Except that for one thing, up until the recent court case any kind of traffic shaping was a violation of FCC regulations and for another a 1mbps shaped connection would be unusable. You can't take a 35mbps pipe and make it a 1 mbps pipe, all you can really do for traffic shaping is to drop packets to keep the TCP transfer window small enough to get the speed you want, it makes your service essentially unusable even for uses which don't need the speed(basic web browsing is virtually unusable for instance). I know this because we have data caps which then shape your traffic when you go over the caps. It gets shaped to 64kbps which is lower than what you're suggesting, but still should be more than adequate for basic web surfing. It isn't though.
Data caps take some getting used to, and they're of course horrible for the cord cutters because they don't get subsidized service, but what they generally do do is stop companies from deliberately over subscribing. If increased demand is associated with increased revenue companies are a lot more motivated to keep their infrastructure up to date, after all if the guy on the 100 gig plan can't actually get more than 5 gig downloaded he's going to drop his 100 gig plan and you lose revenue.
Of course it is, it's not like you just hook up a cable and bang unlimited data. You can only fit so much data down any given pipe which means either slower connections or fewer connections, the laws of physics still apply just because it's electrons and photons. Any given connection has only so much capacity in terms of number of users and speed.
Except leaving aside the fact that lots of artists have talked about streaming revenue, TFA actually talks about the money they make off streaming revenue. Given that your assertion both goes against common experience and TFA, I'd suggest you need to provide proof.
You talk about $0.0003 a song. How much are you willing to pay for listening to a two minute song once? Really and honestly, what will you pay for two minutes of entertainment. If you want an artist to get a cent per song, that's.5 cents per minutes. To still make a profit for everyone spotify is likely going to have to charge 4 times that(to cover their profits and expenses, the record companies profits and expenses, etc). So We'll call it 2 cents a minute. So for a 24 hour day you're talking about $28.80, so that's $864 per month. Let's be a bit more realistic and say that the average listener is actually only using spotify 4 hours a day. Then we'll be generous and say this isn't going to change so they can build a business model on it and we'll screw the record companies and spotify themselves to the wall and cut the rate down to.75 cents per minute of song(so here the artist is actually making two thirds of the gross revenue which is ridiculous). That takes the monthly rate down to $54.
Will you subscribe to $54 per month spotify?
In reality of course we know spotify is $16 a month and that spotify would be insane if they weren't budgeting for people listening at least 8 hours a day on average and even that probably isn't actually sustainable as internet on mobile devices becomes more common, so if we're building a company we have to be able to deal with at least 16 hour a day play time to be able to stay in business over the long haul. Then we take into account the fact that the amount the artist should actually get is probably closer to a third of revenue or lower. $16/month/30 days/16 hours/ 60 minutes/3 * 2 minutes per song gives you well wouldn't you know it $.00037.
Artists are up in arms largely because they're irrational idiots. They see that they got a million plays and they look at their check which is only a few grand and think they're getting royally screwed, which simply isn't true
The problem for artists is that they don't really understand what a million plays actually means, I've heard it over and over again in radio interviews and articles. 10 tracks to an album, presuming anyone who actually likes the album enough to buy it will listen to it at least 10 times and you're down to 10,000 sales if you go with the most optimistic result possible. In reality it's probably more likely that the people who would have actually bought the album would have listened to the album at least 100 times for their $13 and that more than half the people who listen to a song would never have bought the album and may never listen to it again.
Fundamentally the issue is that while streaming opens up the number of artists that your average punter has available to listen to by several orders of magnitude the number of record companies is the same as it's always been. So when you have consumers spending more on music than they did previously with much lower overheads the record companies make more money and the artists(on average) make significantly less(more money available but spread over a much larger number of people).
