Indeed, much of the scientific work will eventually be folded into commercial products that will in fact result in "monetary returns".

Nope, but you're half-way there. The problem with the United States is that, well... States. In most other countries, if you want to run cable, utilities, etc., you go to the federal government, get your permit, do whatever environmental impact studies need done, and be on your merry. But here, you have to deal with municipalities. Thousands of them. And that opens the door for exclusive contracts; Which are typically for 10, 20, even 50 years. And it goes to one company. One. For an entire town. For 50 years. They didn't write any legislation, they just took advantage of how our government was organized. It's a glitch courtesy of our Constitution.

The other half of the equation though, and one most people forget, is that the United States is big. Like, really big. Like, it could fit all those other countries mentioned inside it and still have space left over for dessert. Low population density is what fucks us, even more than the above-mentioned which, while bad, can be fixed by law. You cannot shrink a landmass down to a more maintainable size.

Roads, water works, electricity, cabling... all of it, we need more. A lot more than say, Japan would. In Japan, people are packed in like sardines. There are parts of this country where you can watch your dog run away for three days it's so flat and barren. But it still needs cabling run across it.

We are, in a very literal sense, a victim of our own size. No fat american jokes though please.

I once tried submitting a tip on a possible terrorism lead to the FBI's website. Then it put up a CAPTCHA, and that pretty much ended it. I hope he didn't blow up anything important.

Keep waiting.

I wouldn't cry if the coal companies went out of business, coal is nasty stuff. CO2 is the least of its problems.

Yep, the Green Party, Libertarian Party, and Constitution party were on enough ballots to win. The are about fifty more parties who mathematically have no chance, but those 3 could win if the corporate media let them.

There are all kinds here, cops (any time you see a cop referred as an "LEO" you know it's a cop because that's Low Earth Orbit to us), firefighters, pilots, and it seems that lately there are an awful lot of greengrocers. Hell Will Wheaton has a slashdot account and posts sometimes, he's an actor.

I've been using EAC on the XP box. I want to nuke Windows on that machine and put kubuntu on it.

There's a little lens flare in the CrystaLens, too, but not enough to matter. Oh, and you spelled "lasik" right.

And we're off to a brilliant start here with a classic ad hominid abuse fallacy. Or as it's known in IT circles... The Handwave. Not that it matters, but I worked for a fortune 50 company in systems administration; My job role included maintenance of workstations and ATMs at over 3,700 retail locations throughout North America. But again; you're attacking the messenger, not the message. Not cool.

Number two burning up the charts is a Nirvana fallacy. Brilliant. No, nobody can guarantee 100%. But I can be pretty confident of 99.997%, yes. And you do recall that the "script kiddies" and "Anonymous" (an aggregate group of script kiddies) have about .01% of the funding of the NSA, right? Yes, they regularly make headlines breaking into computers, but the odds of them breaking into any specific computer is quite low. Unlike the NSA, which has cultivated the ability to point at something and say "I want it. Make it mine." You're comparing the mongolian hordes to the Knights Templar here, buddy.

Up next, we've got ourselves a false dilemma, with a bonus -- another ad hominim. This harkens back to high school where you'd say "If you don't answer, you're gay!"

That wasn't sarcasm. That's how the professionals protect highly classified, compartmentalized information. Perhaps you misunderstand what "physically secured facility" means. These are places like military bases; They have men with shotguns, lots of cameras, a perimeter, barbed wire, high explosives, and thick concrete walls.

This time, a less obvious one: the single cause fallacy, otherwise known as oversimplification.

Please show me the "easy" plan you have for bypassing all of the layers of security at a typical military base, in order to access the server in the middle of it that contains the secure data, and to either do it so quickly that nobody has time to push the self-destruct button, or so quietly nobody thinks to.

I feel sorry for you too, because you spent a couple kilowords demolishing an argument that wasn't made to begin with. Your entire post is a giant strawman, and a poorly executed one at that. I didn't say to give up on information security; I said that a guy on a shoestring budget is no match for them. Somewhere in your brain, a process caught a signal 11, trapped it incorrectly, and you vomited out a four page error message onto Slashdot.

an invasive species native to South America has been threatening biological diversity in the ear which can have lasting consequences on the ecosystem

Threatening biological diversity in the ear? Huh? Plus, when I tried to go to your link it wanted a username and password. Fix the summary, find a better link, and resubmit.

Meanwhile - Chicago has the highest death toll by handguns in the WORLD. Imagine that. You won't address those statistics, will you?

Ah, but They do. They blame the NRA for the violence in Chicago, believe it or not (link is to a political cartoon).

do they ground military aircraft like they do commercial ones?

Yes, when I was in the USAF they often grounded whole fleets. The C5As were out of service for a few months after a piece of equipment used to service the tail fell over and killed a guy. Unlike civilian planes, when military planes get grounded it seldom makes the news.

No, I'm merely suggesting that locking those IT professionals in a room and beating them with a metal pipe, is an effective method of "unsecuring" those communications. It's only in the imagination of Anonymous Cowards and hollywood screen-writers that the police kick in the door, seize the computer, and then say "Oh shit! He's using a 8192 bit encryption key. We'll never recover the data! I guess we better just leave then, defeated."

The people who designed these systems, those venerated IT professionals you mentioned earlier? Yeah, they knew from day one that TLS, SSL, certificate authorities, etc., were not truly secure. They were a compromise that provided "reasonable" security -- and it still does do that. Millions of internet-based financial transactions are secured using SSL, TLS, etc., every day and are not compromised. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not. Is it a decent one? Sortof.

But fundamentally, you're asking for the impossible with your "end to end" encryption non-sense. The very first in a long list of problems is: How do you securely exchange keys with an entity you have no prior relationship with? How does Alice know she's talking to Bob, if she has never met Bob before? The solution that TLS/SSL used was certificate authorities; A trusted third party that both Bob and Alice trust. Unfortunately, like any trust model, it is only as strong as the weakest link, and as certificate authorities proliferated... rogue CAs and stolen keys became a very real threat.

But simply switching the protocols around won't solve the very first problem: How do you securely exchange keys over what is, inherently, an insecure medium? You can't.

First, yes, I do have superior knowledge (obviously). And I'm willing to put my reputation on the line by not posting anonymously. This frequently comes back to bite me in the ass, especially when dealing with Anonymous Cowards, but karma is not as important to me as getting as accurate of information as possible in front of as many eyeballs as possible. If a few -1, Troll mods is the price I pay, I do so gladly. Second, Thunderbird has an OpenPGP addon... developing another addon is silly, and frankly, you and I both know you lack the chops to actually program.

But regardless, if I'm going to get serious about personal privacy, I'm not going to do it by sitting down to write my own crypto addon. For one, it would almost certainly be more buggy than the ones that have been reviewed and certified as correctly implimented by crytologists... and crypto is amazingly easy to get wrong, and devilishly difficult for someone without loads of experience to detect the failure. For two... why would I spend hundreds of hours doing that, when I can spend dozens of hours making phone calls and writing letters to the people who have far, far more power than I do, and convince others to do the same?

I'm sorry, but looking at my large list of tools available to me, the one labelled "Democracy" seems far more likely to get me what I want than one labelled "Amateur Crypto".