Basically her response is that of the bankrobber who is angry and blaiming his friends for turning him in rather than himself for being caught with the cash.

The response of the entire administration has been the response of a spoiled, petulant teenager.

In fact, this has been the response of the administration -- and the previous one -- to just about any development or obstancle they don't like.

The US is no longer a nation of laws. It is a nation of men (and some women) who are impulsive, incompetent, largely juvenile, disrespectful of their offices, and contemptuous of both the public and the law. The Administration is being run by people with the mentality and motives of a cast of Saturday morning cartoon, or late Thursday night TV villains. Unfortunately these people have one common talent -- they are all connected to each other like threads in a rotten carpet.

Not a nation of laws. A nation of men. And a particularly base and uninspiring kind of man at that. Central and South American countries have been run by such men for centuries. Run into the ground. The US, for all its power and potential, is now being run into the ground as well.

The end result is probably something like Singapore. Ostensibly free, but scratch the surface and you quickly hit authoritarianism and an oligarchy of connected families and companies. The problem is, most of the US governing class would see little wrong with such an outcome.

Pretty much all foreign intelligence agencies already knew about what the NSA was up to; the USA government IS upset because Snowden informed the USA general public.

What the NSA was and is doing wasn't a big secret among governments. Many of the governments now complaining about being spied on cooperated with the USA to gather and share much of this information. Yes, they might be pissed that the USA crossed a few lines here and there, but they knew the USA was spying on everyone.

Top performers burn out fast and do not return to the IT field.

And now they get ripped off, too.

People with links to other talented, employable, people have been getting finder's bonuses from their employers for recommending a good candidate.

Now Google has patented mining their email and social network metadata so THEY can get a hiring fee. They just monitized the money out of their subscribers' pockets into their own.

Once you understand quantum, it all makes sense.

Well, ....until you come to measure it.

The price of living in a free society is that occasionally someone is going to get pissed off at the world and blow up spectators at a marathon or take a gun to a classroom of kiddies. It would be great if we could stop this, but if the only way of stopping it is to take away your freedom and allow the government to spy on its people then maybe the price is too high.

Assuming that such things would actually be effective in the first place. Even if they were that they wouldn't put the public at greater risk from rogue "law enforcement".

Terrorists aim to inspire terror. That's what they do.

This is something often missed. A bomb threat can be a very effective terror tactic. Even for a terrorist group without the ability to actually build a working bomb.
Causing such sensors to falsely trigger would be a variation on the theme of "SWATting".

I was thinking very much this. You don't even need to use a septic tank: all you need is that it never reaches the sewer system. Just get it into some kind of barrel or tank, bury it if you so desire (at your house or somewhere else) and continue as planned.

Or more usefully someone else's house. If the intention is for a car/truck bomb any waste products can probably go in the vehicle too.

First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.

What's to stop someone else pouring something nasty down YOUR drain though?

Do it yourself means that you manage risk and cost. Handing it over to an outside contractor means, inevitably, eventually, with all companies, some douche nozzle accountant executive with limited tech knowledge in the pursuit personal bonuses and claiming great savings and extra profit with the typical B$ spreadsheet. Will take a series of cost savings short cuts that allow risk of data loss to become a certainty of data loss.

However you don't know when this is happening. So cannot assess and manage you risk. It' s possible you may not even find out even after a loss/disclosure has occured.
Note also that if the company you choose is bigger than you are then you automatically increase your risk. Since crackers, both criminal and government sponsored, tend to be interested in the biggest targets. Whilst momandpop.com might have to specifically attract the attention of the "bad guys" they are already looking at Dropbox, Amazon, Google, Skydrive, etc.

How will you ever know for sure that the program won't send your private key to the server - encrypted with another key so you will never see it if you would try to monitor traffic?

Unless you control the "client side" software you can't even know if it is even using the key you think it is. Never mind doing something as elaborate as steganography to send data you don't know it's sending.

Indeed. Mostly give up the idea of having the host encrypt files for you. You never know if they have a backdoor of some sort.

Even "pre-Snowden" relying on a remote service or software provided by that service to perform such "encryption" was a bad idea. Even without deliberate "backdoors" there are many ways in which such a system can can fail, especially if proprietary software in involved.

looking at question 6, I see immediately, based on the language, that there are at least two answers: 2 and 6. The test writer only meant for one answer to be correct,

Reminds me of a standardized test I hit back in the 6th (or so) grade. It was a "what's the missing number to this series?" question. One of the five options completed an arithmetic series, another a geometric series.

This was one of those that also measured speed, by throwing too many questions at you to answer them all. I recall I hung on that question long enough, trying to figure out which one they wanted, that I could have answered perhaps five more.

(That's the one where, while thinking about it afterward, I figured out that good test strategy includes abandoning a question that is taking too long.)

But that is not a word problem.

Correct. Those are pictograms. That would place them in the 3rd example that I gave ("And if the school feels it necessary, a THIRD test with pictograms (or whatever).")

There is no right answer to that unique set of words. ... As that is a meaningless set of words, by itself.

No. They are not words. They are pictograms. And whether you understand a particular pictogram depends upon whether you have had previous exposure to it.

You can only understand that question if a teacher explains the template to you before hand.

Which is what I've said. And that is why it is the 3rd example that I gave. In essence, it is testing whether the teacher taught the student what those pictograms (or similar ones) represented.

My take on it (as I've posted previously):

The government seems to treat the population, in many ways, much as a farmer treats his livestock. But when it comes to getting old, how DOES a farmer treat livestock?

On a farm, while livestock is healthy and producing profit, they're valuable. Once they're costing more than they're producing, it's time to get rid of them. A particularly beloved animal might be kept on as a pet. But the anonymous mass has to go.

Since at lest the late '70s or early '80s, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security has been a worry for government officials. I recall one of them making a "slip of the tongue" on a CNN interview, back when the channel was new: She lamented that small families and the success of the '60s anti-population-growth propaganda was leading to too many retired and two few working, and they had to "get the death rate up to match the birth rate" to save the program. That may not be the official position, but that sort of thinking is pervasive.

In past generations oldsters could be counted on for votes. But aging boomers aren't as solid a voting block for the party in power as some of the later generations - particularly the new, undocumented, immigrants.

What if our current party-in-power has decided that, now that the Baby Boomers are aging out of the work force, becoming a drain on, rather than paying into, the government coffers, it's time to kill them off? How could they go about it?

Just setting up "Death Panels" and picking who's going to be left to die isn't too popular. (Look at the bad press they got when they included that in a companion bill to Obamacare.)

But how about this:

- Nationalize the bulk of the medical insurance industry.
- Change the rules on all of it, so the prices for private plans goes 'way up, and the insurance companies can dump the sickly from their current, lower-priced, plans because they don't conform to the new rules.
- Then botch the rollout, so those dumped can't get new insurance, either.

Result:
    - The poor boomers are dumped from their insurance. The moderately well-to-do boomers have their healthcare prices skyrocket, quickly draining them into "poor boomer" status. (Give 'em six months to three years without insurance and see how many are left.) Only the truly rich can afford to stay alive and healthy.
- With the "It's a really GREAT program, there's just a few bugs in the rollout." claim they can stretch it out and leave the oldsters uninsured for years.
    - Meanwhile the politicians who orchestrated this get to claim they're doing it to HELP the population, not to kill them off. (They even get to claim it's their opposition who is trying to kill off grandma.)

Maybe it's not what's happening. But it fits so well with the rest of their track records and the party's historical roots. I ask myself, "If they were doing this deliberately, WHAT would they do differently?". And I can't think of a single thing.