" I doubt that Germany KNEW that we were listening in on their gov officials"
The US has anti spying agreements with the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The German government knows that and the US does not have one with Germany.
Are they really that dumb?

And yet we all want the benefits that come from spying. Even the first arms limitation treaties where based on the ability to spy to verify that they were being followed.

Some did and some did not. It is unfair to judge the individuals of a nation by the actions of other individuals. None of us know what we would do in the same situation. We all know what we would like to say we do but that is not the same thing.
Of the nations of Europe that had to live under the occupation Norway probably has the best record for resistance. Frankly the Germans didn't treat the Norwegians badly at all. They thought of them as fellow Nordics. They could have sat out the war with little grief but instead they tied down massive numbers of German troops. That being said sitting at your computer and making accusations is not helpful in the least.

I don't disagree in general, but please remember the original context here was whether going it alone as a start-up might be a liability if Big Players declined to let you into those programmes, i.e., we are talking about precisely the situation where the platform maintainer might not have that implicit interest in your success.

The key difference IMHO is that I don't need Microsoft to care about me. I can write Windows-based software and sell it to Windows-using customers with no help from Microsoft except selling us Windows and any related tools in the first place, and all three parties win on the deal. If I want to sell an iPhone app, my entire revenue stream is entirely dependent on Apple, and Apple are not known in these parts for the care with which they examine new apps or the caution or neutrality they exhibit when banning something they decide they don't like.

In the past Microsoft may have had an NIH approach, but over the past few years they have significantly changed from that in the developer area - switching from the Microsoft Ajax tools to jQuery, using Json.Net etc etc etc.

As an outsider with no bias here, it occurs to me that the above is probably in the long-term interests of the US as well. India is a big place, with lots of people, many of whom today are struggling with things we take for granted in the West. Helping to improve things like education standards and technological advancement potentially develops a vast export market for US products and services in the future and/or a mutually advantageous trading partner.

People often look at international aid schemes as charity, and support them on that basis, but the truth is that there is often a level of "enlightened self-interest" behind government support for those schemes, because things like global security and having stable economies in your trading partners are in everyone's interest. Much the same arguments could be made, as I understand it, for the US H1-B programme.

Code monkeys are, and that's the way that managers who hire code monkeys like it.

There are plenty of programmers out there creating interesting and useful new software, and plenty of customers/clients willing to pay serious money for the value that software offers them without all the unnecessary bureaucratic overheads and middle management crap.

If you are a good programmer and professional in your general conduct, you owe it to yourself not to be a code monkey for anyone, IMHO. You have to be really, really unlucky with the time and place when your current gig(s) run out not to have better options in 2014.

If you're developing on a platform as developer-hostile as that and you're locked into it so your business can't port to other platforms if necessary, I would submit that you have bigger strategic problems and long-term risks than merely being a small company. An arrangement like that is an axe hanging over the head of almost any size of company and you have absolutely no control over when it might fall.

(No, I don't develop iOS apps or write console games, despite occasionally getting enquiries in those fields, and this is why.)

One pathway for electron/positron collision can produce a neutral Z and a Higgs. In fact, they already tried that at the Large Electron Positron collider, the predecessor to the LHC. It came very close, at 115 GeV. There were hints of the Higgs, and so it came as no real surprise to find it just 10% higher.

This is actually a more efficient way of producing Higgs particles, at lower energies. The LHC produces the Higgs with two quarks, but there are six quarks involved in the proton/proton collision, so a lot of the energy you put in doesn't produce Higgs bosons. (In very rare instances you'll get two Higgs bosons, but most of the time the other quarks just produce other stuff.)

From the corner drug store. Duh.

Any Nexus branded device running Cyanogenmod. Or any non-Nexus device that CM supports (there are literally dozens)

In which universe do you live where ads on a webpage total up to half of the bandwidth to deliver said webpage?

They don't make it easy but they don't make it all that difficult either. Buy a Nexus, Developer Edition, or one of the multitude of carrier branded phones that are rootable. Install one of the multitude of ad blocking apps that are available, AdFree being my personal favorite. Problem solved.

Taiwan had various degrees of local democratic reform culminating in the first presidential election in 1996, but it wasnt until 2000 that the Kuomintang party actually lost power in an election.