I don't know any Comcast customer who has had a positive experience with their customer service. I also know some who've had Comcast blatantly disregard the details of their contract with respect to price and features a few months into a 12-24 month contract. Frankly, what Comcast needs besides competition from more companies and municipal broadband (via utilities) is a few strategic arrests of employees and executives for fraud. Put a few of their guys in prison for fraudulent business practices, and I'll wager their billing and sales people will wake the f#$% up and do right.

Is that Verizon probably knows there's a market for this from market research...

After what's come out about corporations having to feed the surveillance beast, anyone who opts in should be subjected to having their house and cars wiretapped in perpetuity by the NSA with a direct feed to the FBI as the price for their nonchalance toward surveillance.

You think Elon Musk went into Nokia with an understanding of what Nokia needed as a business? Or merely a view that whatever they were doing was wrong because it wasn't based on Microsoft stuff?

Don't you mean Stephen Elop? If Elon Musk had taken over Nokia, chances are Nokia would have ended up owning Samsung not being acquired by Microsoft.

The NSA's actions will be regarded as the modern Smoot-Hawley which set forth the collapse in sales in one of America's last major export industries that set it into motion.

Though in fairness to the NSA, the American people are to blame for their "want my cake and eat it too" mentality on intelligence gathering. When it was discovered that the CIA did a lot of Really Bad Things because, shocker, that's par for the course in normal boots on the ground intelligence work we switched to electronics surveillance and created this mess.

There is no enforcement mechanism in the event of a dispute with another country, however.

Any company rich enough to get there can probably afford to hire people to defend its claim. Within a few years, they'll probably be rich enough to outright buy a company like Blackwater to serve as a small army to defend their claim if need be. That's the real danger here.

But there are no credible reports of the US allowing criminals to just wantonly defraud Russian and Chinese citizens. While all of our governments spy on each other (and each other's economies), the US at least tends to take a dim view toward its citizens committing criminal acts against foreigners.

Seriously? Under what logic is it okay to publicly disseminate, often for the express purpose of humiliation, someone else's private photographs whether obtained illegally, surreptitiously, or shared in confidence with you?

You're missing the point. It's not ok, but it is a highly foreseeable consequence of taking nude photographs, much less disseminating them. You'd have to live under a rock and have a Pollyannaish view of human relations in 2014 to have no idea that this is a common consequence. Most often now, it probably happens because someone believes they are special and they won't fall victim to what so many others in their demographic have suffered. In that sense, it is precisely the sort of behavior one expects of a child because children and adolescents are almost completely incapable of believing "you're not special and it could damn well happen to you too."

Don't want your nudes to end up in public? Don't take nudes that you wouldn't want the public to see. Then you can be a true victim. The whole concept of "revenge porn," insofar as it applies to nudes and porn freely made and disseminated, is ever so much "I want my freedom.... but I don't want my choices to have consequences of which I don't approve."

We have a term for that behavior. It's called behaving like a child.

We live in the golden age of low barrier to entry programming. I'm 31 (upper bounds of millennial). When I started, JavaEE in its earlier stages or .NET were the only choices outside of C/C++ that a typical graduate could get. Now you have Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, Groovy and all sorts of easy to use languages. FFS, JavaScript is now a serious career choice where it was considered a skill that no serious developer needed when I was in college (2001-2005).

I swear, some people won't be happy until the machine becomes sentient, writes the code they really meant to write (originally express in plain English, probably at a 6th grade level) and then gives them all of the credit at review time.

If we were to lock him up for ideas that if acted upon would be dangerous, the moderate left, center and right would be justified in openly exterminating the entire registered member list of every Socialist, Fascist and Communist movement in the US. Ideas do have consequences, one of which is that if you are going to declare that a hypothetical cannibal is a threat to his neighbors because he might snap and eat them (despite showing no signs of willingness to act on his depravity), then society would be justified in wiping out those political movements known to have a historic predisposition to slaughter their opponents.

but bullshit as in, contrary to a reasonable reading of the Constitution by a citizen of normal intelligence.

And how so? He waved his ability to execute their search in their faces and then suddenly is surprised when his failure to STFU per the 5th was held against him.

If an ordinary person believes they can give a cop legally valuable information about a case against them and not expect to have that used against them, their intelligence doesn't even rise to the level of pop culture references (you have the right to remain silent, anything you say...)

And let's be clear here. This was a lawyer, not an ordinary person. Odds are higher an ordinary person would have been smart enough to just shut up whereas this guy probably thought he'd use some fancy legal maneuvering he learned along the way to win on a technical point.

I think the correct response here would be to say that you can plead the 5th on the question of whether you can decrypt it or not, and if you claim the 5th compulsion is illegal. However, once you make an affirmative statement you waive the right to not be compelled. In terms of a key, it would be like if you had an almost impenetrable door that used a single key. The police ask you if you are in possession of said key while they have a valid warrant. You say yes, which means they have a right to compel you to hand over the key per the valid warrant. However if you shrug and plead the 5th it should not be on you at that point.

Men, particularly blue collar men, have been disproportionately impacted by the bad economy. Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men. There is also a true shortage of qualified people, unlike in computer-related fields. Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."