In the end, the problem is that making a living as an artist of any kind is difficult. It was difficult before streaming, it'll be difficult after streaming is replaced, hell it was difficult before there were recordings of any kind(though for different reasons). If you release an album every 3 years and you're making about $3 per sale, you'll be looking at needing 30,000 fans who buy every album just to get the kind of income you could earn at a pretty bog standard office job, and that's not even counting any of the costs associated with recording and makes a pretty optimistic assumption that you can actually produce an album every 3 years that anyone will actually buy for the entirety of your working life. A very few people get huge amounts of money, some people get a little bit of money or money for a little bit of time, most get a whole lot of nothing.
The important question isn't about whether you've earned your fortune, it's about whether others have earned their misfortune.
When you start to realize exactly how much of what you have is the result of things you have no control over and perhaps even more importantly when you realize that some of those things could be taken away from you in an instant due to no fault of your own, you begin to develop some compassion for those who don't have your advantages, or at the a rational self interest to realize that as the old saying goes "There but for the grace of god go I".
The interesting thing about this sort of privilege is that people who have it don't notice it, because it isn't overt.
As a white, heterosexual, middle class male in pretty much any western nation, if you're reasonably intelligent and work hard, you're pretty much guaranteed to succeed. Hell even if you don't work hard you're pretty much guaranteed to at least reach mediocrity. The deck is stacked in your favor in a truly fundamental way, you will be given opportunities and second chances just as a matter of course, people will pretty much expect that you're capable of doing things and any confidence in your abilities will be treated as confidence and not as arrogance. For the most part you can substitute "part of the majority ethnic group" for white and apply the same rule to any country, though not always. Those same opportunities aren't available to everyone. Doors aren't necessarily locked, but they aren't wide open either. It's not impossible to succeed, but it's nowhere near as easy.
It's one of the reasons why libertarians are almost exclusively white middle class males. The belief that hard work will be rewarded requires a life where that actually happens.
Maybe if instead of spending 6 months trying to get rid of him you'd spent a month or so getting him up to speed on your particular environment and tech(the odds of actually employing someone who knows your companies flavors of either is pretty close to zero) you might have gotten a better result.
Re:How long would that last...
on
Programmer Privilege
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· Score: 4, Informative
Bullshit artists are the result of having people in charge who don't actually understand what their employees are doing. It's not unique to government, nor is it unique to programming. It's worse when you have larger organisations which have more separation between you and the decision makers and much better in small organisations where your actual job is part of the core business of the company. Basically it boils down to the fact that the bullshit artist has really good communication skills and you either don't possess or don't utilise those skills.
I know it's fun to hate on government, but large scale private enterprise is in nearly all respects actually worse than government. They are just as crippled by process, just as risk averse, just as hidebound, and just as likely to award mediocrity. The only real difference is that private enterprise will be profit motivated so they will make all of the above mistakes for even worse reasons than the government.
I'd actually suggest that the "average" university student from today is probably smarter than the "average" student from 80 years ago. 80 years ago the primary determining factor for university admission wasn't how smart you were, it was whether you had enough money to attend. On top of that much of what was taught in universities 80 years ago is actually core curriculum in high school today. In terms of 50 years ago that's post GI bill territory so it wouldn't really be much different than today.
No I think it's more that standard deviation is a horrible name for what standard deviation actually is. On top of that it's often used by the wrong people for the wrong purpose(in part because it's badly named). It's certainly a useful tool for people who know what it does and what it's for, but when non statisticians read it they are going to assume that it actually represents MAD, which it doesn't.
I don't think the author means for a second that we shouldn't use STD for any purpose, but that as a general rule it should stop being used to highlight results. This makes sense because the audiences for most papers, even highly scientific ones are not statisticians and will not really understand STD in any meaningful way.
It's fairly clear if all you read is the news headlines, the evidence is actually a lot less clear. Greenwald has an ax to grind and Snowden himself is basically off the grid. I'm not saying bad things aren't happening, merely that the scale of the bad things is far from clear and often massively over inflated both in the news media and especially on places like Slashdot. There's no real information about how any of it actually works, what was collected, who it was collected on. We know there have been some abuses, but most of them are the usual sort of crap which happens in most places which collect personal information as opposed to particularly maliciou evil big government types. Specifically there is absolutely no evidence that I've ever seen that the government is actually collecting every single e-mail or recording every single phone call, let alone actually reading or listening to them despite it being frequently claimed on here. Hell, I've yet to be able to even find the source document which backs up the claim that RSA were paid by the NSA to include a backdoor. Lots of news stories, but no documentary evidence. It seems these days they just say "Snowden reveals" in the press and security Chicken Little's not only believe every single word but then add in stuff that wasn't ever revealed.
