I do not want my car grinding to a halt because the police are looking for some runaway or a bank was robbed.

GLWT.

The difference between theory and practice is often much smaller in theory than in practice.

Wait, are you implying that some of these walls are missing and/or faulty?

pushing a product on the public with the hope that it will be useful once we have it is a cruel inversion of how product adoption should be handled.

Nonsense. People buy a product like a game console speculating that they will get future use out of it. This doesn't always pan out, as many second and third-gen consoles can demonstrate quite well. You can certainly make the argument (and I believe the author has) that the XBone raises the risk too high, and that's a valid point, but the only inversion going on here is the one between reality and wishful thinking.

You know what's been increasing (far faster than the population) for 40 years?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

The problem is that angry customers don't much matter when said angries have little or no alternative.

Umm, no need to be alarmed (nervous laugh), but you may want to get that looked at. The, ah, propaganda bullshit sirens were explicitly designed to be installed outside of the head, and as you may notice, they are not going off as you read this.

Like it or not, and despite rationalizations and protests to the contrary, the criminal justice system probably exists primarily to serve the emotional need for fairness. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

What's more cruel, caging chickens, or pricing food out of reach of the poor? While I acknowledge that it doesn't have to be a dichotomy, I would suggest that eliminating human starvation is a higher priority than deciding whether chickens are sad (but obviously not starving) and if so, how to remedy that.

Yes.

Next question.

...adding that emails sent to that address would be deleted after 10 seconds.

They definitely are an engineering organization. But just like LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.nsa.gov/careers/career_fields/compee.shtml

The government doesn't so much want to eliminate corruption as much as they want a cut of it.

Oh, Steve Ballmer... You're the king of semantics. That's so hot. When I think about you I touch my screen. Guess which side has a sweaty photo of you in it? Hint: both. Call me!

The legal argument isn't one of efficacy; it's one of Constitutionality. It doesn't matter whether the program could have prevented 9/11 -- a lot of arguably unconstitutional actions could also have prevented 9/11 -- but whether the program follows the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment and related law. Does the government have an inherent right to know about any and all communications simply because they occur? The answer should be an obvious "no."