The point with webapps is the same as replacing closed source with open source. Why is Google Docs better, at least in principle, than Microsoft Office? Because I can use Google Docs from Windows, from Linux, from Mac, from FreeBSD, from Android, from Tizen, from Blackberry, etc... etc...
If every good native application in the iPhone app store, Google Play store, and Windows App Store has an equivalent web app version, then it's much easier to convince people to ditch their iPhone/Android phone/Windows phone and replace it with something running Firefox OS, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, WebOS, or whatever. The average person has made it crystal clear that they'll accept a nice garden with walls over a wide open range that's a desert. We have to create an awesome garden outside the walls, and then maybe people will start leaving their walled gardens.
And if the only thing this effort really accomplishes is forcing Apple, Google, and Microsoft to continuously innovate so their walled gardens are constantly a better place to play than the web app world, that's still a tremendous achievement.
There are other reasons to prefer a native application, but I'm not sure your argument is one of them.
Installation period: web app, page download time. native app, application download. Winner, web app.
Approval process before you are in front of potential customers: web app, instant. native app, depends on the whim of the store curator. Winner, web app.
Chances that your app gets removed by a change to the terms of service: web app, zero. native app, depends upon the whim of the store curator. Winner, web app.
Effort for end-user to update their copy of your application to the newest: web app, none. native app, some to none (depending upon preferences set in app store application). Winner, web app.
Competitors in the market: web app, millions. native app, hundreds of thousands, rapidly climbing towards millions. Winner, native app - but only for the moment.
Restrictions on in-app purchases, restrictions in terms of use, requirement that you have to share revenue with mobile OS developer: web app, none. native app, some. Winner, web app.
Effort to make your product available on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Tizen, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch: web app, none. native app, none if you use a cross-platform development kit. Winner, none.
Chances the end user deletes your application to save storage space on their device: web app - only if you use offline storage. native app, some. Winner, web app.
Again, I'm not saying web app is clearly the way to go. I'm just saying it has advantages.
Microsoft is in the wrong, they're trying to steal market from Google by running a smear campaign with "Scroogled". For example they're crying foul that Google reads your Gmail mail for targeted ads. Hotmail and Outlook.com, both run by Microsoft, may not read your email for targeted ads but they read it to block spam. Either way, your hosting provider reads it and an unethical employee, law enforcement official, or sufficiently skilled hacker can access your email too.
Google is in the wrong, as far as I can tell, by blocking access to Youtube for Windows Phone using requirements they don't have for iOS or Android. I have to imagine it's just a childish tit-for-tat back at Microsoft for Scroogled, a way to do payback. But it's still annoying - I think it would be more ethical and also better for Google's image to just give Windows Phone the same treatment as the rest.
On the other hand, I'm genuinely surprised Microsoft refuses to do an HTML5 version of the app. Youtube works fine on mobile as-is, I don't need a native application.
KVM and VirtualBox on Linux both run Windows VMs flawlessly. KVM was originally created by engineers at Qumranet for the specific purpose of running Windows guests in virtualization on Linux hosts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qumranet
If you buy an enterprise support package from Microsoft, which costs - of course - quite a bit of money on top of what you're already paying for your software licenses, I understand that their support teams are excellent.
But I agree with your point - Red Hat and Canonical make almost all of their revenue from support, so if they get that wrong they're screwed. They have a bigger interest than Microsoft in getting it right.
If I had dozens or hundreds of servers and every minute of downtime could cost the company thousands or millions of dollars, I would want support professionals I trusted available at a moment's notice to fix things when they break.
My first inclination would just be to hire competent people on my own - if I'm the one paying their paycheck directly, and I treat them with respect, I would hope that a sense of loyalty and a desire to keep from collapsing the company that issues their paycheck.
But if I truly believed Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, HP, Dell, Oracle, or anybody else had genuinely first class support staff, I would consider having a smaller number of my own staff and relying upon the vendor as needed. My own inclination is to support Red Hat, because just about everything they do is open source. Canonical would come second, with the rest following behind and Oracle last. But that's my personal favoritism towards open source, if I was running a business it would just be a cost-benefit analysis including heavy research into the support experiences other companies have had with each vendor.
The virtualization itself is awesome - to my knowledge nothing proprietary beats the stability and performance of KVM. The weakness is the fancy tools around managing your virtual infrastructure. But Red Hat, OpenSUSE, and others are working very hard to make the tools built around KVM, VirtualBox, Xen, etc... better so they can compete with the best VMWare has to offer head-on.
