If he had been working for them all along he:

(1) Would have gone directly to Russia
(2) Would not have given the information to reporters

Yes, but Congressman Mike Rogers said he was a Russian spy. Surely a US Congressman wouldn't lie about important stuff like that?

</sarcasm>

What's wrong with a few SuperHornets?

Nothing. At this point it's got nothing to do with the capabilities of the aircraft.

I'm guessing that the people who originally pushed for the F-35 still haven't retired/been voted out, and hence any choice except the F-35 would mean they'd look like idiots.

When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month.

It's an add-on to a pure-electric car to extend the range. The Nissan Leaf, for example, is rated at at least 120km/charge. So, in theory you'd never actually draw on this magic battery for your daily driving. It'd only be if you had longer trips or weren't able to plug in one night, etc.

The average commute in North America is well within the range of a plug-in electric vehicle, and this thing is just icing/insurance. There's going to be outliers, but if we routinely killed ideas because they didn't work for 100% of possible scenarios, we'd still be shivering naked in caves (fur being too darned hot for those in warmer climates...)

Usability my ass...

You see, you're assuming that your usabilty concerns matter. It makes far more sense when you realize that it was all designed for Steve Jobs.

just TRY connecting the damn thing to a projector or second display in a conference room and making it behave in a rational manner.

Steve didn't need to do that stuff. He had a technical team to handle projection and other A/V needs.

Or try taking a screenshot... what was that obnoxious key combo again? That's right... it makes no sense and can't be remembered by a mere mortal.

Don't be silly. Screenshots are handled by the marketing department.

Let's jump to the beginning of a line with the Home key, or the end of the line with the End key... oh wait, it doesn't have one. They conveniently replaced those with more key combinations that can't be remembered by us mortals. Apparently text entry isn't an important usability case for Apple.

Well, it turns out that the dead don't need to do much text entry...

There a word for that. It's called "previous". As in "the previous packet".

When you're talking about packet protocols, where things get lost, duplicated, or reordered, "previous" is an incredibly imprecise word.

The rule is, you have the contract done and signed before the previous one expires.

I expect that there's also a very applicable rule about how any contract negotiation after getting caught in anti-trust collusion against one of the largest retailers of your goods will probably involve you making more concessions that you might like.

Any wise old vets want to chime in about when to use "goto" and when not to?

Not claiming to be a wise old vet, but as a general rule of thumb, the ideal way to use it is to emulate control structures from even higher level languages. For example, if in C++ you'd write an error handling behavior in a function as an exception, in C you might goto a common area to cleanup transient memory and gracefully return an error code. Which is exactly what that snippet you've shown is doing.

anybody have any objections sending Rob Ford as well?

Let's not push our luck.

Besides, I was thinking Ford should tag along with Rodman on his next jaunt to North Korea...

Considering there's a petition before the White House to have him deported back to the Canada anyway, I vote we offer this as an alternative.

As a Canadian, I second this proposal.

So from the other side, if an Afghani intelligence agency was recording every call in America, that's OK too because it's their job?

Under Afghani law, probably.

Granted, Afghan law has perhaps recently had a lot of outside fingers in it, so that might actually be illegal.

I don't doubt that it's legal for the NSA to be doing this under American law, seeing how foreign signals interception is largely their main function. With American troops in a foreign country with a history of militant extremist activity, it's pretty much a given that there's going to be signals interception, and with America being heavily involved in stuff like infrastructure rebuilding, there would have been plenty of opportunity to build in interception capabilities. I'd also assume Iraq is in a similar state.

Sure, all MHz are not created equal, but still, there's plenty of Windows software that was written in the 200MHz days that's still in use that I suspect would run just fine on my phone.

True, but you get into the x86-emulation-on-ARM problem. I'm sure you can build such an emulator, but I'm not sure what kind of speed.

That and I suspect a lot of the old software from that era that someone might want to run might be tied to hardware. Games targeting specific graphics cards, industrial software using parallel/serial ports, etc.

shrug I imagine it could work, but I don't see it driving enough sales to make it worth Microsoft's time.

It still amazes me that you can't just run normal Windows on the ARM-based surface.

I suspect it's doable, but performance wouldn't be good.

There's a definite horsepower difference between ARM and x86, and if the "normal Windows" config is tuned for x86, it'll (slowly) suck balls on ARM. They'd have to strip down services to make it work. Plus, people are going to expect x86 Windows apps to run (hence the marketing debacle of Windows RT), which isn't feasible on ARM.

It's not exactly scientific, but for comparison try out Android-x86 on older hardware. I have an old Acer AAO ZG5, and every time I've run Android on it, running off a USB key, the first thing I've noticed is that it smokes any ARM Android device I've ever tried. Keeping in mind that many of the apps I've been testing are native ARM builds being emulated.

Besides the privacy and safety concerns of these things, I was under the impression that a major flaw is that it's a bit too easy to sneak things through them.

Is it really a smart idea to move these things from a place where security is theatre to a place where the targets actually *are* sneaking weapons through security and using those to actually kill other people?

Anyone at NSA who is participating in this is committing an act of war against a sovereign nation without any declaration of war.

Actually, since it's interception of communications of a foreign country, this may be one of the few recently reported instances of the NSA actually doing their job.

... but that doesn't mean their lives should be ruined simply for some relatively minor past mistakes.

I agree, and that's essentially part of my point, but is this really the fault of the search engines, or is it the "no forgiveness" attitude of employers (and a whole host of others that are in a position to make major decisions that massively affect someone's life) that's the fundamental problem?

It's not just a criminal background problem, either. People are looking at stuff like Facebook photos of someone partying, or political affiliations, etc, and making decisions about employability.

This isn't anything really new, it's just easier to dig up dirt on someone, it's possible to do it on a wider scale, and the results tend to be more authoritative. But there's always been the concept of a "permanent record". That's where expressions like "reference checks", "background checks", "not burning your bridges", "skeletons in the closet", etc came from.

Having Google take down information isn't going to make that information go away; if anything it's creating a business case for a "reputation search engine" to set up shop in a jurisdiction which wouldn't allow this sort of thing.

It's a huge can of worms.