I'm still just confused by the terminology. In the explosion of marketing names for things in between a phone and a laptop, I guess I missed the "smartbook". I assume that's like a netbook, only retarded? Because if there's one thing I know about computer terminology, it's that the word "Smart" always means anything but.
Happy? Sometimes I don't use qualifiers but you can safely assume I never mean "absolutely always with no exceptions" unless I'm at least that specific about it.
Absolutely correct, very well written explanation. "Bits" cost the ISP essentially nothing. "Bits per second" cost them something. I'll only quibble on this:
With ISPs, they want to limit your use because the speeds they charge you for aren't actually the speeds they can deliver if everyone actually uses their connection.
Except they can't deliver those speeds even with their caps because all the "light" users downloading 10-100MB a month all hop on the net at the same time and saturate the available bandwidth. Whereas your overnight dl of 20GB is screaming fast because nobody else is using the pipe and there's plenty of bw to spare for anyone who is. Get rid of those heavy users, and the prime-time slowdown will still occur. Usage caps don't even come close to solving the problem they're allegedly supposed to.
Of course there is the totally separate issue of most ISPs also selling content that they would much rather you get via pay per view, etc than via the Internet...
Totally separate, but ultimately the real issue. Crap about providing quality internet service is just a diversion from the ISPs.
I, on the other hand, would rather have a faster speed and a cap. I don't download much stuff from home -- some email, some light web browsing. When I do, I want it to be fast. If I'm not planning on BTing a bunch of stuff, or watching tons of online video, then why sacrifice speed for a cap that I'll never hit?
There's no reason for you not to have the best of both worlds. It's not like a cap keeps the ISP's pipe from getting choked at prime time just by light users like yourself all logging in at once. And even if some people are downloading terrabytes of data in the middle of the night, your connection will still be fast.
The ISPs just want it to seem like you have to choose because they're greedy fuckers (who don't want you to download tv shows from Hulu instead of paying for their cable TV services).
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
No, that wouldn't be in our best interest though it would probably happen, even though the comparison to utilities fails for the exact same reason that fixed download caps are stupid in the first place, which is this: Bits are free. The total amount of power you use in a month directly affects the amount of fuel a power utility has to burn, or the amount of water you consumer affects how much water the utility has to treat. Bits on a connection aren't like that. If you "don't use" a bit on their fiber link to the backbone, that doesn't leave them with an extra bit, and if you use a bit, the next one is coming at the same time and same cost anyway. Combined with how most peering relationships work, other than a tiny amount of electricity in their routers, it doesn't make any difference to them if a bit is used or not and thus the total number of bits you consume is by itself meaningless.
Bits per second, aka bandwidth, is a different matter. That's what costs them money to provide, and money to improve. And no single user's cable modem/DSL connection is going to saturate their ISPs bandwidth even if it is used continuously. Rather it's during Internet Prime Time when everyone, even "light" users, hop on the net and download some Youtube videos which in aggregate suck up every last bps and make the ISP's pipe choke. It's Prime Time peak usage that makes the ISP have to go out and buy new hardware in order to keep their customers happy. Utilities have maximum rates too, which is why electricity is cheaper at night and the water company will have designated days for watering your lawn based on addresses. But they also have per-unit expenses. With an ISP, someone who downloads 100GB a month but does it all at 2am will cost them less than someone who downloads 20MB but does it all at 8pm.
So here's what makes sense with an ISP: You charge your user for bandwidth. "Unlimited" bits -- as in as many as you can download -- goes without saying because its irrelevant. During Prime Time, when the ISP's link is saturated, then everyone's performance degrades, ideally in proportion to the amount of bandwidth they payed for (as in if the link is at 120% utilization, everyone's bandwidth goes down by 18%). Thus just like with electricity everyone is encouraged to use off-peak bandwidth to get better performance. If prime time performance degrades too much, the ISP buys more hardware.
Unfortunately, while this is completely fair to everyone, it's not going to happen because 1) the ISPs probably believe they can make more money charging per-bit and 2) most of the biggest ISPs are also content providers, and thus for them total number of bits -- as in total number of movies/shows you could download without paying for their more expensive media services -- matters a great deal. That is what download caps are all about. Not conserving their precious bits.
Now just because the yanks have adopted the word it's considered unbritish. Crazy.
Crazy, yes, but also a long-standing tradition of spiting America through language. It began when the Brits were embarrassed by being unable to stop the colonial revolt, so they decided to start spelling "color" with a 'u' and acting like that was the proper way to spell it all along.
