Hard to tell who "them" is.

It's being used by, and trying to be hacked by, many groups.

University researchers, governments, MPAA/RIAA, computer security companies, etc.

Seems the project should encourage as many people as possible attempting to hack it -- because that increases the odds that when people finds a hack, at least some of them will report the weakness back to the project.

On the other hand, if the project discourages hacking attempts, only malicious groups will find the hacks.

If they just unlocked the bootloader on the rest of their phones and encouraged people to download and try Tizen on their formerly-android phones, it could grow the ecosystem fast. Just market it as a "now with no google spyware" phone, and I think many will go for it.

This way people will be much more aware of the kind of tracking possible (merging of locations from the phone ; with interestests from what websites you browser; with associates that you call).

I can see a new service coming up similar to a Taxi for your phone..... have someone drive your phone to where you're supposed to be, while you go to where you want to be. And perhaps they can loan you a loaner phone and forward the calls to it.

I imagine it's hardest on the accountants.

• Is the cost of those experiments passed on to customers? Overhead? Do the customers get discounts for the dual purpose mission? Would they want discounts but didn't think to ask because they weren't even aware?
• How is the risk / insurance handled? It the added experiments' components caused a failure, who's insurance pays for it? Is the cost of that insurance passed on to customers?

etc.

With Surface, it seems Microsoft is a bigger threat to Lenovo than Dell, HP, IBM, etc.

With that in mind, I can't imagine why they'd support any Windows platforms.

They supplied the wires for some of that data, didn't they?

They don't even lose jobs.

The money their taxpayers save can be spent locally creating the same amount (measured in dollars) of jobs that it would have if the money makes a round trip through the federal government along the way.

The existing energy grid is already excellent for energy storage and arbitrage. Energy companies even do stuff like pump water up hydroelectric dams at night when they have a surplus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... ) - so it's win-win for everyone if you give them your solar energy during the day, and take their surplus ( from hydro, nuke, wind, etc) at night.

As rooftop solar gets cheaper every year, electricity won't be the biggest environmental impact of lighting.

I already have a number of friends who's rooftop solar panels generate more electricity than they use. Once people reach that point, the biggest impact to the environment will be manufacturing --- either with poisons like mercury in CFL bulbs or with dirty semiconductor fabs and lead on circuit boards for LEDs.

Hard to beat a plain glass globe with a metal wire for clean recyclable environmentally friendly materials.

Their mice and keyboards are.

Somethings I think they missed their calling and should have focused on that strength.

It's not a matter of making the technology disappear.

It's about using appropriate technologies to keep sensitive data private.

I would hope that every foreign business in the world is now researching encrypted email, VPNs, etc for their corporate communication just to protect their industrial secrets and corporate IP.

And I would hope that US companies now assume that China and Russia are doing similar spying to the NSA -- and therefore are also researching encrypted email, VPNs, etc.

Once such companies do that (and they will - because money), the appropriate technogies will become widespread enough that reasonably encrypted email will trickle down to consumer tools like gmail/hotmal/etc.

And that's what'll re-enstate privacy for the common person.

Does that mean that Alexander's kinda a witness to Snowden's innocence in this leak?

If it goes to trial, a NSA director saying it couldn't have been Snowden who leaked this stuff is probably a pretty good alibi.

Somewhat surprisingly, they didn't (to the best of my knowledge).

That's exactly what I did, covering a reaonsably busy intersection in SF. Maybe back then people were more careful what they did online - but all I ever noticed was light casual use like bring up maps of the area.

The trick for me was to switch to LOffice. More compatible with the old WIndows office than the new one is.

I think that'll be my answer for the OS too -- Ubuntu+Wine is probably closer to Windows 7 than Windows 8+ are.

For a better analogy, instead of Ham Radio -- consider that this "using unencrypted wifi == wiretapping" logic makes it really hard to run an open WiFi hotspot.

Back when in lived in SF, I provided free wifi to the coffee shop at the end of my block just for fun. QOS routing meant it didn't interfere with my traffic, and the only thing protecting it was a "please don't abuse this" welcome page.

Now people would be afraid to connect to it, on the grounds that even seeing if an access point welcomes the public could be seen as wiretapping.