As a 50 year-old man nearing retirement, I can emphatically say "Hell yes!" to all of those questions.
And I'll let Linda know that I'll be wankin' it to much of that aforementioned content. While smoking weed.
Making poor Linda suffer for the fact that this unfortunate job has been foisted upon her would not achieve anything. Statistically Linda is highly likely to be a single mom or one half of a low income family and I can't blame her for not being reluctant to take a stand over this and risk losing her job over it. David Cameron, the conservative party and UKIP (out of fear of whom the Tories are doing this and who really deserve your scorn) can, however, shove their entire censorship program where the sun does not shine along with all of the hypocritical spin about how censorship measures that are only rivalled by those used by communist China and Saudi Arabia are being introduced in a democratic country in the name of protecting 'freedom' and 'moral values'.
So stop dicking around already and put a dog in a Faraday cage to see if we can get a dog that doesn't poop!
Faraday cage? If we put him in Schrödinger's box he'll poop and not poop simultaneously until you open the box and fix his state, or that of the poop.... or.... oh never mind.
using the book he got the stories from is hardly a collaborating citation.
Dude, you said:
Please back it up somehow. You'd do your cause a favor by not just saying stuff without citations.
...and that's what you got, he backed it up. If you expected the kind of exhaustive source checking you get from a professional historian you should not be looking for it in slashdot posts.
Well then, explain how this article relates to science and technology. What's that? It doesn't? Shut up then.
If you go through US customs, the tools you use to do your job may not make it with you. Like your phone, laptop, textbooks, thumb drives, or hand made wooden flutes.
Right, because you might walk back out of the US with NSA secrets hidden in your wooden flute.
You do understand that the 'C' in 'ICE' stands for Customs, right? Customs and la migra merged as part of the post-9/11 panic-based legislation.
So? Your luggage/goods are now first going to what used to be Immigration first an then to what used to be customs. Same result until they train the immigration people to be competent at filtering stuff they find in luggage. Classifying a bunch of flutes as 'agricultural items' and incinerating them is the worst kind of failing grade, rookie mistake.
Lol wasn't that the point of this article? And every comment afterward??
Yes but where people previously didn't read the f*ing article they now no longer read the f*ing/. summary before making informed comments on the subject. Thus the gist of the/. summary bears repeating in abbreviated form because anything longer than 4 words is likely to overtax the attention span of some of some of the youngest generation of/. posters. Come to think of it he's actually kind of pushing the envelope by using 5 words and no SMS-speak.
You can't assure me jack shit. This is an appeal to emotion. Try getting help from apple when your machine is out of its expensive applecare warranty. Good luck. At least with a home built, it'll last as long as you want it to as parts are always readily available, and at no worse reliability than the crappy refurbs apple sticks into supposedly 'new' computers when they fail. They're usually cheaper too.
A whole pile of PC computer vendors can be accused of the fact that it is impossible to get support after the warranty runs out. As for Macs it is not as if they are somehow welded shut and impossible to repair. Some of the later model Macs can be hard to strip down but that's only what anybody with even a basic knowledge of computer repairs would expect from a super compact machine and the Macs are not that much different in this respect from what you get in super compact Windows/PC machines. While I haven't taken apart too many Mac Pros I have lost count of the number of out-of-warranty MacBooks and Mac Minis that I have stripped down, repaired, upgraded and restored to life. Spares are perhaps not quite as easy to come by as they are for home-build PCs (which is not surprising since that market is way bigger) and Mac parts are not as cheap as they are for home-builds (especially the lower end models) but there is a whole pile of parts vendors that specialise in Apple computers starting with Other World Computing.
I think he meant cars in general, Audi has been making extensive use of aluminium in their cars for years, as have Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Jaguar,... Rover built an aluminium Landrover in 1948, and the American Motors Corporation did the same with their little M422 jeep back in the 50s. This is hardly news except perhaps because somebody has plucked up the courage to make a (**Grunt**) 'muscle' SUV out of Aluminium with the intention of selling it to the US public.
This sounds like an advert for Apple, simply. Already for that reason alone, I am not going to read the articles.
Calling what I suspect is just a souped up fashion statement a "work horse", is probably just a symptom of cluelessness. And wanting to do the same with Windows supports that diagnosis. A "work horse" is a big, sweaty and dirty animal, not a dainty thing to take on a fashionable stroll along the promenade; and a souped up Macintosh or PC is more like a rich kid's toy car than a tractor. I don't know if you have noticed, but you don't often see a Ferrari pulling a plough - there's a reason for that.
