Scenario 1:

You keep a webcam focused on a dam to monitor whether it fails. You see cracks. You watch as the dam washes out, but you warn no one. You are a scientist. You have broken no laws.

Scenario 2:

You are paid to monitor the dam and to issue warnings when appropriate. You see cracks. You watch as the dam washes out, but you warn no one. You are an element of the public safety system and you willfully and criminally left people unprotected. It doesn't matter if you were a scientist under contract.

Strategic sales usually involve an internal champion who has the confidence of senior managers and is betting three to five years of career advancement on the adoption of your product and its strategic importance to your firm. Sales is the process of helping that person acquire endorsements up the chain of command.

The best way to locate an internal champion is to meet with managers who appreciate the need but lack the time to immerse themselves in the decision. They will hand you off.

Incidentally: since you are already publishing your buglist, you personally have very little more to do to gain the trust of an internal champion and your appearance at one or two critical meetings will help senior managers understand that a sale is an alliance. Go to learn, not to teach. You'll do well.

Thank you for showing us the problem.

Your firm is being undermined by a lazy and uncommitted sales force

with little appreciation for the kind of transparency that is involuntary

and with weak relationship-development skills

and with zero tact

and insufficient fear of the bullshit-detection abilities of a technical audience.

Your lead developer is a genius. Look what just happened.

This is not a decision for you and the sales force to negotiate, because there is a large diversity among potential customers and it is the single greatest responsibility of senior management to decide what market segment to invest in.

Publication of the bug list does not look like "disclosure" to the larger and more capable customers. It is a feature that expands the customer's planning, development, and decision ranges. To a smaller customer or one with a shallower requirement, it looks like an apology in advance for everything that could go wrong.

It could be that because ERP software adoption is hard to undo, your competitors are just trying to haul in market share and let the customers discover the truth when it is too late. In that case, your competitors should be forced to lose sales for their lack of transparency.

In the end, I think you can't stop publishing the list for two reasons:

First, because transparency signals the kind of bold and capable team you are, so ceasing the publication would signal that you are not that team any more.

Second, because competitors whose sales proposition is anchored on "the other guys have imperfections that we don't" will always find negatives. A bug list is a way to manage the negatives, because as the negatives evaporate, what's left is transparency.

You are absolutely correct.

Successful investment bankers usually have smooth manners and a gift for softspoken vagueness that makes their duplicity harder to spot.

The mean ornery dogchild is just a midlevel henchmen for the really dangerous types.

And I've paid with for the right to say so.

Advertising revenues from local news is the largest source of income for most local television network affiliates and local car dealerships are the foundation of their revenues. (TV stations get little or nothing for carrying national programming, just the right to borrow the audience for a couple of hours.)

Local television economics is a political protection racket with car dealers as the collection point for funds, precisely as kings and shahs and sultans handed out exclusive franchises for cloths and dyes and wines and every manner of goods.

Car dealers fund a local-news system that ensures that Congressional representatives and state governments are rarely reported on.

Threaten laws protecting car dealers, and get you a lot of enemies who don't want to show their faces.

Will the person who modded my comment down please read it?

He did not set the whole facility on fire. He tore up the floorboards and set fire to whatever was underneath his basement workplace.

He was cutting his own throat with a knife when emergency crew got there.

He wrote that for the first time in a long time he gave a shit.

This is not the profile of a disgruntled worker. It sounds more like a story about a repentant member of some secret police -- domestic surveillance squad.

The reassignment to Hawaii sounds like a promotion, as it was for Snowden.

We'll know more if the government actually brings this guy to trial. That's why I think they won't.

Yup.

Is it mad optimism to suspect that some tiny fraction of the motivation here might not be military but a concern for the integrity of electronic elections?

This guy was a telecommunications specialist working in the basement. Are you familiar with the type?

He is a contractor whose direct employer is specified as Company A in the affadavit.

Apparently he looked in the mirror and did not like what he saw in himself or in his employer.

He was being transferred from Chicago to Hawaii. Disgruntlement?

He claims it's a crisis of conscience.

Goldman Sachs has captured something much much bigger than a regulatory agency. The Federal Reserve is a massive financial operation with a charter from the people of United States to maintain the monetary conditions for a stable and robust market economy.

Goldman got the General Counsel of the New York Fed to force the dismissal of an investigator who was brought in specifically to stop the kowtowing. She was fired for asking follow-up questions and telling her superiors to change her reports themselves if they wanted them changed.

In the background of this scandal, Goldman Sachs was engaged in a transaction with the sole purpose of allowing a European bank to pretend that it was not overextended and so avoid recapitalizing to meet European-Union capital requirements. In other words, a European bank was risking an economic catastrophe that would have forced the EU to conduct a too-big-to-fail rescue, and Goldman Sachs enabled that bank to circumvent European banking authorities.

Every investment in securities involves risk, and risk reduces the price at which paper trades. The Fed is now a guarantor of financial investments, making them more valuable than they might be if true risks were incorporated into the pricing. And the Fed is just one of the sovereign assets controlled by Goldman's posse of financial institutions.

Meanwhile, we have neither a stable nor a robust economy. We just have incredible liquidity for investors in securities.

The immediate commercial demand is in the displays of portable electronics, where this technology will decrease power consumption and deliver better contrast, especially in daylight.

Does four million get even one item on this list?

So of course this whole project will need to attract international support from all those other governments grateful that the US role protects the integrity of critical hardware worldwide.

After all, those same governments will probably send their very brightest and most dedicated graduate students and post-docs to the institutions conducting the research.

Maybe they're already supporting it and working on it.

The real danger is the secrecy with which these privacy-violators operate. Even if they were miraculously staffed with Spock-like analysts pure of all malevolence, they would drive the country off a cliff by avoiding the corrective of public accountability.

Suppose Australia outlawed all clothing and curtains, put every square centimeter under public surveillance with open online access, published all bank statements online, restricted the use of passwords only to verify authority for transactions, and recorded all conversations, whether in person or electronic, for public review. It would be a different village, and individual liberites would need to be protected from taboo rather than intrusion, but it would still be a society, susceptible to being changed by its inhabitants.

Instead, Australia's One-Way Mirror of Control will reduce Australians to a slave population controlled by a paranoid elite. The pyramids and monuments will be magnificent and the leaders all superhuman geniuses concerned only for the welfare of all, and you'd better agree if you hope to eat another meal.