What has Sergei Brin or Elon Musk ever done for me? Or, for that matter, anyone other than their shareholders and employees?
There's an awful lot of economic activity in Silicon Valley. That economic activity feeds everyone from Google employees to coffee shop barristas and grocery store clerks. The taxes paid by Google, their employees, and the supporting economic activity support city, state, and federal government functions that benefit you. Vibrant economic activity provides social stability that benefits you.
It's sad that the only benefit you seem to recognize is a personal check.
How will that materially affect you, other than hurt your ego?
The US enjoys its current leadership position in the world, and its current high quality of life largely as a consequence of its technological superiority between 1950 and 1990. That superiority brought some exceptionally bright and talented people from all over the world to US schools and to the US market, and those people helped to fuel US dominance. Its "ego" is a consequence, not a cause of that condition. So, looking up to an Indian moonbase or a Chinese Mars base would encourage those talented innovators to see China and India, rather than the US or Europe, as the places where cool stuff can be developed. It will encourage the next Elon Musk or Sergei Brin to move not to the US, but to China.
There just aren't enough smart people in the US (or in any other country for that matter) to maintain dominance. If a country can't poach the smartest people from other countries, then it's going to decline. Government policies hostile to the advancement of science and technology make it harder to recruit those scientists and engineers.
Neil was not trolling. He was making a tongue-in-cheek statement, that apparently was too much for some people.
Tyson's tweet parodies one of the most recognizable of all bible verses: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." That is definitely trolling, in the sense of making a statement which is almost correct, but in which a certain segment of people will find an error that requires correction. It's trolling like parodies of the lord's prayer. It's trolling like a picture of Mohammed eating a BLT.
People just assume he was atheist because, hey, father of modern science and all. And we all know it's impossible for anyone who is rational to be religious too, right?
Of course, through most of history, mankind's greatest thinkers have been religious. Many of them, including Newton and Einstein, believed that the observations they made and the laws they discovered were evidence of divine power.
Sadly, especially among Christians, there seem to be two branches: the "thinking man's" religion and the "authoritarian" religion. The thinking man's version encourages discussion and debate. It encourages questioning, because through those questions one comes better to understand his faith. It accepts that the source of that faith can not be described explicitly, but must be discussed through metaphor. The authoritarian version renounces doubt and considers questions to be threats. It equates faith with loyalty to the figurehead and insists on plain language that admits no room for interpretation. The authoritarian version is always more popular.
Now if she had broken into the house instead of just banging on it this might have been a different story but I wont open the door to shoot someone, they have to actually break in first.
Not all gun owners are so reserved.
The problem with easy access to guns is not the responsible owners. The problem is that every time you sell a gun to someone, that person might be a stalker, or crazy, or just have real problems controlling his rage. The problem is that every gun sold is a gun open to theft. The problem is that the easier it is for you to get a gun, the easier it is for criminals to get guns, and they're not nearly as reluctant to use them.
To be fair, the DHS did a terrible job predicting safety around the Boston Marathon, then number of underwear bomber copy-cats, and the number of bombs hidden in non-functional laptop computers.
We, on the other hand, have spent trillions on military action and our citizens are still being kidnapped, held, and executed. Why? Because taking Americans hostage is a worthwhile endeavor regardless of whether the captors actually expect to get paid.
Taking an American hostage is hugely more fun than getting some ransom. You take a French dude hostage and maybe you get a few million dollars out of it - but that doesn't really buy much military hardware or support very many jihadis for long. It happens in quiet, so you don't get any PR out of it. If you just want money, it's easier and more certain just to rob a couple of banks. You take an American hostage, though, and you can be sure of whipping the most powerful government on the planet into an irrational frenzy. They'll make big threats, blow up a few wedding parties, and generally, brazenly, demonstrate themselves to be nationalistic assholes. If you're interested in gaining support for your own nationalistic pride, there's no better way than to get the other guys to make asses of themselves.
Presumably the answer includes a high-tension cable strung across all 8 or whatever lanes of I-95 at the height of the barriers that run along the side of the road (about windshield height I imagine). What could go wrong?
