The opposite would be true I think, that along with Campaign finance reform should lessen the impact of lobbyists. http://www.publicampaign.org/blog/2011/02/11/lobbying-and-campaign-finance-theyre-related

If you look at the roots of all of this it goes back to the 1979 Supreme Court Ruling in Smith vs. Maryland where:

The case centered around the installation of a pen register, which records phone numbers dialed in the phone company office. As all of the current press indicates the NSA and other Federal Agencies and Administrations to justify scooping up all of information they can. In 1979 it was difficult to trace phone calls because most of the local COs were analog and getting this kind of data meant installing devices, requiring court orders, anybody remember rotary dial? The 1979 ruling has therefore been applied now in our current era where this information is "at hand." Using this we can now see why the large Data Center in Utah is being built to collect the billions of Call Detail Records and other Internet IP data that the NSA can gobble up. Strangely enough the safeguards that protect a US citizen fall down suddenly if you have contact with a foreign country. Let's see, going on vacation to Europe this year? You're sucked into the system. Have friends or family members overseas? You're sucked into the system. Compound that over zealous approach to collection and the fact that they can save the data for up to 10 years for historical analysis and you have a huge storage problem. Now if you add it Network Graph Analysis, you'll be sucked in if your friends or family members have contacts with people in other countries. That means effectively everybody in US is on a graph somewhere and it's being used to create fake evidence chains against your fellow citizens. I'm not advocating crime or terrorism in any way but there has to be oversight of law enforcement in this nation, with the NSA scoping up everything they can you have a police state where evidence can be created out of thin air and you can't challenge it's authenticity.

The ramifications of this are staggering and I for one have been in touch with my congressman and written to both my Senators to voice my opposition to it but the only way to fix this is to end the two party stranglehold of our government that has allowed this to happen behind closed doors. The FISA court needs to be abolished and the NSA systems need to be dismantled. That won't happen when you have elected officials who don't fear the electorate and the only way that will change is to force our government to enact:

• Term Limits. Stop allowing the same assholes who get re-elected over and over again from serving on these committees. Look at the Senate Intelligence Committee who has partial oversight of the NSA, how many members have changed over the past decade? Despite Republicans or Democrats running the Senate, the players strangely enough remain the same. Fuck that and start electing people who have your interests at heart, not the defense industry!
• Campaign finance reform. Washington politics runs on money, no money, no incentive for these fucktards to constantly get re-elected or to have the process corrupted by corporations and lobbying groups up on M street. Plus it will free up a lot of office space in DC.
• Get off your lazy butts and vote! General Elections get shitty turnout, it's time we take back our nation and get this career politicians afraid of the electorate again. Stop voting on pure party lines too. Democrats and Republicans could give a shit about you, it's about them maintaining power and getting re-elected so wake up.
• Stop Gerrymandering. Every 10 years we go through endless redistricting battles with lawsuits over redistricting because the party in power wants to keep power. Have appointed officials with a set of strict rules draw up districts that stop the bullshit, including racial quotas to ensure we don't "disenfranchise" voters and apple picking areas where one party is stronger. Draw the districts along natural boundaries, streets, Government limits, city, county lines etc. and end the practice once and for all.
• Write your representatives. Use E-Mail, use a stamp and the Post Office lord knows they could use the money but let them know you're not happy with the situation and that you vote! Keep on them and keep them honest. Look at their voting records and call them to account when they vote for any legislation that violates your rights.

So you're saying that RIAA should be in charge of the H1-B Visas and their allocation?

"You have to pass the bill to know what's in it." - Nancy Pelosi

And this representative from California was re-elected. Huh. Well as Ron White says "You can't fix stupid."

