Okay, I know nobody RTFAs. But the original paper is here, and it makes the following points:

1) It has nothing to do with technical abilities. Terrorists don't attempt to recruit people by technical ability, they just take whoever they can get.

2) It has nothing to do with ease of immigration as a skilled migrant. The paper cites studies on American religious terrorists (the nominally Christian far-right) and concludes that the unusual tendency of engineers towards right-wing radicalism seems universal.

3) The paper argues that the 'styles of thinking' that predispose people towards engineering, also predispose them towards right-wing radicalism. Engineers are more reliably right-wing than even economists! (who are the second-most reliably right-wing academic group). Likewise, a liberal arts education is correlated with left-wing radicalism (e.g., communist bombing campaigns in postwar Western Europe). But there have been relatively few left-wing bombing terrorist acts after the end of the Soviet Union, while right-wing radicalism is on the rise. Hence mad engineers rather than mad Marx-spewing liberal arts graduates.

Purchasing power per person, 2008:

Cuba: $9500

People's Republic of China: $6000

So, the average Cuban is still richer than the average Chinese. In ten years it might be different, though. But all this is irrelevant to the parent's point: dropping an embargo doesn't necessarily lead to political liberalization, even if the people do become better off. You can be very rich and still dictatorial.

You can ban it, but who would believe you? There's no way for the CIA to show that it isn't spying even if it really wasn't.

The circuit’s ruling came in a case that dates to 2004, when federal prosecutors probing a Northern California steroid ring obtained warrants to seize the results of urine samples of 10 pro baseball players at a Long Beach, California drug-testing facility. The players had been tested as part of a voluntary drug-deterrence program implemented by Major League Baseball.

Federal agents serving the search warrant on the Comprehensive Drug Testing lab wound up making a copy of a directory containing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with results of every player that was tested in the program. Then, back in the office, they scrolled freely through the spreadsheet, ultimately noting the names of all 104 players who tested positive.

The government argued that the information was lawfully found in “plain sight,” just like marijuana being discovered on a dining room table during a court-authorized weapons search of a home. But the court noted that the agents actively scrolled to the right side of the spreadsheet to peek at all the players test results, when they could easily have selected, copied and pasted only the rows listing the players named in the search warrant.

This... doesn't actually sound that objectionable. Scrolling to the right breaks the Fourth Amendment?

I don't know about you, but I get exact matches for "foo bar baz".

Think about it this way. The news is public, now. Do you see any frothing outrage, outside of a few fringe activist groups? Outside of Slashdot? No?

There doesn't seem to be any real interest now, so there definitely wouldn't be any then, in the with-us-or-against-us environment in the years immediately after 9/11. So how would a newspaper or media outlet gain by breaking the story? It'll just instantly lose all its government contacts, but not gain any new readership. Why would anyone publish it?

The free coverage is limited to built-up public areas, not islandwide (which makes sense - this is a tropical city, who goes outside to work? Hide indoors under air conditioning!). So to find the free wifi you need to trek to the nearest McDonald's or such.

*threats to national security. Bleagh, need sleep

Issuing ID cards is an old tactic dating from the colonial period to suppress national security - as in, regular serial bomb attacks. Both the British and new local governments used it, either to suppress independence movements, or to suppress communist/breakaway movements post-independence.

Regular bombings is not something that happens nowadays in the West, obviously. The United States, which is generally free of persistent domestic terrorism, may not have excuses to implement national ID and databases, but other countries may need it. Don't export your conceptions on first-world freedom to places where first-world safety don't exist.

It's reasonable to assume that electronics may be more expensive in Ghana, so a used HDD may be worth more. But, yes, foreigners haggling probably can't get a good price anyway.

This is, amazingly, an actual (and common!) Chinese proverb:

No matter how strong you are, there is always someone stronger.

An amazingly optimistic culture, eh?

This comic captures this point very clearly. Also: "[The] future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson

No: Flashblock doesn't prevent flash applets from running, it merely hides them as soon as it can. If your connection is sufficiently fast and your computer sufficiently slow, you'll still get hit by Flash exploits. And then there's PDF exploits/misc browser holes, too.

Less "beta" and more "it's not WinME/Vista redux, honest!", I guess.