It's not like they're going to moor it in downtown Baltimore, and 10,000 feet is really not that long. I would expect they can keep this thing and the entire length of its tether, safely within the boundaries of an army base, where it would pose little risk to the public. Remember, these guys lob artillery shells around on a pretty regular basis and they almost never hit any interstates or shopping malls.
This American is tired of the rightards false equivalences.
You're the one making the "rightard" equivalence between lowering spending and raising taxes.
You may be too young to remember, but this "Congress has to learn to live within a budget" drumbeat has been going on since at least 1980. Most of the tax cuts we have had, including Reagan's, were intended to force congress to cut spending. The only three out of the past 40 year that federal spending has decreased year-over-year are 2010, 2012, and 2013, most of which can be attributed to expiration of the massive bailout/stimulus programs. (If you do the math in inflation-adjusted dollars, then you can find another couple of years in the early 90s where spending declines)
So, the "right" appears to be very good at reducing taxes, but not very good at reducing spending. The "left" is not very good at reducing spending, but at least they seem to realize that income has to rise to meet spending.
I get 6MB and I pay about $120/month for internet, cable and phone.
Good lord, that's awful. In Atlanta, Comcast is $45 for 20MB+basic cable. It goes up to $55 if you decline cable. Ooma is $4/month for phone, so I never even consider 3-way bundles
No, a false flag would be the intelligence agency itself going out and bombing a train or hijacking an airplane while masquerading as Islamic terrorists. ie: committing atrocities while waving a false flag. Intelligence agents badgering an otherwise unwilling suspect into meeting with someone selling a "bomb" is entrapment.
If someone tells you some facts, and they happen to have already made up their mind on what those facts imply, that's still a perfectly valid source of knowledge to use.
If someone has made up his mind what the facts will show, then separates violent activities into those considers to be religiously motivated and those he considers simply criminal or mental-health related, then one should be suspicious that his list propagates a No-True-Scotsman fallacy. One should be suspicious that his bias prevents an impartial presentation of facts.
Many of the 'Islamic terrorist' attacks happen within conflict zones or occupied regions. Many Catholics violently opposed occupation by Nazi Germany: are their bombings terrorism?
So, there's no such thing as a property investor? Property is all scarcity.
Exactly. Buying and selling property is real estate speculation.
Now, buying property because you want to build apartments on it and collect rent would be an investment, or buying an office complex because you think it will provide more income than its costs, but buying something with the sole intention of selling it to the next sucker is speculation
Let's for argument's sake say the site turns to obnoxious ads and anti-blocking measures. You either stop reading or stop fighting the ads. If they lose you as a reader they lose you as a freeloader so what exactly have they lost, the privilege of you reading their blog?
If it's a blog like/., where people show up to read or participate in discussion more than the actual post, then every lost reader degrades the community and degrades the content that attracts the other readers.
Ad-supported web sites are asking for an exchange of time. So much of my time spent filtering through ads in exchange for so much of their time spent generating content. Based on that exchange, most content providers seem to massively overvalue their content.
Remember that ad-supported web sites are actually competing against hobbyists. People who will happily spend, from their own pocket, money on hosting in order to play on the internet. To have "their" web site and community. To have a place where they can vent their rage or express their creativity. If your professional web site can't generate content better than what people are willing to give away for free, then you may lack a viable business model.
Chances are every site he visits, including this one, would be part of the 99% that is gone. Unless his fantasy web is some sort of early 90s Geocities flashback, it requires advertising to exist.
No, advertising today is just the easiest way to monetize a web site. Seriously: sign up for google, and you can make money from grandma visiting the latest grandbaby picture album. Even if it's only a few cents, why the hell not? The vast majority of web content provides no relevant income to its creators, not enough to pay for hosting, definitely not enough to pay for dinner.
If you make advertising pay less, or just make it harder than creating a google account, then people who are actually serious about making a living off internet content will switch compensation models. Their content is likely to become more valuable, because there won't be a hundred other morons out there doing exactly the same thing.
