They will no longer need to worry about oil spills. Many of those silly, and very expensive 'safety' precautions can now be avoided. Saving costs increases shareholder value.

The only real drawback to this solution seems to be that the membrane's ingredients do not include ground up kittens and babies.

That's because whenever you try something socialist-ish it's implemented as corporate welfare. Instead of taxing the corporations and helping the people you're bailing out the corporations and handing the bill to the people. Your version of Robin Hood would involve trying to get a trickle-down effect by handing the sheriff of Nottingham more money so he could hire more tax collectors and guards. Or to use a car analogy it's like stabbing the tires and pouring sugar in the gas tank, then comparing it to a horse.

The intersection between stuff I'd love to do and the stuff people would pay me to do = Ø, particularly if I got paid to do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my job (37.5 hour work week, decent pay with overtime, 5 weeks vacation, interesting and meaningful work) but I don't love it and it's not something I'd do without the paycheck. If you can't really think of anything else to do than work, you must have a very gimped imagination. I'm sorry.

The first part you got right, the second I don't think so. From what I gather the photon is really like an "on and off again" couple, every so often they split apart to an electron and positron but almost instantly realize being on their own doesn't work so they get back together again. But in those brief moments they're single they're pulled much stronger towards parties, curving the path they take between our house and their house - not zigzagging.

Apparently over a 168000 light year stretch this adds up to a 0.0005 light year detour, they've not traveled as straight a line as the neutrinos have. Of course we already knew gravity bends light, but these quantum effects means it bends a little more than expected from the photon's mass. It's no wonder quantum mechanics can drive you crazy, God isn't just playing dice on top of that the dice morphs between 1d6 and 1d20 during the throw.

Oh there's plenty of hellholes left, but the remaining ones are mostly plagued by civil war, crazy dictators, massive corruption, lack of basic education and infrastructure or some other form of ethnic, religious, economical, social or political instability that make them unsuitable for running a business no matter how low the wages get. The extremely poor but stable countries are quickly running out, India is still lagging quite a bit behind China but after that if gets tougher and tougher.

Man, I wish I could sell at a loss with a 60% gross margin. Like all companies they make margins slim where competition is strong and large where it's weak or non-existant, but if you've ever had the impression Intel was dumping prices to squish AMD out of the market you must have lived in a different world than me. Dirty OEM tricks? Sure. Bleeding consumers dry by charging tons for extreme performance, long battery life or server features? Sure. Having superior process technology and pocketing the profit from lower costs? Sure. Force feeding the mainstream market IGPs to eat AMD/nVidia's low end? Sure. But I've never looked at an Intel CPU - and particularly a CPU+mobo combo since they have a monopoly on chipsets too and effectively set prices for both - and thought "wow, that's cheap"

To be fair, at the CEO level of a major company it's impossible to deal with individuals. I've worked for many years with project portfolio management tools and on that level it looks more like a knapsack problem where you have say 100 developers and doing project A consumes 30, project B consumes 40 and project C consumes 50. Except it turns out B and C is both eating the same pool of 20 that know one particular technology or they touch the same systems or users and you don't want two major overhauls colliding. And one project has a much better ROI short term, but the other is strategically important or one is high risk and the other low risk and so on. When you're at this level you're looking at whether you have the capacity and right mix of staff, not how well each individual is suited to their position.

You must understand that as a CEO you're dealing with layers of indirection, perhaps you can make some changes to HR policy that may over time help improve the composition of your workforce, but on the normal management timescale you're stuck with what you've got. And every company tends to have the employees that are favored by that system, rock the boat too much and you get issues with employee dissatisfaction, turnover and a management chain that resist you so mostly they focus on getting the business side right, what products and services should we be delivering. It's up to middle management to pick the aces and go to bat for why these people deserve such a big paycheck compared to others who also call themselves developers. But I will tell you one thing, the CEO might not know what's going on but he does care when the 100 man hours he was going to spend turned into 200, even if the rate was lower.

Why would anyone bother to LIE to Congress when you can just PAY them instead?

Haven't you heard, congress will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING for money. They don't even make much of a pretense of representing the people any more.

Yes. This can be circumvented. If these people can get around the clear wording of the constitution, then they can do anything.

Black is white. Up is down. Secret courts can issue secret overly broad warrants to secretly spy on everyone all the time. People can be secretly compelled to secretly hand over their secret keys and keep this a secret. People can be compelled to help spy on you and keep this a secret. People can be secretly arrested, and taken to secret prisons. We have secret trials with secret evidence. Defendants are now not even allowed access to the secret evidence against them. I thought I had heard everything when a government official said that their interpretation of the law was secret. (I'm sure they were thinking this keeps the enemy from knowing.)

So yes, these people can go on with business as usual. All they need is a hand waving rationalization to make it all okay.

I strongly agree! We should NOT pay to have our products' security secretly weakened.

The government should do it for free*.

(* just like 'free' public roads, public education, and many other 'free' things from the government)

The NSA would need a logo and branding for such a large advertising and PR campaign as you suggest.

I know! How about Big Brother is Watching You! And the face should, of course, have a smile and a pleasant, re-assuring image.

Funny? Why oh why wasn't your post moded Insightful?

A few decades ago the very existence of NSA was a secret. The CIA had a bad rep.

Now the NSA has a bad rep. So it's time to wind down the importance of NSA and introduce a new sooper dooper sekrit spy agency that can do dirty tricks in the dark without oversight, and especially without pesky annoyances like laws and the constitution. Meanwhile the NSA and CIA can both get all the public bad press, criticism, and 'oversight' of pointy-haired congresscritters.

Obligatory Far Side

I think something got lost in translation. If it was compromised 2+ years ago, why didn't the developer pull this stunt back then? If he knew, he sure waited a very long time and NSLs don't expire. If he didn't know, how did he find it since development was essentially dead and how did the NSA know their backdoor was about to get exposed? The more logical explanation is that he's being forced now in 2014 to burn the 2012 version which was too good for NSA to let live. I think the people abandoning TrueCrypt now are led by the nose by NSA, not the other way around.

No, the point of a kill switch is to destroy the resale value. Same as an IMEI ban, once reported stolen nobody should* give you service

* not actually implemented worldwide, yet