No matter what I do with my Bunsen Burner and Alchemy cookbook I can still only turn my SSD's into a molten pile of useless debris. Which smells.
Tips for speed production using only harddrive technology would be most welcome.
No, you're doing it right, because all they're really doing is cutting their speed with melted storage devices and I guess the melted SSDs blend in better so people don't notice as much. Seems crazy to me. I mean I know it's hard to get tons of pseudafed OTC these days, but I can't imagine they're saving a lot of effort or money this way.
I'd be willing to bet that MS cut their losses a while ago. SCO did the job MS set them up to do -- spread enough FUD to slow Linux adoptions while they scrambled to get Vista out at which point the world would be safe from free software hippies. The FUD part of the plan worked perfectly, the Vista ruling the world part not so much. Sure it'd be really nice if they had some way to delay Linux adoption until Windows 7, but SCO's usefulness as an anti-Linux FUD factor is long gone.
No, I'm pretty sure MS propped them up for as long as they were useful, and then happily walked away to leave SCO to swing.
As to why anyone would buy their UNIX business... Hell, I don't know, but I'm betting some bean counters figured that they could make some money off of SCO's existing customers. All I can say is good luck with that!
Valve is a publisher, Valve's Steam is a storefront. Valve publishes games and distributes them through Steam, Valve accepts games they didn't publish to distribute through Steam.
Valve basically is publishing your game for you, handling the distribution of it and the production of new copies.
Distribution is not publishing; publishers often use a separate distribution company to handle that part. And in the digital world, "production of new copies" is meaningless. That's no more publishing than Google cache.
Part of the problem seems to be that, historically, you'd have only one publisher, but now you can go to Steam, WiiWare, Microsoft's downloadable game thing, Sony's downloadable game thing, Direct-2-Drive, etc, and they can all publish your game for you.
Not a problem at all, because those are all stores. The difference is actually that before, you'd need a publisher both to get funding to make your game, and to talk to make deals with retailers to carry your game. Now there are retailers who make it easy for you to talk to them directly about selling your game.
Yeah, okay, I felt bad about forgetting post-Genesis Sega consoles, but I don't feel bad at all for neglecting to mention a 'console' that was essentially an arcade rig minus the cabinet with a price for both the hardware and the games to match.
So with no soldiers to kill, it will be who runs out of money or civilians or infrastructure...
I agree it's better. Until now we were watching war on TV between mercenaries. Now we will hear our little Johnny at school got blasted away war may not be a great spectator sport.
Except that war between major powers capable of fielding robot armies is the least likely kind of war that we'll be fighting. In particular it's not the war that these drones are being built for.
In that context, it'll be our robots vs their fighters (and the civilians they hide amongst), with them largely unable to attack us on our home soil. When they don't have to suppress photos of soldiers' caskets returning home, because there are no dead soldiers, the popularity of the war will only be higher. And when they do finally manage to launch an attack, and Little Johnny is blown up in an act of terrorism, I doubt the response will be to pull back but rather to increase kill-bot production.
I mean, there is some merit here. One easy to identify reason for the difference between European and US views on war is that none of our cities were carpet-bombed. Certainly being directly affected by war as opposed to watching videos on CNN means you're less likely to start it.
Just... I don't think fighting with robot drones is going to have that affect. Anyone that advanced would already have the ability to attack our cities even if we had actual soldiers in their territory and thus would probably do so. The last purely soldier-on-soldier war we were involved in was WWI. Okay if you don't count Gulf War I.
Well at a technological level, it's just a matter of fact that it is not necessary for the CA to have your private key. All they need to do their job is your public key, and something signed with your private key. When your public key successfully decrypts the signed message, they then know you possess the matching private key. Then they verify your actual identity credentials to whatever extent they want (has nothing to do with encryption), and bam, they can do their job: Attest that your public key does in fact belong to you.
Anyway, I don't know what sources said that the TTP/CA generates keys for you, but how about this page from Verisign on how to generate a Certificate Signing Request, which is what you send them in your application for a certificate. Notice how it explicitly states (and gives Linux command lines for) generating your own public/private key pair. You use it to sign your request, and there you go.
Nope, I don't buy it. Once fusion hits positive returns, there will be more money spent on it, to develop it to practical status. And the lab that first hits positive return will go down in history, famous forever.
And the researchers could get a Nobel Prize and could name their price for a job with a company building commercial fusion plants, and...
Yeah, score one for common sense there. Mod the AC up.
