Just engage in very dodgy terrorist-likeXXXXXXXX normal everyday activity and I hear the NSA will back your data up for free!
Oh wait. You want data that also flows in the other direction so you can restore it. The NSA's viewpoint is that data is for sharing. You share it with them and they... no they don't.
Walking a disk/dvd over is actually probably one of the more realistic solutions. You don't have to have a server powered up and ready to receive on the other side, the bandwidth is the proverbial "station wagon full of tapes" and you have minimal worry about the data being intercepted and used in ways you don't like.
It's actually pretty economical these days to either buy a pair of external hard drives and swap them or to get a USB drive dock and swap internal disks. I have given up on tape as much because tape cartridges often cost more than hard drives as anything else and that's even before you have to buy the tape drives.
Another, more technical way of doing things would be something like one of the schemes I've worked with. Backup to archive files using a utility such as Bacula (which can conveniently slice backups into sizes small enough to burn to individual DVDs). If you do differential backups, the later generations can be appended to the full backup (I create a full backup once a week). From what I've seen, rsync is capable of optimizing the process of updating a mirror copy of the backup, transferring only the additions and thereby greatly reducing the resources required to keep the master and mirror backups in sync. The bacula backups can be compressed, but unlike ZIP compression, adding incremental changes don't re-arrange the previous backed-up data, so rsync can simply skip over the parts already received.
We have been able to fly planes up tens of thousands of feet for nearly a century, but we're a long way from flying passengers to even to the Moon, let alone another solar system.
A small step in one direction is rarely a sign that a great leap will be made.
About 110 years ago (next month), powered flying for a distance of around 200 feet was the best we could do.
Personally, I insist that Obamacare's worst enemies are the people who are working hardest to make it work. Incompetent lackwits wrote the specs, hired more incompetent lackwits to build the site, and failed to test anything. Had Obama and his supporters actually been competent, they could have at least made the site work. Had they been smart enough to hire competent contractors, they could have made the site work. Bottom line, we have a bunch of idiots who can't even get a web site up and running, but maintain that they will be competent to oversee life and death decisions made hundreds of thousands of times every single day throughout the nation.
I can't help but wonder if Obama supporters are colluding with Obama detractors.
There's no need to ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Take any random large-size public or private IT project. Odds are that it will be a disaster.
Time zones are a relatively recent invention. Originally, time was solar time and noon was when the sun was at its highest point.
The real impetus for time zones came with the railroads when people began travelling rapidly enough and far enough that having a different solar time every time you moved East or West a few miles got to be a problem so they normalized the time into strips more or less following the longitudinal lines - time zones.
The closer your time is to solar time, the easier it is to keep a reference to the local light/dark cycles. So down at the OK Corral, a shootout at 18:00 loses some of its magic.
Putting more of the morning commute for schoolkids in the light is a good reason for DST
Huh? DST moves the morning commute back into the DARK, just when the solar cycles start making it light. Hardly a year goes by around here when at least one local kid gets hit on that account.
I have been changing clocks all my life and it simply has not been the nerve racking. I don't know where all the drama is coming from.
For a while it seemed like every year I had acquired yet one more clock that needed resetting. Even now, however, not all or even a majority of my clocks support DST, either via a setting or automatically, and one of the worst offenders is the dashboard clock in my car. And some of the rituals required to change digital clocks are so arcane that I have to dig out the manuals every time.
Aside from the annoyance of spending the next week chasing forgotten clocks, however, DST is pointless. The A/C runs according to temperature, not the clock, as does the refrigerator. Only the water heater and cooking times shift, and in the case of cooking, it means that dinner moves closer to the hottest part of the day, adding additional loading to the A/C. And in this part of the world, A/C is only optional if you like heatstroke.
Skype is a household word as is Kleenex, and people want to get rid of both as soon as they have used it.