I didn't say the majority of the people in the US want to live in a police state, even assuming that what they're doing actually constitutes one. I said that a plurality of people in most electorates care more about other issues. If you were to run on a anti-NSA platform you wouldn't lose because the system is rigged, you'd lose because unless the rest of your platform was also something people wanted they wouldn't vote for you.
No, it's not clear. A lot of Snowden's evidence is fairly crap. We have an idea of how many pieces of data were transferred from certain countries, mostly because of footnotes on powerpoint slides. There's been a lot of contradiction over who actually did the spying and who they were spying on, not to mention how many people each bit of Metadata actually represents.
We know that Norway spied on its own citizens and it seems clear that ASIO did the same thing in Australia.
In terms of your "how to get someone into office to stop the secret spying crap" it doesn't, but that's not the god damned point.
I reiterate, just because voting doesn't give you the result you want doesn't mean that voting is broken. Voting is not intended to get you the result you want it's intended to get the result that the people for whatever definition of the people your country uses(in the US it's the plurality of people in a given geographic district) want.
Voting determines who wins, as it is supposed to. If you don't like the major parties, vote for someone else, if you don't like the options, run for office, you probably won't win, but that's beside the point. If an issue is actually massively unpopular or massively popular in the electorate to the degree that it changes votes then lobbying doesn't matter. The problem is that a lot of the things that Slashdot is really passionate about (NSA, SOPA, etc) the vast majority of people don't care about and even Slashdotter's aren't generally willing to actually change their vote over it.
It's a common misconception by people that when they don't get the result they want from voting it's because voting doesn't work.
If there's no one to vote for, run for office on that platform. You probably won't win, but you have that right and the capability.
I didn't say everyone in Europe was a legitimate target, though it's massively unclear how many actual European citizens actually got spied on and by who. I said that foreign governments are a legitimate target. Most of the stuff that's actually gotten coverage has been spying on foreign governments.
To start with, the goal of the first past the post system isn't to "represent the people", at least not in the context you actually mean it, it's to represent the largest voting block, which is exactly what it does.
Secondly, first past the post isn't actually the problem, instant runoff voting is pretty much just as broken it just allows you to make yourself feel better by voting for a third party, you still won't actually get your third party elected to any meaningful amount of seats. The actual solution, at least insofar as I can see is to either move to some sort of direct democratic process or to give up on the idea of your local representative actually giving a crap about you and do proportional voting, ideally covering the whole electorate(nationally for federal seats, the whole state for state, etc), combined with a form of preference system. You get.2% of the population to agree with you, you get a congressman, you get 10%, you get a senator. Obviously you'd be voting for party platforms not people specifically, at least aside from the president, but barring some form of major scandal that's what we do now anyway. That would spell the instantaneous end of the two party monopoly of the congress. It'd end gerrymandering and also make it substantially more difficult for corporate interests to buy congressional votes(it'd be cheaper to run campaigns since you're essentially electing a policy platform not a person, and since there would be an expectation for congress critters belonging to a party to vote as a bloc you'd have to corrupt the platform of the entire party which would be much more likely to see them kicked out).
I don't know enough about the Canadian election to comment on that specifically, but the public option isn't massively popular even though we'd probably like it to be. In today's US you'd probably be lucky to actually get 40% voting in favor of it in a referendum, but that's entirely the point, elections aren't a referendum on a single issue, they are a choice of packages.