The last I'd heard from them, they had built a small module that could do inertial fusion, and could fire rapidly and for many cycles. They could be stacked to increase power, and in theory all they had to do (simplifying of course) was stack a bunch of these modules to make practical power generation, and a test product was supposed to be done in a few years.
Sadly, being small self-contained boxes and not a research toy they don't look nearly as awesome as the original.
But yeah. Bussard could work too. In any case, ITER seems like the real long shot.
Well, I can see that got absolutely nowhere, what with the bitter, humorless reply. The point was that...ah hell I'm not writing that much. Go watch that one part of "A Few Good Men" again.
No shit you got nowhere with that pack of lies. Where was the humor supposed to be -- your delusional assertion that the sheepdog can't harm the sheep, that "the world can't work any other way"? Ha ha, hilarious! I know what your point is, and it's pointless. It's naive and stupid.
Why don't you go watch "A Few Good Men" and while Jack is ranting and you're nodding your head like a good little sheep, imagine that instead of some Gomer Pile recruits who can't hack it in the force and could endanger their comrades, it was an innocent civilian on the street who got the "Code Red" from some men in blue. You think Ol' Jack was defending that? You think he was saying that because they are the good guys, they can do whatever bad shit they want and it's okay?
It is you who can't handle the truth, sheep. Your comforting self-delusion is disgusting. You don't protect the people's freedom by violating the people's freedom. There is no justification for the NSAs behavior, your attempt to find one is pathetic. Just keep your eyes shut, sheep.
No, you have been misinformed. I can see how a couple sentences in that explanation could be misleading, but certifying that you possess the private key associated with your public key does not require the certificate authority to have your private key, and the phrase "...private key, which is also provided to the user" should not be construed to mean the certificate authority is creating your private key for you.
You and only you possess your private keys. Nobody else, not the certificate authority or anyone else, needs to have your private key for PKI to work. And they don't.
We know that the sheep live in denial, which is what makes them sheep.
Indeed.
The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.
If you believe that, then you're just a sheep who has accepted the existence of the wolf and the need for the sheepdog, but can't handle the uncomfortable truth that a sheepdog improperly trained or improperly supervised has the same sharp teeth and taste for meat as the wolf, and that some sheepdogs are really just wolves that can do the right tricks to get the rancher to let them in the gate.
So you replace the comforting lie that the wolf will never come with the comforting lie that the sheepdog is a perfect shield against the wolf that will never turn its fangs on you.
And then when the sheepdog shows its true colors and bites you, your braying goes unheeded. You find that the rancher, the other sheepdogs, and even other sheep all support the wolf-in-sheepdogs-clothing. They all say you're a silly sheep for saying bad things about the sheepdog, because sheepdogs keep wolves away, and a sheepdog is by definition not a wolf so how could the sheepdog have done something bad?
This is exactly what's happening here. The sheepdogs are turning on the sheep, and some of the sheep are defending them. You see, in real life, you can't tell a sheepdog from a wolf by looking at them. You try to get sheepdogs, but wolves are attracted to the same positions where they can abuse the power and authority over the sheep given them by the rancher (and because in reality these are humans, not canines, their nature as one or the other is not fixed). Thus, we have checks, balances, and oversight over the workings of the sheepdogs.
Oone of the most basic is the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. And the NSA is flagrantly violating it. It is violating one of the basic freedoms of our country that the sheepdogs are supposed to be protecting. At that point they are not sheepdogs. They are wolves given the authority of sheepdogs.
So let me know when the NSA is forced to cease this behavior, and when the agents responsible for doing it and the supervisors who authorized it are all held accountable, because in the meantime "the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep... The world cannot work any other way" is a farcical lie. And your self-delusion is made all the more apparent by trying to defend the wolves-in-sheepdogs-clothing with this blatant lie, in an article where the proof of its falsehood is staring us in the face.
Slashdot Mirror
Shame too, because it's a surprisingly nice place to live when it isn't winter
Yeah, I've been there, and I gotta say, those three days are awesome. I hear summer falls on a Saturday this year so the Alaskans should be happy!
I live downtown in a major international city
What city could that be? Jerusalem? Berlin in the 80s? Uh... Hong Kong, I guess? Come on, throw me a bone here...
I'm still just confused by the terminology. In the explosion of marketing names for things in between a phone and a laptop, I guess I missed the "smartbook". I assume that's like a netbook, only retarded? Because if there's one thing I know about computer terminology, it's that the word "Smart" always means anything but.
