> Bureaucratic overreach is hardly confined to the Federal government, and often occurs in conjunction with it.

Especially if it's funded *by* the federal government. It wouldn't come as a bit of a surprise if the acquisition of this Stingray device was funded by one of many federal grants the the national government has been handing out in an effort to militarize local law enforcement agencies.

Seriously - for the entire history of this country, we've had laws that say, "first you suspect someone of committing, or conspiring to commit a crime, THEN you spy on them." What's not to understand?

It might also behoove us to remember that much of this spying is done by *third-party contractors*. This means that it's not only the government with access to this information, hired hands as well. God only knows where the information might end up.

> So what about Apple kept them from screwing up as bad as M$?

Two things:

"Shiny" and "Marketing"

Micromanagement is every bit as good as open space.

I don't see how it is possible to make any conclusion with respect to whether or not we have a say in matters, UNTIL we actually say something. By this, I mean that a large number of voters stop feeling sorry for themselves, take a serious look a candidates that do not receive corporate funding, and then VOTE for them.

After this, it is incumbent on the electorate to monitor the performance of their new representative - if the key issue is not being addressed, recall them.

Unfortunately it has become a bit more complex than that because the definition of terrorism keeps changing. For example, in Maury County, Tennessee, Sherwin Smith, a deputy director for the state's Department of Environment and Conservation told a group of residents that complaints about water quality that department deemed unsubstantiated, could be considered an act of terrorism. Protesting something like the XL Pipeline? Terrorism.

There's a legal term for this: due process.

I think this is exactly what Google is afraid of.

"it'll be done when it is done" isn't the only thing that an agile customer has to go on. There are high and mid-level estimates that give them a general idea. If you're doing something other than SCRUM (like Kanban), you can use cycle time to determine a completion timeline. With a little bit of metrics analysis, you can even provide a probability that you'll be able to meet a particular time estimate.

Two other things that will make a HUGE difference is whether or not you have a committed product owner, and how much control you have over external dependencies. With respect to product owners, people can't just say, "here build this," and then disappear until it's finished. I've been there. It sucks. If there is one reason an agile project will fail, this is it. Product owners need to be fully engaged.

Finally, if the agile project is executed correctly, timelines shouldn't be *that* big a deal because the product owner is receiving delivery of the highest priority features along the way. I realize there are ways that this can be sidetracked (if, for example, the product owner decides that a delivered feature needs to be re-designed because of a faulty assumption), but that's what agile is supposed to accommodate.

It's a very big stretch, in my opinion. What they're saying is tantamount to asserting that every time I load different plates onto a printing press, it becomes a "new machine". Nope.

The entire country *could* take Amazon, Google, and Apple by the nuts and make them *beg* to pay taxes, but we just don't have that kind of resolve as a citizenry. I think things are moving in the right direction with new mobile apps like Buycott, but seriously....can't people give up their sense of convenience for just a little bit so that we can work to correct some *major* problems with the current political/social structure?

The ideologies aren't corrupt, the people and system are. The cycle is the same...big companies fund mainstream candidates who use the corporate money flood the airwaves with ads about why you should vote for them (which are typically 80% - 90% horseshit, since they don't contain anything substantive). This is typically all people listen to, so they naturally restrict themselves to the worst choices they could make. Lather, rinse, repeat.

>> From where I sit, it doesn't look like anybody in Washington DC has a damned clue what it means to really work

If that's the case, then Washington DC and the 1% have a lot in common.

Yahoo needs to succeed - Google needs competition, especially since it owns so much internet real estate. Put another way, users need alternatives to Google so that it doesn't become a single, monolithic central clearing house for just about everything you do in your life.