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I mean, just have a look at Amazon to see all the new Ubuntu books coming out. I think they've got a good thing going with Ubuntu... forget about userlinux.

I remember the good old days when you could send the instructions F0 0F to the Intel CPU and voila... crash!

Since wind is driven by temperature differences within the atmosphere, wouldn't a faster spinning earth have more consistent temperatures across it due to a more even heating?

Sorry, you are wrong. Read the book Pentium Chronicles by the lead architect of the P6 and NetBurst processors, Robert Colwell.

Mentifex was the original author of Mind.Forth, Mind.html and the AI4U ISBN 0595654371 textbook of artificial intelligence.

Mind.Forth was a primitive artificial mind written in Win32Forth for robots and based on a Theory of Cognitivity for artificial intelligence. AI functionality was developed by Mentifex first in Mind.Forth and ported subsequently into the Mind.html Seed AI for propagation throughout the installed user base.

Mind.html was an artificial intelligence coded by Mentifex initially in JavaScript for Web migration and in Forth for robots, evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ.

The AI4U textbook was reviewed falsely and viciously but found its way into libraries at such prestigious universities as the University of Hong Kong, North Carolina State University and Texas A&M University.

Technological Singularity was launched almost single-handedly by Mentifex against all odds and in the face of desperate opposition from the FAQ-writing AI Establishment and the Singularity wannabes whose revenue stream was threatened by the free Open-Source AI software released into the Web Wilds by Mentifex.

Without Jobs there would be no Apple, Woz would have stuck at HP and written printer drivers.

Even writing printer drivers can lead to great things. After all, it was a printer problem that spurred Richard Stallman towards development of GNU, which of course became the foundation for the later flourishing of Free Software and the open source development model. (Sam William's biography Free as in Freedom published by O'Reilly gives the whole story of the printer problem.) You don't need to hook up with a charismatic individual with a reality distortion field to change the world. If a controversial eccentric like Stallman can do great things from a hermit-like AI lab, then Woz would have had opportunities even without Jobs.

It'll be nice to get an autobiography from Woz, but the problem with many autobiographies is that they show you just one side of a person, and in the tech industry that can be dull. I think that gossipy histories like Apple Confidental 2.0 are superior, as they present a whole range of viewpoints and better show a person in context with other historical actors.

Still, I'm curious if Woz will write anything about the challenges he faced at early Apple from rude coworkers. He wasn't exactly treated fairly by Jobs and the company in its fledgling days, and a personal perspective would be interesting.

Principal investigator Steve Squyres (mentioned in the /. summary) is the author of the fantastic book about building and deploying the rovers: Roving Mars : Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet.

"Is RDBMS still a Brave New Frontier, or will Google make the art obsolete once they finish indexing everything?""

Data Mining is about asking the right questions. Indexing is only a small part of that.

--
Data Mining Solutions: Methods and Tools for Solving Real-World Problems

Datamining would be a piece of cake if all data were kept in clear, standard XML dialects. See Visualising the Semantic Web , ed Geroimenko and Chen (Spring Verlag, 2004). Some of the possibilities of combing through information and elucidating it, combining it and converting it described in that book are simply awesome. Too bad that the Semantic Web is a pipe dream at the moment.

The Synthaxe, is simply a midi controller. The only difference between that and the more 'traditional' keyboard style controllers is that it's held and can be played like a guitar. Guitarist Allan Holdsworth was one of the early pioneers of it's use back in 1985 or so. It's all over the album Metal Fatigue, and others.

Like any other midi controller, you can connect it to any DSP device you want, not just drum machines, but any synthsizer that you can get a cable connected to.

Methinks he meant to go here. At least, I hope he did.

It's only a matter of time before you have virtual crackwhores whose avatars stumble into your pad, and after they give sex for money, they ask if you want to try a hot new drug called "snow crash". (If you are in the 0.001% of Slashdot users who don't get the joke because you haven't read Neal Stephenson's , you don't know what you've been missing).