You got that wrong. I don't know anyone that uses 'skype', nor anyone that talks about it. But I do know that people hoover, and use andrex to wipe their arse. Maybe MS think doing dirty and shitty work makes the name stick.
X10, when it works, works well. I exclude that horrible webserver appliance that was supposed to let me control X10 and SmartHome and made X10 look fast AND reliable by comparison. Total waste of money.
How well X10 works depends on the age and quality of your wiring and whether the control and target devices have a relatively clear shot at each other.
I get pretty good operation in a relatively new home. But I used to live almost directly across from a 5KW AM radio transmitter. The stereo could "play" itself with the power unplugged. I don't even want to think of how X10 would have worked there!
Why do you need to turn off the lights or turn on the TV when no one is home? Why do you want you door locks to be as venerable as you car, or have your home key cost $300 to replace.
Because I want the house to look lived-in when I'm gone. Because I want a bright warm (or cool) house waiting for me when I get home. Because why should I have to turn the holiday lights on and off manually when a timer/daylight sensor could do it cheaply>
I've resisted automating my door locks, but two of the cheapest alternatives to a key are the Bluetooth in my phone (already paid for) or an RFID chip in my wallet (about 10 cents, give or take). Those are items I'm almost certainly carrying whenever I go out and I've already got problems if I lose either one, so I tend to keep track of them.
"most plentiful and free in that particular state"
Except, perhaps, at night. See, there is one of the problems; Solar make sense when it;s available, but not when it isn't. Arizona is blessed with largely cloudless days, but the nights include half the peak demand, and so some other sources are needed alongside solar.
And yes, this did seem like a troll right up the point where you are encouraged to look back at the solar claims; clean, available. Either of these have debatable points.
Not that I care much for APS or SRP, as a customer of both I'd rather see them play fair, but no one is playing fair in this. NO ONE.
I am so very tired of the lame old oil-sucker counter to solar power.
I don't get my electricity from an oil company, I get it from an electric company. My local utility has the ability to generate power from about 4 different sources, depending on which ones are most economical at the time.
If Arizona wants to get its some or all of its peak-demand (daytime) power from solar and revert to hamster-powered treadmills when the sun isn't available, what of it? If they can build smaller fossil-fuel plants or buy power from the interstate grid, fine. They can import it from Philadelphia. I hear it's always sunny there.
you are way off base with your assumptions. the problem with insurance is that adjusters can no longer simply deny the claim under ACA reforms. the law killed predatory insurance, where the fine print makes it so they can collect premiums with no intent of ever paying to the working poor who try to find affordable healthcare, and in generations past have always been burned to find out they not only had a $3000-5000 deductible and a $20,000 cap or worse. ACA was written to fix this and people say now they can't afford healthcare because before they didn't really have real healthcare. these companies have come and gone over the years, but they are all regulated out of business by ACA which defines so many rules and has the teeth to shutdown malicious predatory insurance scams.
Actually, what I assumed was that both insurer and insured were operating primarily in good faith. Rather like when Free-market worshippers assume that a "perfect" market adjusts out inequities. Or that the only thing that keeps a Free Market from being free is government interference.
This is the difference between Insurance and Insurance Companies.
Insurance is a bet between the insurer and the insured that the insured will not need to cash in. By setting appropriate odds, the insured pays less for benefits than if he/she covered them directly and the insurer makes a profit.
This scheme can be extended in 2 ways. First, the insurer can take some of the premiums and invest them, insuring more profit, since the invested money helps reduce the amount of reserve cash that has to be held in order to meet obligations.
The second way to extend this is to broaden the pool. Take lots of people. It's possible to compute over a statistical population how many people will cash in and set rates, reserves, and investments accordingly. This is what actuaries are for. You also deepen this pool by extending it through time, since the claims rates for many insurable conditions vary with age.
That was the original idea. Insurance companies were early and enthusiastic adopters of computer technology since computers helped with the bookkeeping of the large pools of insured people as well as being able to assist with actuarial computations.
