Among other things, Snowden has demonstrated that a traitor can be a hero, and that "traitor" and "patriot" are not mutually exclusive terms.
One of the worst things that could happen right now is for Snowden to be brought to trial. There is no good outcome that could come of that. He is best left in legal limbo, his legal status undefined.
The USA could try to strike a bargain with Snowden: give him back his passport and an ironclad promise not to extradite him or do any kind of "extraordinary rendition" in exchange for his agreement to never set foot in the USA or attempt to bring his case before a USA court. The ancient Greeks came up with the concept of ostracism for persons of Snowden's ilk. The USA should ostracise Snowden, and get on with the work of purging the NSA of those managers and policy makers who do not have the ethics needed in their positions of power, and cleaning up the mess those assholes have created.
The Columbian cartels have been developing diesel powered fiberglass hulled subs with snorkels that can remain submerged for long distances, like South America to California waters. They do not go deep, but they go deep enough that they are undetectable. They are quite fast. They are disposable: once the cargo is transferred to a fishing boat or pleasure boat close to USA shores, the sub is scuttled. Looking for the telltale of the snorkel must be like looking for a mechanical dolphin in the waves-- a good task for a drone that can stay on station and compare images taken every two minutes or so; an almost impossible task for a human observer.
Presumably the NSA knows a lot about when and where these boats are launched and when and where the rendezvous would be: that is perhaps the only good defense for what the NSA is doing with its phone taps. BUT it seems like the NSA does a better job of tracking when and where you are playing Angry Birds than in getting info on big drug deals. Stupid NSA.
Since it was far enough out to sea that getting it back to land was problematic, it was probably patrolling for drug runners, not illegal aliens. Those guys in the home built one-shot subs bringing in the Columbia coke, a thousand kilos at a time.
My, my, my! We don't mind showing off our mindless biases much, do we? I suppose Picasso's statue in Chicago must be a lesser work, since it was given to the city at no cost, huh?
I don't know a thing about music or the software used in making it, but I have been running Studio Ubuntu for a year or so on both my desktop and my laptop. I think its low latency Linux kernel speeds the CG rendering I do somewhat, but the low latency design is intended to meet the needs of music and video makers. The distro comes with more than 25 apps under its "Audio Production" menu. It is probably worth looking at, being as how that would cost the OP nothing. He might then be able to spend more on the hardware.
Then again, there is the school of thought that if it costs nothing, it can't be very good, no matter how many professionals volunteer their time to making contributions to the project. I guess that there's never been any good music at any of those charity concerts, either.
This is one of the rare instances where prosecuting the perpetrator of a crime would harm the USA in ways that cannot be foretold and quite possibly not be repaired. The bare facts of the matter are that Snowden did violate USA laws, and in doing so he did the citizenry of the USA a tremendous service, that could not have been accomplished in any other way. He is a criminal and a patriot.
What the Federal government can do at this point is make a deal with Snowden: that he accept ostracism in exchange for a USA guarantee of a comfortable life somewhere else. He would never be able to bring his situation before a USA court, and so never be able to defend his actions. He would never be able to step on USA soil. In return, the USA would pay him adequately to stay away, would make his passport good again, and would guarantee not to go after him through extradition or any kind of "extraordinary rendition" process.
Often closure is a good thing. In this case, the cost of closure is too great, and the situation should be left alone as it stands now, perpetually unjudged until after we all are dead and then the historians can have at it. Paying Snowden an annual stipend to assure that he doesn't force this mess into the courts would be a small price. The USA already has the awful job of cleaning up the fucked up sewer systems of its information gathering networks; it does not need, and cannot afford, to do a Snowden trial before it has purged its guts of the NSA/FBI managers who have neither honor nor sense of ethics.
While I have not cross-checked this myself, I understand that the biblical age of the universe can be calculated from the begats. That trail of Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel who (with apparently the help of some nephilum) begat a whole bunch of kids was, at the time it was recorded, the only way of documenting time spans longer than a century. Quite an invention, really.