/this is not a troll, it's sarcasm

/this is not a troll, it's sarcasm

/this is not a troll, it's sarcasm

It was obvious that this was coming, as there are already plenty of cordless phones like the Linksys Cordless Internet Telephony Kit for Skype. Just get skype-in and skype-out service and you're good to go. Extending this idea to cell-phones was a matter of time.

A very good book with many essays on the application and importance of open standards and open source is Open Sources 2.0 : The Continuing Evolution. Check it out if you are interested in researching more of what some experts have to say about this.

The list of essays are:
1. The Mozilla Project: Past and Future by Mitchell Baker
2. Open Source and Proprietary Software Development by Chris DiBona
3. A Tale of Two Standards by Jeremy Allison
4. Open Source and Security by Ben Laurie
5. Dual Licensing by Michael Olson
6. Open Source and the Commoditization of Software by Ian Murdock
7. Open Source and the Commodity Urge: Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process by Matthew N. Asay
8. Under the Hood: Open Source and Open Standards Business Models in Context by Stephen R. Walli
9. Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur by Russ Nelson
10. Why Open Source Needs Copyright Politics by Wendy Seltzer
11. Libre Software in Europe by Jesus M. Gonzalez-BarahonaGregorio Robles
12. OSS in India by Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins
13. When China Dances with OSS by Boon-Lock Yeo, Louisa Liu, and Sunil Saxena
14. How Much Freedom Do You Want? by Bruno Souza
15. Making a New World by Doc Searls
16. The Open Source Paradigm Shift by Tim O'Reilly
17. Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development by Pamela Jones
18. Open Source Biology by Andrew Hessel
19. Everything Is Known by Eugene Kim
20. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir by Larry Sanger
21. Open Beyond Software by Sonali K. Shah
22. Patterns of Governance in Open Source by Steven Weber
23. Communicating Many to Many by Jeff Bates and Mark Stone
Appendixes :
A. The Open Source Definition
B. Referenced Open Source Licenses
C. Columns from Slashdot

They already have the Xandros Business Edition which provides a desktop environment that looks and feels much like a better-looking Windows 2003. Unlike Windows, Xandros is easy to install and maintain, and it doesn't come with all of the security flaws and virus vulnerabilities that Windows has. Xandros Business Edition also includes the full edition of CrossOver Office. That means that if there is a major Windows software package that you can't live without, chances are you will be able to install and run it on Xandros through CrossOver. Now with the introduction of Xandros Server, which will go hand-in-hand with their business desktop distro, they are ready to eliminate Windows from almost any corporate environment. More power to them!

I once had a standards seminar where soemone made the interresing remark that open standards only matter to companies that are behind in marketshare. Once a company is dominant they want closed standards.

Perhaps that can be true, but I'm inclined to think that this is no longer so sure now that ESR's thoughts in The Cathedral and the Bazaar have spread throughout the IT world. The more a company supports "open" ideas, such as open standards and open source, the more support it will get from the open source developer community. When a company is supported by open source developers, they can get a lot of unpaid labour that can push their products ahead of the crowd. Sure, certain licenses may require that the developers' contributions be available to all, but by the time competing companies implement the ideas, the first company should already have some new advantage.

If corporations want to profit from this community spirit, then they need to avoid pissing off their labour force, and so supporting open standards is a good idea.

Speaking of science fiction books, some aliens in Star Trek have come up with a solution to that "too long of a day" problem!

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy has terraformers get started on Venus by blocking its sunlight with a veil in between the planet and the sun. Once the atmosphere freezes, you can build on that. One is still forced to live in tents until terraforming is finally effective, but at least you're no longer in a death trap oven.

Here it is on Amazon.com, seems it's out of print! I didn't realize that.