On a normal day, I visit probably two dozen different websites - a mixture of electronic versions of traditional journalism, "web 2.0" blog aggregators, storefronts, and specialty sites. Devaluing network advertising isn't going to hurt the storefronts or professional journalists (who, even today, collect some subscription fees). It might encourage the reddit/wordpress world to impose subscriptions, which would certainly reduce discourse. Most of the specialty sites I visit are people's hobbies - they spend $10, $20, or $200/month on these things from personal passion and because their real life work gives them the means to do so. They're not going to change if the ad networks dry up.
...a server in every small business and a PC on every desktop was actually a good idea after all, because this Cloud thing means you own nothing, much less have control over it.
The interesting thing will be, once they successfully turn your operating system and applications into a service, whether their service, running on your hardware can be compelled to transmit data from your hardware to the FBI. Or to the FSB, since MS has offices in Russia.
Finally, we may access, disclose and preserve your personal information, including your private content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:
comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process from competent authorities, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;
This is exactly the point under contention. MS is claiming that their good faith belief in this case does not compel their Irish operations to comply with a US court order. Clearly, their US operations would comply with the US order; likewise, the Irish company would comply with an Irish order.
The argument MS makes is that, if a US court can compel actions by foreign subsidiaries, then their future "good faith belief" must admit valid legal processes in other countries to compel actions by US subsidiaries. This, completely independent of whether US practice would consider the foreign process (or even the foreign government) valid.
The US Government is not sending any orders to any entity outside of the US.
No, it is requiring a person in the US send orders to an entity outside the US. I hardly see where the fact that the foreign response is automated makes any difference. They're essentially trying to compel a corporate office to order its subsidiary to provide some information, relying on the power of the parent company over the subsidiary as a proxy for any direct legal power over the subsidiary.
Their analogy also fits how I personally think the case should be resolved. The court seems to be unsure about the personal access of Microsoft's American staff though. In your example, a U.S.-based employee has to be ordered to comply with the German subpoena. But it sounds like in this case, Microsoft's U.S. employees can comply with the subpoena fully themselves, without having to order Microsoft Ireland employees to assist. So the court seems to be leaning towards thinking that in that case, as corporate officers subject to U.S. jurisdiction, they can be served subpoenas to retrieve that data, even if the data is elsewhereâ"because data isn't a legal person.
I see. So, in your mind, a company with an office in (say) North Korea, could be compelled to provide a copy of their entire cloud network in order to comply with the government's search for spies and terrorists? Or that Lockheed Martin, which does business in NK, could be compelled to turn over designs for the F-22 Raptor, based on a NK court order (regardless of any validity a US court might assign to that order)?
Warrants have always been used to access storage units and safe deposit boxes.
That's because you rent those spaces. They're "yours" in the same way as the apartment you live in is "yours." Do you want to guess whether the police need a warrant to search the pockets of trousers you left at the dry cleaner? Neither google nor microsoft assign you a particular range of sectors on an HD, nor a particular slice of RAM, so safety deposit box or other forms of rent are a terrible analogy for cloud-based services. It might be an acceptable analogy for a co-located server, but not for a cloud service. The postal system is a much better analogy, and the government is still not allowed to intercept your mail without a warrant.
Secondly, I think I disagree that the government's job is to protect the citizens with "whatever force is required".
The US currently has two major government priorities, both dedicated to protecting citizens from themselves. The Nannystate party is mostly concerned that its citizens are incompetent to feed, clothe, or bathe themselves, and establishes programs to ensure that even the most idle among us has a hot meal and regular haircuts. The Papastate party is mostly concerned that nefarious people mean harm to its precious, naive citizens, and makes great blustery show of the pain that will be visited upon anyone who touches those chaste citizens. The citizens themselves are somewhat divided, but a majority of them appear quite satisfied with both the image of incompetence and the image of naivete, as long as TV privileges are not withheld.
When you decide the morality of the situation is asymmetrical, don't expect the other guy to see your side of it.
This has been the main argument in favor of torture. "Do you think the terrorists treat their prisoners nicely? Then why should we be bound to any conventions we know they won't abide?" The argument has always been that "they" started it.
