You may not know this, but the President of the United States doesn't have an office in the NSA, and doesn't have direct access to their leadership or decision-making.

Actually, he DOES have direct access to their leadership and decision-making. He's the PRESIDENT!

All he needs to do is pick up his phone and call the NSA Director, tell him to get his ass over to the White House RIGHT NOW, and, lo, the NSA Director will be heading toward the White House.

Then he tells the NSA Director words to the effect of "Stop this shit, right the F**k now!", and lo, it will be stopped.

And if that doesn't work, there's the "Fire him, right now" option. Like when Truman fired MacArthur back in the day.

Remember, he's the President. Head of the Executive Branch. Which includes both CIA and NSA. They all work for HIM, not the other way around.

The fact that this is still going on does not show a lack of power on the part of Obama, it shows agreement with this on the part of Obama.

Germany wants its own trade deals in private.

While you can negotiate a trade deal privately, it's pretty much impossible to operate one privately. After all, at least one other country has to know the details, and most (if not all) of the economic effects are easily detectable....

[Citation needed]

Don't forget the RF shielded optical fiber interconnects, for true fidelity at high frequencies, and a mellow bass.

My bad, I should have checked.

Yes, there are people who were born in the 19th century and were still alive in the 21st. As of a year ago, there were 21 women born in the 19th century still alive.

I have a daughter born in 1999.

A bit younger than my daughter, so your daughter has a higher chance than mine (and my kid's chances are non-zero) of living in three different centuries (20th, 21st, 22nd).

I'm thinking that noone has ever done that (unless you count some Biblical codgers)....

If Lloyd Blankfein and others who attested to the veracity of their financial reports even after they were repeatedly warned their mark-to-market was completely unrealistic, which in turn led to the largest financial disaster in over 70 years, are not being prosecuted for false reporting, I don't see why the police should be.

Especially as in this case no one was harmed. Can't say the same thing about the millions who lost their money or homes, can you?

A few years later, and millions lives lost, England prevailed.

I am assuming you mean "millions of German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese lives lost here", since the UK lost fewer than half a million?

How is it reckless endangerment when the police were supposed to be in the area and did their job by investigating something suspicious?

Corporate tax avoidance?

Would that be like when you take your Standard Deduction (or Itemized, as appropriate for you) on your Income Taxes?

Or deduct your VAT, if applicable?

Do try to remember that "tax avoidance" is synonymous with "didn't pay any more taxes than legally obligated to". What it does NOT mean is "broke the law by paying less taxes than the law requires"....

But later, Earth got into drugs and became like Lindsey Lohan.

But drugs are cool. I'm always told how great it is to do drugs. Just look at Elvis, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cory Monteith, Dee Dee Ramone, Jim Morrison and whole host of others who extolled the virtues of drugs.

P.S. If Lohan would drink water instead of alcohol, she'd look (and feel) a lot better than she does.

IIRC not until the early 1900 when private bank notes becaome uncommon.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. After that, privately issued Bank Notes pretty much vanished.

You need to qualify your statement about large quantities overcoming a qualitative difference with the following: had Hitler not ordered a full stop of the Panzers before they reached Moscow and given Russia six weeks to rearm, reorganize and regroup, Russia would not have been able to deliver the large quantities of tanks it eventually did.

Go read "Hitler's Panzers East" by Stolfi for a fantastic discussion of why Germany beat Russia in World War II except for the fact Hitler meddled in operational control.

Here's a brief synopsis: the German military laid out the plans necessary to defeat Russia before the winter set in. Without exception, they met every single objective in the time allotted and in some cases ahead of schedule.

Before the halt ordered by Hitler, there was only one remaining pocket of strong resistance in the South. Russia, at that point in time, had no other forces available to offer any significant resistance to the German armies anywhere in the country. Had he wanted to, Guderian could have literally driven his 2nd Panzer Army into the streets of Moscow in late August.

What I think a lot of the utopian visions miss, as well as a lot of the posters here, is that the problems with programming are not problems with the tools, but with the code that these amateurs produce. Writing clean, clear, correct, modular, maintainable, tested, and reusable code is still a skill that takes time to learn.