Interesting troll. A bit heavy handed, though. If I were to grade it, if it was written by a high school student it would get a C+, if written by a college student, it would rate a D- (barely passing).
Point of interest: the Copenhagen convention suggests that there is no possibility of a physics Out There. That all physicists can do is make mental models of whatever reality might be, and play around with those models, since reality itself is unobservable without the distortions of observer bias. There are some things we think we know, and there are some things that we know that we can never know (such as what is happening in close proximity to a singularity, or why is Pi 3.14159... and not something else). And it turns out that because there are some things that we know we can never know, we can't be sure about any of the things we think we know.
So, yes, AC is completely correct: relativity is wrong. Also quantum mechanics is wrong. Also classical physics is wrong. It is all wrong. So what? Asking whether this stuff is right or wrong is asking the wrong question. The right questions to ask of any physics model are: How useful is it, and what is its scope of usefulness?
We are the tool using monkeys. We are not Gods. Don't sweat the Really Big Stuff. Do something with the tools: make more tools, make some fun toys and games. That's what we do best. And, that's all that we can do.
Carbon dating proves it was written in the 1400's.
I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that carbon dating of the parchment and ink can only say that the materials are from the 1400s, but cannot say anything about how long they were in storage before the ink was put on the parchment.
Could writing materials that had been in storage for a couple of centuries have been sent to the New World on some of the Spanish ships? If the owner of a stationary shop got a government contract to supply parchment and ink to an expedition going half way around the world, maybe that would seem like a good opportunity to get rid of all that old stock in the back room that he could not sell.
Parent post as well as several others are missing an obvious key piece of information:
This is not about typical pot smokers. This is about persons who get stoned every day (and some are probably somewhat stoned every waking minute).
Being stoned most all the time is of itself aberrant behavior, so its association with other aberrant behaviors that cause a diagnosis of psychosis should not be a surprise. A useful conjecture is that there may be a single underlying cause that can lead to chronic marijuana abuse or psychotic behavior, but thinking in terms of one progressing somehow to the other is not so useful.
At a guess, the typical use of marijuana is probably more like once a week, or two or three times a month. Has anyone seen any studies of how frequently pot smokers get stoned?
The most valuable part of any asteroid mining is not going to have anything to do with its composition. It is going to be all about its location. Well, actually more about its delta vee relative to whatever platform we intend to build.
Regolith: asteroid dust. That will be the prime component in making stoneware. We will either use some form of water based chemistry to make concrete, or we will use solar furnaces to fashion ceramics. But either way, the biggest of our space ships will have outer shells and load bearing walls made of some form of stone. Expensive materials like metals and plastics will see minimal use.
Any exotic materials we might acquire in the process will be gravy. But the meat and potatoes will be characterized by sheer mass, that happens to already be headed in more or less the direction we want to go.
While it is within the specs for the spacecraft, the effects of the solar event might well have distorted the monitoring and telemetry that are used to gain an increased understanding of the forces acting on the craft during its ascent. Waiting for a quiet moment just so that there is less noise in the record makes sense, especially on the first flights of a new bird.
When a company incorporates, the amount of stock is fixed. Say at 10,000 shares. When it makes its initial public offering (IPO), most companies offer only a percentage of the total stock. Say 6,000 shares. The remainder is held in reserve. Possibly for a later release, or possibly for use as stock incentives for corporate officers or employees.
"New" stock is not new; it is stock that had been held in reserve but is now newly released to public trading.
All the above is of course a gross simplification of all the ins and outs that can be done. There is an incredible variety of ways that corporations can manage their stock.
This is selling shares in Blue Sky Incorporated. There is no business plan, there is no structure, there is no market analysis, there is absolutely no business there. Simply a blue sky vision.
What is it with you, that you have to have every fiction labeled as such? Yours must be a strange world indeed where you cannot rely on your own senses to tell fact from fiction, but need a government agency to do that for you.