Voting as it is currently configured in the US allows the voters to pick the policy package that you want and the policy package picked by the most people in a specific geographic area gets a representative to argue for that policy package in congress, or to place a vote for president. The geographic areas are fairly arbitrary these days and the money required for running for office somewhat limits the choices available but voting still does exactly that. It works perfectly well (note perfectly well is not the same as perfectly the well changes the meaning). You can still do a write in vote and US citizens can, subject to some reasonable eligibility requirements run for office in any election they so choose. The system is not broken, let alone irrevocably broken. There are issues of course, mostly having to do with the fact that we pretend we want to vote for a local representative who we personally know as an individual but at the same time almost never actually cast our vote that way, but that's not the same thing as being broken.
The reason people like the GP pretend that voting is irrevocably broken is that their vote doesn't give them the result they want which is NOT what voting is supposed to do. If your favored policy position isn't the one which garners the most votes and it isn't guaranteed under the Constitution as it actually exists and is interpreted by the courts(as opposed to how so many folks on the internet think it exists) then you don't get that policy package. I realize that of course you know better than everyone else voting because they're all idiot sheeple, but that doesn't mean that what you want gets up. If there's no candidate espousing your particular policy package, run for office or find someone else who will run for office and support their campaign. It's fairly expensive since you've got to get your message out to a very large number of people, but federal law requires that the TV stations charge you the exact same rate as they charge any other candidate so you can do it.
Voting works perfectly well, it's just not simple. Voting and policy have a related relationship. If policy will change voting then voting will change policy. If people won't change their vote over an issue then politicians won't change the issue based on votes. The core reality is that the vast majority of Americans don't give a crap about the NSA, certainly not enough to change their vote in the current political climate where the two parties are pushing contradictory world views.
For the most part this isn't surprising, the vast majority of the news time on the NSA scandal has been manufactured outrage about legitimate foreign targets and the repercussions of revealing the monitoring of those targets. There's been bugger all discussion about what metadata actually is, what it can reveal to the government, and what that means for regular people. People are also perfectly entitled, even if they actually understand all that, to not give a flying fuck.
Except you've got a unique identifier for an individual and there will always be a link between the voter and the ballot, even if it's just a time stamp.
On top of that, it's just good practice to assume that the people who develop and run any system like this have full access to the data no matter how much they promise you they don't, because even if they open the code writing a bypass or proxy is trivially easy.
Like I said, having the government know your political affiliations may or may not actually be a big deal, but we'd have to move forward with something like this assuming they will. They probably know now.
There's a very solid argument that Snowden was right in revealing the NSA's domestic intelligence gathering operations and that he should receive clemency for revealing that information. However there's also a very solid argument to be made that Snowden revealed information which he shouldn't have revealed and which went against the interests of the US and supported its enemies.
Security isn't the problem, security combined with anonymity is the problem.
Writing an electronic voting system is piss easy, there's some process issues with validating identification, but nothing that couldn't be resolved through the existing voter registration processes. The issue is that the only way it works without massive amounts of fraud is if enough data is stored to allow a person with access to said data to determine exactly who every single person voted for. It wouldn't be public knowledge so a lot of the actual issues that anonymous voting are designed to address would still not be an issue(your boss wouldn't know who you voted for), but voting wouldn't be anonymous.
Now we can have a robust discussion about whether we're willing to trade the absolute anonymity of our votes for a greater ease of voting, higher voter turnout, potential reductions in vote tampering etc, but that's the decision we'd be making. I'm a bit on the fence on this one, on the one hand I'm not ashamed of who I vote for, nor is either the US or the country I now live in a place where the government is in a position to do much evil with the knowledge of voting(most of the issues with pre-anonymous voting were more local than that), but anonymous voting was instituted for a very good reason and getting rid of it isn't something to be done on a whim.
