What MS really needs to do to keep in the mobile market and save Nokia is to completely move to a MS branded flavor of Android. They still need to meet the requirements for Google services, which I know would be horrible for them to have to release a device that would require a google logon for all it's features. They have, however, lost the mobile OS race. If they would just give up on their mobile OS and delicate those resources to a platform(android) they could actually start working on REAL desktop and mobile OS integration. I got a Lumia at the same time I got my surface pro. There was absolutely no integration benefit. The surface pro was awesome. The Lumia 1020, with my favorite camera ever, only stayed with me 6 months. The windows mobile interface was miserable. I can't believe they're throwing away so much time on making what is their only decision at this point.

This is going to only increase the difficulty in catching people engaging in truely bad activity, such as terrorism and child pornography. Every time these idiots start trying to go after things that cause little or no harm to society, encryption and privacy tools make leeps and bounds because the demand for these tools sky rocket. And people that do cause acutal harm to society get these tools too. Hardly anyone used a VPN ten years ago, now that people know everything they do can be watched by anyone, people like my 70 year old dad use VPN just to do his banking..

One thing that non of this will do he help you from IP address identification. Lookup aids, or 'early signs of x desease' .... It's not hard to tie that to a name based off of the scripts that you do allow to run on other sites that have your name. This is all too confusing and hectic, but I have levels in my head of what I'm ok with going to whome. I use 3 instances of firefox portable, and IXquick's proxied results. 1 ff portable is for social media, which I rarely use these days. 1ff portable is my general browser that I only log onto things where my real name and personal credentials aren't used. The last is for email and using IXQuick. IXQuick will allow you to search through privately and view pages through their proxy. This means that when the page loads on your screen, the IP address that requested the page is IXQuick's. The only problem there is that you can't use javascript on a proxied page, but that's not a huge deal. I think my next step will be to use a VM that is always using a VPN to deal with my personal confidential stuff, I just hate the idea of buying more windows licenses for this purpose.

I hope that's tongue in cheek. There are many things you could want to gather information about without it being tied to you for everyone to see. Looking up health related things is what I use it most for. If a friend or family has something I would like more info on, I don't want that ailment being attached to my name...

People can see the real danger that terrorist pose. However, they fail to see the real threat that a fully surveilled society poses. The 'control' that the nazi occupation had on it's society will pale in comparison. I'm not trying to be an alarmist by saying that, I'm not saying the control over the population will be used the same way, I'm saying that the control will be much stronger and harder to fight if it were ever needed.

People say that they have nothing to fear because they aren't doing anything wrong. While they may not be doing something wrong by today's measures, that may not always be the case. If you keep giving and giving controls to elites, it will in all likely hood, one day be illegal to speak negatively about the elites. After all they don't want anything threatening their power. If after something like that does occur, and things aren't where they want them, why not take care of anyone who's ever spoken out against someone in power in the past.

People like to think this is far fetched, but we are already taking steps to get there. Right now, you say anything threatening about them or you'll find yourself in a heap of trouble. Even if it's obviously light hearted and not at all serious. Gradually the definition of what is 'threatening' is changing. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see that one day it could be threatening to say anything negative at all about the people in control.

To preserve freedom, there has to be an avenue for decent. Just because 'I have nothing to hide' doesn't mean that I want the avenues for decent to be closed. That's the scariest part to me. When there is no possibility of decent, there is no end to the possibilities of human abuse on the largest scales ever known to mankind. Our world is full, there will be no where to run, there would be no way to get there if there was a place. If there were such a place, they would be able to quickly find you. There would be no chance of a large enough group to get together to help put things back in balance.

I watched the original Red Dawn a few months ago, and while I was watching it, I thought to myself, the resistance that the young guys put up would not be possible with today's technology. Simply with drones and infrared cameras it would have been game over. Add into that the lockheed martin laser that was up on slashdot a few weeks ago that could zap a truck engine from a mile away...

I'm not saying that the powers that be will ever force these kinds of control over the masses, but why wouldn't they... if there was nothing to stop them? They've proven their scrupulousness time and time again. I just don't have that much faith in them to say 'go head and spy on me, I've got nothing to hide'.

It's not security vs liberty. Though one takes away from the other, not many people would want an absolute one of either. Police take away my liberty to rob you in the street. That's a liberty that as part of our social contract with each other that we've decided for security over liberty.
What many people have been tricked into believing is that if you have two opposing ideas, that there should be an absolute of one or the other. When that happens the argument goes no where and things carry on the way they were headed. And we're headed into a terrifying direction for mankind if we can't start having intelligent conversations about these topics.

In this article for example, we are talking about a nation of elected officials not only lying, but committing fraud to and on behalf of their constituents. Because of the national discussion around the spying revelations, the conversation gets mixed up in that. Many people don't care about the spying and are tired of hearing about the potential dangers that they don't believe will come. What those people fail to realize, is that this topic is one of those potential dangers. Not only are they lying to us now, they are fabricating events to meet their goals.

What happens when it's too late, and people realize how messed up things are and speak up about it. Only to have some truth fabricated about them to have them discredited, imprisoned, or even murdered.

There needs to be a new universally enforced bill of rights that protects us from the possibility of creating the most effective global authoritarian government this world has ever seen.

Generally, yes, the market would clear things up. The problem you have though is that the government is involved in distorting this market via H1B visas and discussions around expanding them. If they would cut it out, and tax outsourced overseas labor properly, people would start investing in their futures in IT related areas. The way it is now, I wouldn't recommend to anyone planning their future to look in these areas. You can't fully blame companies either. Their primary goal is to provide xyz while making as much profit as possible. Unless you take it out of their mind that outsourcing and h1bs are viable options, then for every competitively paid(on a local scale) employee they have, they are spending more on that person then they have to.