The morality of any of these situations has to be asymmetrical, and "our side" always needs to be the kinder, more honest, and more fair side. As soon as you demonstrate your willingness to use the unethical or evil techniques of your enemy, you lose any distinction from them.
Submit. The thug prospers, I suffer and probably die early. If nearly all people do this, thugs find it an easy way to live, and the class of thugs expands until it dominates the whole world. The whole world becomes a cesspool like North Korea.
Arm myself to resist the thug, and on a national scale arm to resist thug-states. At the cost of defending myself, I can prosper in relative freedom. One of the worse costs is listening to ignorant tools like you advising me to let my throat be cut.
Here is where your black-and-white, false dichotomy fails. You can "arm" yourself to resist the thug by hiring your own gang of thugs, by buying your own gun, or by buying armor. You can arm yourself against the worst thug your imagination can conjure, or against thugs that actually exist. You can prove the strength of your arms by walking into every dark alley, kicking down the doors of hovels and speakeasies, loudly proclaiming your invincibility, or you can follow open, well-lighted paths without offering to fight all comers, and at least pretend to be civil.
I don't care about legal this and changed-the-constitution-100-years-ago-now-its-lawful. Because morally, there's no difference between taxation and thieft-at-gunpoint-threatened-with-kidnapping.
Legal is when the governed society agrees on expected behaviors an consequences. Moral is how you believe you should act. So, you thinking that you deserve my iPhone and using your gun to realize that belief may be moral but illegal. The society getting together and stating that we will provide armed protection against invaders (among other things) and that each person will share the cost of that protection is a statement of moral value. The society codifying that moral value by writing, revoking, or revising their written rules is legal. As long as there's a social contract, legal actions are a subset of socially moral actions.
I'm sorry you live in a country where your moral code is so divergent from the society - none of us get to choose our birthplace, after all. But given that your moral position is the deviant one, perhaps you can provide the moral argument against communal functions of society. Or at least an alternative system for providing essential services that does not require the society to share in the economic activity of its participants.
Slashdot Mirror
What has Sergei Brin or Elon Musk ever done for me? Or, for that matter, anyone other than their shareholders and employees?
There's an awful lot of economic activity in Silicon Valley. That economic activity feeds everyone from Google employees to coffee shop barristas and grocery store clerks. The taxes paid by Google, their employees, and the supporting economic activity support city, state, and federal government functions that benefit you. Vibrant economic activity provides social stability that benefits you.
It's sad that the only benefit you seem to recognize is a personal check.
How will that materially affect you, other than hurt your ego?
The US enjoys its current leadership position in the world, and its current high quality of life largely as a consequence of its technological superiority between 1950 and 1990. That superiority brought some exceptionally bright and talented people from all over the world to US schools and to the US market, and those people helped to fuel US dominance. Its "ego" is a consequence, not a cause of that condition. So, looking up to an Indian moonbase or a Chinese Mars base would encourage those talented innovators to see China and India, rather than the US or Europe, as the places where cool stuff can be developed. It will encourage the next Elon Musk or Sergei Brin to move not to the US, but to China.
There just aren't enough smart people in the US (or in any other country for that matter) to maintain dominance. If a country can't poach the smartest people from other countries, then it's going to decline. Government policies hostile to the advancement of science and technology make it harder to recruit those scientists and engineers.
Neil was not trolling. He was making a tongue-in-cheek statement, that apparently was too much for some people.
Tyson's tweet parodies one of the most recognizable of all bible verses: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." That is definitely trolling, in the sense of making a statement which is almost correct, but in which a certain segment of people will find an error that requires correction. It's trolling like parodies of the lord's prayer. It's trolling like a picture of Mohammed eating a BLT.
People just assume he was atheist because, hey, father of modern science and all. And we all know it's impossible for anyone who is rational to be religious too, right?
Of course, through most of history, mankind's greatest thinkers have been religious. Many of them, including Newton and Einstein, believed that the observations they made and the laws they discovered were evidence of divine power.