Perhaps this will help: There are three different kinds of entities involved in this discussion. Call one category Real Businesses. Call another category Crowdfunded Startups. And call the third category, that has always been with us and always will be around, Fraudulent Ripoffs.
The SEC has more than it can handle in just trying to keep Real Businesses from screwing us over: witness the Great Recession. That is what it is intended to do, and maybe someday it will be made to work well enough to do its job, but don't count it.
The SEC has nothing at all to do with protecting you or anyone from Fraudulent Ripoffs-- you want a nanny state then move to a comfortable socialist country. Don't try to reform the USA Federal government into some kind of kindergarten monitor that will protect you from the schemes of your more clever playmates.
And the SEC has no business at all in messing with Crowdfunded Startups. Until those dream chasers become legal, tax paying, businesses they are nothing more than musicians busking on the street corner, hoping their song of a vibrant dream will encourage passers-by to toss them some change.
Buying tickets to a raffle so the High School Band can get some new uniforms is not at all about what the prize might be. And that is what crowdfunding is all about; if you feel the need to know what the prize might be, then off you go, this is not for you. Crowdfunding is for those who share a dream, and are willing to put a couple of shillings into it.
It could be that with the Internet we might need some Consumer Reports type of investigation / approval to separate legitimate crowdfunding efforts from pure scams. But that, as you suggest, has nothing to do with statistics, finances, or any of the tools the SEC is supposed to know how to use. To, you know, protect us all from things like the Great Recession. The kind of vetting that crowdfunding requires is better done by a volunteer group that can roll with the changes inherent in a newly emerging approach to getting things done.
There is no possibility of fraud here where there is no reasonable expectation of a return on investment. There is no real investment here; people giving to crowdfunded activities know full well that they are buying into a pipe dream. Crowdfunding is like walking by a street musician and tossing some coins into his bucket.
Crowdfunding probably scares the bejeezus out of strongly devout orthodox capitalist visionaries, since there is nothing in that religion to explain how it could possibly work. FOSS scares these nutjobs too, for the same reason: that persons might give away the product of their labor in the numinous hope that somehow someone else will give them back something of value is just too much for the rigid minds of the true believers in capitalism to understand. Too bad. They should really just recognize that their capitalism is an exceedingly simple and mostly wrong model of real world economies. Instead, they ignore the way that FOSS has had such a profound affect on the economies of Internet server software, office suites, network management, cell phone and tablet OSs, etc. Flat earthers, the lot of them.
My guess is that the SEC hierarchy is too strongly invested in the false religion of capitalism to ever be able to understand gift economies like FOSS, and the emerging crowdfunding phenomena. Well, not forever, probably. The SEC will probably eventually come around, one funeral at a time.
I can't count the number of times I've bought a raffle ticket for some worthy cause without bothering to see what the prize might be. That's not very informed, is it? Yet it makes more sense than wasting time gathering information about something when I know that there is zip nada nothing that I would find that would influence my decision.
The SEC has no business in this kind of transaction. Beggars, busking musicians, and crowdfunding entities all have this in common: even though money is being moved around, these are NOT financial transactions. They are part of the gift economy, more akin to FOSS than to a mom and pop store.
Also known as "needed regulation" for a problem that does not exist.
Precisely.
No mutual funds, retirement funds, or anything similar should have anything to do with crowdfunding. The SEC has no place here. Crowdfunding is similar to buying raffle tickets at a Church bazaar and the SEC has no business messing with those, either.
The SEC has more than enough to do with figuring out how to manage their direct mandate and prevent Big Finance from screwing us all over yet again with some new and clever shiny like the sub prime mortgage instruments, etc. They still need to clean their own house. And quit looking around for something to divert attention from they way that agency has managed to so fuck things up for 20 or more years.
