) and start describing the universe as we know it. Honestly, it doesn't seem *that* hard as long as we aren't looking at a random scroll that may contain anything at all and makes no attempt to be decipherable by itself.

Well your complaint is probably just you. One of said religious groups can mean the whole church congregation, friends, family, coworkers and so on get pestered to stop shopping there. Sadly I think their risk assessment is spot on.