As a slight point of clarification, one member of the public was granted time during the hearing to speak, and said person pre-request it and was asked to submit their script for review. It was not a "we will now open the floor" situation.

At no position on planet earth could any customer have asked themselves "Do I want to be a customer of Comcast or Time Warner Cable?"

That is the "backwards" portion of the proposal, namely the presumed backroom deals going on to ensure that customers would be prevented from having choice, and to ensure that should they dislike the level of service offered, their only option would be to move to a location where you have elected to allow a "competitor" to operate unrestricted by your presence.

The distinction that corporations should have a voice in the political process is itself asinine considering that a corporation is nothing more than a conglomeration of individuals who already possess said voice and can act independently. The removal of campaign contribution caps is itself a travesty considering that it allows for an extremely unleveled playing field. While we are at it, perhaps we should go back to pre-Jacksonian era voting rights and only extend them to individuals who own in excess of 50 acres of property while we are at it; allowing those who want their voice heard to be required to jump through quite specific hoops to buy their way into the system and making those who are "drains on the system" as stated by a our last Presidential Election's Runner-Up sit back and watch.

Your concern was with backing up the installer, which isn't a requirement.
If you want to break the trivial DRM so that you don't need to sign in to your App Store account in the future, that is a completely different thing!
The App contains a receipt file that links it to your App Store account. Sign in so that you can validate the receipt and you can run the app.
I've personally tested some apps that have been pulled by Developers.

Aperture as with all other Mac App Store titles is a bundle that gets dropped into /Applications. If you are concerned, copy your Aperture.app bundle to an external hard drive and you're done.

They do, actually.

It is still a question of trust... Trust that the encryption method isn't flawed, trust that they aren't super secret squirreling away your key, trust that they aren't just "saying" that it is encrypted.

Bitcoin used a vulnerable version of OpenSSL and required an update to Bitcoin Core to stop it from revealing the contents of it's memory to a remote attacker. That is why 0.9.1 came out in such short order after the disclosure of the Heartbleed vulnerability. See the Bitcoin Foundation's website: Heartbleed

Instructions were given to commit perjury, under oath, to a judge in any situation in which they were asked about the surveillance tech that they have at their disposal.

Perjury is a crime whenever it takes place.
Conspiracy to commit perjury or enticement to commit perjury both are also crimes, and this email chain shows that that took place.

The real question is whether the DoJ cares about going after cops as opposed to just going after the low hanging fruit like people who beat their wives, sell drugs, or annoy the wrong person in a position of power.

What are the odds that CBS was the one to break this??? It's their time to shine, and they've spent so long looking for the right time to capitAlize on their name! See, BS!

The phone has *the same* specs as the OnePlus One, minus the head tracking camera. The OnePlus One costs $299 *off contract* while the Fire Phone costs $649 off contract. Are the head tracking cameras on the front are worth $350 extra versus an otherwise identically specced phone from a company that is actually turning a profit? The "value add apps" on the Fire Phone would seem more like an avenue for trimming margin rather than adding it, since they exist solely to sell you more things through Amazon.

Maybe I missed the memo... Have we figured out how to rapidly mobilize a coal mine to wherever we want to make a statement?

Yes, conventional weapons can cause serious deaths too, there is no debating that, and we as a species are getting ever more effective at making even more ingenious ways of killing each other.

Let's say that a bomb goes off in downtown Tokyo killing everyone. No potential for "long term injuries or complications from flying debris", everyone. If that explosion was a conventional chemical explosion, someone could walk into downtown Tokyo tomorrow and be safe from the explosive itself, and any danger would come solely from the rubble. If that bomb were biological or nuclear, entering downtown Tokyo would be extremely dangerous for months, years, decades, or longer depending on just what kind we are talking about.

And please don't be so obtuse that you can't realize that there is a wild difference between a nuclear weapon and a nuclear power source. One is designed to render an area uninhabitable *after* causing massive devastation. The other is designed to provide large amounts of energy in a controlled fashion that barring a major outside influence is safe.

The difference between a conventional explosive and a nuclear one is that in one case, when the damage is done and minutes later the region is inhabitable again... in the other, add a dozen orders of magnitude and it *may* be safe to return.

Your average smart phone knows where it is, the exact position in 3D space, what devices are nearby, whether it is being held versus on a table or in a pocket, whether you are laying down, sitting, walking, jogging, running, biking or driving, whether you are indoors or outdoors, what the temperature is, what the atmospheric pressure is, what the relative humidity is, UV levels, air quality levels, the tone of your voice to determine whether you are happy, sad, angry, ..., and in many cases what your heart rate is when using it by looking at your face.

And more sensors are being added with each revision to make them better able to be everything for you.

There are even sensors out now that will build live 3D models of whatever the phone sees, letting it know what is in it's surroundings.

Your phone already knows the things that your thermostat *can* know, except it does a better job because in our hyper-connected, instant gratification culture it has become the 8th deadly sin to be anywhere without your cell phone for 5 minutes.

While it is good to be considerate about what could happen should all of these existing systems that we already have in our homes and are adding daily get linked together into one gigantic monitoring system, it is an exercise in futility considering that we knowingly don't care because next year we can play Kinectimals on our phone and have our ePet interact with the world by jumping up on the couch or hiding behind the counter.

WebGL is becoming a nice technology, and systems like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 are supporting web deployments (not download via the web, but render in a full on HTML5 compliant browser) so at a certain point it makes sense for someone to be the first mover for implementing gamepad support.

Um... a good PCI-E drive, such as a Fusion-IO board will certainly handle that write rate. That *he* is generating enough content to fill that pipe for a week strait is unlikely though as it would require multiple 10Gbase connections to do so. Since he is talking about video editing, let's say this is a surveillance system taking uncompressed HD streams that are being written natively to disk without transcoding prior to editing; we are still talking about 188 cameras coming to this one server.

That the likes of Facebook would be generating sufficient content to saturate these cards, again possible in terms of server to server replication to keep their cluster in sync and maintain live backups and hot standbys, however unlikely that they would want to fully saturate their bandwidth to single nodes as opposed to just adding some more servers to ensure that capacity exists so their users can connect.