Sad but true; only the government can make this happen, since there isn't any profit to be had via science spending in the next quarter or year (which is all modern corporations look at).

Well, too bad. I mean sorry, kids, that your parents were dumbasses, but you don't get to complain about a nanny state (preventing you from building in a risky location) and complain about the lack of a nanny state (that didn't forcibly remove you or removed your kids) at the same time.

Marriage confers various legal statuses, and as such, involves the gov't.

Now if you are talking about some kind of Libertarian exception that exempts both spouses from ALL legal status and responsibilities, then sure, knock yourself out. Just be happy with a giant middle finger if later you wanted one of those rights/benefits you passed on, to avoid the gov't definition.

But it would be very hypocritical to expect the gov't to grant legal status with marriage, without agreeing to the definition of marriage.

Dude, your original claim is complete bullshit (can't get ANY manual), so come on, man up, and admit you were either willfully ignorant or stupid.

Monopoly abuse? You mean of Comcast, the ISP, right?

Once Netflix caved, paying for bandwidth (the whole thing about an ISP not actually providing the bandwidth they claim to their consumers is another issue), the race will be on for others to do the same.

Or are you going to claim that Comcast, after extorting special payments from Netflix and then demanding the same from Apple, is the fair and free-market way an ISP is supposed to behave??

Corporations generally don't give a flip about this situation:

>I could convince a company to hire me based on willingness to learn and improve.

If that's true, what sets you apart from anybody else that is also willing to learn and improve, with a more extensive background that you have?

That being said, I think what you should do is start networking immediately, reach out to anybody and everyone you know for entry level positions in development and/or system administration. Do not spend the next 6 months studying on your own in the evening, in isolation.

>violate the US Constitution, US law, international treaties, the trust of US allies

Dude, they are an intelligence agency, what the fuck do you think they do? Except the constitutional violation part, that should be reigned in. Violate treaties and trust? Hello are you that naive? If you want to get all butthurt about US violations, start with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed thousand, pissed away trillions, and had us take a dump on the world. That an intel agency is developing exploits - this confuses you?

I'm not sure you'll get that much out of studying the Accumulo source code, honestly. Secure coding practices have been widely knows for decades at this point, and it isn't as if they've got some magic way to call sprintf() securely, that nobody else has figured out.

High performance data storage and retrieval? So basically they are interested in dealing with lots of data? I could have told you that without bothering to look at Accumulo (and I haven't). Where their magic lies isn't in the software, it is the DATA, which they aren't releasing (obviously) and don't want to talk about gathering.

It isn't as if they are giving out do_mitm_attack.a or break_encryption.dll.

>To fix existing weaknesses while also deliberately creating others seems illogical and self defeating to me...

Makes perfect sense to me. Think of the low hanging fruit theory. Fix a weakness that adversaries and script kiddies can find (thus, the weakness has no actual long term value) and create ones that take nation-state levels of effort to get.

How is heck is this insightful?

I thought Slashdot was the bastion of "technology is inherently neutral; anything can be used for various purposes and that doesn't make them bad". See previous argument as applied to guns, encryption, laser pointers, chemistry, hell scientific progress in general.

So now you just need to bribe a few extra people to clear a plane for flight with a non-functional tracking device installed by maintainence?

Folks, we're talking about protection $250 million. If your simple suggestion won't resist $25 million of theft effort, it is worthless, as in it merely provides the illusion of protection.

Simple: is it possible to protect a $250 million dollar asset against, say 10% effort ($25 million) to steal it?
$25 million pays for a lot of training, bypass devices, and bribes.

If Slashdot let me edit posts I'd put that in my original: what is the break even point of added cost of incremental protection versus cost of theft? For a $250 million dollar asset, you need a system that at least resists $25 million of theft effort. Otherwise it is an illusion of protection.

So you've added two or three more people to be bribed to ignore a faulty tracking device - 1 or 2 in maintenance, and someone in the control tower?
A group bankrolling a $250 million theft attempt, this is small peanuts to work around.

More info about what happened will help, but at the moment it appears adding a few more beacons on the aircraft would be an illusion of protection. Now if they were super cheap, sure do it. But for a $250 million profit I think you can bypass a hell of a lot of gizmos between training and bribes, if you were willing to invest say 10% of that.

Like cryptography, it comes down to the value being protected versus the cost of protecting it. For a 777 worth a quarter of a billion dollars, a couple of transponders located wherever (outside, inside, in the tail fin, wing) would increment the cost of ripping the plane off just a little - mostly by including a few more people to bribe to ignore problems.

What I'm saying is that given how expensive the asset is, what is the real added value of a few enhancements (all the suggestions boil down to more locator beacons)? I'd argue bypassing a handful of locator beacons would cost less than say $25 million in more bribes and so on, making a 777 theft still profitable.

The point is somebody willing to ripoff a hundred million dollars is willing to invest several million doing it.
If your anti-theft device can't resist millions of dollars of effort, then it is pointless.

As for putting it outside the plane and whatever, the ring of thieves merely has to bribe an extra person or two in the maintenance hangar and air traffic control, to sign off on a non-functional device and then clear the plane for takeoff. Then the reasonably impervious device is bypassed altogether.

Again, the asset being protected is worth hundreds of millions. It comes down to how much are you willing to spend to steal it? Google tells me the "list price" of a 777 is around $250 million. Could 5-10 key people splitting 25 million do it?

If somebody is willing to ripoff a hundred million dollar plane, as the OP mentions, they are also willing to invest millions in stealing it.
Your car with an anti-theft device isn't the same reward to effort that motivated people interested in stealing a 777 would be willing to put in.

So the cost of bypassing the anti-theft device needs to be very large, or there isn't a point in having it.

How would you guarantee such a tracking device resists all possible sabotage efforts?