I don't think the problem here is that IBM worked with the NSA. Problem is that as a shareholder IBM should have said something more about it and keep shareholders informed about the risks towards the share price. At minimum IBM should have stated it is working closely with US government organisations in electronic surveillance programs, which may cause loss of business if political environment changes.

If the assumption is that treatments covered by obamacare are useless or not needed then cost will be huge. If we assume the treatments are justified and needed then obamacare just redistributes the cost among every American. Additionally obamacare maybe helps with overall health of the nation and that is a huge cost saver.

That's a strange claim as both of the connectors work as USB style data/charging primarly and need heavy processing on the cable to produce any kind of video output. MicroUSB has exactly same features, it also transfers data and charge device. There might be some proprietary protocols that are unique to the lightning connector, but I doubt they are going to be widely used. However I like the hardware design of the lightning connector and hope next USB connector standard will be similar.

Problem is that you can have two persons working on a same thing where one does public presentation and does not want to patent the invention. Second one can then after this fact file patent for the invention and sue the former even if the invention was actually done first by the one who didn't want to file a patent for it. For open source and open ideas it's better to have a system where inventions can be made un-patentable without expensive legal process so I prefer the European system.

I think the novel idea here is that if you enter different passwords into same account you get different functionality. Especially useful on shared home iPad or computer or tv where you don't have need for separate accounts. Don't know if there is any prior art to this, but it sounds like a clearly different compared to user accounts in traditional sense.

Best way to deflect any talk of sanctions is to say like this : "Mr Putin's foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov said the situation was "rather insignificant" and should not influence relations with the US."

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." — Eric Schmidt

That quote (or a variant thereof) is actually often used to defend government surveillance. It's a version of the "if you've got nothing to hide, you have no reason to oppose government surveillance" argument.

Have you ever entered US as a foreigner? That sounds pretty standard procedure. Even when I was returning with valid visa to my home in San Diego I was asked questions and treated like I was trying to sneak in to the US. Not to mention the 1-2 hour lines in the immigration at Atlanta. The job of the immigration is to check the stories and documentation, if she honestly doubted your story then you wouldn't be let in.

I cannot say anything about Philippines or India, but I know for a fact that UK immigration is closer to US one towards foreigners (non-EU), my wife got once denied visa because she only had 1 month of bank statements prepared instead of 3 months. Often the treatment in other countries is similar to the one the country's citizens receive at your own country, it's called reciprocity and since US is one of the bigger offenders in poor immigration experience around the world the countries treat US citizens poorly as well. So if you are treated badly while travelling around the world it is most likely because you are US citizen.

How do you want foreign people to come to work to US? Close the borders for the foreign workers? I had opportunity to work in US for 3 years (L-2 visa), I liked it and I never had any problems with the salary level. At the moment I'm working in Europe again and happy, but if I ever wanted to return to work in US how should I do that? I also worked in China and sad to say the Chinese government is more open towards foreign workers than the US government.

I would hope that a real capitalistic economy would be able to handle also free market for employment. I would say that foreign workers also bring more to the table than just the low wage and inferior skills. Open the borders for foreign workers who pay their taxes to US and economy will benefit from that, having companies held hostage to some nation wide union of american workers is not a good thing in the long run.

If you read the bill text you quickly see (without lawyers) that your logs that are held to comply with laws and then deleted afterwards are not considered information your company retains. However you might retain other information and that information needs to be shared with the customer.

I started my own mobile game company back in 2002, which was the J2ME era. I think that was around the time of the start of the hype cycle. During this hype many companies paid big amounts of money for these mobile game startups that didn't generate real profit in a real market place. Just before Apple came out with iPhone mobile games market was in a really bad shape (disillusionment) and other apps were virtually nonexistent. Once Apple came out with iPhone market place and Android was announced things changed and companies started to make profit from paying happy customers. I consider current situation as plateau of productivity and the app market can sustain viable businesses in a relatively free marketplace.

Except the full size USB port is designed for 1500 cycles of insertion and removal and micro USB port is designed for 10000 cycles.

I'm Swedish, not Finnish, but Finland do have Swedish as an official second language, due to the fact that Finland was part of Sweden for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, you are correct. Because otherwise, I could have made a bad joke about "fiskar" meaning plural of "fish" in Swedish, which certainly relates to submersion in water.