With the benefits accruing entirely to the owners of capital (except for a few crumbs given to the managers and techs who enable the process). Hence the need for the workers of the world to unite -- so we can get our fair share of the world's resources. Hopefully this can be accomplished through conventional political means, otherwise it's going to get awfully bloody.

"Seriously, no touch screen display in the Odyssey, what are they thinking?" This is why Osama hates us.

Did you create the new profile under the same name?

...of "Duh" magazine.

Do you actually believe this? I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so naive. Maybe I'm just missing the sarcasm.

Or maybe you're talking about police in your home country. Here in the U.S.A. police routinely seize valuables with little or no justification, relying on the threat of violence to get what they want in the street and then relying on their privileged positions within the legal and political systems to make sure no one can do anything about it.

Departments are routinely allowed to keep 80% of the money they seize, and the totals routinely reach the millions.

From the ACLU:

In 2008, the Department of Justice's forfeiture fund topped $1 billion. By contrast, in 1986, the year after [the law changed to allow departments to keep most of the money they seize], the fund took in $93.7 million. This money does not account for the hundreds of millions seized by state law enforcement agencies.

The money is the point of the seizures. Any evidentiary value is a bonus.

....and that's saying something.

The inability of MS's teams to work together might have something to do with the atrocious stack ranking method they used for employee evaluation:

“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

That's from Vanity Faire from last year. I still find it hard to believe. I used to think Balmer hate was just sort of nerd posturing, but after reading that I realized, no, Balmer really is a clueless jack off doing nothing more than reciting the latest MBA buzzwords he learned from the latest business bestseller.

...it may not be a good one, but there's always a choice. You can move the company to Iceland and tell the NSA to suck it. It's not a good, practical, or wise choice, but it's a choice.

Dude, you're missing the point. We want to keep the invasion of Canada limited to conventional weapons. Because it's not the uranium we need -- it's their healthcare system.

This is what intelligence agencies do. And this is what they should be doing. I would expect American intelligence agencies to be spying on every foreign government. Of course I'd hope they're spending more resources spying on China and Russia and Saudi Arabia than France and the U.K., but at the end of the day, nations don't have friends, only interests.

Remember when the French played coy about if they'd put their military under NATO command if the Russians invaded West Germany? Knowing whether that was just the French being the French or if they seriously planned to sit out WWIII would have been really helpful if you were responsible for U.S. deployments in the Fulda gap. That's why you spy on your allies. Gentlemen don't read each other's mail. Which is why we should avoid hiring gentlemen to work at CIA.

Everyone should (and no doubt did) expect this kind of thing. But in revealing methods and practices and details of operations Snowden has actually done something wrong. Revealing the details of NSA's pervasive spying on American citizens was a public service. Dude should get a medal for that. But revealing the details of how the U.S. is spying on foreign governments today is kinda the textbook definition of a traitor.

On balance I'd say Snowden has still been a net positive -- the NSA operation is evil, immoral, and unconstitutional. It's worth losing some diplomatic intelligence in order to expose it. But it's not like that was the inevitable price -- he chose to reveal this new stuff in addition to the earlier revelations.

Unions represent, what, about 6% of American private sector workers? The American labor movement is if not dead than on life support. On their best day unions exert a tiny fraction of the political influence big business does. They have some impact on some Democratic primary campaigns, but they're a bit player in general elections in most of the country, and they've been so marginalized they don't have much impact on capital hill.

It already has happened here. How many tens of thousands of innocent Americans did we imprison during WWII because they happened to be of Japanese descent?

Don't forget to also take out the battery from your cell when you've turned it off, otherwise your phone can still be pinged by the network and in some cases will continue to automatically phone home. IIRC, smartphones will often also have some internal micro-power source (kinda like a cmos battery in your desktop). You'd have to disable that to make sure there's no power to the phone when it's off. I believe that most older dumbphones do not have this kind of thing, so you should probably stick to one of those for your burner (and of course if you've got a burner and a legit phone, never have them powered up in the same location at the same time).