Setting up an alarm which will work when you're at home is an order of complexity higher than anything even remotely discussed in this thread. You're essentially looking at setting up some form of perimeter alarm to make that happen and trying to ensure that it's not set off by every cat in the neighbourhood. I've never even heard of anyone setting up anything effective in a regular residence.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that for one thing, up until the recent court case any kind of traffic shaping was a violation of FCC regulations and for another a 1mbps shaped connection would be unusable. You can't take a 35mbps pipe and make it a 1 mbps pipe, all you can really do for traffic shaping is to drop packets to keep the TCP transfer window small enough to get the speed you want, it makes your service essentially unusable even for uses which don't need the speed(basic web browsing is virtually unusable for instance). I know this because we have data caps which then shape your traffic when you go over the caps. It gets shaped to 64kbps which is lower than what you're suggesting, but still should be more than adequate for basic web surfing. It isn't though.
Data caps take some getting used to, and they're of course horrible for the cord cutters because they don't get subsidized service, but what they generally do do is stop companies from deliberately over subscribing. If increased demand is associated with increased revenue companies are a lot more motivated to keep their infrastructure up to date, after all if the guy on the 100 gig plan can't actually get more than 5 gig downloaded he's going to drop his 100 gig plan and you lose revenue.
Of course it is, it's not like you just hook up a cable and bang unlimited data. You can only fit so much data down any given pipe which means either slower connections or fewer connections, the laws of physics still apply just because it's electrons and photons. Any given connection has only so much capacity in terms of number of users and speed.
It's only irrelevant if you're a sociopath.
Someday you'll be old and useless and I hope that you don't get treated as badly as you believe others should be treated.
Except leaving aside the fact that lots of artists have talked about streaming revenue, TFA actually talks about the money they make off streaming revenue. Given that your assertion both goes against common experience and TFA, I'd suggest you need to provide proof.
You talk about $0.0003 a song. How much are you willing to pay for listening to a two minute song once? Really and honestly, what will you pay for two minutes of entertainment. If you want an artist to get a cent per song, that's .5 cents per minutes. To still make a profit for everyone spotify is likely going to have to charge 4 times that(to cover their profits and expenses, the record companies profits and expenses, etc). So We'll call it 2 cents a minute. So for a 24 hour day you're talking about $28.80, so that's $864 per month. Let's be a bit more realistic and say that the average listener is actually only using spotify 4 hours a day. Then we'll be generous and say this isn't going to change so they can build a business model on it and we'll screw the record companies and spotify themselves to the wall and cut the rate down to .75 cents per minute of song(so here the artist is actually making two thirds of the gross revenue which is ridiculous). That takes the monthly rate down to $54.
Will you subscribe to $54 per month spotify?
In reality of course we know spotify is $16 a month and that spotify would be insane if they weren't budgeting for people listening at least 8 hours a day on average and even that probably isn't actually sustainable as internet on mobile devices becomes more common, so if we're building a company we have to be able to deal with at least 16 hour a day play time to be able to stay in business over the long haul. Then we take into account the fact that the amount the artist should actually get is probably closer to a third of revenue or lower. $16/month/30 days/16 hours/ 60 minutes /3 * 2 minutes per song gives you well wouldn't you know it $.00037.
Artists are up in arms largely because they're irrational idiots. They see that they got a million plays and they look at their check which is only a few grand and think they're getting royally screwed, which simply isn't true
The problem for artists is that they don't really understand what a million plays actually means, I've heard it over and over again in radio interviews and articles. 10 tracks to an album, presuming anyone who actually likes the album enough to buy it will listen to it at least 10 times and you're down to 10,000 sales if you go with the most optimistic result possible. In reality it's probably more likely that the people who would have actually bought the album would have listened to the album at least 100 times for their $13 and that more than half the people who listen to a song would never have bought the album and may never listen to it again.
Fundamentally the issue is that while streaming opens up the number of artists that your average punter has available to listen to by several orders of magnitude the number of record companies is the same as it's always been. So when you have consumers spending more on music than they did previously with much lower overheads the record companies make more money and the artists(on average) make significantly less(more money available but spread over a much larger number of people).
In the end, the problem is that making a living as an artist of any kind is difficult. It was difficult before streaming, it'll be difficult after streaming is replaced, hell it was difficult before there were recordings of any kind(though for different reasons). If you release an album every 3 years and you're making about $3 per sale, you'll be looking at needing 30,000 fans who buy every album just to get the kind of income you could earn at a pretty bog standard office job, and that's not even counting any of the costs associated with recording and makes a pretty optimistic assumption that you can actually produce an album every 3 years that anyone will actually buy for the entirety of your working life. A very few people get huge amounts of money, some people get a little bit of money or money for a little bit of time, most get a whole lot of nothing.
