I'll never have one of these in my home. It's bad enough I have smart phones which could have the microphone turned on without my knowledge either by a "legitimate" party or by someone with malicious intent. Either way, it's a constant mental struggle between enjoying neat technology and concerns about having it used against you. These days, it seems like every business entity or government agency feels the need to know what you're thinking or doing at every moment of ever yday... and some folks seem to welcome that.

I think the difference between you and I is that at least I'm upfront with the uncertain nature of my argument. If you believe that the lack of certainty in my argument discredits it, I disagree. I openly admit that my beliefs on these matters aren't backed up by concrete facts, but no one else's is either. The "establishment" purposely makes this the case. We all get our news from the same places and make are own determinations from what information we have. I think any sensible person that looks at the news articles that come out regarding actions taken by the US Government or military and asks themselves who stands to benefit from them can draw their only reasonable conclusions.

It's off-topic, but let me take an example from recent history to try and explain what my point is, the Boston marathon bombing. Some folks believe all that military armed law enforcement was justified. You know what I saw? A trial run at martial law to see how the public would react and how much resistance there would be. I live in Maine, and happened to get home early from work that day, so naturally, I had the TV on watching several different networks for coverage. Over and over, they displayed examples of hundreds... no exaggeration... hundreds of military armed police conducting dragnet-style searches in neighborhood after neighborhood in the Boston area. The city was on full lockdown. Have you ever seen that for a 2-person manhunt? I've not. There is video footage of police entering peoples homes. There is other footage of people who refused police entry. Heh, side note, there is evidence showing CNN using crisis actors. Ask yourself why they'd need to do such a thing. There is obviously an agenda there, even if it's something as stupid as a ratings grab... but I digress.

The level of paranoia and fear mongering is amazing. I think the Federal government is intentionally doing this because I think the more afraid you make people, the more accepting they are of Government control in the interest of "protecting people". Consider how out-of-control political correctness is. Once upon a time, the "accepted" idea was that in the US, we tolerated our differences. Nowadays, the "accepted" idea is that we offend no one. These are control tactics, in my opinion. Ask yourself where you believe it will stop.

I'm not attempting to start an argument with anyone. All I ask is for "people" (in general) to consider that it's even remotely possible that there is a grand plan for all of this. Throughout human history there is a mountain of evidence showing people with power over other people want more of it. The people living in the US have been fortunate to have this grand experiment of the population having some amount personal liberty. It's not the only place for it, but there have not been many. I'm merely stating that there are people that want to take that away. Call them liberals, call them democrats, can call them whatever you want, the premise is the same.

One thing I am certain of... is that fear is a popular method used to control people.

I have to disagree with you. I don't have any unnecessary feelings of "fear", and yes it is exactly what has been happening. In fact, I'm quite the opposite, as I've questioned the fear mongering that has been going on for a long time. I really wish you people would look up how things actually work. Everything from petrodollar recycling, to quantitative easing, to the purchase and sales of bonds to adjust the money supply. It's all there. Another belief I have, and I don't have any proof of this, but neither does anyone else, but I think the real reason for the second Iraq war was to protect the US Dollar. It had nothing to do with WMD. Hussein had started to sell Iraq oil on the Euro, which was on the rise at the time as a currency (17% more value than the US Dollar, IIRC). The US went in and secured the Ministry of Oil and the oil fields and switched the countries oil sales back to the US Dollar immediately.

Furthermore, you can't ignore the technical details for the purpose of making your argument, the truth of the matter is in the technical details. I don't think you understand inflation. My suspicion is that everything you know about how things work is incorrect.

You saying that shows you don't understand how the Federal Reserve works. It is a central bank that uses bond purchases to increase or decrease the money supply as it deems necessary. You should look up "Quantitative Easing" as well. The Federal Reserve has been injecting money into the economy or buying toxic assets from commercial banks like crazy since the Great Recession in 2008.

The only reason they can do this, with little effect on the economy right now, is that the US Dollar is still held in high regard as the World's reserve currency. I believe that whenever that changes, whether it be 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years from now will be when the US economy officially collapses. It's certain to happen at some point, the only unknown is when. I actually have come to believe that all of our involvement in the Middle East is to protect the US oil interests over there and making sure that the US Dollar is the currency other countries must use to purchase oil.

I personally think that is a very ignorant thing to say. First off, I think the evidence that piracy "hurts" these industries is sketchy at best. Sure... *IF* the person pirating said copyrighted material would have bought it legitimately otherwise, then I could buy that argument, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more likely that most of the pirated material simply would not have been purchased at all. If someone wanted it bad enough, and they couldn't obtain it any other way, of course they'd pay for it.

For me though the real issue is how anyone thinks they could make such a bold claim to stop piracy all together. If it just so happens that torrents no longer function because of their software, or some other means, people who want to pirate copyrighted material will just come up with another way. This is a never-ending competition and the RIAA, the MPAA, or any other organization for that matter, will *NEVER* win it as long as there is some method to digitize the material and there is someone out there with the intelligence and the desire to put forth the effort to get around whatever copy-protection mechonism is in place at the time.

I use VPS servers and run my own site using wordpress for blogging, as well as some other software, and I encountered a situation similar to this with VPSLand (which, by the way, is the worst VPS hosting service I have ever used). I have since changed providers, obviously.

After having already been through several periods of unexplained downtime, and an instance where the VPS was unexpectedly rolled back due to some unexplained problems (you can see where this is going), my VPS seemed to be permanently down, and customer service would not, or could not, assist me.

I had been using their backup service, but I could not restore the VPS to a running state with the tools I was provided. However, I figured out that I could put the VPS in maintenance mode and I could atleast SSH to it, so I used WinSCP across SSH to download my files and databases.

Bottom line. While I didn't lose anything, I learned the hard way (which was a failure on my part since I am a systems administrator) that you can't become complacent if you care about your data when you don't control the environment. I trusted VPSLand's administrators to safeguard my data and they failed. If I had not discovered the maintenance mode option, I would have lost everything. The only way I can ensure my data is safe is to back it up myself. I eventually wrote a VBscript that connects and downloads all of the web and MySQL directories to my machine at home on a regular basis.

I know all situations are different, but if you can backup your data yourself in any way... even if it's just additional copies on some form of removable media, it's best to do it. Do not trust that whatever service you are paying for will ensure that it's never lost. The company might have a great looking website and have well written policies, but if you don't know what's going on behind the scenes, you don't really know anything about the company hosting your data. Go the extra mile and safeguard your data yourself.