My Nexus 5 thinks you don't know what you're talking about; it works just fine on T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint. Get with the times, man; it's ALL ball bearings now!

No, congress.
And they would know and never lie to us. Would they?

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

Oh, I agree with you.
I worked on aspects of the US PAT act. As such, I became aware of some of capabilities (snowden released more than I knew, but has missed other things; thank god). NSA having them is not a fear to me, BUT, I always thought that they needed a LOT OF OVERSIGHT. Sadly, once the act went through, the GOP pretty much removed CONgressional oversight of the NSA. That was their way of disavowing responsibility for their actions. But, I have no doubt that many terrorists actions were caught. In fact, I suspect that this is one of those, though others claim that it is not likely.

BUT, the idea that ANY of this equipment could be turned over to police, FBI, DEA, etc is just TERRIFYING. Oddly, a number of the GOP have called for just that, which I can not image a worst situation. We would have a true police state (which in many aspects, I think that we can argue that we already are in one).

As to the Dutch sitation, if that data is limited to say another intelligence group and not a local police group, it makes good sense. After all, the goal of groups like NSA and GCHQ is not to go after local citizens, but to find others from outside of the nation that are threats to their nations.

But probably not many. Slashdot admins could run a query to see; that would be vaguely interesting, but I've seen comments from several people who say they're using the site under a newer login than their original.

Those states were gerrymandered by the GOP. Impossible to vote out the GOP until the courts shoot that down (and yes, it meandering in the courts, though it is possible that it is only about federal).

I don't see what's wrong with having government have a monopoly on some basic necessities. The government has a monopoly on my local water utility, and they do a pretty good job of things. Electricity and natural gas are highly regulated by the government, and I'm very happy with the service I'm getting.

In fact, of all the monthly utility bills I have, the ones I despise the most are landline phone, and cable tv/Internet. And those are both delivered by commercial entities that have a monopoly because they own the lines. With cable and phone lines, you can buy services off another companies, but they are just paying big corps who own the lines, making it so that there's really no way to escape them. And if you ever need your lines fixed, and you're with one of the other guys, the guys who own the lines make sure it isn't fixed quickly. Even with other connectivity problems, the internet providers are often just renting some racks inside the big corps data center, meaning even small configuration issues can take a long time to get resolved.

I like my cell phone provider, because they've allowed smaller players to buy some of the spectrum so they can operate completely independently of the big boys, and they offer much better service, with lower prices for more features.

By that logic, people who have kids should get paid more. People should be paid based on the work they accomplish, and not on their personal circumstances. If I choose to live in a smaller house, drive a cheap car, and live a meager lifestyle does that mean I should get paid less, because I don't "need" the money?

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

If they have a foreign visa, then that means they are living in America, working in America, and paying American taxes. The question is, why are they willing to accept less pay than an American citizen if they have all the same expenses as an American? They may (most likely?) have less student loans, but other than that, there's no reason you can't live off the same wages they are. I can understand complaining about overseas workers, because in some places it's actually cheaper for just about everything, even if you buy the exact same stuff. But for foreign workers living in the same city, with the same housing options, and shopping at the same stores, if they think the job is worth the lower wages, maybe you are the one who's expecting too much.

But why does it have to be the most efficient? I know a woman who took software engineering. After she completed her degree, she went to teacher's college, and ended up becoming a teacher. To be a teacher where I live, you need 2 things. A bachelors degree, and to graduate from teachers college. For the most part, it doesn't matter what discipline you get your bachelors degree in. For her, at the time, it was interesting to take software engineering, and it gives you something good to fall back on in case you can't get in to teacher's college, or you decide you don't want to be a teacher, or if the number of jobs for teachers goes into decline. It's a much smarter path than taking an English degree, and then for some reason you can't get a job as a teacher, and you end up with a degree that doesn't help you get a job either.

Which is really not all that bad.
I would rather NSA, who has no powers, spy on me, than FBI, or even worse, the local police.
Taking it further, I have less issues with say GCHQ spying on me. Why? Because not only do they not have any powers, but, they have no INTEREST in me, unless I am up to something that will be seriously detrimental to UK, or other western nations.

Dutch citizens? I doubt it. BUT, Dutch government is probably ignored by the US government.

NSA to spy. Of course, I doubt that Germany KNEW that we were listening in on their gov officials, to which they absolutely should be mad. But, I suspect that NSA is still allowed to spy all over Europe. I would not be surprised though, if we have a few new treaties.

Even after looking at the full report, I see no actual numbers for how many vulnerabilities there were. Going from 1 vulnerability to 2 vulnerabilities would have been a 100% increase, without a huge reason for concern. They also state:

a trend underscored by a progressively shorter time to first patch for its past two releases

Is time to first patch really a bad thing? It really means that vulnabilities were found, and that they were fixed quickly. As opposed to vulnerabilities found and not fixed quickly. I suppose it's worse than "no vulnerabilities found" but even if none are found, it doesn't mean they don't exist. Fixing things quickly is about the best thing you can do. It also goes on to say in the report

Both IE exploits released in 2014 (CVE -2014-1776, CVE-2014-0322) used Flash to build the ROP chain and launch shellcode

Which really leads me to believe that the numbers really did go from 1 to 2, and that the exploits were more due to flash than they were to specific functionality in IE. MS was able to work around the bug by stopping it at the first step, but looks like the exploit isn't possible without Flash.