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The problem is that when consumer make bad decisions (i.e. don't go to the doctor and develop serious health problems), the government in the end still has to foot the bill. You can't turn people away from emergency rooms and have them die on the street.

As I assume tptacek would also say, the specifics of the "direct access" are rather a big deal. If the access is constrained to NSLs approved by judges in regulated quantity, you have a legal process. Perhaps there is no independent oversight or accountability to the public at large, yet you still have legality.

However, if any analyst can at whim look at the info associated with any gmail account / Facebook user / etc. then you have a clearly extra-legal approach with absolutely no accountability.

Also, there is a significant difference between capacity and use. If a analyst or a sys admin for the NSA has capacity to view things but does not actually have permission from the NSA to use that capability absent an NSL, then

To be honest, to date nothing has emerged that makes it seem that the NSA has this sort of capacity, except when it comes to Verizon phone calls, although I don't think we know much if anything about the NSA's downstream capabilities when it comes to major Silicon Valley firms.

In short, I assume that Google, Facebook, etc. are telling an important truth when they say that access is limited to legal processes. Whether or not the NSA also has and uses downstream access to similar data is another question altogether.

I think this is a bit of a cheap shot at tptacek so will defend him in his absence.

First, when it comes to programs by US intelligence agencies (both previously known, currently revealed, and yet to be revealed) there are multiple categories of evaluation: namely, ethical, legal, constitutional.

Generally speaking, everything the Feds are doing is legal in the sense that it follows a specific legal process that was setup in the scare over terrorism, which both expanded the powers of the executive branch and created "shadow courts" which presumably provide some checks and balances in the system. Of course, we can't really know how reliably these work since the process for National Security Letters and other aspects itself is secret. Nonetheless, there are specific process in places that seem generally speaking to be followed. How often there are "exceptions" to this process is difficult to ascertain, and has not really been a focus in the present debate.

When it comes to constitutionality, it is a hotly debated topic among Americans partially because it was the bedrock of the American state, but an increasing number of Americans (including justices) either aren't knowledgable or don't care about the specifics of the constitution. This is a huge topic, but it is sufficient to say that something can be unconstitutional (even blatantly so) and nonetheless be legal. In this specific case, it is difficult to know how or whether the protection against "unreasonable" searches includes storage of metadata associated with phonecalls that can be searched by an analyst.

Then, more broadly, there are a wide representation of ethical issues. For example, it is completely legal and constitutional to spy on non US citizens, but are there any boundaries that should be set on what is and is not acceptable behavior? My strongly held view is that, at least when it comes to US hq'ed companies with a large foreign user base that they provisions in places for non US citizens should at the very least be the same as those for US citizens. However, saying that something should exist and implementing it are two different things, and one is considerably more difficult than the other.

So this is all basically to defend tptacek and say that it is important to differentiate when accusing the US government of "crimes." In other words, there are lots of unethical things that you can do that are perfectly legal.

Fascinating. My preferred choice for transmitting arcane knowledge is poetry (in fact, there is a long tradition of exchanging alchemical poetry in cipher).

Additionally, it is worth noting that the weakest target is very often the human element. Although this was noted by Mitnick in his "hacking" (which generally was just clever social engineering), it is equally true when governments are targeting you. The stasi (or other pernicious organizations organized to carry out state censorship) could easily have someone smeared in the press, dismissed from their job, or many other means short of official imprisonment.

To the point of encryption, as noted by the NSA (inclusive of present revelations), it actually makes you a target for state surveillance. This is a bizarre catch 22. If you are using facebook and "rah rah-ing" about Obama or the latest political fever you probably are at very little current risk of long term data retention. The government doesn't care about you. If you slip into politically suspect views and/or start encrypting your messages simply because you don't want the government to read them, you attract government attention, including the likely possibility that your communications will be retained.

