I have been following the NSA revelations with keen interest. I am not a cryptologist. Advanced math escapes me. But I have understood enough to know that the NSA has been poisoning the well for our entire society. They, not Al Qaeda, not Iran, not China, pose the most existential threat to American freedom and the ability of my kids to grow up in peace. So I ask my fellow Americans and freedom-loving foreigners alike, can we not resolve to resist and bring down these criminals in any way we can? Whether it's better encryption, darknets, ostracism of the actual flesh-and-blood human beings practicing this tyranny on the rest of us, or many, many other measures, can't we all commit to doing what we can, where we can, to putting an end to them?

What the NSA, White House, Congress, and Judiciary (ie. FISA courts) are doing is un-Constitutional, meaning you can't get more illegal and deserving of maximum penalty than that. Murder is terrible and wrong, but it does not rise to the level of undermining the basis for our very society and the social contract that binds people to government and vice versa. With murder, one person dies; with undermining our system of government you get chaos, civil war, deprivation, demise of the rule of law, and masses of men, women, and children dying. Which is worse?

So what we're looking at right now, folks, and I mean all of us on the political Right and Left, is an entire government that has colluded to violate the Constitution, that is, the social contract that separates our country and society from Malthusian consequences. There can be no penalty harsh enough to punish them for what they have done. If we do not, as a People, levy that punishment on them now, immediately, then we deserve the misery of the slavery that meek acquiescence consigns us to.

To me this sounds like a question asking, "what are you going to do with your Walkman?" TVs, and TV-viewing, are quite obsolete. The device you watch anything on now is irrelevant. When you can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, why would anyone spend money on a single-use device like a TV to conform to a very outdated form of media consumption?

Companies that base their revenue model on 1980's technological realities are about to wake up to the harsh reality of no revenues. It happened to Kodak, it's happened to the RIAA companies, and it's even now happening to the vaunted Microsoft. And yet, none of the other, related companies, think it could happen to them.

So I must answer the article's question with a question, why would I throw hundreds of dollars into a purchase which can only do one thing (READ: HDTVs), and that only after I have thrown away hundreds of dollars more on a service (READ: cable TV), that I don't need or want?

God, I look forward to the day when the Baby Boomer dinosaurs retard no more social progress for the entire world with their ineptitude and irrelevancy...

We all need to ostracize and refuse to have anything to do with any of these people. Looking to hire a subcontractor, and one of the firms in the running has connections to these people? Knock them out of the running and let them and their competitors know why. If we tag and track all of them and make them effectively persona non grata everywhere, and those who do their bidding likewise persona non grata, then we would begin to see change.

Society in general must excise these people or risk imploding catastrophically.

Because that sure would be handy when I'm coming up to an intersection or within range of a known traffic camera so that my plate can toggle to the governor's personal license plate number or that guy from accounting I don't like.

That's why it's important to use wind maps (average wind speed where you are) and insolation (average number of daily hours of maximum solar production where you are) to determine if you should do wind/solar and how much. Energy storage (batteries, hydrogen, gravity, etc) help with temporal buffering and smoothing, as in, my solar array produced more than I needed yesterday but not as much as I need today. Micro-grids provide lateral buffering, as in, a tree branch took out my neighbor's wind turbine but he can still function because I and the neighbors are still producing.

Of course it's also worth pointing out that even on cloudy days solar panels still produce electricity, just not as much as on full sunny days. It's also worth pointing out that the house up the bend and slightly lower than me can have a different local wind speed; and if you live anywhere near an ocean or large body of water, there is almost never *no* wind.

So if ConEdison were to struggle to supply Jackson Heights and the swathes of Queens that always experience brownouts every summer and those areas were to have micro-grids in place, then they could continue to function no matter the problems ConEdison might have. That is the definition and benefit of "decentralization."

