It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

Recently, the US federal government shut down MegaUpload, a cloud-service offering from a company, based in Hong Kong, which allowed online backup and file sharing. The government raided the hosting premises and took the physical servers, taking the company effectively offline. They did this, nominally, because MegaUpload was used in large part to share copyrighted material; the recent setback to SOPA/PIPA, and the renewed need to demonstrate obedience to their big media overlords patrons, was probably another motivating factor. However, that wasn't the end of the story. Today, the government released an interesting statement, regarding the online assets of the customers hosted on MegaUpload. Apparently the government had released the servers, having copied whatever forensic evidence they "needed", and the data was back under nominal control of the company. However, as they also noted, the hosting companies might delete the data if MegaUpload did not pay their [monthly] ...

I listened to Obama's campaign speech State of the Union Address, and came away with an interesting perception: at a high level, I agree with a lot of what he's saying. There are plenty of reference to the speech/highlights on the web, but I'll focus on a few points, and point out where I agree with our socialist dictator socialist president, and where I differ. [on the housing bubble/pop] Regulators had looked the other way, or didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour. It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. I totally agree. There was no reason for the government to be cheer-leading the housing bubble, when they knew it was unsustainable. Regulators not only looked the other way, they led the charge in the other direction: recall Greenspan's praise of the "new and innovative" lending products wh...

There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there. Many of these have to do with governmental, or extra-governmental, organizations, and how they are following secret agendas to advance their own goals, to the detriment (or in indifference to) to well-being of the rest of humanity. I'd be surprised if there weren't a few which are true, but likewise I'd speculate that most are false, yet they continue to persist, and many are at least somewhat plausible. I postulate that one significant reason for this is that people, probably largely subconsciously, refuse to believe that the actual governments could be as bad as they actually are. Consider, for example, the Department of Homeland Security. You could certainly make the argument that, as part of a secret plot by the Skull and Bones fraternity (of which George Bush was a member), and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretense, DHS was setup as en evolution of police-suppression and monitoring in the US, and was designed to be a mo...