Moreover (and this is where it gets scary, even if it wasn't already), the likelihood is that the many people that are part of your social graph (even if you aren't involved in social networks, some friends likely are and have probably shared their email contacts at the very least), governments can very easily figure out your social circles, and how suspect they may be from any standpoint that the government cares about.

Today this may be "terrorism" (itself a vague term, but one that at least nominally includes the threat of violent acts), tomorrow it may simply be having politically incorrect opinions of some variety. As noted by many, even the nominal but legally actionable protections for American citizens have been eroded to the point that the executive branch can hold anyone in infinite detention without trial. A world without borders has become the panopticon, a jail where we are bound by ever-peering eyes of our peers.

"What you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law" -- even if you said it 10 years ago when you were drunk in a private message on Facebook.

Welcome to the Brave New World.

2 minutes per trip. 35 scales per trip. 700 scales needed. That works out to 40 minutes per Alien Alloy.

I guess it depends on what you consider unreasonable. I don't usually play games w/ a large amount of grinding.

Very cool, thanks for your response.

Btw, do you know any other online sources for good minimalist games (text adventures or otherwise) ?

I'm trying to use some as a way to teach programming.

Ok, so I just played through your game since you put the link here.

Qs:

(1) are you supposed to interact w/ the NPCs? Only substantial interaction I noticed is when you turn on the lighthouse and the pirates run away

(2) Looks like you don't need to solve any of the puzzles to win the game?

(3) Seem to be a lot of unneeded items also?

In general, a bit confused. I never did anything w/ the brick, the rake, the racket, the music, or moby dick, and yet managed to win the game it seems.

Despite attending an "activist" undergrad school, I've never attended any protests -- since I'm out of the US at the moment I can't attend this one even though I would like to. But here's the question, what can be done to yoke a protest and popular frustration to a particular implementable agenda? It seems that there is a natural tendency in these things to something I can only call "dumb populism" with the loudest people generally making their way most easily to the microphone. I don't know if this is inevitable, but it certainly seems the norm. Any thoughts?

You mean I can't build any more huts...

I almost cried...

Maybe you could have live competition between villages on other worlds? For example, if you and I start at the same time, we can each see the number of villagers of the other person and houses, etc. built so far.

Yes, ironically I didn't figure this out until I had already beat the game.

Modding would be fun, could even be refactored as a "minimalist game framework." No particular mods come to mind ATM though. Any ideas?

What better sources of teeth and scales are you referring to? Harvesting them from wandering beasts seems extraordinarily tedious and time-consuming. Converting to them from fur requires an incredible amount of fur.

Maybe you just don't have the health upgrade. Once you get 20 health per cured meat the ferral beasts are much easier to keep at bay.

Dunno, but if you are a frequent online gamer you probably know that 'minimialism' is a frequently used tag over at Kongregate and that there many other minimalist games that are not text adventures.

Notable examples:

Momiga (http://www.kongregate.com/games/Rogerup/momiga) - one button, one dot

Midas (http://www.kongregate.com/games/wanderlands/midas)

This is not a minimalist game (http://stormalligator.com/this-is-not/)

Pretentious game (http://www.kongregate.com/games/keybol/pretentious-game)

I'm not sure if this is cheating, but I set auto-clicking on the buttons with the console and left it open in its own tab so that I could do other things while my minions created steel. Certainly my time spent was considerably less than 4 hours.

You didn't miss anything. There is no cool end, just a reset (sadly IMO).

However, "End game" usually refers to the gameplay at the end of the game, specifically in chess where you try to force mate with only a few pieces.

The Ferral beast is more easily defeated than you think, simply an iron sword plus a steel sword fairly easily does the trick. Add in a rifle and/or laser rifle and you can finish him off quickly every time.

Riffs:

<<Why don't more painters have hacking jobs?>>

I think pg is right in highlighting age here. Generally speaking you need to get started young. Beyond this, there is a natural synchronicity in all "arts" when engaged at a high level, which is why the renaissance produced true "renaissance men." The trick is to start early but resist the all too common impulse to mediocrity in the context of specialization -- pg's association with elite institutions certainly helps here.

