His supervisors at the NSA certainly did. I think we can be reasonable that the head of the NSA, and the upper levels of management, knew the extent of this monitoring, even if they didn't know the day to day details. They're the ones who should be facing prosecution in this case.
Thank you for catching that, but no. My RSI is acting up a bit, I'm afraid I'll need to edit more carefully.
Evolution does not require "genes". Any biological or physical or even behavioral feature that allows information to be transferred to other members of the species, especially to new members of the species, can support evolutionary pressures. We can see it in social and cultural evolution as well as biological evolution, and they also in co-dependent ways. A great deal of child-rearing is learned behavior in more neurologically complex species.
> can use quite small amounts of fuel to "junk" in their trajectory
Please excuse my typo. The word I meant to use is "jink".
> This self feeds where the vast majority internally still are riding on skills from 20yrs ago
Like UNIX, lightweight code, C, consistent API's, and documentation? I'm afraid that while you may run into stodginess problems, a large part of my income right now comes from cleaning up after entrepreneurial spirits who ignore some of our hard-won lessons. And I'm afraid I've now seen several generations of newer developers take on new fads and be forced to re-learn, and re-invent from scratch, the procedures we learned 20 years ago.
I'm not insisting that IBM engineers are currently doing this, but don't underestimate the usefulness of these old skills.
There were reasons to pursue such programs, although at least one fortunately never worked. There was a US "Star Wars" missile defense program involving fission bomb triggered X-Ray lasers. I'm afraid the design was quite useless for defense, the tracking system would have had to be much better than anything currently available. The design would also be completely useless as defense technologies, since they can't reach lower trajectory weapons such as drones or cruise missiles, and the larger missiles can use quite small amounts of fuel to "junk" in their trajectory and modern missile guidance systems can do course corrections for such jinking at the last moment. The X-ray lasers were a terrifying _offensive_ weapon, an unstoppable satellite killer against orbitally stable targets.
The overall program was fascinating. The "Star Wars" missile defense program helped bankrupt the Soviet Union trying to pursue the same technologies. So in an economic sense, it was an extremely effective Trojan Horse.
The Surface has turned out to be both very fragile, and very difficult to repair. The result is that when there is any damage, and with the constantly droppping fire sale prices, the only personnel I know who've bought them have each replaced them twice, within the 2 years that the devices have been available. The result would look like "new sales" because the price of the extended warranty to cover such repairs, along with the time it takes to navigate the repair and replacement system, is better spent earning the money to buy a new one if you insist on continuing with such a fragile device.
> f Google locks the information up and refuses to share,
They don't "refuse to share". They sell it in various ways, it's absolutely critical to their income.
> Laws and customs are irrelevant, as I criticize those frequently
This is precisely what I referred to. If they were irrelevant, there'd be nothing for you to criticize.
If you want to draw legal or political conclusions based on your personal utopic ideal, please make that clear. Because in the real legal and political world, it doesn't work. There is _no_ human society where those in power do not set boundaries on the use of recreational chemicals.
It used to be the House Committe on Un-American Activities hunting Communists. Before that, the Axis powers. Before that, rum-runners. Before that, the Anarchists.
There is always some group being pursued for political or criminal activity and innocent people crushed in the net used to catch them.
They certainly have the right when "in loco parentis" to make medical and lifestyle choices for children or for those incarcerated. There's also a great deal of long established political and legal right to prevent fraud. So please, do not throw around absolutes so carelessly when discussing law and custom.
The part about ESR wanting to transform large public repositories to git, I understand. I only meant to explain why someone would want to take the original step of transforming a CVS repo to Subversion.
> Why would one in his sane mind convert from CVS to SVN?
Because Subversion really is "CVS done right". It scales much, much better, it's much easier to administer and manage, and it has much better support for large centralized repositories with limited access to specific parts of it for specific developers. My transformations from CVS to Subversion have been quite straightforward, except where developers manually edited old CVS files in the repository itself and broke things years previously.
If you need the local flexibility and to have source control access when disconnected from your central repository, the 'git2svn' interface has also been invaluable.
Deleting the Google links is a quite serious hindrance to scholarship and informed research today. One may as well put it here (with due credit to Douglas Adams for writing this.
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
>but when you apply for them you get a response that the job doesn't exist
Oh, dear. This is a quite old trick. It's even more fascinating when they say "we already have candidates", but when your colleague with a different age, gender, or citizenship applies with similar credentials at the same time their application is accepted for review. The classic example of this is tuning HR requirements to only hire H1B candidates, as shown at:
Nothing happens.