More recently, however, 2 things have distorted that plan. One the one hand, advances in technology have skewed the original actuarial computations. Car crashes are more survivable, cancer isn't a guaranteed death sentence, and so forth. You have people paying in longer, but the expense of the payouts has also risen, and the likelihood that multiple payout events later in an otherwise curtailed life will occur likewise.
The other distortion has been that really cheap computing has led to the development of sophisticated data mining. This, in turn has led to the processes of "cherry picking" (favoring those who will pay in but not make a claim) and "lemon dropping" (dropping the policies of people most likely to prove unprofitable). All of which makes the process more efficient.
The problem is, this efficiency is gained at the expense of one of the primary benefits originally accorded to organized insurance. The pools become shallower and narrower. The insurance companies get more profit, but the outliers in the insured base pay for it. The more likely you are to truly need insurance, the less likely you'll get it. If not from outright denial, simply because in order to support these extra profits, you'll pay a higher premium rate. If you can afford it at all.
Seems also birds are afraid of snakes. I place rubber snakes on places like boat decks and balconies, they are very effective and birds stay away.
Not all of them. I once looked out across a pond to see a heron whacking the bejeezus out of a snake. 3-foot long snake and the bird had it in its bill and was flailing it around like a whip!
The forward facing eyes and huge visual cortex couldn't be because flying through trees and landing on branches requires accurate depth perception and finding food by mainly sight requires acute vision./sarcasm
Or that prey animals are prone to have side-facing eyes to see possible threats all around, but predators have front-facing eyes because they're more concerned with attacking than in being attacked.
Africa is full of felines who love to snack on monkey-like creatures, but we don't have that instinctive revulsion for cats that we do for snakes.
Because building websites is a tad bit more difficult than they are giving credit for? Think about it. They want to be commanders, handing down orders, and seeing them implemented...but they are seeing themselves fail time and time again. They are then obviously missing something...something so close to home that it's taken for granted.
Building websites means dealing with potentially dozens of vendors, whose products are more like legoes than fine tools. (Not that we don't love the tools we do have...we just know how difficult it is to build tools that are good). It means dealing with abstracts, and putting their designs into an implementation. That's a lot of mental travelling.
This is not taken into account by those who understand least, yet control the most, of their wages. It's a communication issue, a wage issue, and several thousand other issues which, at this point, even I've thrown up my hands in frustration.
It isn't a frickin' "website". It's an attempt to connect a raft of mutually hostile systems, add functionality on top of that, allow for differences in both user needs and theit localities, stay within mandates such as HIPAA, AND carry a load of confused first-time users and rubberneckers.
The quack-o-bots immediately push the button that plays the "See? Government doesn't work" response, but the truth is, business doesn't have anything to brag about on projects of this scale. How many companies were effectively shut down just getting SAP going?
I think it would take a monumental problem to get people to come together again. It would have to be something that neither side could deny or minimize the scope of, like another World War or pandemic or asteroid strike, or something like that.
Our government has reached the point that if an asteroid strike were imminent, a large group of people would deny such a thing could happen and cite "studies" proving it, while belittling the research that caused the alarm. Then when the Earth was pitted with smoking craters, the climate was down the tubes and species were going extinct right and left, they'd claim that it was all the other party's fault.
The Red Menace was almost worth it in that it gave us a common enemy instead of turning against ourselves. Regrettably, it also gave us the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Just read some of the comments and you'll see the audience of this rag. Slashdot can do better than to post this crap. If Ann Coulter is associated with it..... I'm NOT.
I don't care if it's Ann Coulter personally. The spirit of the USA is that people like Coulter can spew their vitriol - right, left, or sideways without fear of armed officers storming the premises. The idea is that we're self-responsible enough and intelligent enough to accept or reject it without government interference. Although admittedly, the fact that Coulter hasn't had to get a second job at McDonalds to make ends meet may make the "intelligent enough" part hard to swallow.