As for the price - for $10000 you could get a decent sized Dell PowerEdge server; or even a Sun SPARC, IBM pSeries or HP if that takes your fancy. All of them are real work horses and all run operating systems that are meant for real work. True, you can't play games on them, and they don't pull chicks, but it is amazing how often that is not a major concern when you need to hold down a job.
Yeah, why actually bother read stuff, let's just judge books by their cover and then make informed comments about what you think is written in them.
Oh, because someone doesn't like Apple stuff, they're a "Hateboi". It is possible for someone to genuinely not like their style, you know.
Actually, it took a while (due to GreatFirewall-itis) for the original page to come up, but I find the actual computer to be very un-Apple-like...and I actually quite like it.
The monitors, though, I still don't like.
This computer is the first Apple product I've genuinely thought was good looking since the old PowerBook Titanium...I had a twinge of 'hrm, not bad' for the iPhone4 (hated the prior ones), but that didn't take hold.
I must take a closer look at it...I somehow don't think the photos do it justice.
Of course, I don't much care for Aqua either, so I'd wipe it and put on Ubuntu...which I find an interesting proposition...
You mean like everybody around here who finds some fault with Android/Google/Samnung/Linux however legitimate it may be and anybody around here who actually finds something positive about Microsoft or Apple products is automatically ripped to shreds and accused of being a paid shill? Different people have different tastes and different experiences and there is nothing wrong with that in most places. On Slashdot, however, people tend to be a bit extreme in their views. You just happen to be somebody who has found that Apple products are not to his taste without being so fanatical about it that you have morphed into a hateboi... unfortunately for you that makes you part of a minority around here since most people here are __way__ more fanatical about not liking Apple than you are. Just about the last place you want to look a fair, civilized and structured debate around here is in any discussion having to do with Apple, Microsoft, patents or copyright.
Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).
See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
And of course that could only ever be Apple's fault, it's not as if Linux ever had crappy drivers.
Well, there is a point to "the islamists are taking over". It is a power struggle between Erdogan's party, which has a bit of an islamist agenda, and the Gülen movement, which is an islamist movement, whose goals are unclear. Turkey has always had a "deep state", mainly secular, Atatürk-oriented, which has done some ghastly things. And now either islamist movement is interfering there. It's not racism. It might be bigoted, but racism?
BTW, Turks are not brown people, although a few do have unpronounceable names.
The leaders of the USA have also done ghastly and unspeakable things over the years. This might seem embarrassing to Turkey but can you imagine a corruption probe exposing the fact that US cabinet members and the president are as hopelessly corrupt? I mean we all know that most US political leaders they are corrupt to various degrees as they are in most countries but can you imagine the FBI raiding major corporations, wall-street banks, wiretapping the white house and hauling these bozos into court? At least Turkish law enforcement still has enough backbone to mount an operation like this. It would take another Snowden, sheltering in some secure foreign location safe from being kidnapped, gagged and locked away like the "Man in the Iron Mask" to expose this kind of graft in the US administration.
If you read the Verge article it talks about Apple having talked with people and horror stories of people sawing the handles off their old Mac Pros so they could fit into a rackmount.
This is kind of important for crews with large amounts of equipment, as hand-carrying every...individual...component...is about the stupidest possible way to do it. Being able to rack a complete solution just makes more sense. You drop the case where it needs to go, plug it into power and a monitor and go.
With the new version, you pull out your "case O' stuff", unpack the Mac. Unpack the first peripheral, unpack the second peripheral, unpack the third peripheral...and so on. Y'know, DUMB.
Apple may have listened. But they apparently didn't hear a damn thing.
Complaining that Mac Pros aren't rack friendly is like me complaining that my Lenovo ThinkCentre (Linux) Desktop PC is a bad design because I'd have to drill holes in the casing to be able to attach it to a rack mount slider. ThinkCentre PC's are designed to sit on a desktop, they are not designed to fit seamlessly into a rack mount and neither were the old Mac Pros and sitting on top of or underneath a desk is how most users use these machines. One can make the case that square pegs are crappy pegs for all sorts of reasons but not because they don't fit into round holes. Apple used to have the server line for people with rack mount needs and I'm not sure I want to take the piss out of them for not catering to the small number of people who need the Mac Pro package in rack mount format. That being said I do agree with you in that sometimes Apple just forgets to shut up and listen to the customer. Apple is good at design but sometimes they do have the tendency to put form over function, just like Dell (just as an example of the other extreme) sometimes focuses so much on practicality/austerity/affordability that they completely forget that a little design can go a long way toward making their products more usable.