Along with the concerns already mentioned, there is also a legitimate concern about the method of destruction. I'm pretty certain that TSA does not keep a yard debris chipper at each customs station. So what are the odds that these primitive artifacts were destroyed by distribution through craigslist sales, curio shops, or to fill somebody's Christmas shopping list?
This whole thing stinks. It definitely has relevance to slashdot: we are talking about persons with no understanding of a technology being put in positions where they can destroy the artifacts of that technology. Would I have trouble taking my collection of slide rules and 1970 era hand calculators through customs? I guess probably so.
You make much over-use of the "we". You do not speak for me or for the reasons why I come to slashdot. Take your doltish, bigoted views and STFU.
I read slashdot because I am interested in science and technology, and because I am also interested in anything others with similar interests find interesting. I do not use slashdot as a mirror that would let me pimp and preen in what I already know; I also value its use as a periscope that looks around corners I am unaware of to show me things of interest I would never otherwise see.
For a start, we could at this point reasonably demand that everyone who has accepted a salary from NSA be branded on the forehead with a scarlet letter, so that anyone with any sense would know not to hire them for any position involving trust. Let them work as street sweepers. As persons who sort garbage into different recycling streams. We know these persons cannot be trusted. Identify them, remove them from their current jobs, and place their names on a very public list of persons who cannot be entrusted with anything, in any endeavor.
There needs to be some amount of personal responsibility in the NSA, yet with the obvious exception of Snowden, there is no evidence of any such thing. One good place to start is to hold those who were involved in creating this monster accountable for ethical / moral turpitude.
Slashdot Mirror
"I used to know all that stuff!"
--From Goldie, around, uh, 1965? On, uh.... was it the Smothers Brothers? Or that other show? Maybe it wasn' Goldie...
C'mon fellow geezers, help me out here!
Among other things, Snowden has demonstrated that a traitor can be a hero, and that "traitor" and "patriot" are not mutually exclusive terms.
One of the worst things that could happen right now is for Snowden to be brought to trial. There is no good outcome that could come of that. He is best left in legal limbo, his legal status undefined.
The USA could try to strike a bargain with Snowden: give him back his passport and an ironclad promise not to extradite him or do any kind of "extraordinary rendition" in exchange for his agreement to never set foot in the USA or attempt to bring his case before a USA court. The ancient Greeks came up with the concept of ostracism for persons of Snowden's ilk. The USA should ostracise Snowden, and get on with the work of purging the NSA of those managers and policy makers who do not have the ethics needed in their positions of power, and cleaning up the mess those assholes have created.
Read up on it.
The Columbian cartels have been developing diesel powered fiberglass hulled subs with snorkels that can remain submerged for long distances, like South America to California waters. They do not go deep, but they go deep enough that they are undetectable. They are quite fast. They are disposable: once the cargo is transferred to a fishing boat or pleasure boat close to USA shores, the sub is scuttled. Looking for the telltale of the snorkel must be like looking for a mechanical dolphin in the waves-- a good task for a drone that can stay on station and compare images taken every two minutes or so; an almost impossible task for a human observer.
Presumably the NSA knows a lot about when and where these boats are launched and when and where the rendezvous would be: that is perhaps the only good defense for what the NSA is doing with its phone taps. BUT it seems like the NSA does a better job of tracking when and where you are playing Angry Birds than in getting info on big drug deals. Stupid NSA.
Since it was far enough out to sea that getting it back to land was problematic, it was probably patrolling for drug runners, not illegal aliens. Those guys in the home built one-shot subs bringing in the Columbia coke, a thousand kilos at a time.
My, my, my! We don't mind showing off our mindless biases much, do we? I suppose Picasso's statue in Chicago must be a lesser work, since it was given to the city at no cost, huh?
I don't know a thing about music or the software used in making it, but I have been running Studio Ubuntu for a year or so on both my desktop and my laptop. I think its low latency Linux kernel speeds the CG rendering I do somewhat, but the low latency design is intended to meet the needs of music and video makers. The distro comes with more than 25 apps under its "Audio Production" menu. It is probably worth looking at, being as how that would cost the OP nothing. He might then be able to spend more on the hardware.