Sadly, especially among Christians, there seem to be two branches: the "thinking man's" religion and the "authoritarian" religion. The thinking man's version encourages discussion and debate. It encourages questioning, because through those questions one comes better to understand his faith. It accepts that the source of that faith can not be described explicitly, but must be discussed through metaphor. The authoritarian version renounces doubt and considers questions to be threats. It equates faith with loyalty to the figurehead and insists on plain language that admits no room for interpretation. The authoritarian version is always more popular.
Now if she had broken into the house instead of just banging on it this might have been a different story but I wont open the door to shoot someone, they have to actually break in first.
Not all gun owners are so reserved.
The problem with easy access to guns is not the responsible owners. The problem is that every time you sell a gun to someone, that person might be a stalker, or crazy, or just have real problems controlling his rage. The problem is that every gun sold is a gun open to theft. The problem is that the easier it is for you to get a gun, the easier it is for criminals to get guns, and they're not nearly as reluctant to use them.
To be fair, the DHS did a terrible job predicting safety around the Boston Marathon, then number of underwear bomber copy-cats, and the number of bombs hidden in non-functional laptop computers.
We, on the other hand, have spent trillions on military action and our citizens are still being kidnapped, held, and executed. Why? Because taking Americans hostage is a worthwhile endeavor regardless of whether the captors actually expect to get paid.
Taking an American hostage is hugely more fun than getting some ransom. You take a French dude hostage and maybe you get a few million dollars out of it - but that doesn't really buy much military hardware or support very many jihadis for long. It happens in quiet, so you don't get any PR out of it. If you just want money, it's easier and more certain just to rob a couple of banks. You take an American hostage, though, and you can be sure of whipping the most powerful government on the planet into an irrational frenzy. They'll make big threats, blow up a few wedding parties, and generally, brazenly, demonstrate themselves to be nationalistic assholes. If you're interested in gaining support for your own nationalistic pride, there's no better way than to get the other guys to make asses of themselves.
Presumably the answer includes a high-tension cable strung across all 8 or whatever lanes of I-95 at the height of the barriers that run along the side of the road (about windshield height I imagine). What could go wrong?
It's not like they're going to moor it in downtown Baltimore, and 10,000 feet is really not that long. I would expect they can keep this thing and the entire length of its tether, safely within the boundaries of an army base, where it would pose little risk to the public. Remember, these guys lob artillery shells around on a pretty regular basis and they almost never hit any interstates or shopping malls.
Look at your shoes. Did they need to pass regulations to make your shoes not terrible?
Yes
You don't buy the ones that are bad.
People will happily buy terrible shoes. Quality has nothing to do with economic success.
This American is tired of the rightards false equivalences.
You're the one making the "rightard" equivalence between lowering spending and raising taxes.
You may be too young to remember, but this "Congress has to learn to live within a budget" drumbeat has been going on since at least 1980. Most of the tax cuts we have had, including Reagan's, were intended to force congress to cut spending. The only three out of the past 40 year that federal spending has decreased year-over-year are 2010, 2012, and 2013, most of which can be attributed to expiration of the massive bailout/stimulus programs. (If you do the math in inflation-adjusted dollars, then you can find another couple of years in the early 90s where spending declines)
So, the "right" appears to be very good at reducing taxes, but not very good at reducing spending. The "left" is not very good at reducing spending, but at least they seem to realize that income has to rise to meet spending.
I get 6MB and I pay about $120/month for internet, cable and phone.
Good lord, that's awful. In Atlanta, Comcast is $45 for 20MB+basic cable. It goes up to $55 if you decline cable. Ooma is $4/month for phone, so I never even consider 3-way bundles
No, a false flag would be the intelligence agency itself going out and bombing a train or hijacking an airplane while masquerading as Islamic terrorists. ie: committing atrocities while waving a false flag. Intelligence agents badgering an otherwise unwilling suspect into meeting with someone selling a "bomb" is entrapment.
If someone tells you some facts, and they happen to have already made up their mind on what those facts imply, that's still a perfectly valid source of knowledge to use.
If someone has made up his mind what the facts will show, then separates violent activities into those considers to be religiously motivated and those he considers simply criminal or mental-health related, then one should be suspicious that his list propagates a No-True-Scotsman fallacy. One should be suspicious that his bias prevents an impartial presentation of facts.
