That's a pretty negative view of young SAs, not borne out by my experience. Are you sure you're not discriminating against them?

The top of the list is probably an intersection of "cities people move to for work" and "cities which have recently developed IT industry," or places where IT workers are less likely to have extended family.

Woah, interesting. As a counterexample ever since Windows search was introduced I always hit start and type the first several characters I'm interested in:

[win]steam[enter]
[win]chrome[enter]
[win]kmymo[enter] (kmymoney)
etc.

Perhaps if, in order to become law, your idea must become so sabotaged that it is no longer decent, you should not pass it.

What makes you think Facebook's architecture doesn't have a similarly complex diagram? Also, it's been more or less admitted that the whole "Eligibility" box was not correctly implemented, which takes a lot of steps out of the chart.

Interop is very difficult when you don't control both ends, you won't find cogent arguments against that, but defining bad interfaces is bad design, not some magical issue that only affects government work. If a bad design results in excess cost, most people would consider that a problem. Within the government, if they can't coordinate enough to redefine interfaces correctly, the issue is a dysfunctional organization.

For interaction with the external insurance agencies, work was probably harder. Supporting disparate systems may have been unavoidable given deadlines. While the PHBs for this project may have said "this is how you get your plan listed on the exchange. If you don't work with our interface, tough." If so, good for them! I've heard too much about how hard it is to work with so many insurance companies to be optimistic about that, however.

Intelligent software design is not optional in any service at scale. The fact that it's hard does not excuse doing it incorrectly at 6x the cost.

FTFY

Accounting especially is outsourced all the time. That's why there are the "Big Four" audit/accounting firms. You hire one to account for you and another to audit for you. And the money flows...

This is seems like a permutation of the Butterfield fallacy

Whichever attack you've decided was the "most visible" was so because it was missed.

Fortunately this doesn't affect arguments regarding the proper scope of surveillance, but unfortunately it underscores that people are often oblivious to their assumptions. In your case, it's that you would have heard of stopped terrorist plots. I'll agree that it's plausible because of the temptation to brag about success, but far from certain.

That this is a legal question has escaped many of the newscasters, who as far as I can tell make the mistake of spewing that there's something special about USA citizenship. The executive branch's control over foreign policy gives it a lot of leeway regarding foreign non-USA citizens that it does not have over citizens or in many cases non-USA citizens within the country. Rest assured that your country (I would love to be educated on any exceptions) has similar allowances for its military's commander in chief.

Assuming that the NSA has obtained information on a US citizen unconstitutionally, they can't constitutionally use it in a court proceeding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree. They'd have to go get a warrant based on entirely unrelated justifications in order to "rediscover" the evidence and make it maybe viable. It can get complicated (and lawyers love to argue).

However, I am not aware of any way that one could "send them to prison" or force the government to stop collecting information on everyone because you think (without proof) that they've probably caught your stuff when they shouldn't have.

IANAL, etc.

If your friend tells you that, and you still ID them, they will:

1. Change
2. No longer be your friend.

Semi-related question: does wiretapping law protect someone operating like you? That is to say, since presumably you don't notify everyone that you're running tcpdump to see their activity, and something as benign as recording the hostnames in DNS queries could be considered wiretapping, does the individual connecting to your network bear the responsibility of "assuming" you could do such a thing?

I ask because I remember in college we were specifically told we could NOT use the internal network for "real world" traffic data, and that recording anything, either in promiscuous mode in a crowded lecture hall or even at a router behind the WAP would be illegal/unethical/both

This is unfortunately the most useful post on this rah-rah thread. Shame you're AC and I have no mod points.

Practical reasons: Google's NYC office is a full block between 15th and 16th St and 8th and 9th Ave, in the north-east part of the coverage area. They probably are reusing some of the network infrastructure they built out already to support that office.

Model.where(some_field: 5) is not the same as Model.find_by_some_field(5). The #where method returns a lazily evaluated database request which functions more or less like an array. #find_by_... returns either the "first"* model to match or nil if no models match and is much more useful for one-liners

* IIRC no ordering is guaranteed unless you have an #order portion in your model default scope