I think you unfairly got modded down, sorry enthusiasm for FOSS got in the way of fair discussion.
Typically Linux gets more patches because the person has a lot of software installed. If you've got a pretty barebones setup and only pulled in exactly what you need (Apache + PHP + PostgreSQL), I imagine the patch rate isn't too different from something like IIS + PHP + PostgreSQL or IIS +.NET framework + SQL Server.
I have the same refurbished Transform Ultra, actually, but I only got a $25 discount.
The last time I looked, if you tried to get a month-to-month contract directly with Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, or T-Mobile they only supported low end smart phones. Ting supports the full range, so you can pay $700 for a brand new whatever it is and spend barely $20 per month on it.
You are definitely correct that bash's strength - consistency over time - is also its weakness. I suspect people have already worked on much more full-featured, modern shells for Linux that just haven't caught on. But one of the curses of proprietary programming, that the company can take your preferred technology tool that they make and end-of-life it, is also a strength because they can force their customers to move in different directions. Sometimes those directions are backwards or at best sideways, but this is a case where Microsoft is pulling things forward.
Some guy on Sourceforge had started working on Powershell for Mono so that you could use one admin tool on all of your platforms. I think the project was abandoned, but I wonder if he was on to something good.
You're right, of course. But like many people, I'm already comfortable with bash and cmd.exe, so I'm not in the mood to learn something new.
Of course that attitude is self-defeating - few things irritate me more than working with IT professionals that fight tooth and nail against learning new technology. There may be damned good reasons for preferring technology X to technology Y, but you can't make that judgement unless you're highly skilled in both. It just so happens that right now I'm trying to learn new programming languages, and I had put sysadmin tools on the back burner.
Some nations - i.e. Denmark, maintain a much higher revenue as percentage of GDP, have much more social welfare benefits, and still have a thriving economy.
Now obviously comparing nations is difficult because of so many factors outside of government control. The US economy grew like gangbusters after World War 2 because we were one of the few first world nations without most of our factories and infrastructure in ruins.
But some of our uncontrolled spending is imprisoning marijuana offenders, which is ludicrous - pot users are idiots, but pot is less dangerous to the user and to others around the user than alcohol.
Thanks for filling in some details. I've heard people rave about PowerShell before. I've also read that Microsoft planned adding an optional view pane to every control panel and administrator tool in Server 2012 that would output the PowerShell equivalent command to anything you did in the GUI. That strikes me as a brilliant way to turn your slow click-monkeys into fast shell admins. I'd like to see Red Hat or Canonical (Ubuntu) do something similar for Unix, but I don't think even Red Hat has the engineering resources for a project like that.
The problem I had with powershell, which I assume is commonplace, is that I fired it up expecting it to be a backwards-compatible superset of cmd.exe. It isn't, lots of the syntax that works fine in cmd.exe gives errors in Powershell or works but does something different from the cmd.exe equivalent. That of course makes me nervous - to my knowledge, bash hasn't changed much since introduction over 20 years ago. It has arcane syntax and plenty of warts, but an investment in bash will probably still be useful in another twenty years. Will Microsoft be using Powershell in ten years, in a form that's compatible with current syntax?
And while consistency in command interfaces is hugely powerful, there's something to be said for the global interoperability of using text everywhere. If I'm doing complicated administrative tasks on Linux, I can do part of it in C++, pipe the output through a sed script, pipe that output through some Python script I downloaded, pipe that output through a Perl script I wrote, and feed that into some Ruby program. Then I can take the Ruby results and put them through a Basic application and then through Common Lisp and then a C# program running on Mono. Of course that's a contrived and very silly example, but the point is that while text is far more tedious to work with than (properly designed) object types, you have easy interoperability between hundreds of different tools.
I appreciate the advice and I believe it to be true. The question is whether I can move my career forward into working entirely in a Linux environment or not. If I can't, then learning Powershell is a necessity.
As if the Microsoft fanbase does not contain its own horde of trolls. Both communities have huge numbers of kind, welcoming, intelligent people and huge numbers of assholes. You can't use that criteria to condemn or praise either side, because in that respect they're even.
The problem with monitoring the debt clock is that you're looking in the wrong direction. Here are three things that don't get enough attention by people in the US:
1. Taxes on wealthy Americans were higher under President Reagan. Was he a dreaded socialist? Did he engage in class warfare?
