Large corporations are run by far fewer people than they employ. And it's not a democracy within a corporation. The "suits" make the decisions, leave at 4pm to play golf, while the middle class clerks toil away to 8pm. If the clerks don't like it, they're encouraged to quit and find an identical large corporation where the same scenario repeats itself.

It's like saying Afghanistan is run, maintained, and full of... "people" -- even though all the real power belongs to the Taliban.

That's a retarded example. Farms are treated as businesses, and businesses only pay taxes on profits, not revenue. If you don't post any profits because all your food is consumed by yourself and family with no additional crops to sell, you don't pay any taxes. Even if you do sell some crops, that's only revenue, it's not profit until it surpasses all the costs of doing business (buying a tractor, buying a backhoe, etc.) In fact, the tax system -encourages- spending, because businesses can deduct expenditures from their taxable income. If you spent all your profits on re-investments, buying better equipment, hiring staff, etc., you don't 'lose' any money to the government.

It only beans the station wagon in terms of latency. I'm sure a station wagon has far greater bandwidth than a pigeon. I can fit 500 3TB disks in there (1.5 PB), and drive from California to New York in 1 week (That's 21Gbit/s). Short of a 16-wheeler, I don't think anything at the consumer level has that sort of bandwidth.

We have laws regarding any firefighter / police officer killed in the pursuit of catching someone for committing a crime. The person they pursue is considered guilty of murder.

It's a little silly, in my opinion, to call it murder when a police officer slips on a banana peel and falls down a flight of stairs and dies while pursuing a thief, but that is our current legal system. It is _not_ considered murder if the police officer slips on a banana peel and falls down a flight of stairs and dies while pursuing a donut shopkeeper. The officer has to be acting "in the line of duty" and the person being chased must have committed some other crime in order for the murder charge to stick.

Same is true with firefighters killed while putting out forest fires; if it's a naturally started forest fire, no crime. If it was started by a cigarette butt, the person who threw that cigarette is guilty of murder. Even if the firefighter enters the forest on a "suicide mission", it is considered murder if the fire was initiated by a person.

You're forgetting that with the Master Key now revealed, it's possible to impersonate devices. You can impersonate a graphics card.

What about Google and the Department of Homeland Security? I wonder why they're considered root CAs.

You don't need a weak (backdoored) system. You just need to make the private keys that the RIM servers use to talk to the clients to be available to the govt. This usually involves setting up domiciled servers within a country and giving those particular servers' private keys to the local authorities (as opposed to giving the private keys of the main Canadian servers). RIM has set up domiciled servers in Saudi Arabia and China and shared the private keys there. India wants a "me too" piece of the action.

Encryption is useless if there does not exist at least 1 person who can decrypt it. Currently it's the RIM servers. The Indian govt. wants to be added to that list.

Um, whom are you referring to when you say "he should 'give something back'" ? The lectures are not by Bill Gates, they're by Sal Khan. I don't think anybody accuses Khan of not giving back. Bill Gates is merely stating that Sal Khan is doing a good job, but Sal Khan does not work for Bill Gates or for Microsoft. Nor do Bill Gates or Microsoft seem to donate any money to Sal Khan.

I'm sure the argument works both ways.

1) Fail to respect the laws and regulations of a democratic country
-- or --
2) Benefit from trading with the 2nd largest mobile market in the world (635 million cell phones in India - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_India)

Besides, RIM is not India's only cell phone provider. No longer doing business with RIM would mean fewer choices. It would not mean no choice. It is not a "economic suicide" scenario. It's more like a scenario of "which is more important to us: our laws, or a few more phone models added to our stores?"

Exactly. Higher-level languages are _for_ people who already understand lower-level languages. Just as calculator are _for_ people who already understand arithmetic. Schools don't give calculators to kindergarteners or any child who hasn't yet understood arithmetic. First understand arithmetic, and demonstrate you do so by working _without_ a calculator, _then_ be allowed a calculator. Giving people some high-level language on super fast machines with "retina" pixel density and high-level languages is ludicrous when they don't understand the basics. Heck, I'd suggest children be taught on turing machines, and step through _in their head_ their own code. I know way too many programmers who can't play out their own code in their head. Alan Turing did not have access to computers, he developed and tested algorithms _in his head_.

The resources of students have negative cost. That is, they pay _you_ for you to use their resources (their brains).

China seems to have a rather successful economy, and their policy toward RIM is just as strict.

Yeah, I have to agree with naz404; the guy in the picture looks normal, you're probably just creeped out easily by brown folk.