And in China they say "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
The conversion of America to alternative, clean, renewable energy (and not the Ethanol Scam) is an engineering and collective will issue, not a scientific issue.
If I were President, my plan would be to take a manual transmission approach to the issue.
Here's how my "Manhattan Project" would go:
Gear 1 - the quick, short term stuff. Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER.
Start funding and constructing pebble bed nuclear power plants. Go bare knuckle with the environmentalists. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia Theory, supports this as an intermediate step towards cleaner, more renewable energy in the future. This should take 20-30 years to realize the benefits. Best to start now.
Gear 2 - Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.
Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.
Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars.
Gear 3 - A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. Basically, people who generate solar power on their rooftops while they are at work and nothing's going on in their house, profit when they're using no power and their solar panels are pumping energy back into the grid. They get 100% MARKET VALUE for that energy - exactly 1 for 1 versus what they would pay if they used it. Adjusted daily, weekly or monthly, however it goes.
Bigger Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars. Performance based. Now we start pushing for conversions of the big haulers (big rigs), as well as pushing them to bio diesel with emphasis on converting used veggie oil, etc.
Gear 4 - the first pebble bed nuclear plants go online. Drastic "as immediate as possible" cutbacks in coal and oil powered plants but not enough to completely offset the new nuclear plants.
More Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for electric and biodiesel-powered big rigs. Performance based.
Gear 5 - shutdown of all remaining polluting (Coal/Oil) power plants as all planned nuclear reactors go online and the solar farms are up, and over 50% of all US homes are solar powered.
Hopefully at this point we won't need Government contracts for high miles-per-charge cars; the market should reach critical mass. Research for electric and biodiesel powered big rigs continues until every new rig produced runs on one or the other.
Manhattan project complete. The big mushroom cloud you see is the giant earth-shattering KABOOM that is OPEC corporate heads exploding along with their profits.
As a hard core liberal, I find neither the universal basic income (a dis-incentive to be productive) nor this current capitalist piggish society's sucky status quo, to be a desirable option.
That will never happen, because "what happens next" is this: Companies attract investors by placing their own limits on the ability of insiders to trade.
That is, assuming those limits actually have any teeth. Corporate rules can and often are ignored for the favored few. It's called corruption. If you get busted, you can still negotiate your way out of trouble at the ol' country club. The worst you can get is to lose your profits, but the stock value has already been irreversibly dinged. Other smaller time investors still suffer.
This becomes a lesson to those investors - stay away, lest you get left holding the bag.
This idea totally lacks the public accountability and fear of dire punishment that Government, for all its corruption and plea bargaining horrors, bring to the equation.
Tell me, which one would you be more willing to break: a company rule, or a SEC law?
The only information that insider trading gives away, via the trade records, is that someone on the inside is selling a lot of stock - not their personal reasons why.
Insiders - people who typically have tons of stocks - will pump and dump, harming the company itself and leaving the small investors holding the bag.
After a few years of this going on, there won't be a single company out there, no matter how solid it is, that will survive this recurring, erratic cycle of binge & purge. Small investors, who constantly get burned time and time again, will lose faith in the system.
Hacking goes way beyond computers - hacking people's minds, the legal system and the financial industry, is the big game for the real big hackers who think beyond smashing stacks and simple pretexting social engineering.
I put my faith in nanotechnology for cures to diseases of any sort, far more than in anti-disease viruses (note to potential nitpickers: cancer is listed as a disease).
Viruses mutate and become things you do not expect them to. Known fact. To proceed with a cancer-killing virus is to drive all of humanity over one long IED-infested road of epidemiological Russian Roulette.
Of course, nano-robots can bring about the gray goo scenario, but that's more easily controlled than, say, a runaway virus. Nano-robots can be shut down and can, from the outset, be programmed to follow a predictable blacklist strategy and not friggin deviate. Reliability is quite possible and quite often demonstrated in robotics (as long as MicroSoft doesn't get control *ducks*).
On the contrary, there is never any level of trustworthiness or reliability when it comes to any microbe that we might attempt to employ for our benefit. There is only the temporary illusion of such. Inevitably they all mutate somewhere into parts[mutations] unknown.
