They're less arrogant and more flexible because they have lost power, not because they have learned any lesson or changed in any way. If they find themselves in a position of power they will abuse it again, and if they can screw you and gain from it when nobody's looking, you're going to get screwed.

Not forgetting how they will behave with power and keeping track when the company's nature rears its head again is part of keeping them from doing it again.

Maybe once they've kept their nose clean for half a century, but this far they haven't even managed two days.

"... while listening in to someone elses private conversation."
"... while looking at intercepted pictures."
"... while reading your XKEYSCORE results on 'steamy secret agent sex'"

More like that.

I'm of no interests to secret services whatsoever

Yeah, that's not up to you to decide. Someone else will decide that and if your phone was at the wrong place at the wrong time and someone misread or misinterpreted some data you're going to be the guy on the floor with assault rifles pointed at your back and your family screaming around you. Better hope your realize the masked men are the cops so you don't struggle and get shot.

It's not like those doing the monitoring are certain to be competent or even guaranteed to be sane, and with signal-to-noise ratios being what they are and the extreme rarity of actual terrorists you can be sure that most hits will be false positives. Other people 'of no interest'.

Intent DOES matter to me and I do not think that any government in western democracies would dare misuse this power for oppressing people.

Oh, right, because we're not voting any representatives of ideologies that have shown no such restraint into power in Europe. Oh, wait...

So if you want to keep from being 'of no interest' in the future, better keep from saying anything that could possibly piss off communists, neonazis, religious fundamentalists or anyone else who might possibly wield power in the future during the rest of your life. The archives are going to remain but the intent of today has no binding power over future rulers.

Well, she'd better keep it out of Sweden. Apart from the Swedish opinion on hookers and blackjack, the Swedish FRA loves giving all data passing through the country to the NSA. The UK is as bad, although they don't quite share the Swedish hatred of hookers and blackjack.

Of course, whether any other European security agencies care about their citizens privacy is debatable.

Spending should be proportional to the danger because spending vast amounts of money on minor issues means more people die to the bigger threats.

As terrorism over the last decade killed about as many as die in freak bathtub accidents (about 300 per year), we should be spending about the same as we're spending on bathroom safety on the war on those scary terrorists.

Why would they overwhelm the supremes and bully congress with weakness on terrorism? Don't you think they've got enough dirt on both?

If congressmen or supremes want to claim terrorist threats as the reason they'll do what the NSA tells them to do it's because terrorists sounds better than 'we need to vote for this NSA authorization or they'll leak the mails to my mistress to the NYT'.

The fundamentals of the broken window fallacy means that if you break the bakers window you create a demand for another window and 'stimulate' the economy. The Fallacy aspect is the fact that the baker has now spent that money on a new window instead of a new pot that he needed as well, leading to a sum of a broken window, a new whole window but no new pot. The loss is the opportunity cost of something else not getting bought and produced.

The same applies to wine bottles (if they're drinking (or breaking) them to create demand rather than to enjoy them).

The same could theoretically be applied to virtual goods destruction, but the opportunity cost for virtual goods is actually in the creation side for them. As they are artificially scarce they could theoretically be instantiated en-masse without any cost at all, freeing up money for the production of actual scarce resources being created within the economy.

However, at least for games like EVE, a significant portion of the entertainment is derived from the production of artificially scarce virtual goods. People pay to sit around producing them, unlike windows where very few pay to hang around in a window factory making windows. This means that the failure to just instantiate a titan for anyone who wants one does not carry the same cost to the real world economy as would a failure to instantly replicate a window, could it be done at the same zero cost.

The difference being that wine bottles are scarce, while EVE assets are artificially scarce and could be replaced instantly without any labour or resources being consumed. If any 'real' economic damage is inflicted it's through artificial scarcity.

Of course, as that scarcity is a significant factor in the entertainment value of EVE, and the 'labour' required actually being considered entertainment by some as well it's not as simple as saying it's 'damage' and arguments in favour of the function can't be relegated to a reflection of the broken window fallacy.

You could rewrite the headline to 'Battle causes the opportunity of $200k worth of gameplay about building starships' and it would hold some validity as well.

For whistleblower laws to do any good at all they really need to be enforced with with prohibitive and spectacular zeal, ie, anyone attempting to act against a whistleblower needs to get landed in jail so fast their head spins.

Of course, we all know it doesn't work like that. Perhaps the whistleblower won't get prosecuted but they are likely to lose their job or at the very least they'll find their social situation at work impossible to deal with. Few actions against the whistleblower will ever be punished.

Realistically it's go to the press and hope the attention makes retaliation difficult, or shut up and do something else if you don't want to be complicit in whatever illegal acts happening that should be leaked. Snowden's assessment was without a doubt correct and he chose the only possible ethical course of action.

Even better, don't go to a movie theatre.

I can't even remember when I went last, it must've been more than a decade ago. It's not like it's an excessively pleasant experience to begin with and the handing of money to the MPAA in combination with the theatre anti-piracy crap pretty much was the final nail in that coffin.

Get a good projector and download cam releases made by people wearing google glass if you want the theatre experience.

No consumer has more than 24 hours per day and most arts are infinitely duplicatable. The failure lies in demand as the entire worlds demand is easily filled by a miniscule number of producers who also get to compete with everything already produced.

Services are slightly more resilient, but frankly, replacing cooks, stylists and hairdressers is more a question of when it's profitable to do so than any inherent difficulty.

Unfortunately I think the system is a bit to susceptible to regulatory capture. And considering the nature of Monsanto as a corporation that, given a choice between developing a product that was vastly profitable and one less profitable but would also give the consumers inheritable cancer, would chose the cancer one I'm not convinced that regulation can become trustworthy enough.

I have nothing against GMO per-se, but unless companies like Monsanto can be permanently dispatched to history, and for as long as glaring misapplications of GMO tech seem to be the most common uses (ie, doomed short term applications whose use will soon be negated by resistance buildup in weeds or pests) I'd rather see bans than no bans.

Ultimately, it's not that GMO is that hard to appreciate. I think you'd find that if 90% of screwdrivers were used to build bombs there'd be a lot of interest in banning screwdrivers.

If they have even the slightest concern about appearing to care about legalities they're probably outsourcing it to GCHQ or one of their other partners who will do just enough (with NSA consultant personell if they feel like it) to cover the bare necessities. So of course they'll say no and of course they're spying on congress.

Frankly it sounded more like a threat. Maybe the NSA is planning to take their treasonous activities to the next level.

The pixel count increases as it's a selling point. The optics on most things like phones seem to stay the same utter crap, barely enough to saturate the ccd in full sunlight, leaving most of those megapixels as random noise. Leaving any CSI style zoom as something achievable in photos specifically taken with the proper equipment and setup to allow CSI style zoom but not in the junk quality images they pretend to enhance in CSI.