Politics aside, Kalashnikov was something of a genius. Or at least a commonsense visionary. He only had access to relatively crude manufacturing processes and a basic idea of what he wanted. And he managed to turn out a product that is, by any stretch of the imagination, RIDICULOUSLY successful. Things that'd be considered weaknesses or defects in other weapons systems are some of the very things that are considered strengths in the Kalashnikov rifles.
How does encrypting data prevent the NSA from knowing who you are emailing and calling?
On its own, it doesn't. Though it can make their job a little harder. But when you've got many people communicating via encrypted channels to a single server, like a web forum or mailing list, it gets much harder to figure out who is talking to who.
Maybe they'll still know who is talking to who. Right now, however, they are also able to sniff unencrypted email payloads with complete impunity and listen in on phone calls with equal impunity. If you encrypt email content by default the NSA's job will get a whole lot harder since they'll not be able to identify/relocate individual senders who have changed email addresses or swapped cellphones by sniffing email payloads and conversations. This problem gets progressively worse for them the more frequently people who the NSA wants to stalk swap their accounts and internet access points. My point is that with everything being encrypted the NSA may be able to crack individual emails or phone calls but it's much easier to drop off their radar since once they lose you there is no way they can **decrypt everything** and run it through a text analysis algorithm or a voice print identifier to find you again. Plus encryption raises the bar on the surveillance effort. The NSA will have to hack your computer and install spyware or drop a bug into your phone because that's the only way they can listen in (assuming you are using good quality encryption) and that's a much bigger effort. It is no longer a question of making a phone call to your Telco, who tap into a comms line and minutes later the data comes streaming into the NSA datacenter all nice and unencrypted like it does now. Finally, as you pointed out, there are more ways to communicate online than e-mail.
"Downgrade" data-link isn't exactly right: It was a replacement of the Swedish with Link 16. Which doesn't have all the features the Swedish did 20 years ago but has the important feature that it's NATO compatible. The problem was (is?) that there's not space for both in a Gripen, so suddenly the C/D version wasn't compatible with most data-link resources in the defence force, but the older A/B version was.
Yeah, I didn't remember the exact details, but it made me laugh when that the Swedes actually lost features going over Link 16 so in that sense it was a downgrade.
The Gripen is also designed to interface with the compact Ericsson Erieye AWAC system which is often mounted on either a Saab 2000 turbo-prop airliner to cuts costs and eases maintenance but you can also build the Erieye into a small jet like the Brazilian EMB-145. I remember reading somewhere that the Swedish air force actually had to downgrade it's data-links in order to become NATO compatible so this combination is a good force multiplier. The one caveat with the Gripen is that Brazil had better keep a stockpile of Gripen spares. If they ever get into involved in a shooting war the parts supply from Sweden will dry up faster than you can say 'embargo'.
... and easier to maintain as well. The Saab Gripen is an awesome aircraft and a good choice. On the other hand the Gripens do still have lots of US parts in them so it's not as if US companies don't stand to gain, they'll just gain less. Theoretically the USA can even veto the sale because of the US parts in the Gripen if they want to be really petty about this and piss the Brazilians off even more. The most delicious part of this development (from the point of view of Airbus, EADS, Sukhoi, Dassault et al) is that Boeing, a long time beneficiary of US government sponsored industrial espionage, has been hosted by it's own petard for a change.
Slashdot Mirror
As a 50 year-old man nearing retirement, I can emphatically say "Hell yes!" to all of those questions.
And I'll let Linda know that I'll be wankin' it to much of that aforementioned content. While smoking weed.
Making poor Linda suffer for the fact that this unfortunate job has been foisted upon her would not achieve anything. Statistically Linda is highly likely to be a single mom or one half of a low income family and I can't blame her for not being reluctant to take a stand over this and risk losing her job over it. David Cameron, the conservative party and UKIP (out of fear of whom the Tories are doing this and who really deserve your scorn) can, however, shove their entire censorship program where the sun does not shine along with all of the hypocritical spin about how censorship measures that are only rivalled by those used by communist China and Saudi Arabia are being introduced in a democratic country in the name of protecting 'freedom' and 'moral values'.
So stop dicking around already and put a dog in a Faraday cage to see if we can get a dog that doesn't poop!
