While having a direct pipe to Europe will help, I wonder if they have considered the DNS root servers and the DNS servers below them? They still need to control the traffic routing. Dot com, dot net and dot org domain names will be less attractive to the security paranoids.

It's been at Level 3 for several days already...

and break into Random Joe's and Random Bob's systems to steal the communcation data before they are encrypted, transmitted and stored.

U.S. cops watch too much U.S. TV dramas on cops and imitate them. I doubt it is the other way around.

Fending for oneself... is something my generation (babyboomers) had to do simply because our parents did not have the financial means to provide us with free board and lodging. Our parents' concern was what we, their children, would do to earn a life (work, cook, wash clothes etc. rather than earn a degree.) For entertainment, babyboomers had to be creative (making our own toys), and spending most of our time outdoors (TV, especially daytime TV, was boring.) We didn't have the luxury of classifying our food to likes and dislikes... we had them, but we still had to eat what was put in front of us on the dining table or go to bed hungry. Those of us babyboomers who succeeded in life (I think it's safe to assume most of us did succeed in life) then shielded our own children from the social pressures that we had to go through to earn a life (work, cook, wash clothes). So instead of teaching our children about the absolute need to earn a life, we shifted the attention to earn a degree. We gave them almost anything they want... food and drinks they like, cool electronic gadgets, and the like. We literally spoiled our children with the minimum of hands-on training in life. How many of us are guilty of not teaching our children to do home chores -- cleaning the toilet, washing dishes and clothes, washing windows... you name it? In the meantime, the means of entertainment changed drastically. 24-hour, full color TV programs for all kinds of interest, game consols, Internet (virtual realities, virtual friends, and even virtual jobs) were "free" for the asking. The youth could stay at home and enjoy anything for free, including free board and lodging. The problem is that all of them are enjoyed indoors. We have taught our own children to consider work at Starbucks, bookstores, Walmart, McDonald's lowly jobs not worth doing by giving up the freebees at home. The babyboomer generation considered any kind of work as respectful, and certainly better than remaining a leech at home; but this is no longer the case with the young we have raised. Small wonder that after graduation (high school or even university), the young think they have secured their target in life (or what we, their parents, have taught them to aim for), and never leave home where all the good things in life are free. The young can be very agressive at communcation only if it is virtual (email, texting, on-line chat), but are uterly shy and ineffective at human face-to-face communcation. Many can't look at a person eye-to-eye. They have become weak at unspoken language; they can't read body language and often take spoken language quite literally... as one normally would do with written, brief notes on social network services. They are unable to take both the good and bad of real world social life. They want only the good... something that is possible only by living virtual lives and staying at home. Certainly, not all of the young are like what I describe them to be above. But the Hikikomori's are. We can point the fault at ourselves for creating the Hikikomori's.

I thought I was logged in when I clicked submit the first time around, so I'm redoing this, now logged in so it is not an anonymous post... I thought it is widely accepted in the States that college background does not equate to a good, productive employee. In many countries, unfortunately the diploma is still over valued (even 10+ years after graduation.) HR departments' emphasis are legal to protect the company against would-be employees with potential to harm the company. HR's normally look at candidates with a negative eye. It is not surprising that HR's screening process cannot screen for highly productive, innovative, "make-it-happen" type of candidates. A top class business person (employed or self-employed) needs innovative initiative, drive to make things happen, and of high moral standards to succeed. All of these are not graded in school, college or even HR initiated job interviews. Interviews should be done in two major stages: The screening by HR legal types to weed OUT the harmful (from a legal standpoint), and the screening by successful managers to weed IN the desired candidates. HR for the negative weeding, and Managers for the positive weeding. I don't think the two can be merged since they have different purposes. Managers should have the final say on who to hire because in the end, they are the ones who have to assign work to the new hire, and have to take responsibility for their successes and failures... not HR. In this final stage, the HR legal types should stay out of the process because they will just ruin what should be a really "getting to know each other" early encounter between the future the boss and the subordinate. Nothing is perfect though... there are managers who prefer to hire second-class people because first-class hires endanger their own positions. But most top class managers, who have self-confidence in what they are doing, will select really first-class people to work under them. Through experience, really good managers develop a skill to choose and use talented subordinates, so they are better equipped to weed IN candidates at interviews.