In the USA, laws are entirely based on trending topics.
Gay marriage is trending, so courts are continually overturning bans.
Marijuana is trending, so States are legalizing.
Women's rights are a perennial issue.

In a sane country, we'd enshrine these changes in the US Constitution, instead of leaving the Supreme Court to decide everything and then Congress or the Executive Branch crafting legislation/regulation in order to comply..

That seems like a reasonable statement to include in the Constitution.
Right?

It seems like a lot of people seem to have ignored the detail that Snowden picked Hawaii because it didn't have access controls yet.

The NSA and DoD have been rolling out software upgrades across their facilities specifically to prevent another Manning.
Hawaii was not upgraded, Snowden knew this, and he used this knowledge to pilfer data without restrictions.

If you removed all the government subsidies and tax breaks for exploration/drilling/production, those profit margins wouldn't be nearly so fantastic.

Or because the FAA holds the airplane manufacturers to an extremely high standard for their software.
There's no one holding Microsoft or the creator of Flappy Birds to any standard of security.

/I know /. has some programmers who are familiar with airline standards, so maybe they'll chime in.

This isn't soft power at all.
As the cost differential between Chinese manufacturing and US manufacturing decreases, it makes perfect sense to move the manufacturing closer to where the products will be consumed.

US companies have been slowly moving their manufacturing back to the USA (or to Mexico), because it isn't that much more expensive than China + the lack of language barriers and 12 hour time shift makes resolving problems easier.

The fact that the Chinese are now moving manufacturing to the USA means that cost differential has shrunk even more, to the point that the Chinese are willing to put up with the language barriers and 12 hour time difference.

According to the user manual, no internet connection is required.
http://btsync.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/BitTorrentSyncUserGuide.pdf

On page 2:

Connection
The devices in sync are connected directly.
Ðonnection is established by use of TCP,
UDP, NAT traversal, UPnP port mapping, and relay server. If your devices are on a local
network, BitTorrent Sync will synchronize them without the Internet connection.

When the Clean Air Act was amended in the 70s, coal plant emissions were grandfathered in.
The assumption was that, over time, the plants would either be retired or brought into compliance as major upgrades were made.

Except there was a loophole of sorts... plants did not have to comply with the new emissions rules if their upgrades were less than XY% of the plant's value. The result was that plant operators never ever made any major upgrades. Instead, they used incremental upgrades in order to stay under the legal requirements for coming into compliance.

The end result is that most coal plants in America date back to the 1970s, specifically because of this regulatory loophole.
I have little sympathy for an industry that could have spent the last 40 years reducing their emissions.

Skype's problem isn't proprietary encryption.
If you recall, for a very long time, Skype used random clients as nodes to connect calls..
Microsoft bought Skype and, in 2012, released an update that ended this practice and forced everyone to go through MS controlled nodes.
Microsoft claimed this was for performance reasons, but everyone with two braincells immediately assumed it was for spying.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/24/0039205/microsoft-wont-say-if-skype-is-secure-or-not-time-to-change
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/07/26/2243206/microsoft-makes-skype-easier-to-monitor

Skype's original design was intentionally restructured to give Microsoft the ability to intercept all communiciations.

[Citation Needed]

I imagine The IRS has had more than just those 7 hard drive failures.
But I imagine Congress doesn't really care how many annual hard drive failures the IRS sees across all its employee computers.

"too-big-to-fail fascist/corporate model" is a great description of the USA's existing internet infrastructure.
So according to your logic, the internet is already wrecked.

Sure, there are tens of thousands of companies involved in "the internet," but if you look at the core, it's one or two dozen major corporations that control the vast majority of back hauls, interconnects, and last-mile infrastructure in the USA.

A Fair Price
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/fair-price

Below is the exact math for 734k CNY [Chinese Yuan]:
$81,070 US price
$3,600 Shipping & handling
$19,000 Customs duties & taxes
$17,700 VAT
734k CNY @ 6.05 exchange rate

Tesla already had the opportunity to "Apple it up" and chose not to.

Hereâ(TM)s how the IRS lost emails from key witness Lois Lerner
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/06/16/heres-how-the-irs-lost-emails-from-key-witness-lois-lerner/

I don't think that qualifies as "massively inept," only as garden variety ineptness.

There are plenty of websites that exist solely to index and re-host booking photos and arrest reports.
They make their money by charging a fee for de-listing.

It's extortion, but it's legal.

The FAA regulates the use of your (smart)phone on planes.
Is that also a stretch?