The US dollar has some advantages over other currencies. For example it is accepted in payment of taxes and other debts by the US government.
Hey, doofus, that's a great theory there. Too bady it doesn't work that way in the real world.
For instance: It's illegal to mail the US dollar. So, we don't use it for paying taxes. We write checks. Not even the government uses dollars to pay tax refunds. They write checks and/or directly deposit numerical values in a bank register. Now, my bank doesn't even keep that money in dollars. Nosirree. They invest it in the stock market -- Ah company stocks, now there's a hive of currencies with liquiditiy, just like bitcoin. They're just based on speculator opinion too -- And the dollar is inextricably tied to these through the economy, and through the money markets as well. So, I can exchange some bitcoins into a bank account and convert it into dollars that my tax-man wants -- but I can't pay them in dollars, nope, have to get a bank endorsed IOU and ship that out instead.
That the "US dollar" exists is the biggest lie in America.
If you need an old-er school reference, it's a bit like playing Brickout, if instead of the paddle you were the ball -- Wait, that reminds me of an old Mac game called Diamonds.
This could be called conspiracy if was said two years ago. But now it it very palpable at least.
Conspiracies do exist. Don't shy from the word just because you were trained to by the press. It's like Watergate was a conspiracy. A scientist should attribute degrees of certainty based on evidence, and never be 100% certain about anything.
Plausible deniability does not eliminate undeniable plausibility.
If he was simply a whisteblower for NSA spying on Americans I would agree. However, possibly during negotiations for asylum, he told other countries how we were spying on them.
You assume that the other countries' long running and well funded state sponsored spies have not already infiltrated the NSA far more deeply than Snowden did with his single stint at it. It was whistle blowing because there was no harm to be done in letting the public know how big of a Joke the NSA has become.
Hey, let's get Snowden to come back so we can Kennedy, or John Lennon, or MLK him real good. Next up: Oh, look at that, Snowden doesn't want to return even if offered an olive branch? Guess he's un-American for rejecting our hospitality.
We have a president who, after promising the most open administration ever, has done a complete 180 and tried to limit press coverage, access to records and administration officials, and so on.
We don't need wiretap spying. No serious threat can make a move against us without us knowing instantly. Seriously.Cars and Cheesburgers kill 400 times more than a 9/11 attack every year. We need no expensive War on Terror, DHS, or massive spying apparatus: The Flu kills 6 times more every year than a 9/11 scale attack -- Yet we still accept the risk in driving kids to get a happy-meal and let them play with other kids. If they want to spy they can get out of the damn basement and stand next to me or point a laser microphone at my windows. An encrypted chat/voip program on a burner phone illustrates why the massive spying is incapable of preventing any danger. Further, as a Scientist, I need evidence to believe a claim. Aggregate data of this size is harmless? Prove it.
A government without secrets is immune to spies. Snowden showed the NSA to be leaking worse than a sieve -- All of our taxes spent on data collection the enemy can easily leverage against us too. Tracking everywhere I go and what ideals I hold by what places and sites I visit is a perfect tool for terrorists and enemies to silence those who advocate greater freedom.
"No harm. no foul on either side" -- Grow up kid, you have some history to study.
Cold fjord starts from a basic assumption: The government is not inherently evil. This is the basic tenet that garners so much hatred from the hivemind. Many Slashdotters have decided, with or without reason, that the government is bad unless it is handing out welfare*,
Furthermore you are being foolish. Are citizens to be considered innocent until proven guilty? Yes? Right, then the Accuser, Police, Prosecutor, FBI, NSA, even Judges and Laws themselves are considered WRONG by default. In short: That the government is considered guilty unless proven innocent is a CORE principal to the establishment of law, and illustrates precisely why we must not allow governments secrets: They can't prove they're working in the best interest of the citizens otherwise.
Why??? Snowden did far more harm than good. Nothing has been done about anything he revealed, courts have been ruling it's legal.
You are now aware that not only the allies but our enemies can do what Snowden did. He revealed the NSA to be one giant single point of failure. That the government is ruling something illegal or legal doesn't make it just or correct. Jim Crow was once a law. Rosa Parks went to jail you twit.
He should do it because it's the right thing to do, there should not be any need for more incentive than that.
I agree. If I were president I would do so, because my family has the same ideals I have. They know we can not be used as bargaining chips against each the other, no matter how dire the circumstance. Ask yourself: With a name like the Secret Service do you think they are protecting Presidents or Secrets?
As any scientist can see: That is an unevidenced claim. Prove it.