Huh? Relocate what people? The article mentions that much of this property is already empty/abandoned.
Won't somebody think of the squatters?!
What could possibly go wrong dumping sodium and potassium into the ocean? Who cares! What could go awesome? Everything about it!
We need to start on this plan now.
s/is/can be/;
Happy? Sometimes I don't use qualifiers but you can safely assume I never mean "absolutely always with no exceptions" unless I'm at least that specific about it.
In both of those scenarios the difficulty stays constant - only perceptions change.
Which, as anyone who isn't a slashdot poster already knew, was exactly what they meant.
Absolutely correct, very well written explanation. "Bits" cost the ISP essentially nothing. "Bits per second" cost them something. I'll only quibble on this:
With ISPs, they want to limit your use because the speeds they charge you for aren't actually the speeds they can deliver if everyone actually uses their connection.
Except they can't deliver those speeds even with their caps because all the "light" users downloading 10-100MB a month all hop on the net at the same time and saturate the available bandwidth. Whereas your overnight dl of 20GB is screaming fast because nobody else is using the pipe and there's plenty of bw to spare for anyone who is. Get rid of those heavy users, and the prime-time slowdown will still occur. Usage caps don't even come close to solving the problem they're allegedly supposed to.
Of course there is the totally separate issue of most ISPs also selling content that they would much rather you get via pay per view, etc than via the Internet...
Totally separate, but ultimately the real issue. Crap about providing quality internet service is just a diversion from the ISPs.
I, on the other hand, would rather have a faster speed and a cap. I don't download much stuff from home -- some email, some light web browsing. When I do, I want it to be fast. If I'm not planning on BTing a bunch of stuff, or watching tons of online video, then why sacrifice speed for a cap that I'll never hit?
There's no reason for you not to have the best of both worlds. It's not like a cap keeps the ISP's pipe from getting choked at prime time just by light users like yourself all logging in at once. And even if some people are downloading terrabytes of data in the middle of the night, your connection will still be fast.
The ISPs just want it to seem like you have to choose because they're greedy fuckers (who don't want you to download tv shows from Hulu instead of paying for their cable TV services).
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
No, that wouldn't be in our best interest though it would probably happen, even though the comparison to utilities fails for the exact same reason that fixed download caps are stupid in the first place, which is this: Bits are free. The total amount of power you use in a month directly affects the amount of fuel a power utility has to burn, or the amount of water you consumer affects how much water the utility has to treat. Bits on a connection aren't like that. If you "don't use" a bit on their fiber link to the backbone, that doesn't leave them with an extra bit, and if you use a bit, the next one is coming at the same time and same cost anyway. Combined with how most peering relationships work, other than a tiny amount of electricity in their routers, it doesn't make any difference to them if a bit is used or not and thus the total number of bits you consume is by itself meaningless.
Bits per second, aka bandwidth, is a different matter. That's what costs them money to provide, and money to improve. And no single user's cable modem/DSL connection is going to saturate their ISPs bandwidth even if it is used continuously. Rather it's during Internet Prime Time when everyone, even "light" users, hop on the net and download some Youtube videos which in aggregate suck up every last bps and make the ISP's pipe choke. It's Prime Time peak usage that makes the ISP have to go out and buy new hardware in order to keep their customers happy. Utilities have maximum rates too, which is why electricity is cheaper at night and the water company will have designated days for watering your lawn based on addresses. But they also have per-unit expenses. With an ISP, someone who downloads 100GB a month but does it all at 2am will cost them less than someone who downloads 20MB but does it all at 8pm.
So here's what makes sense with an ISP: You charge your user for bandwidth. "Unlimited" bits -- as in as many as you can download -- goes without saying because its irrelevant. During Prime Time, when the ISP's link is saturated, then everyone's performance degrades, ideally in proportion to the amount of bandwidth they payed for (as in if the link is at 120% utilization, everyone's bandwidth goes down by 18%). Thus just like with electricity everyone is encouraged to use off-peak bandwidth to get better performance. If prime time performance degrades too much, the ISP buys more hardware.
Unfortunately, while this is completely fair to everyone, it's not going to happen because 1) the ISPs probably believe they can make more money charging per-bit and 2) most of the biggest ISPs are also content providers, and thus for them total number of bits -- as in total number of movies/shows you could download without paying for their more expensive media services -- matters a great deal. That is what download caps are all about. Not conserving their precious bits.
They got another? Things are looking up! :)
Like, say, Cooking Mama: British Edition
Use the Wii remote to drop the beef into the boiling water! 3...2...1... Go! Done! You win! Game over.