An employer should be able to dictate what you do on the job because it is their property and what you do on the clock is assigned a 4 digit rate code that defines the employer's liability under work comp. They are responsible for you when you are on the clock so that is their (virtual or real) territory that you are standing on.
When you are at home, that is your territory. They have no right to intrude - if they are not paying for you to be "compliant" at that time, then it stands to reason that they cannot control you.
If a company wants to decide what you do after work hours, they should have to pay you for that privilege. If you slip and fall in the bathtub while being compliant with company rules off-the-job, they should pay workers comp on that. This is called 1 for 1 balance.
Yes, if you have to work with that hypothetical Cletus, you might quit. But there's always some Cletus in every workplace. The Atheist working at Wal Mart is as repulsive to their boss as the Nazi working for Starbuck's: but if Wal Mart is the only bunch that is hiring then there you go. You gotta eat. But the employer doesn't gotta rule your life during the hours they are not paying you. Even if 10,000 bible thumpers see you defending Atheism off hours and decide to boycott Wal Mart (and they've done worse over less). (I am a Christian, definitely not an Atheist.)
Moral judgments are a fact of life - but this is about logic. Logically, if you want to regulate what someone does in their hours off the job, you should pay them during those off hours. You have a right to decide what happens in your workplace, but their home is not your workplace (except during telecommuting hours, perhaps, and tax rules define how far that goes).
I am warning you, seriously, that if Corporate America keeps up with firing people for their off the job activities, they may still face boycotts simply because people will get tired of Big Corporate Brother regulating their lives.
I offer you an old word from the 19th century that applies to what corporations are trying to do now: Company Towns, in a virtual sense. Trust me; you do not want that age to come back.
As a black person I fully support (with great consternation) a KKK or Nazi person's right to have their ignorant bullshit in their front yard as long as it is legal. Ironically, my point here is, "first they came for the skinheads, and I said nothing......... then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me".
And as for people boycotting companies who keep these employees, that is why we need a law to prevent firing them for LEGAL, off-the job activities. What, is every company going to get boycotted?
As for your argument about wearing a Swastika to work, that is invalid - what you do on the job can and should be regulated by the employer.
Unfortunately when you're a traditional journalist, any public expression of opinion is about your job...
I feel bad for this gentleman for losing his day job, but, seriously, anybody who works in the mainstream media understands that your boss is quite likely to impose certain limitations on public expressions of your personal opinion. Therein lies the problem.
There is a such thing as "my personal views do NOT reflect the views of my company". Watch a DVD by Sony some time. They put up this disclaimer about the movie they're about to show.
We need to establish a Constitutional amendment that basically says that if disclaimers work for Sony and their movies, then they work for employees and their off-the-job opinions.
We need to nip this in the bud now. Instead of debating with people who think it's okay to fire someone for their off-the-job behavior, we need to start slapping employers with huge, crippling fines. Fines that can put even a large company into bankruptcy.
Fines that frighten CEOs and teach them that we as Americans will not ever tolerate corporations stifling democracy by threatening your job just for speaking out OFF the job.
What you do that is legal, off the job, should be off-limits to employers. Period. No exception. We must do this now or we will have everyone being afraid to speak out about stuff for fear of losing their jobs.
Then they should take as a lesson and improve their site.
Product information -including price- is most likely manually entered into their database. Why do you think Amazon should swallow thousands of dollars worth of losses over a typo?
No, THEY MADE A MISTAKE. Nothing wrong about it, and the converse is equally true: if you buy a cd set from Amazon priced at $400 when another site has it priced at $30, it's your own damn fault for not checking the price.
Wow, is the idea of screwing the corporations so tempting to you that any shred of morals is lost? I don't think you would be saying what you are saying if any of this involved your money now would you?
So basically you're saying people should not be held responsible for their mistakes.
Hey, according to you, I can price anything the way I want, and if I decide the price is too low today, cancel the order! Now that's morality, at least on planet Firias Zirie.