Many of the 'Islamic terrorist' attacks happen within conflict zones or occupied regions. Many Catholics violently opposed occupation by Nazi Germany: are their bombings terrorism?
So, there's no such thing as a property investor? Property is all scarcity.
Exactly. Buying and selling property is real estate speculation.
Now, buying property because you want to build apartments on it and collect rent would be an investment, or buying an office complex because you think it will provide more income than its costs, but buying something with the sole intention of selling it to the next sucker is speculation
Let's for argument's sake say the site turns to obnoxious ads and anti-blocking measures. You either stop reading or stop fighting the ads. If they lose you as a reader they lose you as a freeloader so what exactly have they lost, the privilege of you reading their blog?
If it's a blog like /., where people show up to read or participate in discussion more than the actual post, then every lost reader degrades the community and degrades the content that attracts the other readers.
Ad-supported web sites are asking for an exchange of time. So much of my time spent filtering through ads in exchange for so much of their time spent generating content. Based on that exchange, most content providers seem to massively overvalue their content.
Remember that ad-supported web sites are actually competing against hobbyists. People who will happily spend, from their own pocket, money on hosting in order to play on the internet. To have "their" web site and community. To have a place where they can vent their rage or express their creativity. If your professional web site can't generate content better than what people are willing to give away for free, then you may lack a viable business model.
Chances are every site he visits, including this one, would be part of the 99% that is gone. Unless his fantasy web is some sort of early 90s Geocities flashback, it requires advertising to exist.
No, advertising today is just the easiest way to monetize a web site. Seriously: sign up for google, and you can make money from grandma visiting the latest grandbaby picture album. Even if it's only a few cents, why the hell not? The vast majority of web content provides no relevant income to its creators, not enough to pay for hosting, definitely not enough to pay for dinner.
If you make advertising pay less, or just make it harder than creating a google account, then people who are actually serious about making a living off internet content will switch compensation models. Their content is likely to become more valuable, because there won't be a hundred other morons out there doing exactly the same thing.
On a normal day, I visit probably two dozen different websites - a mixture of electronic versions of traditional journalism, "web 2.0" blog aggregators, storefronts, and specialty sites. Devaluing network advertising isn't going to hurt the storefronts or professional journalists (who, even today, collect some subscription fees). It might encourage the reddit/wordpress world to impose subscriptions, which would certainly reduce discourse. Most of the specialty sites I visit are people's hobbies - they spend $10, $20, or $200/month on these things from personal passion and because their real life work gives them the means to do so. They're not going to change if the ad networks dry up.
...a server in every small business and a PC on every desktop was actually a good idea after all, because this Cloud thing means you own nothing, much less have control over it.
The interesting thing will be, once they successfully turn your operating system and applications into a service, whether their service, running on your hardware can be compelled to transmit data from your hardware to the FBI. Or to the FSB, since MS has offices in Russia.
Finally, we may access, disclose and preserve your personal information, including your private content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to: comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process from competent authorities, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;
This is exactly the point under contention. MS is claiming that their good faith belief in this case does not compel their Irish operations to comply with a US court order. Clearly, their US operations would comply with the US order; likewise, the Irish company would comply with an Irish order.
The argument MS makes is that, if a US court can compel actions by foreign subsidiaries, then their future "good faith belief" must admit valid legal processes in other countries to compel actions by US subsidiaries. This, completely independent of whether US practice would consider the foreign process (or even the foreign government) valid.
The US Government is not sending any orders to any entity outside of the US.
No, it is requiring a person in the US send orders to an entity outside the US. I hardly see where the fact that the foreign response is automated makes any difference. They're essentially trying to compel a corporate office to order its subsidiary to provide some information, relying on the power of the parent company over the subsidiary as a proxy for any direct legal power over the subsidiary.
Their analogy also fits how I personally think the case should be resolved. The court seems to be unsure about the personal access of Microsoft's American staff though. In your example, a U.S.-based employee has to be ordered to comply with the German subpoena. But it sounds like in this case, Microsoft's U.S. employees can comply with the subpoena fully themselves, without having to order Microsoft Ireland employees to assist. So the court seems to be leaning towards thinking that in that case, as corporate officers subject to U.S. jurisdiction, they can be served subpoenas to retrieve that data, even if the data is elsewhereâ"because data isn't a legal person.
