And forget the interstellar-space angle for a moment, too: anyone for a decent picture of Pluto?

The US is not a democrapcy. It's a Republic!

The main thing that the USA today piece gets at is this:

But his crime devastated the Vatican, shattering the confidentiality that typically governs correspondence with the pope.

Let's consider a similar privilege in the US: attorney-client privilege. It's really important that people can trust their communications with their lawyers are confidential, at least if there is any hope to maintain a semblance of justice in the justice system instead of federal prosecutors running roughshod over everyone. Likewise, it's really important for the Vatican that people trust their priests enough to actually go to confession for forgiveness of sins (important to Catholics, you may have heard) and to receive moral guidance - at least so long as people remain imperfect, which means more or less 'forever'.

There have been some big scandals recently which have compromised that sort of trust.

What do most people need computers to begin with? They are not 3D modeling or doing highly computational mathematics. They needed a computer to surf the web, do email, and maybe now and then create documents.

They (the majority of people) are not 3D modelling or doing highly complex mathematics, or expiermenting with music, or simulations, or art, or anything beyond the box, because the software is not there. The software is not there because programmers themselves believe that computers are now for surfing the web, email, MS Office, and playing Angry Birds.

And this might be tolerable if things just stood still, but instead they're going backwards as the new generation of programmers decides that Personal Computers should be even less usable. File Manger in Windows 3.11 was a very usuable and understandable application. I bought an android tablet recently which dind't even have a file manager. Those which could be downloaded made operations like copy and paste into nigh dystopian process. Don't even get me started on inputing and editing text on this device.

Yet, we see tablet concepts actually bleeding back into the desktop, making it even less usable. It's as though programmers have collectively decided to dumb down device they once used to create entire universe in, and to make possible things which others had never even imagined. The potential of PCs is being put back into the box.

The real issue here is that software is not being developed to exploit the new found power of modern PCs. An entire generation of programmers is wasting their time writing sophmoric beta "apps" for restricted tablet devices. People are buying these yes, but collectively our software and productivity levels are not advancing.

People used to upgrade their PCs to get a new OS with useful new applications. No such OS is being made anymore. Most of them, Windows, Mac and many Linux distros, are instead sliding ever backwards.

Well personally I ran screaming in horror after the first two hours of flailing around trying to regain something approaching my old workflow. To each his own I suppose.

No. Likely there'd be a complete fork from a clean workbase to start over again, a complete distrust of code from day one, and a complete overhaul of all existing systems.

Or the NSA could just rig our cars to explode and burn us alive before we do so, or whatever.

I'm not traditionally in the tin foil hat brigade, but at this point, having SELinux installed on your machine is the height of stupidity. The NSA has comprehensively proved itself to be an untrustworthy, duplicitous, and ruthless organisation. I don't care how many people reviewed the code; I want my computer to be associated as little as possibly with anything written or developed by those people. I regard this as somewhere between reiserfs and apartheid pears.

It's a question of trust and risk. I don't trust the NSA enough to risk keeping SELinux.

P.S.
SELinux is not installed on my machine by default, but libSElinux is. It's interesting how many programs would also have to be removed if the library was.

The contraposition of this story with the fate of John Corzine deserves to be highlighted.

Here we have the a US intelligence agency, saying it needs to snoop on millions in a supposed effort to protect them from threats. And yet John Corzine, who openly stole customers money, is not being prosecuted, despite the reams and reams of records and evidence against him and MFGlobal.

What we see here is that information does not correllate with prosecutions, or effectiveness at protecting people from harm.

Comments like this aren't actually cynical anymore. The rule of law is breaking down all over the Western world as connected people are increasingly allowed to live outside it.

Again Mossad is not the problem. In fact, the NSA or Mossad developing a virus to sabotage Iranian centrifuges or what have you is also not the problem. This is what spy agencies are for. The problem is when the NSA develops viruses which affect, or engages in espionage on, the US public. The NSA is not supposed to do that.

Again, I raise the analogy of the US military dropping bombs on US citizens; they don't do it because they're not supposed to. The same rules should apply to the NSA and its espionage bag of tricks.

Amen. It's obvious that most "modern" interfaces and "apps" are being designed by people who have no real idea of what they are doing, delivering, and are simply winging it on bluff.

Engelbart's tradgedy is the same tradgedy that is giving us substandard tablet interfaces, less usable UI's like Unity, and which is walling us off in restricted private gardens like Facebook instead of offerring us the wider potential of the web.

A notorius Irish Judge recently gave a man a two year suspended sentence for raping a women in front of her children. He's done worse, and so have other Irish judges.

The supreme court is particularly notorius, with at least one judge on it having never sat behind a bench before. They've done everything; from ruling that mens only golf clubs are non-discriminatory, to making it legal to keep people imprisoned even if the law that convicted them is later ruled to be constitutional -- Google the Mr A case (tl;dr "teh pedos!!"). Members of the court are not above public dust-ups with the executive, on their own behalf or for anyone else they favour.

In Ireland, we don't have laws. What we have are more like customs. And he who pays the most for the festivities decides what those customs are.

Son, have you ever considered a career in Intelligence?

"I think the GPs point was that it does not have to be a all or none - that you can have SSL of a self signed cert without the error message and without giving any "expectation of [high] security" (to quote GP "no full secure icon")"

Can you, really? I mean, we have a big enough problem with training users to type credentials in a login box served by http://www.myfavoritebank.com/ all insecure-like. This area where security intersects user interaction design is a tricksy one.