Were this the previous administration (Bush) using jackbooted tactics like this there would be a huge uproar in the US press and public. Why do they tolerate it now? It's just as dangerous to freedom, and to people's rights and a free press as it would have been 8 years go.
I'm sorry to say that you are wrong. Bush invented things like "Free Speech Zones" and while he wasn't the first executive to attempt to control the press, he was outstandingly successful. I don't recall hearing the term "embedded" (a/k/a captive) reporter in pre-Bush military campaigns and the whole Patriot Act thing got passed without even a squeak.
That's what I hate about Obama. Hope and Change? No Hope! It's just Bush continued with a smoother tongue and a suntan.
"The NSA was right when it postulated that the mere knowledge of the existence of their program could weaken its ability to function."
They make it sound like a bad thing.
Efficiency is good. Up to a point. That applies to a lot of things, not just intelligence gathering. Then you get into a situation where the costs of efficiency outweigh the benefits.
While there certainly are enough people in the USA who are such utter craven cowards that they'd prefer to live in a composite Fourth Reich/ Stasi 2.0/ USSA if the butcher promised the little piggies they'd be safe, there are also some of us who are willing to forgo such amenities and trust that the civilians who tackle the guy fiddling with his shoe, the folks inspecting the laser printers, and other diverse less organized ways that we take responsibility for our own lives. And realize that despite everything, an occasional pressure cooker will get through and we'll pay for our freedom with the lives and body parts of ourselves and our relatives. Because freedom isn't the same thing as safety.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a lot of work.
Just engage in very dodgy terrorist-likeXXXXXXXX normal everyday activity and I hear the NSA will back your data up for free!
Oh wait. You want data that also flows in the other direction so you can restore it. The NSA's viewpoint is that data is for sharing. You share it with them and they... no they don't.
Walking a disk/dvd over is actually probably one of the more realistic solutions. You don't have to have a server powered up and ready to receive on the other side, the bandwidth is the proverbial "station wagon full of tapes" and you have minimal worry about the data being intercepted and used in ways you don't like.
It's actually pretty economical these days to either buy a pair of external hard drives and swap them or to get a USB drive dock and swap internal disks. I have given up on tape as much because tape cartridges often cost more than hard drives as anything else and that's even before you have to buy the tape drives.
Another, more technical way of doing things would be something like one of the schemes I've worked with. Backup to archive files using a utility such as Bacula (which can conveniently slice backups into sizes small enough to burn to individual DVDs). If you do differential backups, the later generations can be appended to the full backup (I create a full backup once a week). From what I've seen, rsync is capable of optimizing the process of updating a mirror copy of the backup, transferring only the additions and thereby greatly reducing the resources required to keep the master and mirror backups in sync. The bacula backups can be compressed, but unlike ZIP compression, adding incremental changes don't re-arrange the previous backed-up data, so rsync can simply skip over the parts already received.
We have been able to fly planes up tens of thousands of feet for nearly a century, but we're a long way from flying passengers to even to the Moon, let alone another solar system.
A small step in one direction is rarely a sign that a great leap will be made.
About 110 years ago (next month), powered flying for a distance of around 200 feet was the best we could do.
Personally, I insist that Obamacare's worst enemies are the people who are working hardest to make it work. Incompetent lackwits wrote the specs, hired more incompetent lackwits to build the site, and failed to test anything. Had Obama and his supporters actually been competent, they could have at least made the site work. Had they been smart enough to hire competent contractors, they could have made the site work. Bottom line, we have a bunch of idiots who can't even get a web site up and running, but maintain that they will be competent to oversee life and death decisions made hundreds of thousands of times every single day throughout the nation.
I can't help but wonder if Obama supporters are colluding with Obama detractors.
There's no need to ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Take any random large-size public or private IT project. Odds are that it will be a disaster.
Time zones are a relatively recent invention. Originally, time was solar time and noon was when the sun was at its highest point.
