bush had his war when 'saddam tried to kill mah daddy!'.

obama now has his war on the american people (and the world, if you consider the core routers to be part of the world's infrastructure).

I used to support obama. but not anymore. not after this.

If this was done at the request of the Americans, they've well overestimated their own importance

I take great offense at that statement. the corrupticians in power run bartertown. the american people have no say in things anymore.

please do not assume that We The People have any control over our lawless government officials. that boat sailed a long time ago and it isn't coming back any time soon.

the highest rule one can follow is to Do The Right Thing. we each should have some idea as to what that is.

this is higher than any loyalty to a government or country. higher than loyalty to a religion. higher than what your employer wants you to do.

I include manning and snowden as true heros and patriots. when a country or government goes bad (ours has, in case there was any doubt) then its your DUTY to Do The Right Thing and inform on them.

the notion of checks and balances is near and dear to my heart. those who keep the people informed of wrongdoings are at the highest level of hero.

its sad that our modern heros are being treated like criminals. isn't that a laugh, the criminals are punishing the good guys. I'm not sure when things got so backwards, but they clearly are, now.

Pedanticaly, is it the vibration that is "sound" or is it the experience of the listener receiving vibrations that is "sound"? Those "sound waves", without being experienced, are simply vibrations, but is that enough to consider the entire event "making a sound"? As an audio technician, my (crappy) equipment picks up electronic noise on occasion, so it "hears sound" that isn't actually there. Similarly, can a person actually hear an auditory hallucination, which is the experience without the associated vibrations?

lets also blame our fellow geeks who have ENABLED this spying via their tech efforts.

do you work for a networking company and have you worked on any sniffer or DPI code or hardware? you are to blame - you are part of the problem!

do you work for anything having to do with calea? you are to blame!

do you look the other way when you go into work each day? how do you justify the harm you are doing? oh right, you're helping to 'catch bad guys'. yeah, keep telling yourselves that.

fellow geeks who enable the evil governments that spy are FULLY TO BLAME just as much as the politicians and folks in power who ordered the equipment and software to do this.

seriously - if we, as a group, said NO to such jobs, they would not get done. but we are whores and will work for spying companies and not even think twice about it.

its fucked up beyond belief. and we are part of the problem.

land of the free, home of the "shit, that guy must be snuffed out, he told the world how dirty we really are. an example must be made so that others think twice about being a whistleblower".

happy fourth of july, fellow americans ;( can't say I'm very proud to be american right now. in fact, I'm ashamed of what my country is looking like, to the rest of the world.

Looks like the same old garb to me. Dictators, monarchs, and bureaucrats have always promoted themselves as making better decisions for the good of their people. The key lies in the definition of "better". Tyrants adopt a policy that benefits themselves most, when what's needed is a policy that benefits everyone.

The existence of faults in a government does not mean it's worse than letting each person make indepentently bad decisions.

once your tally of bricks falls below a set limit, they send the work over to india or china.

they WANT you to fail so that they have more excuses to outsource your job.

when I hit 50, my personal non-group insurance went up well over $100 more each month. I made no claims and didn't even use the insurance for anything significant (no operations, etc). but because of my age, they jacked up the price and I had no choice but to pay or lose it.

this was long before obamacare.

as an older worker and one who is a contractor (so I'm 'conveniently' left out of the group discounts and plans) I'm paying close to $1k each month out of pocket!

all I ask for is to be part of a group discount plan were we have power and safety in numbers. when you apply for individual plans, they ask a million very personal questions and you can still get a very high rate if you were unlucky enough to have a health problem.

otoh, when part of a group plan, you don't have to do the questionairre. and you benefit from the total size of the group.

companies can join groups; but individuals are not allowed to. THIS is the scam that needs fixing the most.

you got that right; the R's have been demonizing 'socialism' and programming the populations' minds to think of it as a bad thing.

go to any discussion board and you'll find people who will invoke that word as if its a bad curse word.

fairness and compassion in society? no, lets not use those words. lets just label things 'socialism' and that will do all the hating we need.

I keep trying to argue with co-workers that a good society is one that has compassion for its weaker members (old, sick, unemployed, etc). most understand the notion of compassion. too bad we can't re-take back our word and give it a positive connotation.

Yes it should, because people are utterly terrible at weighing risks for themselves.

The law had some good parts to it...the sections pertaining to pre-existing conditions is good,

yes, that was a great part; but how do we know that even this part will remain intact?

(get out the flip-flops; I'm sure this meme will be resurrected again).

its not the politicians, this time. its the most wonderful 'business men'. you know, the 'job creators'. all hail the job creators! they ask and we supply them with whatever their little hearts desire.

who runs bartertown? businessmen.

obama is a dick. he sold us out. I hated bush but I'm now thinking obama is just about as bad, just not as much of a war-monger (not a blatant one, at any rate) but he has done virtually nothing that he promised. what a wuss!

too bad that we had no choice last 2 elections. we could choose from bad vs really bad. I don't think the R-guys would have done any better, but we certainly were lied to when we were promised 'change we can believe in'. what a load of horse-shit!

even 'clean' android has chip-level comms that you will never EVER defeat. loads of info goes to carriers on request and you can't stop it; its at the radio chip level. (disc: I work in a cell phone tech job that involves android and signalling at the various radio modulation (3g, 4g, etc) levels).

unless you have specs on all the chips in the phone, you'll never be able to fully 'quiet down' your rooted phone.

it would be nice if there was a 100% open phone, but I doubt it will ever happen.

best we can do is to be aware of this and not trust our 'phones' (pocket computers with locked down parts of it) and assume they are always leaking various bits of info about us to 'others'.

pull the battery out and leave the phone at home. that's the only way to stop the leaks.