Faraday cage? If we put him in Schrödinger's box he'll poop and not poop simultaneously until you open the box and fix his state, or that of the poop.... or.... oh never mind.
Alternative explanation. Dogs face away from the sun while crapping.
Where is the raw data?
Annoyingly enough some of it is under the sole of my shoe.
using the book he got the stories from is hardly a collaborating citation.
Dude, you said:
Please back it up somehow. You'd do your cause a favor by not just saying stuff without citations.
...and that's what you got, he backed it up. If you expected the kind of exhaustive source checking you get from a professional historian you should not be looking for it in slashdot posts.
Well then, explain how this article relates to science and technology. What's that? It doesn't?
Shut up then.
If you go through US customs, the tools you use to do your job may not make it with you. Like your phone, laptop, textbooks, thumb drives, or hand made wooden flutes.
Right, because you might walk back out of the US with NSA secrets hidden in your wooden flute.
You do understand that the 'C' in 'ICE' stands for Customs, right? Customs and la migra merged as part of the post-9/11 panic-based legislation.
So? Your luggage/goods are now first going to what used to be Immigration first an then to what used to be customs. Same result until they train the immigration people to be competent at filtering stuff they find in luggage. Classifying a bunch of flutes as 'agricultural items' and incinerating them is the worst kind of failing grade, rookie mistake.
There is another great story from Scahill's book that shows how flimsy and flawed the intelligence JSOC has been using to execute people is.
Again, a lengthy story with no references provided. Please back it up somehow. You'd do your cause a favor by not just saying stuff without citations.
Try reading the book mentioned earlier in the thread and cited by him:
http://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Wars-The-World-Battlefield/dp/156858671X
Only old people use Facebook.
Lol wasn't that the point of this article? And every comment afterward??
Yes but where people previously didn't read the f*ing article they now no longer read the f*ing /. summary before making informed comments on the subject. Thus the gist of the /. summary bears repeating in abbreviated form because anything longer than 4 words is likely to overtax the attention span of some of some of the youngest generation of /. posters. Come to think of it he's actually kind of pushing the envelope by using 5 words and no SMS-speak.
You were just asking for an oblig, weren't you?
http://xkcd.com/347/ ...now that was truly obligatory.
They shoot the super ball at the target and it bounces back with the data.
No, that could knock Titan out of orbit.
You can't assure me jack shit. This is an appeal to emotion. Try getting help from apple when your machine is out of its expensive applecare warranty. Good luck. At least with a home built, it'll last as long as you want it to as parts are always readily available, and at no worse reliability than the crappy refurbs apple sticks into supposedly 'new' computers when they fail. They're usually cheaper too.
A whole pile of PC computer vendors can be accused of the fact that it is impossible to get support after the warranty runs out. As for Macs it is not as if they are somehow welded shut and impossible to repair. Some of the later model Macs can be hard to strip down but that's only what anybody with even a basic knowledge of computer repairs would expect from a super compact machine and the Macs are not that much different in this respect from what you get in super compact Windows/PC machines. While I haven't taken apart too many Mac Pros I have lost count of the number of out-of-warranty MacBooks and Mac Minis that I have stripped down, repaired, upgraded and restored to life. Spares are perhaps not quite as easy to come by as they are for home-build PCs (which is not surprising since that market is way bigger) and Mac parts are not as cheap as they are for home-builds (especially the lower end models) but there is a whole pile of parts vendors that specialise in Apple computers starting with Other World Computing.
Audi's really known for their pickup trucks, too?
Whodathunkit, apparently Audi are playing around with the idea of building a pickup:
http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/08/audi-q7-pickup-truck-is-real-new-spy-photos.html
I think he meant cars in general, Audi has been making extensive use of aluminium in their cars for years, as have Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Jaguar, ... Rover built an aluminium Landrover in 1948, and the American Motors Corporation did the same with their little M422 jeep back in the 50s. This is hardly news except perhaps because somebody has plucked up the courage to make a (**Grunt**) 'muscle' SUV out of Aluminium with the intention of selling it to the US public.
Yeah, why actually bother read stuff, let's just judge books by their cover and then make informed comments about what you think is written in them.
You say that as a hypothetical but; "bam!" that just happened.
You must be new here, it has been happening on /. with monotonous regularity for years.
This sounds like an advert for Apple, simply. Already for that reason alone, I am not going to read the articles.
