This. I find it appalling that this is seen as acceptable. The surveillance power that is now possible is not equivalent to anything we've seen before and changes the nature of the "lawless" foreign surveillance. Surveillance of foreigners used to mean having them spy on you when visiting their country plus some high value target monitoring in their own countries, but the cost and risk of surveillance enforced the selective nature of it. To treat every foreigner like an enemy is madness. For the most part non-US citizens felt that the US was an ally or at least harmless. Now the day-to-day decisions of all those people will take into account that the US is actively working against them. It won't be long before that is ingrained into the culture, tools and business practices of the rest of the world. Imagine the US being thought of as a worldwide Stasi: the day-to-day the common sentiment amongst the rest of the world will be "%*$k the US".

I just don't buy this argument. Do you also think that if the corporations decided to limit executive pay voluntarily they would have trouble enforcing that? How is limiting executive pay different from limiting pay for all the other classes of employees? If there is a difference then how is that difference a benefit for the organization? Best in class non-executive workers are obtainable at lower rates, why would attracting the best executive talent require different pay scales?

More importantly, since history shows pay rates in relation to others has changed significantly while the effectiveness of the executives has not, it is simply an evolution of a business culture oddity, not a business principle at stake here. It may be a cultural mistake that cannot be corrected internally, but needs significant external pressure (preferrably from competitive markets, but regulation will do) to enact change.

Lack of (free) competition creates opportunities for exploiters to siphon ill-gained money into their own pockets at all levels of the corporation, but it's always easiest for those that control the money flow to enrich themselves first. However, there is no reason why you can't use external controls to make it harder for exploiters when the organizations are weaken from lack of compeition.

But reality is more messy than that, there are all sorts of people whose abilities and skills (ranked on how useful or desired by others) are a poor match for today's society. Having a system that only rewards those who fit in best is a recipe for disaster and dehumanizing/neglecting those that don't fit in / are less fit. Diversity is longterm strength, but more importantly we have the capability for rational compassion and care for others and the wealth to make supporting everyone a minor burden at worst. Anyone who has experience with family who cannot succeed financially, but brings them great joy otherwise could tell you how important compassion and care for others is for their entire family.

Setting up a system that takes away the fears and worries about living with a decent quality of life: food, shelter, health care, meaningful work, etc brings unimaginable, but generally indirect (until something terrible happens directly to you or your family), benefits to all. Think reduced crime, more opportunity for someone to make the thing you've always wanted, etc. In a perfect world, this would be common sense and giving and support of others would be voluntary, but (especially in societies that emphasize the rightness of owning and hording regardless of the impact on others) the enforcing of distribution of wealth is a useful but blunt tool.

In addition, in this particular example, capping pay has a direct benefit to the companies: the last sort of person we want running a large business/organization that is designed to outlast their tenure is someone motivated strongly by financial incentives. That sort of leader is a real risk to the organization as they will always make mistakes in their favour rather than sacrifice for the organization.

Although it really depends *why* you play MMOs, for people that have less OCD collector/min-maxer and an interest in both casual exploration and challenging (PvP) gameplay, Guild Wars 2 is by far the best designed game I've seen in years. The skills and combat are well thought out (particular PvP) and are now quite finely balanced and tuned. They are also using an extremely fair monetization/content model where you get enough content for the price of the box, but they are also adding new content regularly every month for free. Plus WvW is a blast, virutal fantasy war should be a bucket list item for every gamer.

I've always wondered by the US has any fears of invasion whatsover. The US is a massive country that is generally well populated throughout which basically makes it impossible to invade and the supply lines for any invader coming from the east and west are basically unsustainable given the size of the country as well. Your neighbours to the north and south have no incentive to attack nor any sort of militaristic culture. The US seems the safest country in the world in regards to invasion. If I was the dictator of the US I'd scrap the military nearly entirely. That money and man/brain power could be better spent making the US a real superpower to go down in the history books as true light shinging through the ages.

