GSM (and GSM cryptography) was developed way back when the smartest thing a cellphone could do was to store a few phone numbers and the hardware grunt the system had was minimal.

Also, when GSM was developed, the various intelligence agencies in the NATO countries deliberately wanted the cryptography to be weak in order to make it easier to hack.

Why is the federal government (and its agencies) so scared to allow state and local law enforcement agencies to reveal the use of these devices?

They will find a way to twist the law so that it only applies to the big corps and not the little guy.

No, time to go to open source verified-by-security-audit strongly-encrypted VoIP (the kind that at the very least will require the spooks to put a lot of effort into cracking it so they cant just vacuum it all up like they do now) and secure anonymous distributed crypto-currencies that the feds cant easily track (and cant seize as part of a "random" roadside stop on the interstate)

You dont need to make one, just buy one of the many varieties of metal credit card wallets already on the market that do the job of blocking the cards just fine.

I have a fairly large C++ project with a bunch of classes and it makes good use of operator overloading including overloading + and += on string classes, [] on containers and a whole bunch of operators on various kinds of matrices and vectors and stuff.

Our codebase would be much less readable and easy to work with if it wasn't for operator overloading.

The difference is that Samba and Bitkeeper don't use the online servers as part of their anti-piracy solution in the way most of the games do. Its not the reverse engineering of the server protocols as such that's illegal, its the fact that these server clones let you play with pirated copies.

Generally they dont hard-code IP addresses, just domain names.
And when it comes to the server clones I have seen before (e.g. the GameSpy clones made after the shutdown of that service) people either hacked the clients to point to the new domain names or used hosts files or proxies to intercept requests and point them at the new locations.

If you post and set it to "show only to certain people" (or whatever the settings are on your social media outlet of choice) then yes there IS an expectation that people outside the group can't see it.

If a cop is posing as as a teenager or college kid online so they can hang out in chat-rooms and hook pedophiles that's one thing (pedophiles are scum who deserve to be locked away in one of those nasty jails they show on various TV documentaries) but if they are doing it to bust up a few kids having some beers (and presumably harming no-one except themselves) then that's different and shouldn't be allowed.

Better yet, why not make a dongle that can pull content directly from the NAS via SAMBA, supports every codec known to man (including the obscure ones) by using something like FFMPEG (with hardware accelerated decoding for the codecs where the hardware can do it) and can be controlled via a normal remote or via an app (one that exists on all the necessary platforms).

As for DRM (which is necessary if you want Netflix etc) just get Adobe to port the same DRM blob being used for Firefox on Windows to the new device and let the blob handle the DRM.

If I was Sony I would be splitting the company into 3 pieces, one for the movie and music operations, one for the consumer electronics division (Bravia TVs, CyberShot & Alpha cameras etc etc) and one for the PlayStation division and their video games empire.

A 3-way split means the consumer electronics division will no longer be restricted by the need to not do anything that would piss off the guys over in the content creation division. Also people who hate Sony and refuse to buy their products due to the crap their content creation division does (come on, they made & sold a whole pile of audio CDs that installed malware on basically any Windows PC you put the disk into) would be able to buy from the (presumably no longer super-evil) stand-alone consumer electronics company knowing they aren't supporting the super-evil content creation part of the company.

RadioShack knew a few years ago that they needed to change but they continued to sell crap no-one wanted to buy from them like crappy cellphone plans and overpriced junk. That and the whole "we need your entire life story and all your personal details before we can sell you that pack of AA batteries" BS.

If they had acted sooner, dropped the crap people didn't want like the cellphone plans and anything else that they couldn't get people to buy, dropped the personal data harvesting and maybe introduced some new product lines that people might actually go to RadioShack to buy, they could have saved the business.

I have a Canon PowerShot SX130IS 12.1 megapixel mid-range point & shoot camera (well it was mid range when it came out). Its got a bigger sensor, bigger lens and higher optical zoom level (12x) than any smartphone camera I have ever seen, including the one on my Nokia N900.

For photographing LEGO creations (and getting right in there for close-ups, the macro mode and bigger/better sensor beats any smartphone hands down.

And for photographing when out and about (e.g. buildings, buses, trains, planes etc) where you want to be able to zoom in on things further away the 12x optical zoom easily beats the 0x optical zoom on all the smartphone cameras.

Unless you are being totally dumb and storing passwords in plain text or something instead of hashing them, there is no good reason why any website should have a maximum password length.

Oh and also they should change the way the airlines (i.e. those doing regular scheduled services, however the FAA defines those) get charged all the airport and airspace fees so as to make it beneficial for the airlines to run fewer services with bigger airplanes instead of more services with smaller planes.