Sadly, they are all under the Executive branch so: 1. Nothing will be found; 2. If something is found refer to #1.

And even if the Judiciary or the Legislative bodies became involved both of them have also already surrendered to "the ends justifies the means" as far as domestic spying goes. Well except that some members of Congress is now saying "Woah! Hold on there, we didn't think this applied to us!"

/Yes parent post was (probably) a joke

Everyone who has paid attention to Windows the last couple of decades knows, Windows 8 is the one you skip. Just like Vista, just like Millennium Edition before that. Sure they threw a in a minor wrinkle in with 8.1, but that was just a distraction to make you think they are doing something, not a major version roll. 98(SE) decent, ME suck, XP decent, Vista suck, 7 good, 8 suck. Next time around they'll keep the back end improvements and fix all the crap they screwed up in the front end.

If you have some time to kill, you might try "I refuse to answer any questions and I do not consent to any search." Just keep repeating that.

I don't think they are powerless either. I think this guy is going around saying that their power is diminished so that people will get more comfortable and move on while the NSA continues almost business as usual.

If they had not been abusing their power to conduct illegal surveillance then Snowden may not have resorted to this. Perhaps then their techniques would have remained secret and been available for legitimate purposes. Perhaps they should be looking in the mirror when placing the blame.

We absolutely test all boundary conditions, on both sides. This is standard practice where I work, for just that reason.

Interesting point. But the choice isn't to put him in jail or just tell him to stop. People like this typically don't stop unless forced. So then, what is the cost to the general population of SPAM? Time wasted, resources expended on filtering technology or effort spend manually sifting through the crap. And it wasn't just unsolicited, it was fraudulent as well.

I think the real issue is that he ignored court orders to stop spamming. They are prosecuting for criminal contempt.

I don't understand this attitude. (Applies here and to the AC OP). This is a negotiation. Both parties have skin in the game. This shouldn't be viewed as an all or nothing proposition. These are the only the starting positions. This shouldn't be emotional; it certainly isn't for Amazon. If a solution can be had that is at least acceptable to both parties then it will be reached. The worst case scenario is that they can't agree and Amazon pulls back to other neighboring countries, while shipping products into Germany from the outside. But this will only happen if the workers in Germany are unwilling to negotiate and push the cost of doing business there up over the combined cost of doing business elsewhere and shipping stuff into Germany from the outside.

Ease of rooting depends on the device and can vary greatly from "download an app and press a button" to "download part of the Android dev environment to your PC, put the phone in dev mode and run a script." My current phone fell into the latter category, and even that wasn't bad with the detailed instructions.

As to your second point, I agree that there should be an easier way, but I don't think it should be enabled by default. Not having Root provides a level of security from malicious apps. Even with root, the phone will prompt you every time an app wants super user access.

Gives granular control of app permissions. Requires Root, but it's worth it. I figured this change was never going to be permanent because it messes with Google's (and app developers') revenue stream.

For lack of a better option, I guess it would be how they are selected for tenure today. If I understood correctly, the parent to my original post was asserting that people who have never done anything particularly noteworthy should be hired by universities and subjected to little oversight. This model has the potential to find some really outstanding young academics (which I think was the point of the earlier post), but most of what you will have are just average. Do I want to commit to keeping a bunch of average academics around forever on my limited budget? /Leaving aside the fact that tenure decisions are usually made by a committee which is the best way to make sure the optimal decision is never actually reached.

I don't think I understand your point. How is anybody being denied "academic freedom?" Who is stopping these PhDs from studying whatever they want? Or by academic freedom do you mean "the freedom to make somebody else pay them for their studies?"

This isn't a dig, I really feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle because I just don't get the outrage, particularly with this statement: "The idea of academic freedom being available only to those who have already made their most significant contribution (and therefore get tenure which is supposed to provide academic freedom) is an idea that needs to be discussed. It is a problem." If I only have a small pool of money to pay tenured professors, why wouldn't I want to select the ones that have proven themselves?