I smelled used-car-salesman sliminess on Obama when I first heard of him, and I was surprised how many people fell for his great sounding but deliberately vague speeches. The man came from Chicago, the most corrupt political system in our country. And I voted for Nader in 08, so I'm no Republican.

I don't know, battteries? FSM knows I need a lot of power at night when all my lights are off and I'm sleeping.

There'a all kinds of possibilities. Machines of Loving Grace, Rage Against the Machine, NIN's Pretty Hate Machine album. There's a roller derby player going by Pretty Skate Machine.

My understanding is that the new facility is for storage of new programs, not stable backups of existing data. I'm not an expert though.

Where did I say or imply anything like that? I'm no more a fan of what NSA is doing than anyone else here. They are disliked throughout the rest of the intel community too, btw.

I imagine the problem is that these databases only hold collected data for a short period of time, say 30 or 90 days. The data scraped is massive, so it is constantly deleting old data to make way for more. IAA Intelligence Analyst, and I know of some imagery databases, for example, that only hold the last 30 days of imagery. If you forced them to hold all of it for years, it would mean increasing server space by orders of magnitude.

"America Has Become a War Zone, According to This One Guy"

You mean our atmosphere, the thing that keeps us alive and will hopefully continue to do so in the future as long as we don't fuck it up? That thing? Yeah, totally not worth the sliver of NASA's small budget.

If you think they're bad, you should see the even uglier people who never had kids!

Yeah. Things seemed simple to me too when I didn't know anything.

Uh, actually, I didn't get it until barlevg pointed it out. Yes, I feel stupid.

Good thing there's no such thing as a soul then.

Maybe. But also know who is driving ahead of time and know their address, relatives, etc? Less likely.

Sure. As long as the same is done with Windows. We went from XP to 7 and every edition of Office with no training. In those cases, we all taught ourselves and each other informally. I taught myself Ubuntu at home, so it can be done. Let's just compare apples to apples.

Defense contractor here, and we get tons of training on how to avoid phishing and other cyber threats, espionage, sabotage, active shooter, equal opportunity, sexual harasment, emergency occupant, ad nauseum. For many people, it's in one ear and out the other.