That's a fine job of redundantly restating my sentence while also pointing out the obvious.

That's the problem with this media-driven urge to view the entire world through the lens of group identity. It becomes a fixation, and people who allow their thought process to be a product of media will miss your clearly-stated point because of it.

You are describing authorized use by those officials who have access to the system.

We were talking about unauthorized use by outside attackers who manage to compromise said system. The post to which I replied spelled this out explicitly and I quoted that in my own post.

See how simple that is?

When the day comes that this information is obtained and used against the same politicians who voted for it, it will be some delicious comeuppance. And better than they deserve. And a minor observation. From the fine summary:

It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.

I must have missed the part when people got to vote on the candidates' policies about the role, powers, leadership and reach of the NSA.

The problem is that the media has managed to alter the perception of formal democratic protest to be little more than a hobby for jobless extreme left liberals, making it something to be ashamed of and even arrested for.

Would you concede that (say, by using managed languages) eliminating all buffer overflows would be a huge step in the right direction? We have the capability of doing that. There is still the impossibility of ever conclusively proving that a given piece of software is completely free of all possible bugs, but that's a lofty and unrealistic goal. There are many feasible steps we could take that are realistic. We generally don't take those steps because the trade-offs involved don't fit our priorities. They usually mean more effort and therefore more expense, but government is the one institution that does not need to make a profit.

Referring to your original post, there is a huge difference between "this doctor is incompetent and is guilty of malpractice" versus "cure all diseases all the time". I am essentially agreeing with you, except I think that with the latter case, you're going to an absurd extreme that no one is realistically suggesting. That was my point.

It's a form of sabre-rattling. Although, it is useful to note the difference between spying as in passive information gathering, versus something intended to cause material damage like Stuxnet. The latter actually is a form of attack.

I imagine the Soviets were pissed off about this one.

The Trans-Siberian Pipeline, as planned, would have a level of complexity that would require advanced automated control software, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). The pipeline used plans for a sophisticated control system and its software that had been stolen from a Canadian firm by the KGB. The CIA allegedly had the company insert a logic bomb in the program for sabotage purposes, eventually resulting in an explosion with the power of three kilotons of TNT.

That's quite a bit more destructive than merely learning unauthorized information.

Vehicles that never fail? No. Vehicles that have a reasonable failure mode? Yes.

Consider the air brakes on a tractor trailer. The air is what keeps the brakes apart. If some mechanical failure caused a loss of air pressure, the failure mode would be stopping the vehicle. That is acceptable. If they did it the other way, with the air pressure being used to apply the brakes, the first sign of failure could be the inability to stop the vehicle at highway speed. That is not acceptable.

Either way, it's not a question of perfection. It's a question of expecting failure. The principle applies to software as well.

Agreed, even after getting to know someone it can be hard to spot tell-tale warning signs. People can spend their life hiding things and get quite good at it. It was only after a girlfriend of mine moved in that her schizophrenia became apparent. She was very good at hiding it but put far less effort into that after she moved in. Warnings like when she yelled at me for listening to her thoughts all the time. That said, maybe I was the one that drove her crazy.

Assuming one is shallow, inexperienced, or quick to judge, then yes that is true. But did you want to be with someone who has that much emotional growing up to do?

Sadly what you described is the majority. That makes it easy to forget that not everyone operates that way.

I'm simply staggered by the number of nay-sayers posting here and being modded up to +5 who are doing little more than desperately grasping at straws while denying the staggering array evidence in the world around them. Ignoring such overwhelming proof isn't even a matter of blind faith, its just willful ignorance sponsored by parties with a massive financial interest in staving off the inevitable as long as profitably possible.

Exactly. Politicians just love that former category, precisely because it never works. It never works and never solves the problem, so there is always a menacing problem they can promise to do something about the next time they campaign. It also has the side-effect of requiring a police state to have even a slight hope of enforcement, which again is great from the perspective of most politicians.

Politicians know the War on Drugs doesn't stop people from acquiring drugs. They know that mass shootings overwhelmingly tend to happen in "gun free" zones. They know even an outright ban on guns doesn't stop criminals from acquiring them. They know someone not afraid of a murder charge isn't going to be deterred by a weapons violation. They probably know that the USA has one of the highest murder rates of the industralized world ... unless you exclude Chicago and a few other cities where it is practically impossible to legally own a firearm; then the USA has one of the lowest. They understand all of this.

They are interested in perpetuating the problems. It's what wins elections. It's what makes people increasingly feel they need government intervention. It's fun to think of them as a bunch of morons who couldn't find their ass in the dark, but this is called allowing sentiment to interfere with judgment.

At least we are teaching them that those with authority and political power are not to be trusted.