It is commonly accepted that everyone else on the Internet is one fat guy in his mom's basement -- Yes, even the "girls". Recent leaks reveal he's an NSA employee.
So when do we take our country back folks? Seriously, I'd like to see it on my watch, but since I'm on my 80th circuit around this star, there might not be much time left for me to watch.
What do you expect us to do with our lives that you did not do with yours? It's not like we haven't seen how the Civil Rights movement ran its course, the Privacy Rights movement will probably play out quite similarly. The racists who fought against abolition of slavery raised their children, who would die ~30 years after them and continued the tradition of hate into the 1900's; When those sewn deep with the seeds of hate had died or had a foot in the grave, and the following generation had grown up with the unignorable repression still in place did the Civil Rights movement succeed. You see, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
Now our enemy is not hate, but fear. Fast cars and Fast food kill 400 times more people every year than 9/11, but our government used the event as to manufacture consent for a "War on Terror" instead of a war on the far more dangerous Automobiles, Happy Meals, The Flu, Bathroom Falls, Lightning, etc. Now using the systems built on your watch our governments can fabricate and plant evidence in our homes remotely. They're so scared they even lie to congress to "protect" we the people from even knowing the extent to which their safety net smothers us. They've been proven liars now so no evidence they present can be assumed legitimate, and enemy spies use our data stores as treasure troves, as Snowden demonstrated was far more than feasible -- Yet they will still fear, and demand to protect us. Who do you think taught these scaremongers this fear that they seek such protection? It was your generation got us in the state we're in now. I'm sorry, but the fearful watchers of the world don't get to see things change for the better because they they watched in grateful fear when things were changing for the worse in the name of protection.
When our children grow up and you & your children are your age, that is when we'll be able to make permanent changes about this: When the ones who have lived with the knowledge and unignorable proof of their despotism grow up and take the reigns. It's not like we haven't seen how these parasitic cold-war spying systems kill their hosts, how the body must become resistant to the euphoric power-high and overdose on the despotic poison the fear drug is laced with. When the state of the system itself becomes more fearful than any pathetic threat. After your generation dies, and the scared little tyrants you raised have become as powerless as you.
If you my accusation unfair, then you hypocritically ignore how unfair it is to grow up our children in brave homes with little freedom of privacy; They will end the mess you wrought. Your only hope to see the change is that enough of the more technically and politically inclined folk grew up knowing about the ugly Omnivore and its descendants, and about what the counter intelligence programs did to silence civil rights and anti-war movements. Unfortunately we were shunned, ridiculed, name called and bullied as Nerds and Geeks. Our children on the other hand...
Additionally: For decades Noam Chomsky has given us insight to the practice of Manufacturing Consent via Media. At the behest of corporate interests the state wages Disaster Capitalism And all of this to control the socio-political landscape through silencing Women's Rights, Anti-War Activists, Civil Rights Activists, under the label "subversive radicals" in order to maintain the status quo: COINTELPRO. Note the NSA was complicit in COINTELPRO activities along with the FBI, and that they are still keen the practice now considering using PRISM to silence "radicals", e.g., exposing porn browsing habits -- I'm sure it has many other such uses. We can't really believe anything they say anymore because they'll even lie to their superiors in congress.
Scaremongers have ensured the land hasn't been free, nor the home brave, for a very long time. The cost in taxes, freedom, security, and privacy is too great. We don't even need TSA or DHS: Lightning is 4 times more dangerous than terrorists. Cars and Cheeseburgers kill 400 times more people than 9/11 every year, but we accept this risk, and drive to get the kids Happy Meals from time to time. We don't have a war on Freedom Fries or Sports Sedans, yet they are far more terrifying than the scaremonger's pathetic terrorist threat.
from right here in our shirtsleeves sitting at a computer desk. I wonder why going up 0.1 Earth radii to stay within the Earth's atmosphere is "exploring space"...
Well, sure, if you want to be pedantic you could call quantum physics space-time exploration too, all of science and reality for that matter. However, note that despite the (non-avian) Dinosaurs extensive duration of "exploring space" they were extinguished by a single rock. So, while it is wondrous to peer out from deep in your basements through vast windows (and unixes) upon the Universe at large, it means fuck-all ultimately if you can't do anything about the state of things physically. The universe is a dangerous place. Entropy is out to kill us. Earth's inhabitants are living on borrowed time. It's not just rocks, but solar flares, gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes, etc. Earth is 500,000 year over-due for a magnetic pole flip.