Now just because the yanks have adopted the word it's considered unbritish. Crazy.
Crazy, yes, but also a long-standing tradition of spiting America through language. It began when the Brits were embarrassed by being unable to stop the colonial revolt, so they decided to start spelling "color" with a 'u' and acting like that was the proper way to spell it all along.
No matter what I do with my Bunsen Burner and Alchemy cookbook I can still only turn my SSD's into a molten pile of useless debris. Which smells.
Tips for speed production using only harddrive technology would be most welcome.
No, you're doing it right, because all they're really doing is cutting their speed with melted storage devices and I guess the melted SSDs blend in better so people don't notice as much. Seems crazy to me. I mean I know it's hard to get tons of pseudafed OTC these days, but I can't imagine they're saving a lot of effort or money this way.
I'd be willing to bet that MS cut their losses a while ago. SCO did the job MS set them up to do -- spread enough FUD to slow Linux adoptions while they scrambled to get Vista out at which point the world would be safe from free software hippies. The FUD part of the plan worked perfectly, the Vista ruling the world part not so much. Sure it'd be really nice if they had some way to delay Linux adoption until Windows 7, but SCO's usefulness as an anti-Linux FUD factor is long gone.
No, I'm pretty sure MS propped them up for as long as they were useful, and then happily walked away to leave SCO to swing.
As to why anyone would buy their UNIX business... Hell, I don't know, but I'm betting some bean counters figured that they could make some money off of SCO's existing customers. All I can say is good luck with that!
But Valve is also a publisher, right?
Valve is a publisher, Valve's Steam is a storefront. Valve publishes games and distributes them through Steam, Valve accepts games they didn't publish to distribute through Steam.
Valve basically is publishing your game for you, handling the distribution of it and the production of new copies.
Distribution is not publishing; publishers often use a separate distribution company to handle that part. And in the digital world, "production of new copies" is meaningless. That's no more publishing than Google cache.
Part of the problem seems to be that, historically, you'd have only one publisher, but now you can go to Steam, WiiWare, Microsoft's downloadable game thing, Sony's downloadable game thing, Direct-2-Drive, etc, and they can all publish your game for you.
Not a problem at all, because those are all stores. The difference is actually that before, you'd need a publisher both to get funding to make your game, and to talk to make deals with retailers to carry your game. Now there are retailers who make it easy for you to talk to them directly about selling your game.
Yeah, okay, I felt bad about forgetting post-Genesis Sega consoles, but I don't feel bad at all for neglecting to mention a 'console' that was essentially an arcade rig minus the cabinet with a price for both the hardware and the games to match.
So with no soldiers to kill, it will be who runs out of money or civilians or infrastructure ...
I agree it's better. Until now we were watching war on TV between mercenaries.
Now we will hear our little Johnny at school got blasted away war may not be a great spectator sport.
Except that war between major powers capable of fielding robot armies is the least likely kind of war that we'll be fighting. In particular it's not the war that these drones are being built for.
In that context, it'll be our robots vs their fighters (and the civilians they hide amongst), with them largely unable to attack us on our home soil. When they don't have to suppress photos of soldiers' caskets returning home, because there are no dead soldiers, the popularity of the war will only be higher. And when they do finally manage to launch an attack, and Little Johnny is blown up in an act of terrorism, I doubt the response will be to pull back but rather to increase kill-bot production.
I mean, there is some merit here. One easy to identify reason for the difference between European and US views on war is that none of our cities were carpet-bombed. Certainly being directly affected by war as opposed to watching videos on CNN means you're less likely to start it.
Just... I don't think fighting with robot drones is going to have that affect. Anyone that advanced would already have the ability to attack our cities even if we had actual soldiers in their territory and thus would probably do so. The last purely soldier-on-soldier war we were involved in was WWI. Okay if you don't count Gulf War I.
"countless billions of stars in the universe all doing nuclear fusion...and not a single one of them is shaped like a donut!â
Bah! Hadn't he ever heard of Bagelgeuse?!
Well at a technological level, it's just a matter of fact that it is not necessary for the CA to have your private key. All they need to do their job is your public key, and something signed with your private key. When your public key successfully decrypts the signed message, they then know you possess the matching private key. Then they verify your actual identity credentials to whatever extent they want (has nothing to do with encryption), and bam, they can do their job: Attest that your public key does in fact belong to you.
