What's more sad, the people who are passionate about devices, or the people who are passionate about chastizing people for being passionate about devices?
A good question, but I put it to you that there is a difference between being passionate about devices and "emo fanboy ranting". (I am passionate about devices.)
Seriously guys, get over yourselves.
Make sure to learn to dance Gondwana Style
I always preferred the Silurian Shuffle.
Not to mention the fact that they're comparing possibly unlawful wiretapping with genocide.
I mean seriously?
The "Any" key would be far more useful.
I spell that as "Esc"
... are condemned to repeat it.
English evolves, as does the global use of Latin based alphabets. The current trend is towards fewer customized symbols, not more.
TL;DR Yet another asshat with more money than sense.
Excuse me... Did you just try to cop the Nuremburg Defence on behalf of the NSA?
I'm just saying you need to blame the politicos who are responsible.
Or in Redneckistan Virginia, 50/25 (FiOS) for $45.
Nice, but then you'd have to live in Virgina! (I kid... Apparently Viginia is quite nice, and the guy who said that was a Pakistani Muslim immigrant so the whole "redneck" thing has to be exaggerated, or at least in suburbia.)
"Martha, there's a nice young man at the gate trying too sell me FiOS... Can you bring him a bowl of that squirrel stew and my checkbook?"
You are very, very naive. NSA IS a core part of government and they have a "intelligence" shitpile on EVERY American by now. They decided Obama's shitpile was smelling better than Romney's.
The NSA were just following orders. All the programs you are so scared of now were put in place during a Republican mandate and are only scaled up versions of what they have been doing for decades. I can only speculate why they were allowed to continue.
Complaining that a lawful government agency was following orders and fulfilling a mandate related to national security is naive.
Shoot the messenger much? It's the political bosses that are to blame, not the foot soldiers.
If that's all it takes why am I still paying $60/mo for 1 mb down...?
Mb or MB?
That's pretty sad when in the Commune of Quebec in the Soviet Republic of Kanada you can get 60Mb down / 10Mb up for $80 a month. (And according to speedtest.net, they're lowballing it, it's actually 62Mb.)
Just like software optimization. When you've got '1000 things' to fix, you've really got 1 thing to fix: Process/Culture. There is a difference between premature optimization and not doing stupid slow things.
Even if you can eventually 'fix' the mess, it's now a mess with the inner loops optimized, not cleaned up. The original team is likely making another mess.
Not at all, you can be inefficient in non-critial code if it makes it easier to understand or maintain.
But if you're attacking a performance problem you don't start by wasting your time and money on little pointless fixes, you go for the root of the problem with extreme prejudice.
"Well we're still bottlenecked on the DB, but I made the pages load 5ms faster by spending the day optimizing our CSS."
And now nobody will understand it... thanks Bob...
The U.S. has overall been a force for good in the world, but do not fail to consider your failings as well. Military force requires oversight.
No worries then - they provide oversights aplenty.
I know you're being ironic but... On a global scale, significantly better than average. From an ideal perspective, never enough.
Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."
Mr. Clapper didn't take that approach because he knows damn well if he told us what he was doing, we'd tell him to stop and/or stop the payments.
Mr. Clapper does not take that approach because he's not allowed to take that approach. Like the Marines, if the NSA is doing something it's because they've been TOLD to do something. (Same for SAS and GCHQ)
I agree! The budget is so big that we shouldn't even consider looking at an item if it isn't in the "top 100" projects list.
In this sense, let's buy everyone an Alienware computer, upgrade to the most expensive brand of toilet paper, put in a soda fridge that is fully stocked for all federal employees, paint the building every year, and invite Britney Spears to the company picnic.
Waste less than 1% of the budget is still waste. The fact that the employees themselves thought that it was enough waste to report it should be an indication.
True... but this is like software optimization, you can spend your time fixing 1000 things that have a 0.00126% impact and you're still fucked.
Or you can go after something that will actually make a difference.
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