Here is some good reading on the subject:

Thousands not Billions
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0890514410/sr=1-1 /qid=1144621052/ref=sr_1_1/002-2229204-8463207?_en coding=UTF8&s=books

The Collapse of Evolution
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801057744/sr=1-1 /qid=1144620897/ref=sr_1_1/002-2229204-8463207?_en coding=UTF8&s=books

Here is some good reading on the subject:

Thousands not Billions
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0890514410/sr=1-1 /qid=1144621052/ref=sr_1_1/002-2229204-8463207?_en coding=UTF8&s=books

The Collapse of Evolution
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801057744/sr=1-1 /qid=1144620897/ref=sr_1_1/002-2229204-8463207?_en coding=UTF8&s=books

Consider part of the foreword from Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance:

"For those who want to attack my view, let me save you the trouble of reading the entire book. On pages 325 and 326, I wrote:'It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.' It is possible; it needs to be done; it will create more jobs, not destroy jobs. I'm proud that I wrote those words in 1992, and I reaffirm them today."

Don't forget that there are not just libraries of book metadata online, there are libraries of complete books:

• Project Gutenberg
• Newton's Library
• Bartleby II
• Electronic Text Center at UVA Library
• Tech Books for Free
• etc.

While these libraries are by no means as extensive as something like Amazon, it's nice having the full text of the books themselves.

"Thus the first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of ten hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all the planets combined - if the bottle of chemicals hadn't run dry long before."

I'm all for Man improving his lot and vanquishing the terrible forces of Nature with technological prowess, but possibilities like this make me consider becoming a Luddite.

It seems to be that the best thing NASA could be doing now is trying to raise a generation that has the drive and vision to make private space ventures work. NASA itself is in trouble, we hear about that on Slashdot all the time (and Klerx's Lost in Space is a good introduction to its problems). NASA should begin phasing out the shuttle program, instead pushing funding towards more educational ventures such as these. I wonder, though, if the age group targeted here (kindergarten to 4th grade) is too young; focusing on adolescents who are soon to enter university, graduate, and then take part in aerospace ventures would possibly result in faster results.

I should mention that though I have my complaints about NASA, and many here are quick to tear it apart with vitriol, I think that for the time being it is the only force for robotic exploration of the universe. Private firms will be profit-driven, which for the time being means transportation from point to point on the globe, mining, and near-space tourism. Only an agency like NASA, not concerned with generating huge amounts of revenue and appeasing shareholders, would currently dare to send a probe to Pluto, for example. There is still room for encouraging children towards NASA's endeavours.

All true. Unfortunately, as soon as amazon decided to stop selling a book, or for whatever reason, the listing will be gone.

Not so. While that sometimes happens with CDs, book listings stay around forever. Amazon contains books concerning obscure fields, published in microscope quantities, and fallen out of print decades ago. I study linguistics, which means I read a lot of dusty old monographs, and I never have a problem finding them on Amazon.com to review. Take Brian Joseph's The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive , an obscure Cambridge University Press publication from 1983 really targeted just at libraries and never cheap enough for individuals. It still has an Amazon.com listing.

Personally, I'd rather a book database be not owned by a commerical entity that can list whatever it wants.

IMDB is now owned by a corporate entity, and while the quality has decreased, there's no problem with disappearing listings.

"Do you have a link to an ad for a six figure post-doc position?"

http://www.amazon.com/jobs

I actually knew someone who made six figures with just a B.S. (in a developer position, not a manager). He did have work experience prior to that.

Of course, you need your doctorate to be in something that interests Amazon, e.g. risk analysis, pricing analysis, load balancing in a service oriented architecture, etc. Work experience would be better.

As others pointed out, you've made mistakes.

The most glaring is that you assume that synchronous processors can only have one clock - that's incorrect. While the clock tick is of fixed length (by design), the global clock (as seen by external parties) may run at a different speed than internal clocks.

If the a path of logic takes 5ns to complete, and its clock matches exactly, then you are perfectly optimized. You are hampered not by the clock, but by the transistor's switching speed. This path will have the same delay, regardless of whether it is driven by a clock.