Anyway, I don't know what sources said that the TTP/CA generates keys for you, but how about this page from Verisign on how to generate a Certificate Signing Request, which is what you send them in your application for a certificate. Notice how it explicitly states (and gives Linux command lines for) generating your own public/private key pair. You use it to sign your request, and there you go.
Nope, I don't buy it. Once fusion hits positive returns, there will be more money spent on it, to develop it to practical status. And the lab that first hits positive return will go down in history, famous forever.
And the researchers could get a Nobel Prize and could name their price for a job with a company building commercial fusion plants, and...
Yeah, score one for common sense there. Mod the AC up.
Personally I'm gunning for Sandia Lab's Z-Pinch device, though mostly because the original looked so unbelievably fucking cool.
The last I'd heard from them, they had built a small module that could do inertial fusion, and could fire rapidly and for many cycles. They could be stacked to increase power, and in theory all they had to do (simplifying of course) was stack a bunch of these modules to make practical power generation, and a test product was supposed to be done in a few years.
Sadly, being small self-contained boxes and not a research toy they don't look nearly as awesome as the original.
But yeah. Bussard could work too. In any case, ITER seems like the real long shot.
Well, I can see that got absolutely nowhere, what with the bitter, humorless reply. The point was that...ah hell I'm not writing that much. Go watch that one part of "A Few Good Men" again.
No shit you got nowhere with that pack of lies. Where was the humor supposed to be -- your delusional assertion that the sheepdog can't harm the sheep, that "the world can't work any other way"? Ha ha, hilarious! I know what your point is, and it's pointless. It's naive and stupid.
Why don't you go watch "A Few Good Men" and while Jack is ranting and you're nodding your head like a good little sheep, imagine that instead of some Gomer Pile recruits who can't hack it in the force and could endanger their comrades, it was an innocent civilian on the street who got the "Code Red" from some men in blue. You think Ol' Jack was defending that? You think he was saying that because they are the good guys, they can do whatever bad shit they want and it's okay?
It is you who can't handle the truth, sheep. Your comforting self-delusion is disgusting. You don't protect the people's freedom by violating the people's freedom. There is no justification for the NSAs behavior, your attempt to find one is pathetic. Just keep your eyes shut, sheep.
No, you have been misinformed. I can see how a couple sentences in that explanation could be misleading, but certifying that you possess the private key associated with your public key does not require the certificate authority to have your private key, and the phrase "...private key, which is also provided to the user" should not be construed to mean the certificate authority is creating your private key for you.
You and only you possess your private keys. Nobody else, not the certificate authority or anyone else, needs to have your private key for PKI to work. And they don't.
We know that the sheep live in denial, which is what makes them sheep.
Indeed.
The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.
If you believe that, then you're just a sheep who has accepted the existence of the wolf and the need for the sheepdog, but can't handle the uncomfortable truth that a sheepdog improperly trained or improperly supervised has the same sharp teeth and taste for meat as the wolf, and that some sheepdogs are really just wolves that can do the right tricks to get the rancher to let them in the gate.
So you replace the comforting lie that the wolf will never come with the comforting lie that the sheepdog is a perfect shield against the wolf that will never turn its fangs on you.
And then when the sheepdog shows its true colors and bites you, your braying goes unheeded. You find that the rancher, the other sheepdogs, and even other sheep all support the wolf-in-sheepdogs-clothing. They all say you're a silly sheep for saying bad things about the sheepdog, because sheepdogs keep wolves away, and a sheepdog is by definition not a wolf so how could the sheepdog have done something bad?
This is exactly what's happening here. The sheepdogs are turning on the sheep, and some of the sheep are defending them. You see, in real life, you can't tell a sheepdog from a wolf by looking at them. You try to get sheepdogs, but wolves are attracted to the same positions where they can abuse the power and authority over the sheep given them by the rancher (and because in reality these are humans, not canines, their nature as one or the other is not fixed). Thus, we have checks, balances, and oversight over the workings of the sheepdogs.
Oone of the most basic is the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. And the NSA is flagrantly violating it. It is violating one of the basic freedoms of our country that the sheepdogs are supposed to be protecting. At that point they are not sheepdogs. They are wolves given the authority of sheepdogs.
So let me know when the NSA is forced to cease this behavior, and when the agents responsible for doing it and the supervisors who authorized it are all held accountable, because in the meantime "the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep... The world cannot work any other way" is a farcical lie. And your self-delusion is made all the more apparent by trying to defend the wolves-in-sheepdogs-clothing with this blatant lie, in an article where the proof of its falsehood is staring us in the face.