You say that as if the US penal system's primary goal is to rehabilitate rather than punish. Our system is designed not to rehabilitate, rather it enacts harsh punishment as a theoretical deterrent to crime, and more recently has become a for-profit private enterprise.

Sony has exclusive rights to publish software on their own hardware and you think it's stupid that they're only focusing on that user base? Seems like the first logical step for a competitor.

From consumerwatchdog.com's "Who We Are" section of the website:

Criticizing a company for getting steep discounts worth millions of dollars on jet fuel from the government and then getting a large lease from that same government seems in line with their mission.

You mean the paper bills with unique serial numbers printed on each one? The ones which are regularly used by law enforcement to track the movement of money in drug and counterfeiting investigations?

I doubt it. In all your examples, the trademark becomes part of the lexicon of the general public but the owners still retain the sole rights to sell the product under that trademark. People call all bandages Band-Aids, yet there is only one Band-Aid brand. Same goes for Hoover, and Cellophane. Now when grandpa types into Bing "where to buy an iPad" he's going to be directed towards Apple, even though he might have been thinking of the Surface tablet he saw during the Steeler's game.

The book is 900 years in the future. I think you mean "Think of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren."

I think it's less about technical know how and more about now having the authority to issue warrants to service providers and connect the dots.

This is an example of where DevOps comes in handy. Developers make requests, and devops creates it (it it doesn't already exist), a maintains it.

If you're looking to get a software job, but can't get the interview, one thing that enormously helps is writing code for open source projects, or having sufficiently complex project work that you built yourself available to see online. If someone can read a short link on your resume, and then go see your actual code, you become *much* less of a wildcard and much more of a known quality; they then know you can do the job, if the code matches up well enough.

Alternatively, if you've done automated test scripts, look for QA Analyst positions as a bridge into most tech organizations.

What's your academic background? And are you located near a large city, and/or a tech hub?

Your scale implies one set of skills, and there's certainly more than that! As two important ones; the ability and desire to learn, and the tools you already know. I've worked with a lot of junior engineers who didn't know much, but were good at picking things up and moving with them. I've worked with a lot of senior engineers who knew lots of tools and theory, but weren't very good at picking up new things. (I've also worked with junior engineers who were terrible, and senior engineers who could pick up new things faster than me; it's a mix.) To get hired, you need to convince the hiring manager you can do the job, can do it better than the next guy, and can do it at a price they're willing to pay. Right now, there's simply not enough developers who can do the job, so even if you're not great but still get the job done and don't seem awful to work with, the determining factor is "did someone else better apply?"

Always go to lunch with coworkers, and chat with them about... anything, or just hang out while they chat if you can join a group doing so. If they want to talk work, ask them what they're working on; if something in what they say is actually interesting to you, ask 'em about it. If they don't want to talk work, where do they live? Where did they go to school? What do they think of both? What did they do this week? Ideally, they want to talk work at least part of the time, as that's likely more useful. :-) At lunch, if you find yourself talking more than a fair share, work on talking less. If you find yourself talking not at all, work on talking slightly more.

Much more useful than seeing code with someone's name on it is hearing that person describe the code. If someone calls you on it, offer to explain the design of the code, the decisions and tradeoffs made along the way, and what you'd improve next, or how you left the code in a state to be more easily maintained (by you or others) in the future. That would feel *much* more useful than seeing your name on it, and would take you a fraction of the time invested to get it done.

Capturing HUMINT is going to involve inciting treason almost 100% of the time given that spying against your country is usually considered treason.

In the US they also have the ability to sue the government if they believe it's unconstitutional.

Wasn't he operating servers in Virginia?