Even through the lens of a nuclear war or WMDs it makes much more sense to invest in creating a country that no one fears and everyone loves rather than some form of fear of retaliation. Retaliation is a poor stick against smaller and smaller, but more and more powerful opponents. The only way to ensure that future superpowered opponents don't use WMD on you is to create a world where that is unthinkable. Unthinkable not through fear but through self-interest, laziness and education.

Might not work in this siutation, but perhaps posting a reward for a feature you wanted would be close enough to purchasing services?

https://www.catincan.com/

Certainy this seems like a good, and likely typical problem for someone to solve so that the interface between free software and large organization accounting mesh better.

How was he attention seeking? He leaked the documents through the most protective and secure whistleblowing service ever created at that time. He never wanted to be identified but was exposed by someone he thought he could trust, but who didn't take any repsonsibility for the information that Manning shared with him and thus doomed Manning to his prison term.

Leakers are in a difficult position, especially given massive databases of documents. One person could not possibly safely release all the documents, but he trusted Wikileaks to look through and responsibly release the documents (which they did along with other reputable news agencies). He had seen what he considered to be crimes in the documents he did look at, so it is reasonable risk to leak the entire corpus in hopes of illuminating more crimes. Wikileaks states "we may remove or significantly delay the publication of some identifying details from original documents to protect life and limb of innocent people."

If you are a leaker, especially at that time, Wikileaks was a seemingly responsible choice. That all the documents eventually got released without redaction was a security mistake (by Wikileaks and others) that cannot be blamed on Manning. The important thing to remember is that exposing crimes of those with great power is extremely valuable and worth considerable risk and cost to those innocent of the crimes.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak

I have only recently heard about this project and haven't investigated too closely yet, but they seem to be trying to solve similar issues, and have an indiegogo campaign active:

http://www.mailpile.is/

Exactly why Assange is unhappy that they are brought up. Do you think those groups were actually involved in the book or asked about their needs? Assange's criticism is yours - they are props.

Does anyone compile their own Windows? If you don't compile it then the source code that you see is just for show.

Hm, I am curious if orgs like the NSA do compile the source and compare their binary to the official one, they wouldn't have a licence to distribute if the binaries differed, but if they were identical that seems pretty safe. If you're serious about security you compile and distribute your own version of the software yourself.

The argument that the customers can force companies to abandon exploitative business practices only holds if there is enough competition in the market and there are not enough victims to make it worthwhile. WoW, Farmville and other games that rely on addiction-based gameplay with either monthly fees or microtransactions have demonstrated that there are people willing to purposely design their game to exploit the vulnerabilities of their players for profit and the industry is holding them up as examples of real success, not expoitation.

To hold the players responsible to make change is similar to holding other victims of abuse and exploitation responsible for the actions of the abusers. Certainly as a whole we need to reject abusive business practices, but the expectation of individual game players should be that the games are designed to provide enjoyment, free from exploitation. Imagine if other forms of entertainment that were designed to make you pay more for them while you experienced them. There is nothing wrong with paying game creators to create more content, but an industry that designs its products to extract profit regardless of the cost to its customers is going to develop a terrible reputation and invite a backlash against it along with regulation. The gaming industry is foolish to not castigate those that try to profit from anything other than making great games that respect their customers.

Checkout adtrap:
http://www.getadtrap.com/

You missed the kickstarter for it, but I think still available for pre-order?

Management requires empathy for others and an ability to be responsible to others, thus a psychopath cannot do the job.

The problem is that in any system, regardless of the incentives for actions that benefit everyone, the psychopaths will always look for other ways to gain only for themselves. Two things will happen: they will find an exploit or they will misunderstand how to gain the most from the working system and instead gain less but harm others.

I thnk we'll need to come to grips with psychopathy and other mental conditions in the same way we've done for physical disabilities. We want to provide access to the good things in life, but we don't want people with disabilities to put others in danger. The example in the article of no blind pilots is quite apt. No psychopathic leaders seems sensible, the trouble being the measuring of the psychopathy.

Why such a low reinvestment? Is that for external developers only? I would total up support costs, etc compare to licence fees and then reinvest 80% of the "savings", especially if it was 70% internal reinvestment (paid staff) and 10% external developers. Save yourself some money, but if you want to future effeciency and capabilities invest as much as you can.