I see. So, in your mind, a company with an office in (say) North Korea, could be compelled to provide a copy of their entire cloud network in order to comply with the government's search for spies and terrorists? Or that Lockheed Martin, which does business in NK, could be compelled to turn over designs for the F-22 Raptor, based on a NK court order (regardless of any validity a US court might assign to that order)?
Warrants have always been used to access storage units and safe deposit boxes.
That's because you rent those spaces. They're "yours" in the same way as the apartment you live in is "yours." Do you want to guess whether the police need a warrant to search the pockets of trousers you left at the dry cleaner? Neither google nor microsoft assign you a particular range of sectors on an HD, nor a particular slice of RAM, so safety deposit box or other forms of rent are a terrible analogy for cloud-based services. It might be an acceptable analogy for a co-located server, but not for a cloud service. The postal system is a much better analogy, and the government is still not allowed to intercept your mail without a warrant.
Secondly, I think I disagree that the government's job is to protect the citizens with "whatever force is required".
The US currently has two major government priorities, both dedicated to protecting citizens from themselves. The Nannystate party is mostly concerned that its citizens are incompetent to feed, clothe, or bathe themselves, and establishes programs to ensure that even the most idle among us has a hot meal and regular haircuts. The Papastate party is mostly concerned that nefarious people mean harm to its precious, naive citizens, and makes great blustery show of the pain that will be visited upon anyone who touches those chaste citizens. The citizens themselves are somewhat divided, but a majority of them appear quite satisfied with both the image of incompetence and the image of naivete, as long as TV privileges are not withheld.
When you decide the morality of the situation is asymmetrical, don't expect the other guy to see your side of it.
This has been the main argument in favor of torture. "Do you think the terrorists treat their prisoners nicely? Then why should we be bound to any conventions we know they won't abide?" The argument has always been that "they" started it.
The morality of any of these situations has to be asymmetrical, and "our side" always needs to be the kinder, more honest, and more fair side. As soon as you demonstrate your willingness to use the unethical or evil techniques of your enemy, you lose any distinction from them.
Submit. The thug prospers, I suffer and probably die early. If nearly all people do this, thugs find it an easy way to live, and the class of thugs expands until it dominates the whole world. The whole world becomes a cesspool like North Korea.
Arm myself to resist the thug, and on a national scale arm to resist thug-states. At the cost of defending myself, I can prosper in relative freedom. One of the worse costs is listening to ignorant tools like you advising me to let my throat be cut.
Here is where your black-and-white, false dichotomy fails. You can "arm" yourself to resist the thug by hiring your own gang of thugs, by buying your own gun, or by buying armor. You can arm yourself against the worst thug your imagination can conjure, or against thugs that actually exist. You can prove the strength of your arms by walking into every dark alley, kicking down the doors of hovels and speakeasies, loudly proclaiming your invincibility, or you can follow open, well-lighted paths without offering to fight all comers, and at least pretend to be civil.
I don't care about legal this and changed-the-constitution-100-years-ago-now-its-lawful. Because morally, there's no difference between taxation and thieft-at-gunpoint-threatened-with-kidnapping.
Legal is when the governed society agrees on expected behaviors an consequences. Moral is how you believe you should act. So, you thinking that you deserve my iPhone and using your gun to realize that belief may be moral but illegal. The society getting together and stating that we will provide armed protection against invaders (among other things) and that each person will share the cost of that protection is a statement of moral value. The society codifying that moral value by writing, revoking, or revising their written rules is legal. As long as there's a social contract, legal actions are a subset of socially moral actions.
I'm sorry you live in a country where your moral code is so divergent from the society - none of us get to choose our birthplace, after all. But given that your moral position is the deviant one, perhaps you can provide the moral argument against communal functions of society. Or at least an alternative system for providing essential services that does not require the society to share in the economic activity of its participants.