Except that it does.
The important question isn't about whether you've earned your fortune, it's about whether others have earned their misfortune.
When you start to realize exactly how much of what you have is the result of things you have no control over and perhaps even more importantly when you realize that some of those things could be taken away from you in an instant due to no fault of your own, you begin to develop some compassion for those who don't have your advantages, or at the a rational self interest to realize that as the old saying goes "There but for the grace of god go I".
The interesting thing about this sort of privilege is that people who have it don't notice it, because it isn't overt.
As a white, heterosexual, middle class male in pretty much any western nation, if you're reasonably intelligent and work hard, you're pretty much guaranteed to succeed. Hell even if you don't work hard you're pretty much guaranteed to at least reach mediocrity. The deck is stacked in your favor in a truly fundamental way, you will be given opportunities and second chances just as a matter of course, people will pretty much expect that you're capable of doing things and any confidence in your abilities will be treated as confidence and not as arrogance. For the most part you can substitute "part of the majority ethnic group" for white and apply the same rule to any country, though not always. Those same opportunities aren't available to everyone. Doors aren't necessarily locked, but they aren't wide open either. It's not impossible to succeed, but it's nowhere near as easy.
It's one of the reasons why libertarians are almost exclusively white middle class males. The belief that hard work will be rewarded requires a life where that actually happens.
Maybe if instead of spending 6 months trying to get rid of him you'd spent a month or so getting him up to speed on your particular environment and tech(the odds of actually employing someone who knows your companies flavors of either is pretty close to zero) you might have gotten a better result.
Bullshit artists are the result of having people in charge who don't actually understand what their employees are doing. It's not unique to government, nor is it unique to programming. It's worse when you have larger organisations which have more separation between you and the decision makers and much better in small organisations where your actual job is part of the core business of the company. Basically it boils down to the fact that the bullshit artist has really good communication skills and you either don't possess or don't utilise those skills.
I know it's fun to hate on government, but large scale private enterprise is in nearly all respects actually worse than government. They are just as crippled by process, just as risk averse, just as hidebound, and just as likely to award mediocrity. The only real difference is that private enterprise will be profit motivated so they will make all of the above mistakes for even worse reasons than the government.
I'd actually suggest that the "average" university student from today is probably smarter than the "average" student from 80 years ago. 80 years ago the primary determining factor for university admission wasn't how smart you were, it was whether you had enough money to attend. On top of that much of what was taught in universities 80 years ago is actually core curriculum in high school today. In terms of 50 years ago that's post GI bill territory so it wouldn't really be much different than today.
No I think it's more that standard deviation is a horrible name for what standard deviation actually is. On top of that it's often used by the wrong people for the wrong purpose(in part because it's badly named). It's certainly a useful tool for people who know what it does and what it's for, but when non statisticians read it they are going to assume that it actually represents MAD, which it doesn't.
I don't think the author means for a second that we shouldn't use STD for any purpose, but that as a general rule it should stop being used to highlight results. This makes sense because the audiences for most papers, even highly scientific ones are not statisticians and will not really understand STD in any meaningful way.
It's fairly clear if all you read is the news headlines, the evidence is actually a lot less clear. Greenwald has an ax to grind and Snowden himself is basically off the grid. I'm not saying bad things aren't happening, merely that the scale of the bad things is far from clear and often massively over inflated both in the news media and especially on places like Slashdot. There's no real information about how any of it actually works, what was collected, who it was collected on. We know there have been some abuses, but most of them are the usual sort of crap which happens in most places which collect personal information as opposed to particularly maliciou evil big government types. Specifically there is absolutely no evidence that I've ever seen that the government is actually collecting every single e-mail or recording every single phone call, let alone actually reading or listening to them despite it being frequently claimed on here. Hell, I've yet to be able to even find the source document which backs up the claim that RSA were paid by the NSA to include a backdoor. Lots of news stories, but no documentary evidence. It seems these days they just say "Snowden reveals" in the press and security Chicken Little's not only believe every single word but then add in stuff that wasn't ever revealed.
