Sorry, but you do not understand European law at all. What you say is plain wrong.

Well, the hidden effective data retention done by the NSA is not in any way better...

Makes sense.

Since I am based in Europe, I do observe these tendencies with some level fascination. It is just as if the US envies Europe the dark ages of non-enlightenment and wants to go into something similar to compensate.

Science can often mean to prove things that seem relatively obvious. In not so few cases, they then turn out to be wrong, and in the other cases they turn from speculation to fact.

Without science, we would still believe the earth was flat, and that bloodletting was a good medical procedure to cure everything. After all, these things were obvious back then.

Indeed. And one of these days, they will crack it. It is not far out of reach. It just needs some engineering optimizations. And once the saltwater problem is solved, the solution will benefit other things working in saltwater as well.

Feel free to use it the next time ;-)

Especially if you consider that many military vehicles do not even have lockable doors...

What is next? Shoplifters as terrorists? Or people that ride public transportation without a ticket?

Seriously, this is far beyond mere ridiculous. Possibly, this utter idiocy results from a deep desire to classify all hackers as "terrorists". After all, they can do things! That seems to scare the government badly.

From her perspective, this move makes perfect sense. Megalomaniac fuck-ups never realize that they are the problem. They are not equipped for it.

... that were once great. I bet she can do the same with a whole nation-state. From statements by some former HP executives, her specialty is "shoot-the-messenger", which means that she has one of the worst possible management mistakes down pat and uses it as standard operating procedure. It really does not get much worse than this.

Indeed. In a very real sense, the US was late to this game. Of course they would revise history to obscure their failure.

No, that was the Zuse Z1 in 1938, 8 years before ENIAC. Even the Z4, which was a freaking _commercial_ design was built from 1943 onwards, years before ENIAC.

Fail. The Z1 was the first programmable computer, finished in 1938 by Zuse himself, on private funding.

Actually, Z1 in 1938. But it was not reliable, so design upgrades were required.