2. Our nation spends three times as much money per capita on health care as other first world countries with longer average life expectancies.
3. From 2002 until the present we have been at war, but in that period the government has cut taxes instead of raising them. During previous wars, US legislators and the President had this crazy idea that taxes should be increased at a time of war to cover the additional expense. Instead, President Bush and Congress cut taxes twice in 2002, and Congress has not substantially raised them since.
Linux isn't harder to administer because of any inherent problems, it's harder for the average person to administer because we probably had Windows in the home computer and at the office, and at the school. Making the jump from Windows 95 to Windows NT or from Windows Vista to Server 2008 is a lot easier than jumping from Windows to Linux.
If you're a serious power-user administrator, Linux and Unixes in general has been easier to administer than Windows Server for a very long time. You have more interoperable shell tools at your disposal. The Server GUI is better for an admin novice, but terminal tools are quicker for a power user than toggling through programs and hunting through menus. Microsoft is catching up with PowerShell, but even if the technology is extremely flexible and mature (and it may well be), they took the odd step of inventing a new syntax different enough to be confusing to people comfortable with bash or cmd.exe - me among them. Now I'm asking myself whether making the investment in Powershell is worthwhile. It probably is, but I don't look forward to it.
I listen to This Week in Google on the TWiT network, that's how I heard of ting.com. I don't regret it. I bought a refurbished Samsung phone for $90 and have averaged $25 per month since then.
Do they throttle old phones, or is there a deterioration on the accuracy of the software related to the antenna as the phone gets older? I'm speculating, it just seems to me that throttling old phones would drive you to a competing carrier - which is what happened - instead of an upgrade.
As a few of us posted higher up in the discussion, try Ting.com https://ting.com/usage_calculator. You get billed based on what you use. If you go over, you get bumped up to the next category for that month only and billed appropriately (e.g. going from the 800 texts for $5.00 for a month to 1200 texts bumps you up to the $8 category for that month).
No contracts, buy the phone up front. The bill is straight, pay for what you use. Again, I wrote this already but if Sprint reception sucks in your area or you use a lot of data ($13 per month for 500MB, $24 for 1GB, $42 for 2GB, then about $20 per GB above that) it doesn't save you money.
I use ting.com too. I realize silas_moeckel and I are going to come across as shills, but Ting is supremely cheap provided A. you don't use tons of data ( much past 2GB of data use and Ting doesn't save you money versus the other carriers) and B. you live in an area where Sprint reception doesn't suck, since Ting uses their network.
Be practical. Bush and Obama and presumably Romney are effectively indistinguishable from one another on foreign policy, torture, indefinite detention, intelligence policy, and the executive branch overstepping its constitutional authority.
But the Republicans want to dismantle the separation between Church and State, specifically by banning gay marriage and related things (visitation rights to gays for their partners in hospital, extending job benefits to a gay partner, allowing gays to adopt children), by banning abortion, and by teaching abstinence-based sex education in school.
The Republicans also want to cut taxes on the wealthy and cover the corresponding deficit in federal income by cutting social services and cutting education spending. Likewise they favor legislation to dismantle unions, remove anti-discrimination laws, and block any moves towards universal health care.
Those differences may not matter to you, but they do matter to me. I voted for Obama, and I don't regret it. I regret that the Democrats and Republicans have a stranglehold on politics in the country, but given that fact I don't regret supporting the Democrats.
The PRISM surveillance program started in 2007, when Bush was president. The Patriot Act was passed when Bush was president.
So the way I see it, we have two bad choices. We can pick a guy that believes in warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, torture, assassination of American citizens without any kind of legislative or judicial check, and making software and media piracy a felony. That would be any Democrat presidential candidate. Or we could pick any Republican presidential candidate and get all those plus plans to dismantle social services, tear down the separation between Church and State, and systematically gang rape the poor and homosexuals.
When Satan's running the country but he's running against Cthulhu, sorry but I'm going to pick Satan every time. I don't see anything plausibly better.
The cryptologist response to that is that any technology the NSA develops, can be independently developed by someone else. And further, any backdoor put in place for the NSA can likewise be exploited by others. Broken cryptography is not a one way door that only opens for good guys.