You might be getting confused because you are thinking about pipelining, where the longest stage dictates stage length. If everything is driven by one clock, you create waste because some partitions will finish sooner than others, and are therefore idle. However, modern designs now employ shew-tolerant clocking. By using multiple clocks, the issues created by clock skew can be entirely avoided. The walls between pipeline stages are destroyed and skewing delay negated.

Your issue with propogation delay of the clock is also not of great concern, in most cases. Synchronous chips can employ distributed clocks, islands of asynchronous logic, and the Pentium-4 actually has stages to help propogate the clock. However most processors are unlike the speed demon design of the P4 and clock speed is limitted by other issues than clock propogation. Currently, that limitting factor is power. In dynamic logic, frequency has a direct relationship to power consumption.

"But here is the deal.... We are not looking for people to help administer our systems. That is relatively easy to do, particularly with operating systems like OS X. You have to be bright and willing to work on *new* problems particularly those dealing with data management and visualization. Many comp-sci students want to go create games and there is a market for that, but where the technology for games really comes from is basic science research dealing with real-world problems. And in fact, some games and game engines are now being applied to real world problems."

Here's a question I'm certain no one will see. I've been researching various game engines for the purpose of serious games and I have a small collection. The question is, what engine(s) are the best for the purposes of "serious games", and what about the new ones coming out this year? Second how is the "middleware" market for tools that sit on top of these engines, and cater to serious games? And last how do games fit into the alternative visualization field?

"There are a couple of exciting projects I am working on in these fields, namely I have just been asked to sit on the board of a media group that will deal with some of these issues and real world application of games and other digital media. Alexander Seropian (of Bungie fame) is also on this board and it should be interesting to see where this goes. Additionally, our research in a new area of bioscience called metabolomics looks ready to take off and we are working with a number of comp-sci graduate students, post-docs and faculty to create tools to deal with the types of data we use to pick out signatures of cells much like the CIA and NASA use to determine signatures of "things" they are interested in. Also data management and communication is another field that is very much in demand and we are working with groups to help us create databases that can be mined and used interactively to collaboratively annotate and discuss data with multiple users."

Data Mining Solutions: Methods and Tools for Solving Real-World Problems covers some of that. A side-avenue is alternative means of displaying that data. BTW you don't need to be a computer scientist to get into the "application of" some of these tools.

"But here is the deal.... We are not looking for people to help administer our systems. That is relatively easy to do, particularly with operating systems like OS X. You have to be bright and willing to work on *new* problems particularly those dealing with data management and visualization. Many comp-sci students want to go create games and there is a market for that, but where the technology for games really comes from is basic science research dealing with real-world problems. And in fact, some games and game engines are now being applied to real world problems."

Here's a question I'm certain no one will see. I've been researching various game engines for the purpose of serious games and I have a small collection. The question is, what engine(s) are the best for the purposes of "serious games", and what about the new ones coming out this year? Second how is the "middleware" market for tools that sit on top of these engines, and cater to serious games? And last how do games fit into the alternative visualization field?

"There are a couple of exciting projects I am working on in these fields, namely I have just been asked to sit on the board of a media group that will deal with some of these issues and real world application of games and other digital media. Alexander Seropian (of Bungie fame) is also on this board and it should be interesting to see where this goes. Additionally, our research in a new area of bioscience called metabolomics looks ready to take off and we are working with a number of comp-sci graduate students, post-docs and faculty to create tools to deal with the types of data we use to pick out signatures of cells much like the CIA and NASA use to determine signatures of "things" they are interested in. Also data management and communication is another field that is very much in demand and we are working with groups to help us create databases that can be mined and used interactively to collaboratively annotate and discuss data with multiple users."

Data Mining Solutions: Methods and Tools for Solving Real-World Problems covers some of that. A side-avenue is alternative means of displaying that data. BTW you don't need to be a computer scientist to get into the "application of" some of these tools.