Then again, there is the school of thought that if it costs nothing, it can't be very good, no matter how many professionals volunteer their time to making contributions to the project. I guess that there's never been any good music at any of those charity concerts, either.
This is one of the rare instances where prosecuting the perpetrator of a crime would harm the USA in ways that cannot be foretold and quite possibly not be repaired. The bare facts of the matter are that Snowden did violate USA laws, and in doing so he did the citizenry of the USA a tremendous service, that could not have been accomplished in any other way. He is a criminal and a patriot.
What the Federal government can do at this point is make a deal with Snowden: that he accept ostracism in exchange for a USA guarantee of a comfortable life somewhere else. He would never be able to bring his situation before a USA court, and so never be able to defend his actions. He would never be able to step on USA soil. In return, the USA would pay him adequately to stay away, would make his passport good again, and would guarantee not to go after him through extradition or any kind of "extraordinary rendition" process.
Often closure is a good thing. In this case, the cost of closure is too great, and the situation should be left alone as it stands now, perpetually unjudged until after we all are dead and then the historians can have at it. Paying Snowden an annual stipend to assure that he doesn't force this mess into the courts would be a small price. The USA already has the awful job of cleaning up the fucked up sewer systems of its information gathering networks; it does not need, and cannot afford, to do a Snowden trial before it has purged its guts of the NSA/FBI managers who have neither honor nor sense of ethics.
And the engineers say they are twice as big as they need to be.
No no no.
It's turtles all the way down. But it's simulations all the way out.
While I have not cross-checked this myself, I understand that the biblical age of the universe can be calculated from the begats. That trail of Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel who (with apparently the help of some nephilum) begat a whole bunch of kids was, at the time it was recorded, the only way of documenting time spans longer than a century. Quite an invention, really.
Interesting troll. A bit heavy handed, though. If I were to grade it, if it was written by a high school student it would get a C+, if written by a college student, it would rate a D- (barely passing).
Point of interest: the Copenhagen convention suggests that there is no possibility of a physics Out There. That all physicists can do is make mental models of whatever reality might be, and play around with those models, since reality itself is unobservable without the distortions of observer bias. There are some things we think we know, and there are some things that we know that we can never know (such as what is happening in close proximity to a singularity, or why is Pi 3.14159... and not something else). And it turns out that because there are some things that we know we can never know, we can't be sure about any of the things we think we know.
So, yes, AC is completely correct: relativity is wrong. Also quantum mechanics is wrong. Also classical physics is wrong. It is all wrong. So what? Asking whether this stuff is right or wrong is asking the wrong question. The right questions to ask of any physics model are: How useful is it, and what is its scope of usefulness?
We are the tool using monkeys. We are not Gods. Don't sweat the Really Big Stuff. Do something with the tools: make more tools, make some fun toys and games. That's what we do best. And, that's all that we can do.
Carbon dating proves it was written in the 1400's.
I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that carbon dating of the parchment and ink can only say that the materials are from the 1400s, but cannot say anything about how long they were in storage before the ink was put on the parchment.
Could writing materials that had been in storage for a couple of centuries have been sent to the New World on some of the Spanish ships? If the owner of a stationary shop got a government contract to supply parchment and ink to an expedition going half way around the world, maybe that would seem like a good opportunity to get rid of all that old stock in the back room that he could not sell.
Parent post as well as several others are missing an obvious key piece of information:
This is not about typical pot smokers. This is about persons who get stoned every day (and some are probably somewhat stoned every waking minute).
Being stoned most all the time is of itself aberrant behavior, so its association with other aberrant behaviors that cause a diagnosis of psychosis should not be a surprise. A useful conjecture is that there may be a single underlying cause that can lead to chronic marijuana abuse or psychotic behavior, but thinking in terms of one progressing somehow to the other is not so useful.