Window shopping for planets is fine, but the tech to get there will include the tech to survive outside the magnetosphere on the Moon, Mars, among the Asteroid Belt, etc. It's been over four decades since humans were outside the magnetosphere. That's irresponsible for any sentient race capable of even a modicum of extra-planetary space exploration. If we found out tomorrow that a big unstoppable rock would hit Earth this year your extinction would be your fault. Don't think that's possible? Eris, a dwarf planet 27% more massive than Pluto, wasn't discovered until 2005! And it comes in closer than Pluto's orbit too. Pluto's not a planet because if it were they'd have to admit there was ANOTHER PLANET unnoticed right in your back yard). Humans are basically blind to space, having extreme tunnel vision.
Trillions are wasted in pointless wars over privatization of industry, and the machines of war burned to make room for more such war spending, meanwhile not instead profiting far more lucratively from space exploration? The scaremongers haven't figured out that our own universe is a far more dangerous threat, and that actually saving the Earth is far more grandiose, expensive, and thus a more profitable venture that war? If fighting extinction through self sustaining off-world colonies isn't your #1 priority, then you're obviously not self aware enough to be deemed sentient. Thus, solves the Fermi Paradox: We gave you a warp drive, you'd stay on your wet rock and turn it into a bomb.
Damn you eggnog. I do understand the difference between their there and they're, and other such typos... Proofreading after editing is always difficult for cybernetic systems who have preexisting mental pattern to match and thus a tendency to see what they expect (a form of confirmation bias). Meh, consider it a test of sentience. If you can grok the message without balking like a BASIC prompt then you're at least as smart as a simple lexical AI which extracts meaning from signal and isn't distracted by a little noise. Bias can be a valuable tool when wielded properly, indeed, without it you would understand nothing.
You see, you've forgotten a key piece of the puzzle. If the citizens are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, then the laws, law enforces, government agents, prosecutors, and etc. governance systems are assumed wrong until proven right -- Or more succinctly: Governments are assumed guilty until proven innocent -- This goes doubly when government secrecy is involved. They can't prove their not guilty so long as they're allowed secrets. We don't really need secrets. No spy can harm a government without secrets. The NSA is just a big single point of failure allowing every enemy spy above Snowden's caliber to get at even more data.
Corporations and governments frequently work together more readily than common citizens. The more money you have to lose the easier it is for the government to threaten you into compliance. This means that the whole "innocent citizen until proven guilty" thing goes right out the window. Apple is not a common citizen. The "guilty system until proven innocent" doesn't apply by default either to corporations. For evaluating them it is up to the methods of rationality. Any claim they make we must prove, as we would any scientific claim, with evidence. No evidence? It's bullshit. That's why the IRS reserves the right to do audits -- They don't trust corporations by default to be acting in the public's best interest, why would you?
How does actively silencing Women's Rights, Civil Rights, Privacy Rights, and Anti-War Activist equate to "land of the free" by any definition of the word?
Remember when the NSA is thinking about using Porn to silence "radical" thinkers? Yeah, don't forget it's not just "subversive people" it's anyone who threatens the status quo: It's folks like Martin Luther King, and John Lennon we're talking about.
Now the NSA, complicit in COINTELPRO activites, even on a personal level (LoveINT), and is proven to be one big single point of failure that probably every spy agency has far more data from than Snowden ever dreamed, you think we should continue pissing away money to support oppression and socio-political control? What an idiot. Please do not reproduce.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the kind of crap Slashdot or Dice should be promoting.
On the contrary, the plan is coming together perfectly.
The US dollar has some advantages over other currencies. For example it is accepted in payment of taxes and other debts by the US government.
Hey, doofus, that's a great theory there. Too bady it doesn't work that way in the real world.
For instance: It's illegal to mail the US dollar. So, we don't use it for paying taxes. We write checks. Not even the government uses dollars to pay tax refunds. They write checks and/or directly deposit numerical values in a bank register. Now, my bank doesn't even keep that money in dollars. Nosirree. They invest it in the stock market -- Ah company stocks, now there's a hive of currencies with liquiditiy, just like bitcoin. They're just based on speculator opinion too -- And the dollar is inextricably tied to these through the economy, and through the money markets as well. So, I can exchange some bitcoins into a bank account and convert it into dollars that my tax-man wants -- but I can't pay them in dollars, nope, have to get a bank endorsed IOU and ship that out instead.
That the "US dollar" exists is the biggest lie in America.
No, more like Labyrinth Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog -- or their rotating maze special stage for collecting chaos emeralds in said game.
