Your aren't talking about ethics or morals, you're talking contract law. And we don't know what the contract amounts to. We do, however, know that MS was treatening to sue people right and left over secret patents, so it's quite reasonable that Samsung may have felt that they were coerced into signing the agreement. If so, then it's quite ethical to look for any escape hole.

Given the history of government, expect the voting mechanism to be bought from a company which has little transparency, and little interest in fixing problems.

The history a voting machines in the US is a history of fraud and probable fraud. If you switch to an on-line voting system, expect it to be vulnerable to fraudulent voting and difficult to check. And illegal to validate. ("That's our proprietary code your'e trying to inspect!")

Do not support it. Were it an open system, I'd be cautiously supportive, but recent history tells me not to expect that.

Pointing at a forum for the editor is probably not what the person you responded to was looking for when asking their question. Except for the "Beautiful Interface" which somehow translates to "Fun" I don't see anything on the list that VI/VIM can't do already.

I personally don't mind graphical text editors, but when managing thousands of servers I find them impractical. I can ssh -> VI something and move on to the next task. Writing a bunch of code or documentation, I prefer a graphical interface. Each has their purpose.

Chomsky explained everything you need to know in the 70's. Educate yourself, idiots.

Here's news for you mate. There is no shortage of skilled workers. There is only capitalistic elites applying very strict selection requirements via flavor of the month bullshit requirements (ignoring that coders learn new languages without having to get a degree or cert). This is done so they can pretend to be looking for workers, when in fact they are trying NOT to hire anyone so they can meet the government's requirements and employ more lower paid H1B visa workers. There are actually HR seminars about how NOT to hire people while still complying with the requirements of looking for work. "Oh my, you don't have a Certificate or Degree in $LANG, I'm afraid that's a requirement. Yes, you may say you know it, but how do I know that?" In fact, they just filter all applicants by their strict filter and you don't even get interviewed. They have to interview a few folks, just to seem legit, but that's the nature of this beast.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

I reached that point in the 90's.

Now I write all my code in a meta language that compiles down into COBOL, C, C++, C#, Erlang, FORTH, Fortran, Google's Go, Haskel, Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and more.

It takes about two weeks for me to learn a new language and write the "runtime" for my meta compiler. Then I can deploy all of my existing solutions on the new platform faster than the other guys can get "Hello DB Connection" out the door.

Fuck all the shitty languages and "new" platforms. Now that you've actually grown up and stopped being a fucking fanboy, go write your own meta compiler. I'll open source mine when I retire, it's what gives me the edge over all the noobs still wasting time reimplementing their wheels.

You probably should be sorry. The fastest Geodes are antiques (I have two of them right here, whee.)

How do you know how long it was "flat" before you noticed it?

And how easy it is to simply label anyone who disagrees with you as ignorant so that they and their point of view can be marginalized and summarily dismissed without further consideration.

Just ignore the history of government screw-ups regarding dangerous things like radioactive materials, nerve agents, or even nuclear warheads that were all in the hands of "experts".

Geez! Just the thought of bringing an infected and still-living Ebola victim to a large US city is enough to make blood shoot out of your eyes!...Oh, wait...

Strat

Well, yes...but if it's illegal (under Irish law) for the company in Ireland to transmit the data to the US, they they are demanding that the company chartered in Ireland under Irish law comit a crime.

I don't know that that applies in this particular case, but there is much information that the EU forbids export of to any country that doesn't protect the information. And that definitely includes the US, where personal information is seen as a corporate asset over which the individual has no right.

In fact, I find it quite plausible that the demanded information might be illegal for the Irish company to transmit. (This goes contrary to the assertion made earlier that the agent of MS merely needs to push a button located in the US and the information will appear...unless there's criminally sloppy systems design.)

Traitor doesn't fit the definition given in the Constitution. OTOH, they do appear to be guilty of multiple counts of malfeasance and conspiracy to commit malfeasance. So criminal would fit if they were prosecuted.

However, since they have not been formally accused by any prosecutorial authority, I think the best word may be "lying scum".

That's oversimplifying, but it was certainly a big part of it. People are incredibly self-centered...so much so that they don't even notice it. If something isn't affecting them or people that they know directly, most people will just ignore it.

Please note: This is not a criticism of the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era. It was a totally stupid war for no reason that was ever explained ... or rather the explanations did not justify it, and were often lies. The ani-war movement was just, moral, and proper. It also woudn't have happened if people who had access to power weren't forced to face what the war might mean to them.

Please note, the current wars in the middle east are much more justifiable, though nobody in government dares to mention the real justification: oil. The wars are a blatant resource grab. (I'm not sure this extends to Afghanistan. I think that may be basically a war to test out the new military toys in a live exercise. But I'm not sure.)

Please also note that the "military toys" currently being developed and debugged are designed to allow a government to attack an armed civilian uprising. And note that simple verstions are being distributed to various police forces all over the US. This may explain what the real purpose of that "war" is.

If I were depending on the word of the CIA that the world wasn't a painted backdrop, then I would consider that excellent advice.

No. Some agency is necessary. The CIA and the NSA as currently constituted are not.

To claim that they are needed is as silly as claiming that because a limited copyright is good, one that extends forever it needed. It's as silly as claiming that because some patents are needed, a patent on something that everyone has been doing for decades is justifiable, and that allowing it is mandatory.

Scale the NSA back to what it was in the 1950's, and the CIA back to what it was back in 1944, when it had a different name. Those agencies were probably necessary, but that's not at all the same as saying the current agencies are necessary, or even desireable. They are currently SO bad, that we'd be better off just totally abolishing them, even though that's clearly a bad idea except as one stage of a "redo from scratch" operation.

Excuse me, but many of us, or at least myself, do believe that they broke actual laws as well as being blatantly immoral. IANAL, so I can't be certain, but I believe that they did.

OTOH, I don't normally condemn people for breaking the laws if I feel the laws are unjust. I'm much more upset that they acted immorally than that they acted illegaly.