<<What should I read to learn more about history?>>

I find pg slightly misguided here. One of the world's best historians was my former advisor (Martin van Creveld), and his technique was to find a subject that he could fall in love with and immerse himself in it passionately for a year or two (ultimately however long it took him to write a book about that subject). I think a strong passion for a particular subject can make up for the otherwise dense and uninteresting material. Looking for books that make things "exciting" is a recipe for an understanding of history that is as piecemeal as one's own reading habits.

<<Couldn't you add something equivalent to Lisp macros to languages like Perl or Python?>>

Yes, of course. One could also quote the apocryphal McCarthy / Norwig story here.

<<How can I avoid turning into a pointy-haired boss?>>

Starts off generally correct and "startups" are certainly one solution to this problem, but I'm not sure they are the only solution. For instance, this basically assumes that your startup can exist as a flat organizational structure with only hyper-intelligent and interesting people. But what if, heaven forbid, you need to add a customer service division?

The truth is that really smart people generally don't want to be middle managers in large firms. The work isn't that interesting, and the compensation is to a certain degree adjusted more highly to compensate people for walking around in suits and clucking their tongues all day. Rather than pointing finger with the negative stereotype ("pointy-haired boss"), I think it is more appropriate to think of these people as corporate trash men, compensated more highly because of a generally undesirable job (after all, managing Dilbert and Dogbert probably isn't a recipe for life long engagement).

<<I'm about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?>>

Agree. Probably a lot that could be added here about how to engage personally with students, although this goes beyond mere "teaching" to "mentorship"

<<Two startups want to hire me. Which should I choose?>>

Perhaps strangely, I generally disagree with the principle that you should go with the startup that is more likely to succeed. I think you should find the subject that you are personally most passionate about and pursue it with all the passion you have. Since you give a sh*t (a rather rare things these days), you will naturally become very good at that particularly area. Only then find startups in your particular area of interest. They should all want to hire you. Then, of course, you will pick the one that matches your passion, which should be the one that is executing most successfully towards their stated goal.

<<How can I become really good at Lisp programming?>>

I'm not very good at Lisp...

<<What philosophy books would you recommend?>>

Very tricky topic and a bit "recursive," in that pg references "what philosophy is supposed to be teaching" without defining it -- this in itself obviously a "philosophical" question.

Also, it's not at all clear from the response what pg has actually read. There are quite obviously a lot of genres of philosophy. Some of them, even if you consider them complete nonsense (like books of canon law derived from dogmatic theological principles), are extraordinarily useful to read if you care about understanding the progress of history, inclusive of why dogmatic patterns of thinking about particular subjects dominate at many period in time.

That said, I think everyone should at the very least have a basic knowledge of the Socratic dialogues, which are an excellent process in stimulating the mind and evaluating one's own presuppositions -- the approach of the majority of people is anything but the "examined life," and the only process of moving beyond the basic assumptions of a particular age is to examine them in the light of reason.

<<I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn?>>

Generally agree with pg, but I think the plethora of online learning aids means that it is better to learn the fundamentals on your own or in a week long course (i.e. how to build your first rails app), then "apprentice" yourself at a very low wage until you grasp the fundamentals. Also, I don't think this is a question merely of "smarts" but of an engineering/builder disposition, which some people simply don't have. I don't think "answering phones" is going to help you get that disposition.

This actually leads to a general critique of pg's "philosophy." Startups may be a very good solution to some problems, but are are certainly not a panacea for all problems. Ipso facto, it is important to more carefully define the problem scope and characteristics before defining the solution.

Very true, and I think is great that Garry here is including a little historical perspective on this. Civil liberties are something that have to be fought for by every generation. It may be a battle that can never be won completely, but if you stop fighting it you always lose your freedoms one by one.

That said, this White House petition makes me nervous since we still don't know the extent of what Snowden leaked.