Even if there is no lock-out deal with the Government, you're not ever going to see two companies laying two different networks of underground fiber. That would mean tearing up the roads over and over again for each city-wide network.
Monopoly or not, you're only going to have one or two cable internet providers at the most in a city unless someone is forced to share.
Why should a seller need to leave feedback EXCEPT when the customer doesn't pay or there is an unnecessary return (all of which can be factually documented)?
Is there some kind of "Customer was a doodoohead" thing going on?
In most metropolitan cities, ESPECIALLY in California, all local roads are hopelessly jammed during rush hour.
If you fly overhead over Sacratomato on most days, you will see tendrils of red (red tail lights) spreading rapidly all over the city between 6:45am and 8:30am, until the whole city is utterly clogged. Almost nothing is passable in this city during rush hour; by 7:30, there are no alternate paths in the city that can get you out of a traffic jam if you are, say, commuting from Elk Grove to Carmichael.
Then there are the Roseville (highway 80, 65, etc.) and West Sac 5/50 mashups - two areas (there are more but for bandwidth's sake I'll leave them out) where roughly 10 lanes of traffic join and compress into 5 or less, forcing people to lane change like crazy to get where they won't get knocked off the freeway by an offramp in their lane. Sorry, I can't leave out the Natomas mashups - I feel sorry for the fools commuting from Roseville to downtown. And you poor souls trying to get to Wal Mart off Truxel, I'm praying for you right now.
The #1 problem on the street routes are traffic lights, and then also the traffic regulators - the utterly insulting red lights that you have to wait behind to get on the freeway. I would arrange a public flogging for those who put traffic regulators on onramps and for those who don't program traffic lights to weight right-of-way more towards the heaviest traffic.
Then we can worry about planning people's routes, as by then we would have actual passable routes.
I dont have to beg. Because i understand the terms on which the game is sold.
So i guess don't buy it, or just worry about Valve selling your name to the Russians. You don't read very well. What I also previously said was, in due time, every game you get will require you do this, if Valve is successful enough with this.
Don't forget your tinfoil hat. If you want to volunteer your information and beg a corporation for permission to play a single player game, then you go ahead and do it.
You're what they call sheep. If you're lucky, they'll come shave you for wool.
I don't care if Valve pays me to download their developer tools, I don't want anything to do with Valve.
Their policy of forcing you to register and identify yourself with them to play a single player game, grates HARD against my sense of privacy (I never play multiplayer games anyway because of all the flaming racists and trash talking pimple faced teenagers). When I buy a game to play it in single player mode, I do not tolerate, I DO NOT TOLERATE companies that make me have to identify myself to them. Zero tolerance. Go to Communist China if you feel you have to collect information on everyone who buys your crap: keep your crap out of America.
I would pay a year's salary, though, to someone who could put Valve out of business and make a goosebump-raising, spine tingling example of them (bankruptcy, outing of corporate CEO personal information to the world that mirrors their demanding of OUR information, etc.) for their subtle privacy-busting tactics, such that no other developer would desire to follow their path.
It may not bother you now, but wait until you buy a few more majorly popular $[non multiplayer game] titles and find you have to go even further and submit your name, phone #, etc. ONLINE to the publisher, in order to play. Then you'll wonder how things got that bad. It got that bad because you're so apathetic now.
Terrorism requires the knowledge to bypass security and/or blow stuff up.
To do that, you need engineers. Otherwise all you get is a bunch of talkers, not doers, or at least doers who blow themselves up more often, and who fail to even reach their targets.
What this means is, your average engineer does not have a terrorist mindset, but terrorist groups must recruit engineers in order to Get Stuff Circumvented/Done[tm]. So they recruit engineers as often as they can, because otherwise they cannot Get Stuff Circumvented/Done[tm].
Slashdot Mirror
And in China they say "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
The conversion of America to alternative, clean, renewable energy (and not the Ethanol Scam) is an engineering and collective will issue, not a scientific issue.
If I were President, my plan would be to take a manual transmission approach to the issue.
Here's how my "Manhattan Project" would go:
Gear 1 - the quick, short term stuff. Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER.
