Your parenthetical is presented as support for your assertion, but it isn't. The fact that they were asked many times, whether via lawful orders or otherwise, indicates nothing about whether or not they knew of secret data gathering by the NSA. They've claimed in public statements that they didn't know about it. Most have also claimed that they didn't comply with any requests except where they were obligated by law. I see no evidence to refute either claim. Do you? If so, can you point it out?

Cite?

Cite?

If the issue is illegal vs legal, give the illegal immigrants work visas, making them legal. Problem solved, right?

You seem to think there's some bright line here, when there really isn't. The vast majority of illegal immigrants would love to come legally, and are here to work and to contribute, but we won't let them. It's insanely difficult to immigrate legally except as a wealthy student or with corporate sponsorship. Outside of those categories it is -- quite literally -- a game of chance, a system of tiny quotas allocated by big lotteries.

That distinction is based on the lines drawn by our immigration laws, which are very arbitrary and capricious, in both design and implementation. I find it really interesting how none of the people who rail against illegal immigration actually know (or care!) how legal immigration works and whether or not the rules are in any way effective at dividing those we'd like to have from those we wouldn't.

Put the cart in front of the horse: reform immigration laws so immigration is possible for those who just want to come and work, then enable all of the current illegal immigrants to make use of the revised laws to obtain legal status and then we can figure out how to secure the borders. At that point it will be much easier because there will be many fewer people anxious to sneak in.

Hmm. I have 26 years of experience. How much longer do I need to wait? I work with a couple of guys who've been professional programmers for nearly 40 years. The industry had better hurry up and ruin them pretty quickly, or they'll retire first.

The answer to that question is obvious. Here's what they say "We aren't spying on Grandma. Sure, we're gathering up her information along with all the rest, but we don't actually look at it, or use it. And we can't be selective about what we grab, because then we'd sometimes miss stuff that's important. So need to continue grabbing everything, just in case, but, really we're nice people and we would only use it to help the American people. Okay, so there's the occasional bad apple who abuses it (e.g. LOVEINT), but we try to find them and get rid of them."

Does getting that answer make you feel any better about it? Probably not. It doesn't make me feel any better, even though I can see clear as day how a bunch of well-intentioned, hard-working people could follow this particular road right into massive surveillance hell, fully convinced that they're doing the right thing. From their perspective, it's easy to see that they are only doing good things, if we'd only just trust them. From our perspective, we can't know what they are or are not doing, and they're doing it without our permission and in contravention of our most fundamental law, no matter how they try to split hairs.

On the Ts & Cs, you have a point, but for the rest of it, I ran my own mail server for years. My uptime never came close to matching gmail, and I'm far more likely to go bankrupt than Google or Amazon. Gmail's spam filtering is better than anything I ever achieved, too.

+5 insightful

Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.

Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.

Actually, online advertisers know exactly how effective the directed advertising is. Unlike traditional advertising, where the old saw goes "I know 50% of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which 50%", online ads can very often be linked precisely to specific sales. This is actually the biggest factor in Google's success as an advertiser; good targeting was important, too, but the real breakthrough was being able to help advertisers quantify very precisely what return they were getting on their advertising spend.

Your experience is completely at odds with mine. I'm 45 and have been a professional programmer since I was 18 (I started writing code at about 12). I work with many guys who are in their 50s and 60s... they're excellent engineers, and compensated very well for their experience and knowledge.

Granted that I work with the upper tier of professional programmers, but it is far from impossible to have a long, satisfying and financially rewarding career writing code. You have to love it, you have to be good at it (which is pretty closely correlated with loving it), and you have to have the talent, intellect and education (which needn't be formal, but formal CS education is generally best).

In the job market right now, if you're good it doesn't matter how old you are, or in many cases even what you smell like, the industry is absolutely desperate for talent.

It's a lot more than that. Coding is very different from the sort of process thinking you use to build processes executed by people, because computers are completely incapable of filling in any gaps or exercising any initiative. If you build company processes the way you write code, they'll be very ineffective, and if you write code the way you build company processes, your code will rarely work.

In addition, outside of code that defines business rules, coding involves huge numbers of details and abstractions of those details which are different from anything we encounter in the "real" world.

If that were true, then former programmers would make outstanding managers and executives. I do know some software engineers who are outstanding managers or executives, and I know plenty who were great coders but lousy at management and leadership. Further, in my experience the correlation between coding effectiveness and managerial effectiveness is negative, though close to zero.

I don't think so. I don't think there's any requirement that people have FDA approval in order to issue opinions on medical issues. You have to be an MD to call yourself a doctor, but if you just want to tell people stuff and aren't claiming to be a doctor and aren't doing any sort of medical procedures on them, go nuts. Likewise, if you're producing medical devices or performing medical tests (like 23andme), then you need approval but if you're not, do what you like.

Are you sure? Coal is dirty, yes, but big coal generation plants can and do make it much cleaner than you might expect. The nature of a big facility makes it possible to ensure a very complete burn, and many coal plants also scrub the output. In addition, large power plants are much more efficient at extracting the energy than a small ICE, which also helps them with the emissions/work ratio. Whether or not what you say is true depends less on the type of coal and more on the type and configuration of the power plant.

+1. This particular aspect of the Snowden revelations shocked and staggered me.

The NSA has always had two missions around signals intelligence (1) spy on the rest of the world and (2) make sure the rest of the world can't spy on us. And that second mission covered all communications important to national security, not just government comms. A few years ago I build an important commercial system that protected stuff related to credit card payments, and I had NSA oversight for the whole project because they (rightly) consider the payment infrastructure to be important to national security. And the NSA guys were clearly working to ensure that the system was highly secure; they never once suggested anything that would in any way compromise it, and they had some valuable insights about how to make it better. Over the years the NSA has done a lot to contribute to the security of important commercial security infrastructure -- because it's their job.

So, what the Snowden revelations made clear is that the NSA has decided mission 2 takes a back seat to mission 1, and in fact that mission 2 is so unimportant that they're actively working to undermine it.