The real impetus for time zones came with the railroads when people began travelling rapidly enough and far enough that having a different solar time every time you moved East or West a few miles got to be a problem so they normalized the time into strips more or less following the longitudinal lines - time zones.
The closer your time is to solar time, the easier it is to keep a reference to the local light/dark cycles. So down at the OK Corral, a shootout at 18:00 loses some of its magic.
Putting more of the morning commute for schoolkids in the light is a good reason for DST
Huh? DST moves the morning commute back into the DARK, just when the solar cycles start making it light. Hardly a year goes by around here when at least one local kid gets hit on that account.
I have been changing clocks all my life and it simply has not been the nerve racking. I don't know where all the drama is coming from.
For a while it seemed like every year I had acquired yet one more clock that needed resetting. Even now, however, not all or even a majority of my clocks support DST, either via a setting or automatically, and one of the worst offenders is the dashboard clock in my car. And some of the rituals required to change digital clocks are so arcane that I have to dig out the manuals every time.
Aside from the annoyance of spending the next week chasing forgotten clocks, however, DST is pointless. The A/C runs according to temperature, not the clock, as does the refrigerator. Only the water heater and cooking times shift, and in the case of cooking, it means that dinner moves closer to the hottest part of the day, adding additional loading to the A/C. And in this part of the world, A/C is only optional if you like heatstroke.
Skype is a household word as is Kleenex, and people want to get rid of both as soon as they have used it.
You got that wrong. I don't know anyone that uses 'skype', nor anyone that talks about it. But I do know that people hoover, and use andrex to wipe their arse. Maybe MS think doing dirty and shitty work makes the name stick.
Did you google that?
X10, when it works, works well. I exclude that horrible webserver appliance that was supposed to let me control X10 and SmartHome and made X10 look fast AND reliable by comparison. Total waste of money.
How well X10 works depends on the age and quality of your wiring and whether the control and target devices have a relatively clear shot at each other.
I get pretty good operation in a relatively new home. But I used to live almost directly across from a 5KW AM radio transmitter. The stereo could "play" itself with the power unplugged. I don't even want to think of how X10 would have worked there!
Why do you need to turn off the lights or turn on the TV when no one is home? Why do you want you door locks to be as venerable as you car, or have your home key cost $300 to replace.
Because I want the house to look lived-in when I'm gone. Because I want a bright warm (or cool) house waiting for me when I get home. Because why should I have to turn the holiday lights on and off manually when a timer/daylight sensor could do it cheaply>
I've resisted automating my door locks, but two of the cheapest alternatives to a key are the Bluetooth in my phone (already paid for) or an RFID chip in my wallet (about 10 cents, give or take). Those are items I'm almost certainly carrying whenever I go out and I've already got problems if I lose either one, so I tend to keep track of them.
"most plentiful and free in that particular state"
Except, perhaps, at night. See, there is one of the problems; Solar make sense when it;s available, but not when it isn't. Arizona is blessed with largely cloudless days, but the nights include half the peak demand, and so some other sources are needed alongside solar.
And yes, this did seem like a troll right up the point where you are encouraged to look back at the solar claims; clean, available. Either of these have debatable points.
Not that I care much for APS or SRP, as a customer of both I'd rather see them play fair, but no one is playing fair in this. NO ONE.
I am so very tired of the lame old oil-sucker counter to solar power.
I don't get my electricity from an oil company, I get it from an electric company. My local utility has the ability to generate power from about 4 different sources, depending on which ones are most economical at the time.
If Arizona wants to get its some or all of its peak-demand (daytime) power from solar and revert to hamster-powered treadmills when the sun isn't available, what of it? If they can build smaller fossil-fuel plants or buy power from the interstate grid, fine. They can import it from Philadelphia. I hear it's always sunny there.
It's good for the gov't, and good for the corps too!
Shame We the People get screwed when they use it
Corporations are People, too!
... how is this a strike against Android?
