Russia banning Bitcoin will have relatively little effect on the use of Bitcoin there since enforcement is highly selective and not dependant on established law.

OTOH if Russia bans it, the US (and its hangers-on) will have to think twice about banning Bitcoin. Heaven forbid the old foe gets it right, and first. Absent strong motivation, the US does not want to be seen as supporting Russia, particularly not ideologically on some matter of principle.

foot ... aim ... fire!

Product "upgrades" always sound compelling to software "product managers" but are always less-so to customers. The managers do not suffer the upgrade costs (which are always far greater than relicence costs, especially when backwards compatibility is not advertised).

Any upgrade is always marginal -- the initial app solved the problem and captured most of the benefits. An upgrade hunts for scraps. Many upgrades are forced by obsolescence -- if customers could keep the old system running, they would.

Sure, with new systems you want the "latest" to have decent lifetime. And with really compelling uses (mobile), new systems will be bought.

I do not see anything remotely compelling about the new Adobe DRM, Amazon will eat their lunch even faster.

Good point. The question is whether TLAs can backdate NSLs so their ill-gotten trove can be used as evidence and not just threat identification/blackmail. Since NSLs are supposed to be secret, how can a judge rule on the [in]admissibility of evidence? One might hope that failing some authorization (warrent, unsealed NSL? etc) an intercept would be ruled inadmissible.

Thank you for the more precise stats. 14.1 B/day is not essentially different from my estimate of 9 B/day and does not change any conclusions.

If anything, it is worse -- NSA is capturing 1.4%, some combination of good filters and missed streams.

Averaged across my family, we send about 10 SMS/day each. So the total US would send around 3 BILLION per day, and the rest-of-the-world using customary multipliers 6+ BILLION.

Either the NSA has 2% filters (scary) or is incompetent. Or [likely] both!

How is keyword blocking going to help abuse victims find recovery resources? I thought most kiddie-pr0n was on the darknet.

Far more innocents will be hurt than the intended targets.

In the surprisingly fierce competition for stupid patents, this one has a leg up on other candidates:

The patent has costs for filing and much larger but nebulous costs for customer relations.

The patent cannot be expected to bring in any revenue. Other who might licence the patent have no incentive to do so since they can bill the NSA for compliance costs. The NSA could direct these others to use the patent, which as an entity of the USGovt it can use royalty-free and so to subcontractors.

Many patents are vain and inane. This one is stupid and destroys shareholder value.

Reducing the number of time-zones is a very good idea, especially in the modern era of telecommunications and broadcasting.

I suspect this is why the USSR operated all on Moscow time and why modern India is on a half-hour timezone to fit in. I'm not sure anything explains Venezuela, still less Newfoundland :)

I cannot abide the SysV (AT&T) mess'o'symlinks multiple-indirect startup scripts. One reason I've stuck with Slackware for almost 20 years. It uses BSD-style inits that have far less indirection and need far fewer lookups. Frankly, some of the BusyBox startup look attractive too -- one script to rule them all :)

wtf? in the 21st Century? This looks like a clear violation of the US Anti-Trust rules against agreeing not to compete in a market. Or agreeing to boycott suppliers. Even a wink is illegal.

I work for a similar mega-corp and we are continually drilled in the importance of Anti-Trust. Where were their lawyers?

Monopsony is far worse than monopoly because you can always decline to buy. Does anyone have any explanation beyond rank corruption?

I am delighted to see the RoW (EU) pay the US back in the same coin. For 200+ years, the US has exercised export restrictions (IMHO unconstitutional). Mostly, these restrictions have been strategic (oil against Japan in 1941, crude oil currently) but sometimes a matter of taste ("horses by sea").

Diplomacy works a lot like the "Prisoners Dilemma" where tit-for-tat appears to be the optimal strategy.

Why the surprise? We all live in police states. From the recent scandals and revealations, that opinion is no longer fringe. If in doubt, just watch some evening news and try to find a story where police/justice/govt is _not_ involved. Small wonder people seek the distractions of sports & gossip.

The tension imposed by the police state stresses everyone (not least the officers themselves). People naturally shy away from it. Even legitimate security efforts suffer under the toxic cloud. Fear of being sucked deeper _should_ keep people away. In applying to Booz-Allen, Mr. Snowden probably expected to be analysing corporate data, or maybe govt contractor data at worst. Surprise!

Thank you. Market cap may not be a perfect deflator as it ignores debt (important for banks & utilities) but is 'way better than no size deflator.

How about some results scaled by sales or by total assets? Google is big, so should spend the most.

It has been awhile since I've tried serious measurements on MS-Windows, but a high interrupt load could easily cause trouble. If frequent enough, the CPU cannot cycle down to a low-power state (1000s of clocks) even if the processing required is minimal.

Something like OS attention for all the broadcast packets (especially bad with NetBIOS) could increase the interrupt load from 100-1000/s to several orders of magnitude more.