How many programmers of that era were expert in modern corporate accounting, law, banking, business practices and procedures, as they had evolved over the past three or four centuries --- and not merely knowledgeable, but credentialed, as a C.P.A., for example?

In turn, how many accountants could have read and validated FORTRAN code for accounts receivable?

This is such a Slashdot story :)

"A girl invited me to her house on several occasions. Each time, I spent more and more time being impressed with the Commodore 64"

Why would you do that? Keep using your current client. If you want to jump in and use a webmail client, then there are solutions for keeping that local as well.

I agree that people should keep their data in a form that is easy to recover from the loss of a provider, just as they should keep their data in a form that is easy to recover from the loss of their local data center.

Yes, if you were small you leased time. That is exactly what I said in my post. The tasks have changed since the dominance of the mainframe, however, and certain common tasks are now mature. It is possible that email is your competitive advantage, but it is almost as likely that electricity generation is your competitive advantage. That is to say, it probably makes as much sense to run your own email server as it does to run your own generator. Of course there are exceptions - you might be big enough to employ a full time Exchange guru and you might use a significant portion of your server capacity, just like Alcoa uses so much electricity that it owns hydroelectric dams.

I think Snowden changed the game on this

Before the Snowden revelation, it wasn't widely accepted that the government was reading everything anybody ever wrote. For _one_ of these companies to come forward to complain was like the prisoners dilemma. There was no guarantee that other players would follow suit, so for GOOG to come out and say "The NSA is spying on you and we can't stop them" puts GOOG at a competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, all of this stuff was secret; not to be disclosed publicly, etc. Companies weren't sure how much teeth there were in those rules, so were further hesitant to talk much about it.

Post Snowden, its all different. Now its an open secret that this happens, and it happens to everyone. Now there's no posturing or competitive advantage to be exploited; everyone is in the same boat. This is a populist issue and once one company made noise about sticking it to the NSA, the rest were going to have to follow.

The other thing that has changed is that Snowden and Lavabit have both gone public. The public has spoken. We now have proof of what kind of stuff the Feds will do and how far they'll go to keep it quiet. The people who leaked this stuff survived.

The government might be able to sue Yahoo or Lavabit or any of them individually, but it cannot sue the entire tech industry.. not right now.

As to your comment about nothing changing in the last 15 years, do you mean terrorists trying to attack the US?

No, of course not - that sort of attack* is not preventable. No amount of infringement on freedoms can stop that. The FBI was informed that there were Saudi men taking flying lessons ($$$) who were completely unconcerned about landing or take-off, and the issue was buried within the FBI. The amount of intelligence is not the issue, it's the Feds' general incompetence that is (and always will be).

In fact, information theorists strongly warn that all of this extra "intelligence" makes things worse because it raises the noise floor significantly.

The NSA didn't stop the Boston bombings, and in Congressional testimony the NSA chief would admit that there were fewer than four potential events over a decade upon which all of their programs had any involvement in detecting, and in none of which was the NSA's intel required.

* asymmetrical, not 'airplanes as missiles' which hasn't been a viable strategy since 2004 when the last cockpit doors became hardened - the TSA is behavioral conditioning, not security.

Generally, this is true. However there are two things that play a role here. The first one is called "lawful order" - it means that a LEO is allowed to demand that people do or not do certain things, and the people are required to comply. For example, you may be instructed to drive around an accident scene. The second one is called "common sense." If a cop approaches you and tells you that your car is parked at a private property, and the owner of the property is requesting that you remove it, there is nothing really that you should be arguing about. The proper way to react here - regardless of who told you the news - is to apologize for inconvenience and leave. Outside of general human rights, you have not that many rights on someone else's private property. It's obvious that you can't park your car (even without charging!) and play tennis unless the owner is OK with that.

If you do not want to comply with that request, yes, you can be forced to obey (by the way of being arrested.) Then the judge will review the situation. This would be a very impractical solution. By making a scene you are just adding charges. The original request could be to move your car; but the final one would be battery against a law enforcement officer. A far better method is to comply immediately, but record everything and then file a lawsuit against those who violated your rights.

Mainframe? You had to shell out big money to buy a mainframe. Cloud services are rented. In the 70s you could certainly buy time on a mainframe, and a lot of people did. But small companies never had an in-house mainframe as an economically viable option. If your company is so big that your IT guys are all specialized and their time is mostly occupied in their specialty, then the cloud doesn't make any sense. If you are smaller and you don't need a full time Outlook guru and your server sits idling most of the time, then you might very well do well with outsourcing your email.

Heh, that's easy:
1. What was your gross income last year?
2. Multiply that number by x.
3. Send money.

The problem is that politicians like to have all sorts of levers to pull. Thousands and thousands of pages worth of levers.

Guns and Ammunition Tax?

Oh look, the corporations I don't like are fighting the government I don't like. It's like Christmas had sex with my birthday!

Ebay created the niche that PayPal needed to become relevant.

I think much the same could have (and usually has) been said before any of the major events in the history of progress that have punctuated the status quo of gradual advancement. Just think of first going to the moon, for example. Most such attempts fail, but without trying them, it would likely take much longer to reach such major milestones. Occasionally, dreams can be achieved, and the skeptics turn out wrong. On any individual enterprise, the numbers don't make sense as the expected outcome is too improbable to justify the expense--but only when you look at it from such a narrow point of voew; in the larger context of many attempts at a time, some will succeed, and those occasional successes can make it all worthwhile. Like Browning wrote, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp". Your approach is too utilitarian. I have no doubt that Bezos has considered the cost benefit analysis, and decided to pursue this not because his estimates were wrong, but because he is looking at the larger context despite the high likelihood of failure and low practicality.

Nope.... The frustrating thing is, eBay has gotten away with it this long because frankly, they're "best in class" at what they do -- enabling online auction sales.

I don't know that eBay felt any real need to innovate when they're just the digital equivalent of the traditional auction house, which has remained essentially the same for hundreds of years?

Unfortunately for the users, eBay (especially with the PayPal merger) has really built an "all your base belong to us" model where they charge you to list an item, charge you a (ever increasing) percentage of any final sale prices, and profit AGAIN when the buyer pays using PayPal, which they conveniently made the ONLY allowable online payment mechanism.

This winds up screwing the users in another way ... lack of options to seek recourse when a transaction goes wrong. With a traditional credit card purchase, I know my credit card issuer offers me certain assurances I won't get ripped off (ability to do a chargeback, and to request an investigation into a fraudulent sale). With the monolithic eBay/PayPal model, it's all about what the company decides to do.

Cryptocoins (bitcoin, etc.) could turn out to force some change over at eBay/PayPal though, IMO. Right now, the auction site AND the payment service both have policies against allowing the sale of any cryptocoins. However, a lot of people are interested in the ability to purchase them directly from an owner, vs. getting on an exchange and placing buy orders like they were purchasing stock shares. The current system doesn't allow eBay/PayPal to conduct one of these transactions safely though (which may be why they disallow it). The REAL fix for them would involve upgrading PayPal to accept cryptocoins as a form of deposit. Will be interesting to see if it's willing to innovate in that manner or not.

Please mod parent post up. Pointing out the significantly deeper complicity and power of the telecom providers in this scandal is a much needed reminder.