Actually, I first read it as Asteroid. Was expecting Bruce Willis and maybe an Onion article.
Oh well.
you are way off base with your assumptions.
the problem with insurance is that adjusters can no longer simply deny the claim under ACA reforms. the law killed predatory insurance, where the fine print makes it so they can collect premiums with no intent of ever paying to the working poor who try to find affordable healthcare, and in generations past have always been burned to find out they not only had a $3000-5000 deductible and a $20,000 cap or worse. ACA was written to fix this and people say now they can't afford healthcare because before they didn't really have real healthcare. these companies have come and gone over the years, but they are all regulated out of business by ACA which defines so many rules and has the teeth to shutdown malicious predatory insurance scams.
Actually, what I assumed was that both insurer and insured were operating primarily in good faith. Rather like when Free-market worshippers assume that a "perfect" market adjusts out inequities. Or that the only thing that keeps a Free Market from being free is government interference.
This is the difference between Insurance and Insurance Companies.
Insurance is a bet between the insurer and the insured that the insured will not need to cash in. By setting appropriate odds, the insured pays less for benefits than if he/she covered them directly and the insurer makes a profit.
This scheme can be extended in 2 ways. First, the insurer can take some of the premiums and invest them, insuring more profit, since the invested money helps reduce the amount of reserve cash that has to be held in order to meet obligations.
The second way to extend this is to broaden the pool. Take lots of people. It's possible to compute over a statistical population how many people will cash in and set rates, reserves, and investments accordingly. This is what actuaries are for. You also deepen this pool by extending it through time, since the claims rates for many insurable conditions vary with age.
That was the original idea. Insurance companies were early and enthusiastic adopters of computer technology since computers helped with the bookkeeping of the large pools of insured people as well as being able to assist with actuarial computations.
More recently, however, 2 things have distorted that plan. One the one hand, advances in technology have skewed the original actuarial computations. Car crashes are more survivable, cancer isn't a guaranteed death sentence, and so forth. You have people paying in longer, but the expense of the payouts has also risen, and the likelihood that multiple payout events later in an otherwise curtailed life will occur likewise.
The other distortion has been that really cheap computing has led to the development of sophisticated data mining. This, in turn has led to the processes of "cherry picking" (favoring those who will pay in but not make a claim) and "lemon dropping" (dropping the policies of people most likely to prove unprofitable). All of which makes the process more efficient.
The problem is, this efficiency is gained at the expense of one of the primary benefits originally accorded to organized insurance. The pools become shallower and narrower. The insurance companies get more profit, but the outliers in the insured base pay for it. The more likely you are to truly need insurance, the less likely you'll get it. If not from outright denial, simply because in order to support these extra profits, you'll pay a higher premium rate. If you can afford it at all.
Let me re-word that for you: Saw it coming, he never did.
Saw it coming, he did not.
Found out just the other day that I missed a golden opportunity. They were scrapping an old aircraft carrier. Sold it for $1!
Seems also birds are afraid of snakes. I place rubber snakes on places like boat decks and balconies, they are very effective and birds stay away.
Not all of them. I once looked out across a pond to see a heron whacking the bejeezus out of a snake. 3-foot long snake and the bird had it in its bill and was flailing it around like a whip!
The forward facing eyes and huge visual cortex couldn't be because flying through trees and landing on branches requires accurate depth perception and finding food by mainly sight requires acute vision. /sarcasm
Or that prey animals are prone to have side-facing eyes to see possible threats all around, but predators have front-facing eyes because they're more concerned with attacking than in being attacked.
Africa is full of felines who love to snack on monkey-like creatures, but we don't have that instinctive revulsion for cats that we do for snakes.
Because building websites is a tad bit more difficult than they are giving credit for? Think about it. They want to be commanders, handing down orders, and seeing them implemented...but they are seeing themselves fail time and time again. They are then obviously missing something...something so close to home that it's taken for granted.
