Actually the gov't thinks its a hotbed of drug smuggling. They claim it is a key logistics point for the cartels. Plus there been reports of a little bit of shady banking down there. This could involve drugs, terror and/or tax evasion.

Raise your hands if you have ever worked somewhere where there was an official build system and most developers did not get matching binaries from their development systems.

Sometimes simplification is helpful, sometimes it is not. Technobabble can give the illusion of importance. For example is you say the NSA is collecting telephone metadata that sound ominous. If you simplify it and say the NSA is having AT&T share the info on your phone bill, date, number called, duration ... then people would understand and probably not rate the collection of much importance.

Actually Oliver was doing something very valuable with his interruptions. Forcing Snowden to refrain from technobabble that the general public would not get. Forcing Snowden to be more effective at his self appointed task, to put in the extra effort necessary to phrase things so the general public could understand.

No. Delegation of your work does not relieve you of responsibility. If Snowden delegates to journalists the screening of releases for info that will aid the enemy (say al-Queda) and they fail, as Oliver also points out they in fact did, then Snowden bears some responsibility too. He decided to make the info public. He chose who to release it and trust with such screening. Similar story if the message is not effectively communicated. Contrary to popular myth, geeks can effectively communicate with non-geeks. It just takes a lot of work and effort. Most geeks merely choose not to make the effort.

And if we can get Pluto designated a planet once again we'll be back to normal. :-)

Unless one raises the price of the iPhone by $35, then it costs nothing. Switchers due to domestic ethical manufacturing would probably outnumber those who couldn't afford the extra $35. So it may be a benefit.

Corporations guide the development of GPL licensed projects too. Take Linux for example, the main contributors are corporate sponsored/subsidized/etc so therefore the work is directed by corporate needs as well.

Plus there are indirect effects too. As a corporate sponsored project like Clang/LLVM becomes highly competitive or surpasses a project like GCC then a fire gets lit under GCC to make a little progress, and possibly to add comparable features that were corporate sponsored in Clang/LLVM. So corps get to indirectly influence GCC as it strives to be competitive.

No. One can also say Cook chooses profits over gay rights. If he can save $35 on the manufacture of an iPhone by manufacturing in a country that is hostile to gays he will do it. That seems hypocrisy not double standard, he is materially benefitting from his silence and/or lack of action.

$35 is the estimated increase in manufacturing costs for making iPhones in the USA where gays have rights.

That is not the debate. The debate is what does he believe in more, saving $35 on the manufacture of an iPhone or gay rights. So far saving the $35 seems more important.

$35 being the estimated increased cost of building an iPhone in the US where gays have rights.

No, its not. The quantity of a particular good or service equating to a bitcoin can vary wildly in a very short period of time.

Bitcoin, like other currencies, it backed by faith. And a lot of that faith has to do with speculation not commerce.

Bitcoin is not a currency, it currently fails as a store of value. Could that change, possibly, but unlikely in the short term.
Bitcoin is a speculative instrument.
Bitcoin's real use is as a payment system. During payment processing bitcoins are generally not held by the recipient so the store of value problem isn't an issue. Advocates make much of the vendors who accept bitcoins but in truth most never touch a bitcoin. A bitcoin exchange is used to actually collect the coins and convert them to fiat currency immediately. And what does this demonstrate, a lack of faith.

Actually ULA will become much more expensive as they will have to include fixed costs (infrastructure, etc) into their launch pricing. Currently they do not. They seem to have a separate contract purely for infrastructure and other related fixed costs, this contract is separate from launch contracts. Short story: ULA launch contracts don't have to include such costs since they are paid for elsewhere, SpaceX launch contracts includes all such costs and they are still far less expensive.

I think recent news stories demonstrated the opposite, the USAF overstepped its bounds and began dictating design changes and corporate reorganizations.

Actually ULA (boeing, lm, etc) gets sweetheart contracts too. For example their launch contracts don't include fixed costs like launch facilities and many other parts of the "infrastructure". ULA gets a separate contract to pay for all the fixed costs. That may be a good idea to make sure this infrastructure is ready and available independently of what the launch schedule may be but the fact remains that SpaceX includes such infrastructure costs into their launch contracts. And SpaceX launch contracts are still far less expensive than ULA.

Why use an SSD in such a do-nothing PC? If you can't go with a regular HD try a hybrid SSD-HD. Last I looked a hybrid with 1 TB HD and 8 GB SSD was under $80.

You wrote: "NO ONE wants this. NO CUSTOMER wants this." The capitalization is your emphasis. You assumed the customer is the user, I demonstrated that this is not so. Only one counterexample is necessary to disprove a claim such as yours. The existence of an employer who does not want to let employees disable secureboot is something far beyond speculation. There are already companies out there that try to lock down configuration for security and compliance reasons. I've known people who work in environments where their PCs netboot for such reasons.