If that's what it means, it is a bit misleading since it is combining two other services (Rhapsody and Napster) against one (Apple).

"They had 300,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over 2 million songs. (Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)"

Something about this does not compute.

My impression is that "hacker" is a word that used to have a fairly specific meaning that has become more general over time, to the point that the differentiation between "software engineer" and "hacker" is more a question of how you self-designate rather than what you do. That said, "Hacker" is a bit counter-cultural. "Engineer" implies that you think of what you do as an extension of engineering. "Developer" is not particularly specific.

Re: over-generalizing, I described what I think is a trend. You might argue that it is less pronounced than I seemed to indicate, but you can't legitimately say I'm over-generalizing (i.e. all trends are ipso facto "generalizations" of some sort)

Generally agree.

I've actually been quite surprised by myself the more I make inroads into "hacker" culture. Many software engineers I know seem far more concerned about the precise incoming dollar volume than very many people I know from my ostensibly "elite" background, Many old friends went wandering around the world attempting to start microfinancing initiatives, work for the Peace Corp, or who dedicated themselves to teaching children in the inner cities for little or no pay.

Within the hacker world it often seems like a need for self-validation vis-a-vis jocks (a major theme in pg's own Hackers and Painters), of which the entire game is playing "catching up" by accumulating enough "fuck you" money.

That sort of anti-social and anti-societal aspect has actually become more and more mainstream, as we see the success of YCombinator and the greater popularity of reddit, etc. but there definitely is a dark side to it, which goes beyond passive or active promotion of "jailbait" and to the core of our own identities as human beings.

I think that people who have to teach things to other people, or engage in some way with broader society, learn necessarily the value of community and should be honored for their contributions to such. The hacker mentality, sadly, often values only linear metrics like lines of code or benjamins in the bank.

Very sad. Silicon Valley is not what it used to be (a major reason why I left).

I agree "if it is true," but the interview makes him look like a fairly smart sort of fellow and he has obviously been considering this for a long time (5+ years), so at the very least he's probably thought through the details more than anyone currently discovering this story via Hacker News.

A bizarre play by Snowden, who seems to have gone to Hong Kong in order to be in the strange space that currently exists between the US and China right now, where despite the normal standard of extradition from HK to the US, there exists the possibility of a Chinese veto. Here, I think Snowden is primarily stalling for time, saying that if China helps his cause (i.e. not allowing him to be extradited) he might do something that helps China.

I don't really know how I feel about this either ethically or as a strategy, but it certainly could play out to Snowden's personal advantage after a bit of time on the international stage. I'd imagine some pretty senior level guys will get involved, and they will decide what to do with Snowden.

That said, regardless of his ultimate fate, this does seem like a legitimate and probably successful tactic for him to buy himself a bit more time in Hong Kong. The Chinese government will probably want to know what he knows, but they will presumably also have to wait for him to reveal what he is willing to over time.

Keep in mind Snowden has already hinted he knows some pretty "dirty secrets" and given his crypto background, etc. it is possible he has some sort of other treasure trove of documents that he hasn't handed over to the reporters yet -- this is sort of an ugly and dangerous game, but I'm sure he knew that from the moment he set things in motion.

This hilarious comment makes up for a lot of the NSA related garbage I've had the misfortune to read recently. Thanks!

Completely agree. Every so often I promote hacker news through twitter, such that my own "brand image" is associated with Hacker News. Today I am completely ashamed to be associated with this twaddle. A couple of days ago a long discourse defending child pornography, today this stuff. Time to start with a new slate!

Exactly. Note that despite the plethora of articles, there is virtually no new content. The issue is an important one, both the breaking story and the details, but layers of political discourse on top of them don't strike me as particularly useful or what I used to consider "HN-worthy," nor do any of them seem likely to produce positive change (i.e. either a coordinated response to a large problem or an alternative system).

So at this point I am also considering leaving HN for good.