Building websites means dealing with potentially dozens of vendors, whose products are more like legoes than fine tools. (Not that we don't love the tools we do have...we just know how difficult it is to build tools that are good). It means dealing with abstracts, and putting their designs into an implementation. That's a lot of mental travelling.
This is not taken into account by those who understand least, yet control the most, of their wages. It's a communication issue, a wage issue, and several thousand other issues which, at this point, even I've thrown up my hands in frustration.
It isn't a frickin' "website". It's an attempt to connect a raft of mutually hostile systems, add functionality on top of that, allow for differences in both user needs and theit localities, stay within mandates such as HIPAA, AND carry a load of confused first-time users and rubberneckers.
The quack-o-bots immediately push the button that plays the "See? Government doesn't work" response, but the truth is, business doesn't have anything to brag about on projects of this scale. How many companies were effectively shut down just getting SAP going?
I think it would take a monumental problem to get people to come together again. It would have to be something that neither side could deny or minimize the scope of, like another World War or pandemic or asteroid strike, or something like that.
Our government has reached the point that if an asteroid strike were imminent, a large group of people would deny such a thing could happen and cite "studies" proving it, while belittling the research that caused the alarm. Then when the Earth was pitted with smoking craters, the climate was down the tubes and species were going extinct right and left, they'd claim that it was all the other party's fault.
The Red Menace was almost worth it in that it gave us a common enemy instead of turning against ourselves. Regrettably, it also gave us the Korean and Vietnam wars.
A tyrant is someone who can sign the death warrants for a thousand people without a second thought.
A bureaucrat is someone who, when told they've been reprieved, will insist on properly-completed individual documents for each person.
Just read some of the comments and you'll see the audience of this rag. Slashdot can do better than to post this crap. If Ann Coulter is associated with it..... I'm NOT.
I don't care if it's Ann Coulter personally. The spirit of the USA is that people like Coulter can spew their vitriol - right, left, or sideways without fear of armed officers storming the premises. The idea is that we're self-responsible enough and intelligent enough to accept or reject it without government interference. Although admittedly, the fact that Coulter hasn't had to get a second job at McDonalds to make ends meet may make the "intelligent enough" part hard to swallow.
Were this the previous administration (Bush) using jackbooted tactics like this there would be a huge uproar in the US press and public. Why do they tolerate it now? It's just as dangerous to freedom, and to people's rights and a free press as it would have been 8 years go.
I'm sorry to say that you are wrong. Bush invented things like "Free Speech Zones" and while he wasn't the first executive to attempt to control the press, he was outstandingly successful. I don't recall hearing the term "embedded" (a/k/a captive) reporter in pre-Bush military campaigns and the whole Patriot Act thing got passed without even a squeak.
That's what I hate about Obama. Hope and Change? No Hope! It's just Bush continued with a smoother tongue and a suntan.
First it was big bloated servers; then big bloated clients, and now it's big bloated servers, clients, and users.
Centralization seems to cycle in and out of popularity about once every 10 years. Back in the '90s, we had (shudder) CORBA.
"The NSA was right when it postulated that the mere knowledge of the existence of their program could weaken its ability to function."
They make it sound like a bad thing.
Efficiency is good. Up to a point. That applies to a lot of things, not just intelligence gathering. Then you get into a situation where the costs of efficiency outweigh the benefits.
While there certainly are enough people in the USA who are such utter craven cowards that they'd prefer to live in a composite Fourth Reich/ Stasi 2.0/ USSA if the butcher promised the little piggies they'd be safe, there are also some of us who are willing to forgo such amenities and trust that the civilians who tackle the guy fiddling with his shoe, the folks inspecting the laser printers, and other diverse less organized ways that we take responsibility for our own lives. And realize that despite everything, an occasional pressure cooker will get through and we'll pay for our freedom with the lives and body parts of ourselves and our relatives. Because freedom isn't the same thing as safety.