Generally, most people understand following a sequence of steps to achieve a goal. They can follow a recipe's steps to bake a cake. Some can even write down the steps they took to accomplish a task, which is the beginning of automating it; but recording and playing back steps is certainly not all there is to programming. Almost anyone who can write steps down can then learn enough of a language to string together a dozen or even a hundred individual steps to then achieve a goal: StepA(foo); bar = StepB(foo); StepC(foo,bar); ... another 97 steps here...; return(). The problem is that because writing down all those steps is possible, people who manage to do it once think they're programming. But all they're really doing is scripting.

Once someone tries to add logic to their scripts, the resultant code is generally buggy, slow, difficult to maintain, impossible to test, and probably should not be put into production, let alone reused. What a professional software developer does is recognizes the difference. He or she uses his or her experience, skills, and knowledge to organize those instructions into small groups of functionality, and wraps them into readable, testable, reusable, methods. He or she recognizes dependencies in the code, follows design principles to ensure they are properly organized, groups related methods into classes or modules, knows when to follow design patterns and when to break from them, groups related areas of modules into architectural layers, and wraps the layers with clean, testable, usable interfaces. He or she knows how to secure the code against various types of attack or misuse, and to properly protect the data it's been entrusted with. He or she understands validation, authorization, authentication, roles, sanitization, whitelisting, and blacklisting. And he or she understands the many forms of testing needed, including unit testing, system testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, pen testing, performance testing, as well as tools to evaluate the code, such as static code analysis and metrics.

On the other end of the developer's life are the inputs to the processes: requirements, stories, use cases, usability, scalability, performance. They know that following certain development methodologies can make a great deal of difference to the software's quality. And then there are the realities of all the non software development issues: equipment, firewall rules, IDPs, networking, vendor contracts, software licensing, hosting, distribution, installation, support, bug tracking, and even sales.

Tools can help with all of these steps, but as you pointed out, having a word processor does not make one a poet.

How does one embed "JavaScript URLs" in CSS?

Very easily, and because so few people know it is possible, it's a rather nasty vector for cross-site scripting attacks.

Also you seem to have no idea about where the web is headed or have heard about responsive design and SPA.

I'm well aware of responsive design. I think it's an abomination, because all it does is make it take two page loads to view your site instead of one, by ensuring that I have to first load your broken mobile site, then click the "full version" link. Every single freaking time I end up on a "responsive" mobile version of a website, I find myself locked out of features that I regularly use, and end up having to switch to the full desktop version of the site.

If you need much more than a couple lines of JavaScript and a custom stylesheet to support mobile devices, it invariably means that your site is badly designed (too complex) to begin with, and as soon as you release the mobile version of your site, you're almost certainly going to make me hate your guts and curse your name.

And SPA is even worse. If your site loads significantly faster as a web app, there's something wrong with your site. 99% of the time, most of the resources should be shared across pages, and only the text of the page should be changing. There's usually not an appreciable difference between the "load the full page" case and the "load the body of the page" case from a performance perspective unless something is very, very wrong. There are exceptions, such as storefronts that use precisely the same page layout for every page, but these are exceptions, not the rule, and even then, the extra savings in initial page load time just result in a customer sitting there wondering why there's no data on the page, and thinking your site is broken. The real problem is that every web engineer thinks their site is the exception to this rule, but most of those engineers are wrong.

More to the point, if I'm accessing your site often enough to care about performance, I'm going to download your native app instead of using your mobile site, because it will always be much, much more functional, with fewer limitations, more features, and better performance. If I'm going to your website, it's either because I don't care about performance or, more commonly, it is because your native app is missing features that are only on the full version of your site. Giving me a mobile version won't help with the second case, and the first case is largely unimportant for everybody but the site designers who are trying desperately to shave off a few bytes from their data bill.

BTW, it's possible to do a manifested web app (giving you all the advantages of heavy-duty caching of shared content) without using JavaScript for all your navigation. You just specify the base path of the content directory as an external URL (I forget the details) in the web app manifest. This approach is much, much more user-friendly than a SPA in my experience.