I didn't say the majority of the people in the US want to live in a police state, even assuming that what they're doing actually constitutes one. I said that a plurality of people in most electorates care more about other issues. If you were to run on a anti-NSA platform you wouldn't lose because the system is rigged, you'd lose because unless the rest of your platform was also something people wanted they wouldn't vote for you.
No, it's not clear. A lot of Snowden's evidence is fairly crap. We have an idea of how many pieces of data were transferred from certain countries, mostly because of footnotes on powerpoint slides. There's been a lot of contradiction over who actually did the spying and who they were spying on, not to mention how many people each bit of Metadata actually represents.
We know that Norway spied on its own citizens and it seems clear that ASIO did the same thing in Australia.
In terms of your "how to get someone into office to stop the secret spying crap" it doesn't, but that's not the god damned point.
I reiterate, just because voting doesn't give you the result you want doesn't mean that voting is broken. Voting is not intended to get you the result you want it's intended to get the result that the people for whatever definition of the people your country uses(in the US it's the plurality of people in a given geographic district) want.
Voting determines who wins, as it is supposed to. If you don't like the major parties, vote for someone else, if you don't like the options, run for office, you probably won't win, but that's beside the point. If an issue is actually massively unpopular or massively popular in the electorate to the degree that it changes votes then lobbying doesn't matter. The problem is that a lot of the things that Slashdot is really passionate about (NSA, SOPA, etc) the vast majority of people don't care about and even Slashdotter's aren't generally willing to actually change their vote over it.
It's a common misconception by people that when they don't get the result they want from voting it's because voting doesn't work.
If there's no one to vote for, run for office on that platform. You probably won't win, but you have that right and the capability.
I didn't say everyone in Europe was a legitimate target, though it's massively unclear how many actual European citizens actually got spied on and by who. I said that foreign governments are a legitimate target. Most of the stuff that's actually gotten coverage has been spying on foreign governments.
To start with, the goal of the first past the post system isn't to "represent the people", at least not in the context you actually mean it, it's to represent the largest voting block, which is exactly what it does.
Secondly, first past the post isn't actually the problem, instant runoff voting is pretty much just as broken it just allows you to make yourself feel better by voting for a third party, you still won't actually get your third party elected to any meaningful amount of seats. The actual solution, at least insofar as I can see is to either move to some sort of direct democratic process or to give up on the idea of your local representative actually giving a crap about you and do proportional voting, ideally covering the whole electorate(nationally for federal seats, the whole state for state, etc), combined with a form of preference system. You get .2% of the population to agree with you, you get a congressman, you get 10%, you get a senator. Obviously you'd be voting for party platforms not people specifically, at least aside from the president, but barring some form of major scandal that's what we do now anyway. That would spell the instantaneous end of the two party monopoly of the congress. It'd end gerrymandering and also make it substantially more difficult for corporate interests to buy congressional votes(it'd be cheaper to run campaigns since you're essentially electing a policy platform not a person, and since there would be an expectation for congress critters belonging to a party to vote as a bloc you'd have to corrupt the platform of the entire party which would be much more likely to see them kicked out).
I don't know enough about the Canadian election to comment on that specifically, but the public option isn't massively popular even though we'd probably like it to be. In today's US you'd probably be lucky to actually get 40% voting in favor of it in a referendum, but that's entirely the point, elections aren't a referendum on a single issue, they are a choice of packages.