Calling what I suspect is just a souped up fashion statement a "work horse", is probably just a symptom of cluelessness. And wanting to do the same with Windows supports that diagnosis. A "work horse" is a big, sweaty and dirty animal, not a dainty thing to take on a fashionable stroll along the promenade; and a souped up Macintosh or PC is more like a rich kid's toy car than a tractor. I don't know if you have noticed, but you don't often see a Ferrari pulling a plough - there's a reason for that.
As for the price - for $10000 you could get a decent sized Dell PowerEdge server; or even a Sun SPARC, IBM pSeries or HP if that takes your fancy. All of them are real work horses and all run operating systems that are meant for real work. True, you can't play games on them, and they don't pull chicks, but it is amazing how often that is not a major concern when you need to hold down a job.
Yeah, why actually bother read stuff, let's just judge books by their cover and then make informed comments about what you think is written in them.
Oh, because someone doesn't like Apple stuff, they're a "Hateboi". It is possible for someone to genuinely not like their style, you know.
Actually, it took a while (due to GreatFirewall-itis) for the original page to come up, but I find the actual computer to be very un-Apple-like...and I actually quite like it.
The monitors, though, I still don't like.
This computer is the first Apple product I've genuinely thought was good looking since the old PowerBook Titanium...I had a twinge of 'hrm, not bad' for the iPhone4 (hated the prior ones), but that didn't take hold.
I must take a closer look at it...I somehow don't think the photos do it justice.
Of course, I don't much care for Aqua either, so I'd wipe it and put on Ubuntu...which I find an interesting proposition...
You mean like everybody around here who finds some fault with Android/Google/Samnung/Linux however legitimate it may be and anybody around here who actually finds something positive about Microsoft or Apple products is automatically ripped to shreds and accused of being a paid shill? Different people have different tastes and different experiences and there is nothing wrong with that in most places. On Slashdot, however, people tend to be a bit extreme in their views. You just happen to be somebody who has found that Apple products are not to his taste without being so fanatical about it that you have morphed into a hateboi ... unfortunately for you that makes you part of a minority around here since most people here are __way__ more fanatical about not liking Apple than you are. Just about the last place you want to look a fair, civilized and structured debate around here is in any discussion having to do with Apple, Microsoft, patents or copyright.
Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).
See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
And of course that could only ever be Apple's fault, it's not as if Linux ever had crappy drivers.
Well, there is a point to "the islamists are taking over". It is a power struggle between Erdogan's party, which has a bit of an islamist agenda, and the Gülen movement, which is an islamist movement, whose goals are unclear. Turkey has always had a "deep state", mainly secular, Atatürk-oriented, which has done some ghastly things. And now either islamist movement is interfering there. It's not racism. It might be bigoted, but racism?
BTW, Turks are not brown people, although a few do have unpronounceable names.
The leaders of the USA have also done ghastly and unspeakable things over the years. This might seem embarrassing to Turkey but can you imagine a corruption probe exposing the fact that US cabinet members and the president are as hopelessly corrupt? I mean we all know that most US political leaders they are corrupt to various degrees as they are in most countries but can you imagine the FBI raiding major corporations, wall-street banks, wiretapping the white house and hauling these bozos into court? At least Turkish law enforcement still has enough backbone to mount an operation like this. It would take another Snowden, sheltering in some secure foreign location safe from being kidnapped, gagged and locked away like the "Man in the Iron Mask" to expose this kind of graft in the US administration.
Because it's not a piece of art. It's a tool.
If you read the Verge article it talks about Apple having talked with people and horror stories of people sawing the handles off their old Mac Pros so they could fit into a rackmount.
This is kind of important for crews with large amounts of equipment, as hand-carrying every...individual...component...is about the stupidest possible way to do it. Being able to rack a complete solution just makes more sense. You drop the case where it needs to go, plug it into power and a monitor and go.
With the new version, you pull out your "case O' stuff", unpack the Mac. Unpack the first peripheral, unpack the second peripheral, unpack the third peripheral...and so on. Y'know, DUMB.
Apple may have listened. But they apparently didn't hear a damn thing.
Complaining that Mac Pros aren't rack friendly is like me complaining that my Lenovo ThinkCentre (Linux) Desktop PC is a bad design because I'd have to drill holes in the casing to be able to attach it to a rack mount slider. ThinkCentre PC's are designed to sit on a desktop, they are not designed to fit seamlessly into a rack mount and neither were the old Mac Pros and sitting on top of or underneath a desk is how most users use these machines. One can make the case that square pegs are crappy pegs for all sorts of reasons but not because they don't fit into round holes. Apple used to have the server line for people with rack mount needs and I'm not sure I want to take the piss out of them for not catering to the small number of people who need the Mac Pro package in rack mount format. That being said I do agree with you in that sometimes Apple just forgets to shut up and listen to the customer. Apple is good at design but sometimes they do have the tendency to put form over function, just like Dell (just as an example of the other extreme) sometimes focuses so much on practicality/austerity/affordability that they completely forget that a little design can go a long way toward making their products more usable.