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The point with webapps is the same as replacing closed source with open source. Why is Google Docs better, at least in principle, than Microsoft Office? Because I can use Google Docs from Windows, from Linux, from Mac, from FreeBSD, from Android, from Tizen, from Blackberry, etc... etc...
If every good native application in the iPhone app store, Google Play store, and Windows App Store has an equivalent web app version, then it's much easier to convince people to ditch their iPhone/Android phone/Windows phone and replace it with something running Firefox OS, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, WebOS, or whatever. The average person has made it crystal clear that they'll accept a nice garden with walls over a wide open range that's a desert. We have to create an awesome garden outside the walls, and then maybe people will start leaving their walled gardens.
And if the only thing this effort really accomplishes is forcing Apple, Google, and Microsoft to continuously innovate so their walled gardens are constantly a better place to play than the web app world, that's still a tremendous achievement.
There are other reasons to prefer a native application, but I'm not sure your argument is one of them.
Installation period: web app, page download time. native app, application download. Winner, web app.
Approval process before you are in front of potential customers: web app, instant. native app, depends on the whim of the store curator. Winner, web app.
Chances that your app gets removed by a change to the terms of service: web app, zero. native app, depends upon the whim of the store curator. Winner, web app.
Effort for end-user to update their copy of your application to the newest: web app, none. native app, some to none (depending upon preferences set in app store application). Winner, web app.
Competitors in the market: web app, millions. native app, hundreds of thousands, rapidly climbing towards millions. Winner, native app - but only for the moment.
Restrictions on in-app purchases, restrictions in terms of use, requirement that you have to share revenue with mobile OS developer: web app, none. native app, some. Winner, web app.
Effort to make your product available on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Tizen, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch: web app, none. native app, none if you use a cross-platform development kit. Winner, none.
Chances the end user deletes your application to save storage space on their device: web app - only if you use offline storage. native app, some. Winner, web app.
Again, I'm not saying web app is clearly the way to go. I'm just saying it has advantages.
Microsoft is in the wrong, they're trying to steal market from Google by running a smear campaign with "Scroogled". For example they're crying foul that Google reads your Gmail mail for targeted ads. Hotmail and Outlook.com, both run by Microsoft, may not read your email for targeted ads but they read it to block spam. Either way, your hosting provider reads it and an unethical employee, law enforcement official, or sufficiently skilled hacker can access your email too.
Google is in the wrong, as far as I can tell, by blocking access to Youtube for Windows Phone using requirements they don't have for iOS or Android. I have to imagine it's just a childish tit-for-tat back at Microsoft for Scroogled, a way to do payback. But it's still annoying - I think it would be more ethical and also better for Google's image to just give Windows Phone the same treatment as the rest.
On the other hand, I'm genuinely surprised Microsoft refuses to do an HTML5 version of the app. Youtube works fine on mobile as-is, I don't need a native application.
KVM and VirtualBox on Linux both run Windows VMs flawlessly. KVM was originally created by engineers at Qumranet for the specific purpose of running Windows guests in virtualization on Linux hosts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qumranet
If you buy an enterprise support package from Microsoft, which costs - of course - quite a bit of money on top of what you're already paying for your software licenses, I understand that their support teams are excellent.
But I agree with your point - Red Hat and Canonical make almost all of their revenue from support, so if they get that wrong they're screwed. They have a bigger interest than Microsoft in getting it right.
If I had dozens or hundreds of servers and every minute of downtime could cost the company thousands or millions of dollars, I would want support professionals I trusted available at a moment's notice to fix things when they break.
My first inclination would just be to hire competent people on my own - if I'm the one paying their paycheck directly, and I treat them with respect, I would hope that a sense of loyalty and a desire to keep from collapsing the company that issues their paycheck.
But if I truly believed Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, HP, Dell, Oracle, or anybody else had genuinely first class support staff, I would consider having a smaller number of my own staff and relying upon the vendor as needed. My own inclination is to support Red Hat, because just about everything they do is open source. Canonical would come second, with the rest following behind and Oracle last. But that's my personal favoritism towards open source, if I was running a business it would just be a cost-benefit analysis including heavy research into the support experiences other companies have had with each vendor.
The virtualization itself is awesome - to my knowledge nothing proprietary beats the stability and performance of KVM. The weakness is the fancy tools around managing your virtual infrastructure. But Red Hat, OpenSUSE, and others are working very hard to make the tools built around KVM, VirtualBox, Xen, etc... better so they can compete with the best VMWare has to offer head-on.