Voting as it is currently configured in the US allows the voters to pick the policy package that you want and the policy package picked by the most people in a specific geographic area gets a representative to argue for that policy package in congress, or to place a vote for president. The geographic areas are fairly arbitrary these days and the money required for running for office somewhat limits the choices available but voting still does exactly that. It works perfectly well (note perfectly well is not the same as perfectly the well changes the meaning). You can still do a write in vote and US citizens can, subject to some reasonable eligibility requirements run for office in any election they so choose. The system is not broken, let alone irrevocably broken. There are issues of course, mostly having to do with the fact that we pretend we want to vote for a local representative who we personally know as an individual but at the same time almost never actually cast our vote that way, but that's not the same thing as being broken.
The reason people like the GP pretend that voting is irrevocably broken is that their vote doesn't give them the result they want which is NOT what voting is supposed to do. If your favored policy position isn't the one which garners the most votes and it isn't guaranteed under the Constitution as it actually exists and is interpreted by the courts(as opposed to how so many folks on the internet think it exists) then you don't get that policy package. I realize that of course you know better than everyone else voting because they're all idiot sheeple, but that doesn't mean that what you want gets up. If there's no candidate espousing your particular policy package, run for office or find someone else who will run for office and support their campaign. It's fairly expensive since you've got to get your message out to a very large number of people, but federal law requires that the TV stations charge you the exact same rate as they charge any other candidate so you can do it.
Defeatist bullshit.
Voting works perfectly well, it's just not simple. Voting and policy have a related relationship. If policy will change voting then voting will change policy. If people won't change their vote over an issue then politicians won't change the issue based on votes. The core reality is that the vast majority of Americans don't give a crap about the NSA, certainly not enough to change their vote in the current political climate where the two parties are pushing contradictory world views.
For the most part this isn't surprising, the vast majority of the news time on the NSA scandal has been manufactured outrage about legitimate foreign targets and the repercussions of revealing the monitoring of those targets. There's been bugger all discussion about what metadata actually is, what it can reveal to the government, and what that means for regular people. People are also perfectly entitled, even if they actually understand all that, to not give a flying fuck.
Except you've got a unique identifier for an individual and there will always be a link between the voter and the ballot, even if it's just a time stamp.
On top of that, it's just good practice to assume that the people who develop and run any system like this have full access to the data no matter how much they promise you they don't, because even if they open the code writing a bypass or proxy is trivially easy.
Like I said, having the government know your political affiliations may or may not actually be a big deal, but we'd have to move forward with something like this assuming they will. They probably know now.
He committed plenty of crimes against justice, the fact that he also committed crimes against the police state doesn't actually change this.
Because it's an intelligence agency and their explicit purpose is to violate the laws of other countries?
Except it's not minutiae.
There's a very solid argument that Snowden was right in revealing the NSA's domestic intelligence gathering operations and that he should receive clemency for revealing that information. However there's also a very solid argument to be made that Snowden revealed information which he shouldn't have revealed and which went against the interests of the US and supported its enemies.
Security isn't the problem, security combined with anonymity is the problem.
Writing an electronic voting system is piss easy, there's some process issues with validating identification, but nothing that couldn't be resolved through the existing voter registration processes. The issue is that the only way it works without massive amounts of fraud is if enough data is stored to allow a person with access to said data to determine exactly who every single person voted for. It wouldn't be public knowledge so a lot of the actual issues that anonymous voting are designed to address would still not be an issue(your boss wouldn't know who you voted for), but voting wouldn't be anonymous.
Now we can have a robust discussion about whether we're willing to trade the absolute anonymity of our votes for a greater ease of voting, higher voter turnout, potential reductions in vote tampering etc, but that's the decision we'd be making. I'm a bit on the fence on this one, on the one hand I'm not ashamed of who I vote for, nor is either the US or the country I now live in a place where the government is in a position to do much evil with the knowledge of voting(most of the issues with pre-anonymous voting were more local than that), but anonymous voting was instituted for a very good reason and getting rid of it isn't something to be done on a whim.
Setting up an alarm which will work when you're at home is an order of complexity higher than anything even remotely discussed in this thread. You're essentially looking at setting up some form of perimeter alarm to make that happen and trying to ensure that it's not set off by every cat in the neighbourhood. I've never even heard of anyone setting up anything effective in a regular residence.