Anyone know if those LED baseball caps really work? What about a can of spray paint, aimed at the Glass-hole?
This looks promising, it's an IR based 'camera blinder' that hides your face:
http://www.slashgear.com/surveillance-cam-blinder-2010369/
Dunno how effective it is against different camera types and it does require you to wear a dumb-ass headband but it looks like a promising concept.
Politics aside, Kalashnikov was something of a genius. Or at least a commonsense visionary.
He only had access to relatively crude manufacturing processes and a basic idea of what he wanted.
And he managed to turn out a product that is, by any stretch of the imagination, RIDICULOUSLY successful.
Things that'd be considered weaknesses or defects in other weapons systems are some of the very things that are considered strengths in the Kalashnikov rifles.
My favourite AK-47 related escapade ever, forge an AK-47 receiver out of an old shovel:
http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/179192-DIY-Shovel-AK-photo-tsunami-warning!
Challenge: Do the same with a Colt M4 (and yes, it has to fire)
How does encrypting data prevent the NSA from knowing who you are emailing and calling?
On its own, it doesn't. Though it can make their job a little harder. But when you've got many people communicating via encrypted channels to a single server, like a web forum or mailing list, it gets much harder to figure out who is talking to who.
Maybe they'll still know who is talking to who. Right now, however, they are also able to sniff unencrypted email payloads with complete impunity and listen in on phone calls with equal impunity. If you encrypt email content by default the NSA's job will get a whole lot harder since they'll not be able to identify/relocate individual senders who have changed email addresses or swapped cellphones by sniffing email payloads and conversations. This problem gets progressively worse for them the more frequently people who the NSA wants to stalk swap their accounts and internet access points. My point is that with everything being encrypted the NSA may be able to crack individual emails or phone calls but it's much easier to drop off their radar since once they lose you there is no way they can **decrypt everything** and run it through a text analysis algorithm or a voice print identifier to find you again. Plus encryption raises the bar on the surveillance effort. The NSA will have to hack your computer and install spyware or drop a bug into your phone because that's the only way they can listen in (assuming you are using good quality encryption) and that's a much bigger effort. It is no longer a question of making a phone call to your Telco, who tap into a comms line and minutes later the data comes streaming into the NSA datacenter all nice and unencrypted like it does now. Finally, as you pointed out, there are more ways to communicate online than e-mail.
Nuff said.
"Downgrade" data-link isn't exactly right: It was a replacement of the Swedish with Link 16. Which doesn't have all the features the Swedish did 20 years ago but has the important feature that it's NATO compatible. The problem was (is?) that there's not space for both in a Gripen, so suddenly the C/D version wasn't compatible with most data-link resources in the defence force, but the older A/B version was.
Yeah, I didn't remember the exact details, but it made me laugh when that the Swedes actually lost features going over Link 16 so in that sense it was a downgrade.
I believe so too, JAS Gripen squadrons have impressive results from Red Flag
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_exercise
The Gripen is also designed to interface with the compact Ericsson Erieye AWAC system which is often mounted on either a Saab 2000 turbo-prop airliner to cuts costs and eases maintenance but you can also build the Erieye into a small jet like the Brazilian EMB-145. I remember reading somewhere that the Swedish air force actually had to downgrade it's data-links in order to become NATO compatible so this combination is a good force multiplier. The one caveat with the Gripen is that Brazil had better keep a stockpile of Gripen spares. If they ever get into involved in a shooting war the parts supply from Sweden will dry up faster than you can say 'embargo'.
... and easier to maintain as well. The Saab Gripen is an awesome aircraft and a good choice. On the other hand the Gripens do still have lots of US parts in them so it's not as if US companies don't stand to gain, they'll just gain less. Theoretically the USA can even veto the sale because of the US parts in the Gripen if they want to be really petty about this and piss the Brazilians off even more. The most delicious part of this development (from the point of view of Airbus, EADS, Sukhoi, Dassault et al) is that Boeing, a long time beneficiary of US government sponsored industrial espionage, has been hosted by it's own petard for a change.