Start funding and constructing pebble bed nuclear power plants. Go bare knuckle with the environmentalists. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia Theory, supports this as an intermediate step towards cleaner, more renewable energy in the future. This should take 20-30 years to realize the benefits. Best to start now.
Gear 2 - Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.
Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.
Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars.
Gear 3 - A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. Basically, people who generate solar power on their rooftops while they are at work and nothing's going on in their house, profit when they're using no power and their solar panels are pumping energy back into the grid. They get 100% MARKET VALUE for that energy - exactly 1 for 1 versus what they would pay if they used it. Adjusted daily, weekly or monthly, however it goes.
Bigger Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars. Performance based. Now we start pushing for conversions of the big haulers (big rigs), as well as pushing them to bio diesel with emphasis on converting used veggie oil, etc.
Gear 4 - the first pebble bed nuclear plants go online. Drastic "as immediate as possible" cutbacks in coal and oil powered plants but not enough to completely offset the new nuclear plants.
More Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for electric and biodiesel-powered big rigs. Performance based.
Gear 5 - shutdown of all remaining polluting (Coal/Oil) power plants as all planned nuclear reactors go online and the solar farms are up, and over 50% of all US homes are solar powered.
Hopefully at this point we won't need Government contracts for high miles-per-charge cars; the market should reach critical mass. Research for electric and biodiesel powered big rigs continues until every new rig produced runs on one or the other.
Manhattan project complete. The big mushroom cloud you see is the giant earth-shattering KABOOM that is OPEC corporate heads exploding along with their profits.
External sound cards are for people who want their cpu's RAM to be working on other things than processing sound.
As a hard core liberal, I find neither the universal basic income (a dis-incentive to be productive) nor this current capitalist piggish society's sucky status quo, to be a desirable option.
No unreasonable search or seizure without due process. Guess which amendment that is.
This is hardly reasonable.
That is, assuming those limits actually have any teeth. Corporate rules can and often are ignored for the favored few. It's called corruption. If you get busted, you can still negotiate your way out of trouble at the ol' country club. The worst you can get is to lose your profits, but the stock value has already been irreversibly dinged. Other smaller time investors still suffer.
This becomes a lesson to those investors - stay away, lest you get left holding the bag.
This idea totally lacks the public accountability and fear of dire punishment that Government, for all its corruption and plea bargaining horrors, bring to the equation.
Tell me, which one would you be more willing to break: a company rule, or a SEC law?
The only information that insider trading gives away, via the trade records, is that someone on the inside is selling a lot of stock - not their personal reasons why.
Insiders - people who typically have tons of stocks - will pump and dump, harming the company itself and leaving the small investors holding the bag.
After a few years of this going on, there won't be a single company out there, no matter how solid it is, that will survive this recurring, erratic cycle of binge & purge. Small investors, who constantly get burned time and time again, will lose faith in the system.
What happens next is fairly obvious.
Consider it an act of "hacking the SEC".
Hacking goes way beyond computers - hacking people's minds, the legal system and the financial industry, is the big game for the real big hackers who think beyond smashing stacks and simple pretexting social engineering.
Circumventing the system - it's what nerds do.
There's not a high enough /. score to do that one justice.
God forbid people getting into a job so they can make enough money to become financially secure.
Golden careers? That's for people who want to retire comfortably and be able to support a family.
Real computer science people work for peanuts with a smile.
I put my faith in nanotechnology for cures to diseases of any sort, far more than in anti-disease viruses (note to potential nitpickers: cancer is listed as a disease).
Viruses mutate and become things you do not expect them to. Known fact. To proceed with a cancer-killing virus is to drive all of humanity over one long IED-infested road of epidemiological Russian Roulette.
Of course, nano-robots can bring about the gray goo scenario, but that's more easily controlled than, say, a runaway virus. Nano-robots can be shut down and can, from the outset, be programmed to follow a predictable blacklist strategy and not friggin deviate. Reliability is quite possible and quite often demonstrated in robotics (as long as MicroSoft doesn't get control *ducks*).
