This is not completely true. Even back then, certain computers running skype could become "super nodes" that handled incoming connections to devices e.g. behind NAT. All you needed to do to wiretap was become one of these nodes, which wasn't hard to do.
But yes, if you made sure neither computer had NAT and used no super nodes it was possible to be pretty protected (except for the problem that PRISM is tied to the network hardware and can read anything anywhere on the internet).
They can't be made for less so if the value isn't there for you, stay out of that market (I never have or will bought a 3D TV for this reason). Buy your "dumb phone" and be happy.
The problem with Ballmer has always been that the man has literally no vision. I saw him speak once and have questions afterwards. He was actually a very good speaker but when the questions came the whole thing fell apart. Someone asked him to tell us his future direction for MS and his answer was some vague sci-fi nonsense.
Who does a talk, allows questions and doesn't realize this question will be asked? Or maybe he did and thought what he described was some kind of vision. The difference is, if you had asked Steve Jobs what his vision was he would have told you things that you would realize he could achieve and probably have some idea of the steps. What Ballmer said was completely generic and there was no reason to imagine MS needed to be involved in any of it. Worse, there wasn't really a compelling argument to even have what he was talking about (some kind of shitty voice recognition software that sends anything I say to the person I referred to by first name. And this I should trust to the inventors of the blue screen? Right).
Unless that particular farm is the US or North Korea. Both of which expect you to keep filing taxes on money you earn no matter where you earn it [1].
[1] Obviously there are exemptions for foreign earned income, but if you're in country with lower tax than the US (of which there are a fair amount) you could end up paying the US taxes on money that has literally nothing to do with them. Worse, if you're married to a native of that country and must file jointly in the new country then the US expects you to file jointly with them too and pay taxes on your spouses earning.
One advantage of Switzerland is that the people have a much stronger voice in telling their politicians to do exactly that (and in some cases, voting on the issues themselves).
There is truth to the fact that we can't completely choose who we work for. But none the less, you are responsible for the choices you make. If a man is repeatedly raped and abused as a child we still hold him accountable as a man who rapes someone.
I consider spending your life behind bars as a form of torture as well, or very close. It's certainly incredibly barbaric and I can't think of any advantage it has over a mental hospital.
No, I'm saying before you waste hours and hours doing tedious tasks on Turks, just get a job at McDonald's. It will pay more and probably be less tedious.
Those on earth would still have the biggest military and as soon as the martian colony made it clear that they didn't submit to which ever overlords claimed them, that army would be in space on its way to Mars.
What do you imagine will happen if Musk lands on Mars? Various countries will be claiming jurisdiction before he lands (assuming they don't already). They could simply call mars an extension of their country and hold him accountable to their laws for anything he does on Mars.
> For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage
What is the incentive to do an online job and set your prices at the lowest possible legal limit? Surely nearly anything else you could do with a computer would be more valuable? I mean, if you get good enough playing computer games you can make more than minimum wage.
Get rid of all the financial data passing to the US! Fuck them, they were the absolute worst player in the financial crisis. How dare they demand that everyone send them all the details of almost all financial dealings.
So if they're beyond help you want to torture them? Why not put them into a mental hospital and try to work out what went wrong? They'll still have a sucky life, but at least we might get something useful out of it.
Well, as I stated: in Smalltalk I can trace statement by statement (compound statements work flawlessly), make a change to a method and the debugger does the right thing. With SBCL under SLIME on Emacs I have to fiddle around with optimize statements over and over, recompile mutliple times before debugging does anything at all, at which point it still doesn't work very well. Randomly skipping over sexpressions, etc., etc. The experience is awful and every time I've ask on #lisp I've been called an idiot for trying to debug instead of tracing (not even exaggerating, sadly).
So you've compiled your entire OS from source with a compiler you verified to be safe? Because if you use a prebuilt OS how do you know it isn't already "root kitted" to not show certain traffic?
Actions have to be taken. Germany is spying on its citizens. The US is spying on everyone. It's pretty obvious where the priority should be here. Man I'm so sick of any fucking action anyone suggests getting met by a bunch of morons pointing out how it might be "hypocritical". Who gives a fuck?
Of course it fucking helps. Every step helps. Your suggestion is so useless to be irritating. "Oh, we can't say anything because there might be some asshole on the internet who could make it sound hypocritical. We best just keep doing fuck all because that's worked so well thus far".
There are many ways you could legally put an encrypted file on someone else's computer. But if you use actual KP then you're putting yourself at unnecessary risk. Better to have something innocent so if you get caught before you finish your sabotage you can use the key to decrypt the data and show it was innocent.
Maybe Obama really is an extremist muslim trying to destroy America? Things are getting bizarre enough that that no longer seems one of the craziest ideas I've heard.
And what possible plan of attack is there for fixing its problems? Voting clearly doesn't work. Violent revolution has about a 0.0000000001% chance of success (if I'm extremely generous). If you could get hundreds of thousands of the right people flooding all aspects of US politics you might have a chance, but that probably has worse odds than a revolution. I can't imagine any possible way to fix the US now.
All we can hope is that they will keep acting insane until the rest of the world simply unplugs from them. We can't stop their power but they can become the "North Korea" continent that we all shake our heads over but realize there's nothing that can be done that would be worth what it would cost.