Let's just look at the arrogance/naivete in this statement:

I also believe that there is nothing wrong with spreading American culture and commerce across the planet. Show me someone that doesn't want peace and prosperity for their children.

There is no way I'm going to convinve a true believer such as yourself in a slashdot post. So, let's just try a reading assignment:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471678783/002-52 95802-3735200?v=glance&n=283155

It talks about how the US-engineered overthrow of the elected government of Iran in 1953 still reverberates today.

Read it and think about it. See if you can look in there to find the truth in the phrase 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'.

I currently use a cheapie Wacom Tablet, and so far it has treated me pretty good. I even use it for some engineering cad as it is more intuitive than a mouse when working in detail.

Just use a fountain pen like this one, even though they are cheap and often take some skill to write with they are preferable to quills. Quills are so 18th century, get into the 19th century you insensitive clod!

Hindi mystics traditionally have a word for 1/36,000,000th of a second, although none of them know why. Indian atomism describes 3 types of indivisible particles that can combine to form all the elements we know (a theory that suspiciously resembles current ideas of subatomic particles).

Have you read Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics ? It's an entertaining look at how closely some Eastern religious beliefs follow modern notions of physics and cosmology. In the end, however, you have to assume that it's all a matter of either coincidence, or discoveries due to observation and reason without any especial benefits of civilization.

Read Plato's Phaedo (Hackforth's translation is pretty good, and the translator's name oddly appropriate for the Slashdot crowd), which recounts the death of Socrates and where the executioner discusses his art in a disconcertingly cheerful fashion. Hemlock had to be downed once in a large quantity for it to kill, taking smaller doses would just cause numbness throughout the body.

For more on your point, see:
    "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
    "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
and:
    "CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery"
    http://www.whywork.org/
    "If you start asking yourself "why work?" you may see a connection between wage slavery, misunderstandings of leisure, lifestyles based on consumption, corporate welfare, education that often amounts to little more than conditioning, and the global social, environmental, and economic crises we are now facing. We hope that the materials we feature here will encourage critical thinking about such things. This site is primarily about ideas and encouragement, so our focus is more philosophical than practical. However, ideas and action go hand-in-hand, so we're currently expanding the "practicality" sections."
and:
    "THE ABOLITION OF WORK" by Bob Black
    http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
    "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
or:
      _The End of Work_
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874778247/002-64 49219-7760050?v=glance&n=283155
  "Global unemployment is now at its highest levels since the Great Depression. Rifkin (Biosphere Politics, LJ 5/15/91) argues that the Information Age is the third great Industrial Revolution. A consequence of these technological advances is the rapid decline in employment and purchasing power that could lead to a worldwide economic collapse. Rifkin foresees two possible outcomes: a near workerless world in which people are free, for the first time in history, to pursue a utopian life of leisure; or a world in which unemployment leads to an even further polarization of the economic classes and a decline in living conditions for millions of people."

James P. Hogan has several sci-fi novels envisioning an alternative positive future (e.g. _Voyage from Yesteryear_)

AI will not be learned by playing with some limitted 3rd party app. However, in my opinion, the first person to combine quality natural language processing with the wealth of data which can be spidered on the Internet will be the first to create a truly "intelligent" machine.

It may be because both of my parents were lawyers (and you thought your childhood was traumatic), but I am not impressed with these spans-of-ELIZA which do little more than regurgetate.

Anyone else around these parts working on some web-based AI projects? If so, I for one would love to see them. Also, I found that this book was exceptionally useful to me (nope, no commission tag- check for yourself ;))

Finally, for anyone using PHP who thinks that AI is waaaay out of their league:

1. get_file_contents()
2. preg_match_all()
3. php.net

The way I see it, we'll *all* be enslaved to the machines sooner or later. May as well join the "winning team". (I kid, I kid!).