I think you unfairly got modded down, sorry enthusiasm for FOSS got in the way of fair discussion.
.NET framework + SQL Server.
Typically Linux gets more patches because the person has a lot of software installed. If you've got a pretty barebones setup and only pulled in exactly what you need (Apache + PHP + PostgreSQL), I imagine the patch rate isn't too different from something like IIS + PHP + PostgreSQL or IIS +
I have the same refurbished Transform Ultra, actually, but I only got a $25 discount.
The last time I looked, if you tried to get a month-to-month contract directly with Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, or T-Mobile they only supported low end smart phones. Ting supports the full range, so you can pay $700 for a brand new whatever it is and spend barely $20 per month on it.
Wow. Thanks for all of that explanation.
You are definitely correct that bash's strength - consistency over time - is also its weakness. I suspect people have already worked on much more full-featured, modern shells for Linux that just haven't caught on. But one of the curses of proprietary programming, that the company can take your preferred technology tool that they make and end-of-life it, is also a strength because they can force their customers to move in different directions. Sometimes those directions are backwards or at best sideways, but this is a case where Microsoft is pulling things forward.
Some guy on Sourceforge had started working on Powershell for Mono so that you could use one admin tool on all of your platforms. I think the project was abandoned, but I wonder if he was on to something good.
You're right, of course. But like many people, I'm already comfortable with bash and cmd.exe, so I'm not in the mood to learn something new.
Of course that attitude is self-defeating - few things irritate me more than working with IT professionals that fight tooth and nail against learning new technology. There may be damned good reasons for preferring technology X to technology Y, but you can't make that judgement unless you're highly skilled in both. It just so happens that right now I'm trying to learn new programming languages, and I had put sysadmin tools on the back burner.
Some nations - i.e. Denmark, maintain a much higher revenue as percentage of GDP, have much more social welfare benefits, and still have a thriving economy.
Now obviously comparing nations is difficult because of so many factors outside of government control. The US economy grew like gangbusters after World War 2 because we were one of the few first world nations without most of our factories and infrastructure in ruins.
But some of our uncontrolled spending is imprisoning marijuana offenders, which is ludicrous - pot users are idiots, but pot is less dangerous to the user and to others around the user than alcohol.
Thanks for filling in some details. I've heard people rave about PowerShell before. I've also read that Microsoft planned adding an optional view pane to every control panel and administrator tool in Server 2012 that would output the PowerShell equivalent command to anything you did in the GUI. That strikes me as a brilliant way to turn your slow click-monkeys into fast shell admins. I'd like to see Red Hat or Canonical (Ubuntu) do something similar for Unix, but I don't think even Red Hat has the engineering resources for a project like that.
The problem I had with powershell, which I assume is commonplace, is that I fired it up expecting it to be a backwards-compatible superset of cmd.exe. It isn't, lots of the syntax that works fine in cmd.exe gives errors in Powershell or works but does something different from the cmd.exe equivalent. That of course makes me nervous - to my knowledge, bash hasn't changed much since introduction over 20 years ago. It has arcane syntax and plenty of warts, but an investment in bash will probably still be useful in another twenty years. Will Microsoft be using Powershell in ten years, in a form that's compatible with current syntax?
And while consistency in command interfaces is hugely powerful, there's something to be said for the global interoperability of using text everywhere. If I'm doing complicated administrative tasks on Linux, I can do part of it in C++, pipe the output through a sed script, pipe that output through some Python script I downloaded, pipe that output through a Perl script I wrote, and feed that into some Ruby program. Then I can take the Ruby results and put them through a Basic application and then through Common Lisp and then a C# program running on Mono. Of course that's a contrived and very silly example, but the point is that while text is far more tedious to work with than (properly designed) object types, you have easy interoperability between hundreds of different tools.
I appreciate the advice and I believe it to be true. The question is whether I can move my career forward into working entirely in a Linux environment or not. If I can't, then learning Powershell is a necessity.
As if the Microsoft fanbase does not contain its own horde of trolls. Both communities have huge numbers of kind, welcoming, intelligent people and huge numbers of assholes. You can't use that criteria to condemn or praise either side, because in that respect they're even.
The problem with monitoring the debt clock is that you're looking in the wrong direction. Here are three things that don't get enough attention by people in the US:
1. Taxes on wealthy Americans were higher under President Reagan. Was he a dreaded socialist? Did he engage in class warfare?
