China isn't like the USA.
They tend to move purposefully and quickly when goals are set.

In the run up to the Olympics, China unilaterally closed coal power plants, various heavy industries, and took cars off the road, all in a bid to reduce pollution in Beijing.
It took the USA 40 years to tell grandfathered coal plants to either shape up or shut down.
  Compare to China:

The key idea here is that all this is happening unilaterally.
Their actions probably wouldn't even be constitutional in the USA.

This isn't true at all
The President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies.
The Congress has ultimate control of funding for the intelligence agencies.
Further, both houses of Congress have intelligence oversight committees that were formed in the wake of multiple scandals from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of this is new. FISA was written as a direct result of the US Army spying on domestic protests by American citizens.
The domestic and overbroad spying by the NSA is exactly the type of thing that FISA was originally intended to halt.

Every time we pass a law to stop some shitty corporate or military behavior, it gets slowly watered down over the years until it's incapable of meeting its original goals.

I'm not sure why you need a case study to support research that was originally done almost 150 years ago,
but If you'll accept "not allowing the undesirables to breed" as a proxy for "murder them,"
here's a more recent long term study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Or you could just read about Mendel's original research with pea plants and honey bees.

Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements.
And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.

And these are the carefully vetted selectors that are being used to not-spy on Americans.
It might be faster for the NSA to just make a list of the things they haven't publicly lied about.
What a farce.

The NSA will still be sniffing any traffic that crosses US borders.
In fact, the NSA might prefer that you store everything overseas,
as it gives them

I can't get the linked PDF to load
This probably isn't the same thing, but it explains what they're trying to do and why
https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-11/Kennedy/BH_US_11_KennedyMuttik_IEEE_Slides.pdf

A bunch of people predicted it. They were ignored.
"Irrational exuberance" Greenspan called it

Here's a website devoted to documenting the people who predicted the bubble
http://investorhome.com/predicted.htm
They even quote Warren Buffet calling derivatives "time bombs."

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.