On the contrary, there is never any level of trustworthiness or reliability when it comes to any microbe that we might attempt to employ for our benefit. There is only the temporary illusion of such. Inevitably they all mutate somewhere into parts[mutations] unknown.
is a major cause of slow-downs in innovation, one has to wonder if we're not looking at the problem in reverse.
Make me the Patent Troll Tracker next week.
There won't be a need for a third tracker.
An employer should be able to dictate what you do on the job because it is their property and what you do on the clock is assigned a 4 digit rate code that defines the employer's liability under work comp. They are responsible for you when you are on the clock so that is their (virtual or real) territory that you are standing on.
When you are at home, that is your territory. They have no right to intrude - if they are not paying for you to be "compliant" at that time, then it stands to reason that they cannot control you.
If a company wants to decide what you do after work hours, they should have to pay you for that privilege. If you slip and fall in the bathtub while being compliant with company rules off-the-job, they should pay workers comp on that. This is called 1 for 1 balance.
Yes, if you have to work with that hypothetical Cletus, you might quit. But there's always some Cletus in every workplace. The Atheist working at Wal Mart is as repulsive to their boss as the Nazi working for Starbuck's: but if Wal Mart is the only bunch that is hiring then there you go. You gotta eat. But the employer doesn't gotta rule your life during the hours they are not paying you. Even if 10,000 bible thumpers see you defending Atheism off hours and decide to boycott Wal Mart (and they've done worse over less). (I am a Christian, definitely not an Atheist.)
Moral judgments are a fact of life - but this is about logic. Logically, if you want to regulate what someone does in their hours off the job, you should pay them during those off hours. You have a right to decide what happens in your workplace, but their home is not your workplace (except during telecommuting hours, perhaps, and tax rules define how far that goes).
I am warning you, seriously, that if Corporate America keeps up with firing people for their off the job activities, they may still face boycotts simply because people will get tired of Big Corporate Brother regulating their lives.
I offer you an old word from the 19th century that applies to what corporations are trying to do now: Company Towns, in a virtual sense. Trust me; you do not want that age to come back.
'If governments or other people with millions of dollars can listen to your conversations right now, why shouldn't your next-door neighbor?'
Because the Government hates the competition?
As a black person I fully support (with great consternation) a KKK or Nazi person's right to have their ignorant bullshit in their front yard as long as it is legal. Ironically, my point here is, "first they came for the skinheads, and I said nothing... ... ... then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me".
And as for people boycotting companies who keep these employees, that is why we need a law to prevent firing them for LEGAL, off-the job activities. What, is every company going to get boycotted?
As for your argument about wearing a Swastika to work, that is invalid - what you do on the job can and should be regulated by the employer.
Unfortunately when you're a traditional journalist, any public expression of opinion is about your job...
I feel bad for this gentleman for losing his day job, but, seriously, anybody who works in the mainstream media understands that your boss is quite likely to impose certain limitations on public expressions of your personal opinion. Therein lies the problem.
There is a such thing as "my personal views do NOT reflect the views of my company". Watch a DVD by Sony some time. They put up this disclaimer about the movie they're about to show.
We need to establish a Constitutional amendment that basically says that if disclaimers work for Sony and their movies, then they work for employees and their off-the-job opinions.
We need to nip this in the bud now. Instead of debating with people who think it's okay to fire someone for their off-the-job behavior, we need to start slapping employers with huge, crippling fines. Fines that can put even a large company into bankruptcy.
Fines that frighten CEOs and teach them that we as Americans will not ever tolerate corporations stifling democracy by threatening your job just for speaking out OFF the job.
What you do that is legal, off the job, should be off-limits to employers. Period. No exception. We must do this now or we will have everyone being afraid to speak out about stuff for fear of losing their jobs.
Then they should take as a lesson and improve their site.
Product information -including price- is most likely manually entered into their database. Why do you think Amazon should swallow thousands of dollars worth of losses over a typo?
No, THEY MADE A MISTAKE. Nothing wrong about it, and the converse is equally true: if you buy a cd set from Amazon priced at $400 when another site has it priced at $30, it's your own damn fault for not checking the price.