At a guess, the typical use of marijuana is probably more like once a week, or two or three times a month. Has anyone seen any studies of how frequently pot smokers get stoned?
The most valuable part of any asteroid mining is not going to have anything to do with its composition. It is going to be all about its location. Well, actually more about its delta vee relative to whatever platform we intend to build.
Regolith: asteroid dust. That will be the prime component in making stoneware. We will either use some form of water based chemistry to make concrete, or we will use solar furnaces to fashion ceramics. But either way, the biggest of our space ships will have outer shells and load bearing walls made of some form of stone. Expensive materials like metals and plastics will see minimal use.
Any exotic materials we might acquire in the process will be gravy. But the meat and potatoes will be characterized by sheer mass, that happens to already be headed in more or less the direction we want to go.
While it is within the specs for the spacecraft, the effects of the solar event might well have distorted the monitoring and telemetry that are used to gain an increased understanding of the forces acting on the craft during its ascent. Waiting for a quiet moment just so that there is less noise in the record makes sense, especially on the first flights of a new bird.
When a company incorporates, the amount of stock is fixed. Say at 10,000 shares. When it makes its initial public offering (IPO), most companies offer only a percentage of the total stock. Say 6,000 shares. The remainder is held in reserve. Possibly for a later release, or possibly for use as stock incentives for corporate officers or employees.
"New" stock is not new; it is stock that had been held in reserve but is now newly released to public trading.
All the above is of course a gross simplification of all the ins and outs that can be done. There is an incredible variety of ways that corporations can manage their stock.
Would you care to rephrase your statement sir?
No, thank you. But I do have less confidence in its value.
Let's see what further comments are made. Maybe I will learn something, or maybe someone else will.
This is selling shares in Blue Sky Incorporated. There is no business plan, there is no structure, there is no market analysis, there is absolutely no business there. Simply a blue sky vision.
What is it with you, that you have to have every fiction labeled as such? Yours must be a strange world indeed where you cannot rely on your own senses to tell fact from fiction, but need a government agency to do that for you.
Perhaps this will help: There are three different kinds of entities involved in this discussion. Call one category Real Businesses. Call another category Crowdfunded Startups. And call the third category, that has always been with us and always will be around, Fraudulent Ripoffs.
The SEC has more than it can handle in just trying to keep Real Businesses from screwing us over: witness the Great Recession. That is what it is intended to do, and maybe someday it will be made to work well enough to do its job, but don't count it.
The SEC has nothing at all to do with protecting you or anyone from Fraudulent Ripoffs-- you want a nanny state then move to a comfortable socialist country. Don't try to reform the USA Federal government into some kind of kindergarten monitor that will protect you from the schemes of your more clever playmates.
And the SEC has no business at all in messing with Crowdfunded Startups. Until those dream chasers become legal, tax paying, businesses they are nothing more than musicians busking on the street corner, hoping their song of a vibrant dream will encourage passers-by to toss them some change.
Sorry, but you are dead wrong.
Buying tickets to a raffle so the High School Band can get some new uniforms is not at all about what the prize might be. And that is what crowdfunding is all about; if you feel the need to know what the prize might be, then off you go, this is not for you. Crowdfunding is for those who share a dream, and are willing to put a couple of shillings into it.
It could be that with the Internet we might need some Consumer Reports type of investigation / approval to separate legitimate crowdfunding efforts from pure scams. But that, as you suggest, has nothing to do with statistics, finances, or any of the tools the SEC is supposed to know how to use. To, you know, protect us all from things like the Great Recession. The kind of vetting that crowdfunding requires is better done by a volunteer group that can roll with the changes inherent in a newly emerging approach to getting things done.
There is no possibility of fraud here where there is no reasonable expectation of a return on investment. There is no real investment here; people giving to crowdfunded activities know full well that they are buying into a pipe dream. Crowdfunding is like walking by a street musician and tossing some coins into his bucket.