If you need an old-er school reference, it's a bit like playing Brickout, if instead of the paddle you were the ball -- Wait, that reminds me of an old Mac game called Diamonds.
Crap, there goes my evening.
> Going to sea.
> Pissing off Poseidon with your dessert dweller chant.
Release The Kraken!
This could be called conspiracy if was said two years ago. But now it it very palpable at least.
Conspiracies do exist. Don't shy from the word just because you were trained to by the press. It's like Watergate was a conspiracy. A scientist should attribute degrees of certainty based on evidence, and never be 100% certain about anything.
Plausible deniability does not eliminate undeniable plausibility.
If he was simply a whisteblower for NSA spying on Americans I would agree. However, possibly during negotiations for asylum, he told other countries how we were spying on them.
You assume that the other countries' long running and well funded state sponsored spies have not already infiltrated the NSA far more deeply than Snowden did with his single stint at it. It was whistle blowing because there was no harm to be done in letting the public know how big of a Joke the NSA has become.
So, the Press is finally doing its fucking job ?
No, few press outlets are. The mainstream news is doing the bare minimum to report on this so they don't look like the completely statist slanted corporate controlled filters that they are.
Hey, let's get Snowden to come back so we can Kennedy, or John Lennon, or MLK him real good. Next up: Oh, look at that, Snowden doesn't want to return even if offered an olive branch? Guess he's un-American for rejecting our hospitality.
What Bollocks.
We have a president who, after promising the most open administration ever, has done a complete 180 and tried to limit press coverage, access to records and administration officials, and so on.
What would you do if your family was "secured"?
Snowden did far more harm than good to the US government and the businesses wielding the US government like a club.
Snowden didn't harm anyone. The NSA was doing the harm. Their secret was bound to get out. Don't shoot the messenger.
Snowden has mainly revealed metadata -- what info collection programs exist, rather than actual data -- what was collected.
The NSA has emphasised what it does is benign as in mainly collects metadata.
Metadata -- no harm. no foul on either side.
Why do you purposefully remain ignorant? Metadata collection is far more powerful than is warranted.
We don't need wiretap spying. No serious threat can make a move against us without us knowing instantly. Seriously. Cars and Cheesburgers kill 400 times more than a 9/11 attack every year. We need no expensive War on Terror, DHS, or massive spying apparatus: The Flu kills 6 times more every year than a 9/11 scale attack -- Yet we still accept the risk in driving kids to get a happy-meal and let them play with other kids. If they want to spy they can get out of the damn basement and stand next to me or point a laser microphone at my windows. An encrypted chat/voip program on a burner phone illustrates why the massive spying is incapable of preventing any danger. Further, as a Scientist, I need evidence to believe a claim. Aggregate data of this size is harmless? Prove it.
A government without secrets is immune to spies. Snowden showed the NSA to be leaking worse than a sieve -- All of our taxes spent on data collection the enemy can easily leverage against us too. Tracking everywhere I go and what ideals I hold by what places and sites I visit is a perfect tool for terrorists and enemies to silence those who advocate greater freedom.
"No harm. no foul on either side" -- Grow up kid, you have some history to study.
Cold fjord starts from a basic assumption: The government is not inherently evil. This is the basic tenet that garners so much hatred from the hivemind. Many Slashdotters have decided, with or without reason, that the government is bad unless it is handing out welfare*,
You mean the general consensus is that the government is pissing away money on programs that do nothing but suppress freedom instead of help the citizenry in any way?
Furthermore you are being foolish. Are citizens to be considered innocent until proven guilty? Yes? Right, then the Accuser, Police, Prosecutor, FBI, NSA, even Judges and Laws themselves are considered WRONG by default. In short: That the government is considered guilty unless proven innocent is a CORE principal to the establishment of law, and illustrates precisely why we must not allow governments secrets: They can't prove they're working in the best interest of the citizens otherwise.
Why??? Snowden did far more harm than good. Nothing has been done about anything he revealed, courts have been ruling it's legal.
You are now aware that not only the allies but our enemies can do what Snowden did. He revealed the NSA to be one giant single point of failure. That the government is ruling something illegal or legal doesn't make it just or correct. Jim Crow was once a law. Rosa Parks went to jail you twit.
A fate they quite arguably deserve.
He should do it because it's the right thing to do, there should not be any need for more incentive than that.
I agree. If I were president I would do so, because my family has the same ideals I have. They know we can not be used as bargaining chips against each the other, no matter how dire the circumstance. Ask yourself: With a name like the Secret Service do you think they are protecting Presidents or Secrets?
there were two different people.