A gust of wind does not produce equal power even within the same neighborhood. And energy usage among households is not uniform even at time t1. What if I'm not home, not using the electricity generated from my wind turbine, but you are? What if we both have battery packs to store unused power generated, that smooth out availability between changes in windspeed? What if we store excess power as hydrogen that gets run back through a fuel cell when we need more power? Or, what if we sell back excess to the larger grid and have them cut us a check? You see, load balancing in a micro grid gives you all that flexibility and resilience.

These are all things that exist now, that people do. It's simply not widespread yet. But it will be.

Here's where venture capitalists play a deleterious role in the process. They don't care about ground-breaking ideas or real vision or even solid business plans with solid revenue models. They care about whether they can turn around their investment in 6 months to a year for some multiple. That's it. That's all they care about. So if right now they feel reasonable certainty that they can unload a photo-sharing site on 2nd round sucke...er, investors, they'll invest. They don't care that there are 100 other such sites out there. They don't care that the founders are 22 years old. They don't care that the business plan is written on a napkin. They care about the flip.

The problem is no one else in the early-stage game understands VCs have that motivation, and only that motivation. They think that when a VC plows money into something that that something must have something going for it. They think it makes the invested-in company real. A million stories about 22-year old founders turning around with that money and blowing it on coke and hookers does not dissuade them of that.

So a lot of the good money that could flow into real entrepreneurs, that is, real people trying to really solve real problems, does not because of the smoke screen thrown up by the VCs and their PR firms. And a great deal of social progress stifles because of it. The real entrepreneurs usually have to literally weave whole cloth out of thin air on what they can beg, borrow, or steal because no capital flows their way.

Once in a blue moon those guys make it through that Dantean hell and produce something world-changing like Apple or Google. But imagine a world where an Apple or Google emerged every 4-6 months. Think of the undiscovered possibilities. Think of the rapidly expanding markets. Think of the jobs, jobs, jobs, that would generate. Think of the benefit to humanity.

I would love to live in that world, wouldn't you?

It does not make sense in your situation as a renter, but when you own it does, even with where installation costs and everything else are now. The average American family uses 940kwh/month.

Let's take the case of a house in NYC, which has both some of the highest labor costs (pertinent to installation costs of solar panels) and electricity costs ($0.35/kwh from ConEdison). You need 26 290W panels to produce the electricity you need. The cost of panels plus installation totals $48.5K. After just the federal incentive it comes down to $32K. The ConEdison-provided electricity costs $4K/yr, so that's a break-even time of 8 years. Most people own their homes longer than 8 years.

When you factor in the New York State solar incentive of 25% the break-even drops to 5 years. When you consider that ConEdison's price per kwh has increased more than 10% every year for the past 10 years, that break-even time drops to 4-4.5 years.

If the upfront cost of $22K is still a barrier when you buy that house, you can shop around for energy efficient mortgages. They lend to you at an advantageous rate so you can afford to upgrade the home's energy efficiency, as in they knock of a couple basis points. The savings over a 30-yr mortgage are huge, on top of what you save on the electricity (most solar panels are rated for that long).

In short, it already makes financial sense to do this stuff, and since the cost of going solar dropped 80% between 2008-2012 it's only going to get easier.

The answer to this problem, and also to the problem of grid failure due to extreme weather, is to decentralize power production. Individual homes can often produce as much power as they need with solar and micro-wind turbines. If they tie in to a micro-grid--essentially a neighborhood-level grid--they can load balance against their neighbors.

Decentralizing power production yields many other benefits, too. Individuals save tons of money on power bills (the cost of solar, for example, has been dropping dramatically), the country produces less CO2, and everyone has a lot more money in their pockets they can boost the economy with.

Sports is certainly the last hold-out for live pay TV, but nightly news isn't. I can already watch Tagesschau on my Roku with a mere several hours' delay, if I don't happen to catch it live. Anything more actual than that people will go to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube to see the real-time reports and videos that people upload from their phones. "Real" news is mostly spin and BS anyhow--it has lost all value.