What if we start posting details of this issue to the amazon.com reviews for the products?

Then do the same for any other places selling the routers.

D-Link won't care unless this hits their pocketbook, and spreading bad word of mouth is the best way we have to do that.

DI-604 on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000069K98/

There have been a few sci-fi novels written that deal with such a scenario. Anyone want to mention their favorite?

Lacey and His Friends is very dark, but very interesting.

Regards,
Ross

Are you saying that space aliens have secretly induced us to act against our nature?

-Kurt

Read The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets then ask yourself if your professor is joking.

Read The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets then ask yourself if your professor is joking.

I know that it is a fact that 1+1=2 (under the common definition of those symbols). Of course, that doesn't prove that if I combine two sets of real-world objects that I'll have a set of 2 real-world objects, but then the a priori is generally less interesting than most people assume.

If you ever do want to have some fun with this, figuring out how you could really say that 1+1=2 with no previous "givens," check out Knuth's (yes, the same Knuth from TAOCP) Surreal Numbers. Interesting stuff.

If you take a look at this book, you'll find that there is a way to measure the "speed of gravity" (according to the author) and that it is indeed faster than the (current) speed of light.

I'm not going to agree or disagree with what he puts forth, but if you're interested in questions such as the one you propose above, you'll probably find the book interesting. The supposition is that the speed of light and the speed of gravity were, at the time of the big bang, equal, and that the speed of light has gradually slowed over time.

I think the answer the author would give to your question is that the "gravity waves" you mention would arrive before the light would, but it would not be instant.

-bs

You had it right in your first sentence. AT&T is forwarding all of their call data to the NSA. The NSA doesn't need any super-cool tech in order to intercept this data since AT&T (and the other telecom companies) simply send this data directly to them. Don't get me wrong, though - the NSA has some amazing technology. All of this data is processed, filtered, tagged and entered into a massive database.

I'm currently reading Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford. It's not light reading, but it's fascinating....and extremely disturbing. The fascinating part is that we've been here before. This exact scenario already happened in the 60's and 70's, until information about it was leaked (by the NY Times, no less) and it was investigated by the Church Committee circa 1975. It was called Project SHAMROCK then, and it involved the phone companies and Western Union delivering huge magnetic tape reels to the NSA on a regular basis. The project was so secret that only a few people within the NSA where even aware of it.

Until the Congressional investigation, hardly anybody within the White House or Justice Department had even heard whispers of it. Congress, of course, was completely out of the loop. This obsession with secrecy goes back to the very founding of the NSA. The NSA operated with no Congressional oversight for decades (it was called "No Such Agency"), and its existance probably wasn't even constitutionally legal/valid, but the information that it provided to other agencies (mostly the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was so good that by the time Congress found out about it, it was indispensible. Today the NSA is the largest of the intelligence agencies (yes you read that right - larger than the CIA), although its exact budget is classified.

Second, this is just an accusation. There's one guy that has some documents that say that's what AT&T is doing. For all we know, this guy could be wearing tin-foil hats and singing to his dog about the aliens.

The only loonies around here are the people who think that the government isn't spying on Americans every single day. Now, that doesn't mean that they are listening to you in real time, and hanging on your every word. But all/most of your calls are recorded, digitized and handed to the NSA. From there, it is probably entered into a massive database. From there they can filter out unimportant calls and use data mining techniques to pull up relevant information. They use the ECHELON computer software to sift through information, which probably works similar to Google, with keyword searches and a list of search results.

If you still don't believe me, why don't you have a conversation with a friend, where you discuss planting bombs around town. See how long it takes the feds to show up.

Check out the Puzzle Palace to see how the NSA can and do have more than you thought possible. It is incredible to see the vast amounts of programs and policies that are either paid for through bogus programs or are taked onto the end of legitimate programs. I was fascinated by what the NSA supposedly have or have access too. If it is all to be believed it can be quite frightening.