As any scientist can see: That is an unevidenced claim. Prove it.
It is commonly accepted that everyone else on the Internet is one fat guy in his mom's basement -- Yes, even the "girls".
Recent leaks reveal he's an NSA employee.
So when do we take our country back folks? Seriously, I'd like to see it on my watch, but since I'm on my 80th circuit around this star, there might not be much time left for me to watch.
What do you expect us to do with our lives that you did not do with yours? It's not like we haven't seen how the Civil Rights movement ran its course, the Privacy Rights movement will probably play out quite similarly. The racists who fought against abolition of slavery raised their children, who would die ~30 years after them and continued the tradition of hate into the 1900's; When those sewn deep with the seeds of hate had died or had a foot in the grave, and the following generation had grown up with the unignorable repression still in place did the Civil Rights movement succeed. You see, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
Now our enemy is not hate, but fear. Fast cars and Fast food kill 400 times more people every year than 9/11, but our government used the event as to manufacture consent for a "War on Terror" instead of a war on the far more dangerous Automobiles, Happy Meals, The Flu, Bathroom Falls, Lightning, etc. Now using the systems built on your watch our governments can fabricate and plant evidence in our homes remotely. They're so scared they even lie to congress to "protect" we the people from even knowing the extent to which their safety net smothers us. They've been proven liars now so no evidence they present can be assumed legitimate, and enemy spies use our data stores as treasure troves, as Snowden demonstrated was far more than feasible -- Yet they will still fear, and demand to protect us. Who do you think taught these scaremongers this fear that they seek such protection? It was your generation got us in the state we're in now. I'm sorry, but the fearful watchers of the world don't get to see things change for the better because they they watched in grateful fear when things were changing for the worse in the name of protection.
When our children grow up and you & your children are your age, that is when we'll be able to make permanent changes about this: When the ones who have lived with the knowledge and unignorable proof of their despotism grow up and take the reigns. It's not like we haven't seen how these parasitic cold-war spying systems kill their hosts, how the body must become resistant to the euphoric power-high and overdose on the despotic poison the fear drug is laced with. When the state of the system itself becomes more fearful than any pathetic threat. After your generation dies, and the scared little tyrants you raised have become as powerless as you.
If you my accusation unfair, then you hypocritically ignore how unfair it is to grow up our children in brave homes with little freedom of privacy; They will end the mess you wrought. Your only hope to see the change is that enough of the more technically and politically inclined folk grew up knowing about the ugly Omnivore and its descendants, and about what the counter intelligence programs did to silence civil rights and anti-war movements. Unfortunately we were shunned, ridiculed, name called and bullied as Nerds and Geeks. Our children on the other hand...
God & Golem, Inc.
A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion
- Norbert Wiener
Specifically because there are ethical lessons in there you apparently haven't learned.
$ man wife
No manual entry for wife
$
$ man fucking
No manual entry for fucking
$
At least in my distro
$ man finger
$ man fsck
$ man make
$ sudo make me a sandwich.
noobs: The September that never ends.
Additionally: For decades Noam Chomsky has given us insight to the practice of Manufacturing Consent via Media. At the behest of corporate interests the state wages Disaster Capitalism
And all of this to control the socio-political landscape through silencing Women's Rights, Anti-War Activists, Civil Rights Activists, under the label "subversive radicals" in order to maintain the status quo: COINTELPRO. Note the NSA was complicit in COINTELPRO activities along with the FBI, and that they are still keen the practice now considering using PRISM to silence "radicals", e.g., exposing porn browsing habits -- I'm sure it has many other such uses. We can't really believe anything they say anymore because they'll even lie to their superiors in congress.
Scaremongers have ensured the land hasn't been free, nor the home brave, for a very long time. The cost in taxes, freedom, security, and privacy is too great. We don't even need TSA or DHS: Lightning is 4 times more dangerous than terrorists. Cars and Cheeseburgers kill 400 times more people than 9/11 every year, but we accept this risk, and drive to get the kids Happy Meals from time to time. We don't have a war on Freedom Fries or Sports Sedans, yet they are far more terrifying than the scaremonger's pathetic terrorist threat.
You moron. My PGP encrypted email passes the Diehard tests for randomness -- Doesn't mean it's actually random bits.
from right here in our shirtsleeves sitting at a computer desk. I wonder why going up 0.1 Earth radii to stay within the Earth's atmosphere is "exploring space"...
