What an absolutely useless article and report. Scaremongering at its best, with no actionable content. Which plugins have vulnerabilities? Can they be mitigated through configuration changes or do they need to be disabled/uninstalled? What is the potential exposure? Those are the sort of things a computer professional needs. Where are the damned CVEs?

Climate change -- no more snow. See -- this is what climate change brings. Touchscreen laptops. Now you know who to blame.

None of those things will help you. To the NSA, the content of your email may be less important than with whom you are communicating. Yes, the care about the content of some emails, but their dragnet appears to be for network analysis -- sender, recipients, date, time, etc. The NSA almost certainly catalogs every DNS lookup you do. This is the stuff that is erroneously being referred to as metadata.

One possibly surprising way to keep your communications private is to read/post your communications to a very public forum. That way the intended recipient is difficult to determine. Keep the communication slightly covert -- a little steganography goes a long way if you can fly under the radar. Just don't trust others with your privacy.

Our rights are inalienable -- but only if we use them.

I used to work doing IT for the ILEC and the more I worked with their systems the more surprised that I was able to pick up the phone and get a dial-tone. A friend of mine worked on the systems that managed the in-the-ground cables, he's the one that said the previous sentence. I worked mostly on the billing and ordering systems. They were not the most robust systems.

So essentially "trust the drone" to avoid collisions with planes carrying a transponder?

If you didn't see it immediately upon following the link, then I guess you will find the bullshit deeper than most.

Right.... because no insurgent would ever choose to put their hang out near a civilian airport. Someplace nice and safe from those pesky drones. Nope... that would never, ever happen.

No one is cheapening the word -- it's its usage in this form predates your absurdist politically correct world view.

Google, tell us what "democratizing" means.

If drones were equipped with automatic collision prevention systems, would those same systems not be used by opposition forces to detect the presence of these drones? The whole point of most of these drones is stealthy surveillance and/or attack.

You mention the "time out" before sedation is administered, which is great. But, the last time I had a procedure, we went through a bunch of stuff before I went into the operating theater, with my wife present and verifying everything that was going on. Then I was moved into an operating theater and asked by someone I had never met before to sign a paper about some sort of sedation, which I could opt out of. Without my wife present to "double check my math".

At this point, I hadn't had anything to eat in 24 hours, nothing to drink in 12, and had gotten little if any sleep in the previous 24+ hours because of the operation preparation... To recap: I was sleep deprived, dehydrated, and my blood sugar was all messed up, and had to make a decision that was so important that it required signing off on a page of dense text.

In retrospect, I should have said that I wasn't able to make that decision and lobbed the ball back into their court. What I did was the doctor said he recommended it, and I signed it.

In second retrospect, if at all possible, I'm never going to "meet" a doctor in the operating room. Apparently I had the opportunity to have a sit-down in their office, but this was presented to me as a waste of time. Never again...

Sean