Sports shouldn't get too comfortable, though, because in the era of Google Glass and drones the chance for real-time broadcasts sourced from those who haven't paid the NFL millions for air rights is quickly coming about.

The upshot of all of this is none of us has the luxury of resting on our laurels anymore. We all have to use our brains constantly to make a living.

The NSA, Congress, Executive, and Judiciary represent a clear and present danger to the People and Constitution of the United States of America. They are violating our god-given rights on a daily basis, lying to us about it, and there is no branch of government that is checking that overreach. If there was, we'd be seeing top officials at the NSA perp-walked to supermax cells and the President of the USA would have been impeached by a unanimous vote weeks ago when he admitted knowing about it and doing nothing about it.

So, dear friends, it is the duty of every patriotic American who still loves freedom to resist the government in every way they can, large and small. If you run a business, refuse to serve anyone from the Congress, Judiciary, or Executive branches. Don't let your kids play with their kids. Ostracize them. If you know how to design systems that resist surveillance, do so and then send them off to live autonomously so no one can compel to you compromise them. If you have the know-how, track & publish the whereabouts of every government agent who thinks spying only goes one-way; send everyone in the Starbucks a text alert every time one of those goons enters the establishment, so you know just who to 'accidentally' spill hot coffee on.

If those kinds of actions are too small fry for you, do something else. Knock yourself out. Do what you can, do what you feel comfortable doing, but don't do nothing. Being quiet about this stuff, letting them get away with it, is the very worst you can do if you don't want to see this country slide completely off the cliff into totalitarianism.

This is why when in the past I worked for others I always surfed via my own personal hotspot, not the corporate network. Yes, it does not help you with the NSA, but it at least avoids the entire issue of corporate IT.

I cannot think of one single Microsoft product, hardware or software, that I've wanted to purchase in the last 15 years, whether as a consumer or head of tech departments with big budgets to spend. Lackluster products, poor user-acceptance testing, poor debugging prior to release, poor security, miserable customer support (on contract or per incident), awful product design, and on and on. The last thing I took momentary note of was Kinect, but I have become so disenchanted with Microsoft across the board that I was sure it would be crap too and dismissed the thought.

About 7-8 years ago a colleague showed me his new install of Vista and I felt so bad for him I unclipped the Ubuntu Live thumbdrive I had on my keychain and gave it to him as a gift. Last month my poor brother-in-law begged me to help him with his brand-new Windows 8 machine, struggling and wheezing under the weight of its operating system, freezing and slowing to a crawl to launch basic apps. I put Ubuntu on as a dual boot and I've never seen a happier human being. He's gaming on Steam now and not casting a single look back at MS.

So when all the marketing hype around the Surface hit, it didn't even cause a ripple on my consciousness. These sales figures confirm it hasn't done so for anyone else, either.

I do wonder how long it's going to take for MS to implode. They have failed to innovate or protect their lock-in for more than a decade now. Users and businesses have moved on with their use patterns. MS's then-and-still cash cow, Office, has been satisfyingly re-created by Google and Open/LibreOffice for many years now, so eventually even stodgy IT Managers (Baby Boomers, I'm looking at you) will get religion.

When I was raised we called America, "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave." Calling ourselves something that echoed "Fatherland," or "Motherland" would have met revulsion. Those were appellations for Nazis and Communists. We despised the KGM, Stasi, and SS for their total surveillance. Being stopped to show your papers on a public road was THE test for whether you lived in a totalitarian state. Now we have the NSA violating the highest law of our land at will, and the TSA making random stops on our highways demanding drivers submit to searches and checks of their papers. Americans are still quite heavily armed for a civlian population, and we still do have means to information that circumvent government and official media. We will see if Americans still have enough moxy, enough self-awareness as a free people to rise up and re-assert their freedom, or if they will submit to tyranny and take the whole world down with them. But either way, it will not happen without a great deal of blood.