2. Our nation spends three times as much money per capita on health care as other first world countries with longer average life expectancies.
3. From 2002 until the present we have been at war, but in that period the government has cut taxes instead of raising them. During previous wars, US legislators and the President had this crazy idea that taxes should be increased at a time of war to cover the additional expense. Instead, President Bush and Congress cut taxes twice in 2002, and Congress has not substantially raised them since.
Linux isn't harder to administer because of any inherent problems, it's harder for the average person to administer because we probably had Windows in the home computer and at the office, and at the school. Making the jump from Windows 95 to Windows NT or from Windows Vista to Server 2008 is a lot easier than jumping from Windows to Linux.
If you're a serious power-user administrator, Linux and Unixes in general has been easier to administer than Windows Server for a very long time. You have more interoperable shell tools at your disposal. The Server GUI is better for an admin novice, but terminal tools are quicker for a power user than toggling through programs and hunting through menus. Microsoft is catching up with PowerShell, but even if the technology is extremely flexible and mature (and it may well be), they took the odd step of inventing a new syntax different enough to be confusing to people comfortable with bash or cmd.exe - me among them. Now I'm asking myself whether making the investment in Powershell is worthwhile. It probably is, but I don't look forward to it.
I listen to This Week in Google on the TWiT network, that's how I heard of ting.com. I don't regret it. I bought a refurbished Samsung phone for $90 and have averaged $25 per month since then.
Do they throttle old phones, or is there a deterioration on the accuracy of the software related to the antenna as the phone gets older? I'm speculating, it just seems to me that throttling old phones would drive you to a competing carrier - which is what happened - instead of an upgrade.
Thanks. I'll check republic wireless out. I have kids old enough for cell phones soon, I think ting might be ideal.
As a few of us posted higher up in the discussion, try Ting.com https://ting.com/usage_calculator. You get billed based on what you use. If you go over, you get bumped up to the next category for that month only and billed appropriately (e.g. going from the 800 texts for $5.00 for a month to 1200 texts bumps you up to the $8 category for that month).
No contracts, buy the phone up front. The bill is straight, pay for what you use. Again, I wrote this already but if Sprint reception sucks in your area or you use a lot of data ($13 per month for 500MB, $24 for 1GB, $42 for 2GB, then about $20 per GB above that) it doesn't save you money.
I use ting.com too. I realize silas_moeckel and I are going to come across as shills, but Ting is supremely cheap provided A. you don't use tons of data ( much past 2GB of data use and Ting doesn't save you money versus the other carriers) and B. you live in an area where Sprint reception doesn't suck, since Ting uses their network.
Be practical. Bush and Obama and presumably Romney are effectively indistinguishable from one another on foreign policy, torture, indefinite detention, intelligence policy, and the executive branch overstepping its constitutional authority.
But the Republicans want to dismantle the separation between Church and State, specifically by banning gay marriage and related things (visitation rights to gays for their partners in hospital, extending job benefits to a gay partner, allowing gays to adopt children), by banning abortion, and by teaching abstinence-based sex education in school.
The Republicans also want to cut taxes on the wealthy and cover the corresponding deficit in federal income by cutting social services and cutting education spending. Likewise they favor legislation to dismantle unions, remove anti-discrimination laws, and block any moves towards universal health care.
Those differences may not matter to you, but they do matter to me. I voted for Obama, and I don't regret it. I regret that the Democrats and Republicans have a stranglehold on politics in the country, but given that fact I don't regret supporting the Democrats.
The PRISM surveillance program started in 2007, when Bush was president. The Patriot Act was passed when Bush was president.
So the way I see it, we have two bad choices. We can pick a guy that believes in warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, torture, assassination of American citizens without any kind of legislative or judicial check, and making software and media piracy a felony. That would be any Democrat presidential candidate. Or we could pick any Republican presidential candidate and get all those plus plans to dismantle social services, tear down the separation between Church and State, and systematically gang rape the poor and homosexuals.
When Satan's running the country but he's running against Cthulhu, sorry but I'm going to pick Satan every time. I don't see anything plausibly better.
If the successor has a backdoor and the bad guys found out about it, would they announce it to the world?
The cryptologist response to that is that any technology the NSA develops, can be independently developed by someone else. And further, any backdoor put in place for the NSA can likewise be exploited by others. Broken cryptography is not a one way door that only opens for good guys.