Wow, is the idea of screwing the corporations so tempting to you that any shred of morals is lost? I don't think you would be saying what you are saying if any of this involved your money now would you?
So basically you're saying people should not be held responsible for their mistakes.Hey, according to you, I can price anything the way I want, and if I decide the price is too low today, cancel the order! Now that's morality, at least on planet Firias Zirie.
Even if there is no lock-out deal with the Government, you're not ever going to see two companies laying two different networks of underground fiber. That would mean tearing up the roads over and over again for each city-wide network.
Monopoly or not, you're only going to have one or two cable internet providers at the most in a city unless someone is forced to share.
You'll have better luck with DSL.
Why should a seller need to leave feedback EXCEPT when the customer doesn't pay or there is an unnecessary return (all of which can be factually documented)?
Is there some kind of "Customer was a doodoohead" thing going on?
In most metropolitan cities, ESPECIALLY in California, all local roads are hopelessly jammed during rush hour.
If you fly overhead over Sacratomato on most days, you will see tendrils of red (red tail lights) spreading rapidly all over the city between 6:45am and 8:30am, until the whole city is utterly clogged. Almost nothing is passable in this city during rush hour; by 7:30, there are no alternate paths in the city that can get you out of a traffic jam if you are, say, commuting from Elk Grove to Carmichael.
Then there are the Roseville (highway 80, 65, etc.) and West Sac 5/50 mashups - two areas (there are more but for bandwidth's sake I'll leave them out) where roughly 10 lanes of traffic join and compress into 5 or less, forcing people to lane change like crazy to get where they won't get knocked off the freeway by an offramp in their lane. Sorry, I can't leave out the Natomas mashups - I feel sorry for the fools commuting from Roseville to downtown. And you poor souls trying to get to Wal Mart off Truxel, I'm praying for you right now.
The #1 problem on the street routes are traffic lights, and then also the traffic regulators - the utterly insulting red lights that you have to wait behind to get on the freeway. I would arrange a public flogging for those who put traffic regulators on onramps and for those who don't program traffic lights to weight right-of-way more towards the heaviest traffic.
Then we can worry about planning people's routes, as by then we would have actual passable routes.
to do this.
I hope they can expand this technology to replace embryonic stem cell harvesting in the future.
So i guess don't buy it, or just worry about Valve selling your name to the Russians. You don't read very well. What I also previously said was, in due time, every game you get will require you do this, if Valve is successful enough with this.
You're what they call sheep. If you're lucky, they'll come shave you for wool.
I don't care if Valve pays me to download their developer tools, I don't want anything to do with Valve.
Their policy of forcing you to register and identify yourself with them to play a single player game, grates HARD against my sense of privacy (I never play multiplayer games anyway because of all the flaming racists and trash talking pimple faced teenagers). When I buy a game to play it in single player mode, I do not tolerate, I DO NOT TOLERATE companies that make me have to identify myself to them. Zero tolerance. Go to Communist China if you feel you have to collect information on everyone who buys your crap: keep your crap out of America.
I would pay a year's salary, though, to someone who could put Valve out of business and make a goosebump-raising, spine tingling example of them (bankruptcy, outing of corporate CEO personal information to the world that mirrors their demanding of OUR information, etc.) for their subtle privacy-busting tactics, such that no other developer would desire to follow their path.
It may not bother you now, but wait until you buy a few more majorly popular $[non multiplayer game] titles and find you have to go even further and submit your name, phone #, etc. ONLINE to the publisher, in order to play. Then you'll wonder how things got that bad. It got that bad because you're so apathetic now.
do terrorists have an ENGINEER mindset?
Terrorism requires the knowledge to bypass security and/or blow stuff up.
To do that, you need engineers. Otherwise all you get is a bunch of talkers, not doers, or at least doers who blow themselves up more often, and who fail to even reach their targets.
What this means is, your average engineer does not have a terrorist mindset, but terrorist groups must recruit engineers in order to Get Stuff Circumvented/Done[tm]. So they recruit engineers as often as they can, because otherwise they cannot Get Stuff Circumvented/Done[tm].