Well, sure, if you want to be pedantic you could call quantum physics space-time exploration too, all of science and reality for that matter. However, note that despite the (non-avian) Dinosaurs extensive duration of "exploring space" they were extinguished by a single rock. So, while it is wondrous to peer out from deep in your basements through vast windows (and unixes) upon the Universe at large, it means fuck-all ultimately if you can't do anything about the state of things physically. The universe is a dangerous place. Entropy is out to kill us. Earth's inhabitants are living on borrowed time. It's not just rocks, but solar flares, gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes, etc. Earth is 500,000 year over-due for a magnetic pole flip.
Window shopping for planets is fine, but the tech to get there will include the tech to survive outside the magnetosphere on the Moon, Mars, among the Asteroid Belt, etc. It's been over four decades since humans were outside the magnetosphere. That's irresponsible for any sentient race capable of even a modicum of extra-planetary space exploration. If we found out tomorrow that a big unstoppable rock would hit Earth this year your extinction would be your fault. Don't think that's possible? Eris, a dwarf planet 27% more massive than Pluto, wasn't discovered until 2005! And it comes in closer than Pluto's orbit too. Pluto's not a planet because if it were they'd have to admit there was ANOTHER PLANET unnoticed right in your back yard). Humans are basically blind to space, having extreme tunnel vision.
Trillions are wasted in pointless wars over privatization of industry, and the machines of war burned to make room for more such war spending, meanwhile not instead profiting far more lucratively from space exploration? The scaremongers haven't figured out that our own universe is a far more dangerous threat, and that actually saving the Earth is far more grandiose, expensive, and thus a more profitable venture that war? If fighting extinction through self sustaining off-world colonies isn't your #1 priority, then you're obviously not self aware enough to be deemed sentient. Thus, solves the Fermi Paradox: We gave you a warp drive, you'd stay on your wet rock and turn it into a bomb.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
To be fair, code rarely contains security holes. It's the instructions you have to worry about.
Damn you eggnog. I do understand the difference between their there and they're, and other such typos... Proofreading after editing is always difficult for cybernetic systems who have preexisting mental pattern to match and thus a tendency to see what they expect (a form of confirmation bias). Meh, consider it a test of sentience. If you can grok the message without balking like a BASIC prompt then you're at least as smart as a simple lexical AI which extracts meaning from signal and isn't distracted by a little noise. Bias can be a valuable tool when wielded properly, indeed, without it you would understand nothing.
Trust no one, but assume innocence until proven guilty.
OK, so what if we find them guilty of silencing activists to protect the status quo instead of protecting us from enemies, and they give us a non choice to trust them or not while they keep doing the same either way, and even escalate to lying directly to their overseers in congress. Then what? At what point do you become a scientist and say: "Oh, they're innocent? No. Prove it."
You see, you've forgotten a key piece of the puzzle. If the citizens are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, then the laws, law enforces, government agents, prosecutors, and etc. governance systems are assumed wrong until proven right -- Or more succinctly: Governments are assumed guilty until proven innocent -- This goes doubly when government secrecy is involved. They can't prove their not guilty so long as they're allowed secrets. We don't really need secrets. No spy can harm a government without secrets. The NSA is just a big single point of failure allowing every enemy spy above Snowden's caliber to get at even more data.
Corporations and governments frequently work together more readily than common citizens. The more money you have to lose the easier it is for the government to threaten you into compliance. This means that the whole "innocent citizen until proven guilty" thing goes right out the window. Apple is not a common citizen. The "guilty system until proven innocent" doesn't apply by default either to corporations. For evaluating them it is up to the methods of rationality. Any claim they make we must prove, as we would any scientific claim, with evidence. No evidence? It's bullshit. That's why the IRS reserves the right to do audits -- They don't trust corporations by default to be acting in the public's best interest, why would you?
Now, please, can we talk about changes without devolving into fake revolutionaries?
No. You're probably a shill. If not, you're just an ignorant fool.
How does actively silencing Women's Rights, Civil Rights, Privacy Rights, and Anti-War Activist equate to "land of the free" by any definition of the word?
Remember when the NSA is thinking about using Porn to silence "radical" thinkers? Yeah, don't forget it's not just "subversive people" it's anyone who threatens the status quo: It's folks like Martin Luther King, and John Lennon we're talking about.
Now the NSA, complicit in COINTELPRO activites, even on a personal level (LoveINT), and is proven to be one big single point of failure that probably every spy agency has far more data from than Snowden ever dreamed, you think we should continue pissing away money to support oppression and socio-political control? What an idiot. Please do not reproduce.