Crowdfunding probably scares the bejeezus out of strongly devout orthodox capitalist visionaries, since there is nothing in that religion to explain how it could possibly work. FOSS scares these nutjobs too, for the same reason: that persons might give away the product of their labor in the numinous hope that somehow someone else will give them back something of value is just too much for the rigid minds of the true believers in capitalism to understand. Too bad. They should really just recognize that their capitalism is an exceedingly simple and mostly wrong model of real world economies. Instead, they ignore the way that FOSS has had such a profound affect on the economies of Internet server software, office suites, network management, cell phone and tablet OSs, etc. Flat earthers, the lot of them.
My guess is that the SEC hierarchy is too strongly invested in the false religion of capitalism to ever be able to understand gift economies like FOSS, and the emerging crowdfunding phenomena. Well, not forever, probably. The SEC will probably eventually come around, one funeral at a time.
I can't count the number of times I've bought a raffle ticket for some worthy cause without bothering to see what the prize might be. That's not very informed, is it? Yet it makes more sense than wasting time gathering information about something when I know that there is zip nada nothing that I would find that would influence my decision.
The SEC has no business in this kind of transaction. Beggars, busking musicians, and crowdfunding entities all have this in common: even though money is being moved around, these are NOT financial transactions. They are part of the gift economy, more akin to FOSS than to a mom and pop store.
Also known as "needed regulation" for a problem that does not exist.
Precisely.
No mutual funds, retirement funds, or anything similar should have anything to do with crowdfunding. The SEC has no place here. Crowdfunding is similar to buying raffle tickets at a Church bazaar and the SEC has no business messing with those, either.
The SEC has more than enough to do with figuring out how to manage their direct mandate and prevent Big Finance from screwing us all over yet again with some new and clever shiny like the sub prime mortgage instruments, etc. They still need to clean their own house. And quit looking around for something to divert attention from they way that agency has managed to so fuck things up for 20 or more years.
Along with the concerns already mentioned, there is also a legitimate concern about the method of destruction. I'm pretty certain that TSA does not keep a yard debris chipper at each customs station. So what are the odds that these primitive artifacts were destroyed by distribution through craigslist sales, curio shops, or to fill somebody's Christmas shopping list?
This whole thing stinks. It definitely has relevance to slashdot: we are talking about persons with no understanding of a technology being put in positions where they can destroy the artifacts of that technology. Would I have trouble taking my collection of slide rules and 1970 era hand calculators through customs? I guess probably so.
You make much over-use of the "we". You do not speak for me or for the reasons why I come to slashdot. Take your doltish, bigoted views and STFU.
I read slashdot because I am interested in science and technology, and because I am also interested in anything others with similar interests find interesting. I do not use slashdot as a mirror that would let me pimp and preen in what I already know; I also value its use as a periscope that looks around corners I am unaware of to show me things of interest I would never otherwise see.
This story has value on slashdot.
For a start, we could at this point reasonably demand that everyone who has accepted a salary from NSA be branded on the forehead with a scarlet letter, so that anyone with any sense would know not to hire them for any position involving trust. Let them work as street sweepers. As persons who sort garbage into different recycling streams. We know these persons cannot be trusted. Identify them, remove them from their current jobs, and place their names on a very public list of persons who cannot be entrusted with anything, in any endeavor.
There needs to be some amount of personal responsibility in the NSA, yet with the obvious exception of Snowden, there is no evidence of any such thing. One good place to start is to hold those who were involved in creating this monster accountable for ethical / moral turpitude.
The guy who is continuing to use deadly force within my sphere of influence.
Dammitall, you should be defending yourself right now, not messing about on slashdot while someone is threatening to kill you or someone around you.
Oh wait. you were probably using the present tense in an imaginary way, not in the correct English way. My bad.
Whatever kind of hell you want to make for yourself in your imaginary world is fine by me. So long as you keep it there.
Now, did you have anything of value to contribute to a real world discussion of what is definitely a problem?