If you wanted to fix the US Healthcare system by making care affordable for all and allowing people with pre-existing conditions to get insured, then it wouldn't take 2700 pages of other crap that's in the legislative package. What we didn't get was:

1) No direct influence over rising expenditures for Medical Care. You have a system which doesn't abide by market forces and hospital administrators get paid millions of dollars in salaries and benefits. When you're seriously ill, you don't usually have the time to shop around so whatever they charge you (or your insurance) is what's charged. Sure, there's negotiations and maximums that insurance companies negotiate but that drives further business through insurance companies, forcing you to deal with them.
2) There was no discussion on tort reform so thousands of ambulance chasers can still sue the doctors and hospitals when your scars comes out a little bit strange. A big component to care is the necessary malpractice insurance which can cost upwards of $200,000 in some high cost states. Add that to office staff, paying the Nurse, the building costs and the medical coder to bill the insurance companies correctly and you can see easily why it costs a lot to see a doctor over a routine sniffle.
3) The Drug companies were let largely intact. There are a few costs they'll have to put up with but they're still expected to rake in Billions in profits under the ACA. Ask yourself why that pill you're taking is $5 and why, if it was allowed, you could get it for $.25. Sure the drug industry will claim that "these are inferior" but really it's a smokescreen.
4) The Single Payer system died. Nobody wanted to go against the big Insurance Firms and their lobbyists so we love big business in this country, so why not throw a few billion dollars their way. Well, they do now have to spend more on direct costs for Insurance which is good but allowing interstate competition and other market driven forces into the process would have been much better. That's what the exchanges are supposed to do but here we have the US Government trying to create markets rather than creating incentives with appropriate regulatory oversight for markets to flourish. Oh wait, considering the Financial Collapse, the Regulatory Process failed, so DC can't be trusted with that.

To be honest, you could have taken this 2700 pages, cut out the BS, the Pork like the "Exchanges" which Deloitte is now merrily feeding upon it seems and done away with it and had legislation that was no more than 10 pages long. Starting next year you'll hear more pigs in DC all lining up because the Feds have just blessed one industry with unlimited monopoly powers and you have to pay what they want to charge you. You have no choice, so invest in big Pharma, Hostpital chains and big medical concerns because they'll be raking it in even more.

As soon as they ask that they want to learn how to do it is when you should start engaging them not only in coding but other computer science topics as well. Before my kids (3 out of 4) learned the basics of programming, they also had a fundamental understanding of electronics not because I pushed it on them but because they saw me working and started asking questions. Coding isn't for everybody and despite efforts to the contrary, it's more creative than people would think at first. That's the fatal assumption, if you have a foundation with Math and good logic skills that doesn't equate to being good or even liking coding as a profession. Now, if you ask my three kids (who are now 18+) what they want to do in terms of careers, one is in a CS program the others are not taking that track.

I'm still waiting for a Solar powered Fraculator.

The Laser he used was Solar Powered not the Golden Gun. He was an assassin that used a Golden Gun that shot bullets made of gold. Do you also have three nipples?

Folks around here say North Texas. Northeast Texas would be Texarkana.
Either that or North Central Texas would have sufficed.

Getting back to the Minnow board, it's a little pricey but I'm sure third parties will start embracing it like the hardware vendors around Raspberry PI.

From technology leader to also ran. That's a sad thing to say from just 6 to 7 years ago when Blackberry was at the top and their shares were over $400.
This needs to go down in history as another epic fail for missed opportunities and complacent management. RIM was innovative, they pushed technology boundaries and had a rock solid platform for the enterprise. Unfortunately in a series of missteps they allowed themselves to look like fools when India and Middle Eastern countries bullied them looking for server logs and back doors by which these governments could track their citizens. Rather than erring on the side of basic human rights and telling these countries to go to hell, RIM went back and forth and depending on what articles you read either caved or gave them access to data just so they could continue to sell in those countries. So much for Security but that's only one nail in the coffin for RIM but their biggest mistake was not embracing the newer style of phones and adapting to the market. RIM could have owned this market instead of Apple but instead, RIM like so many others just let Apple move on up in terms of market share which meant that people Blackberry devices were trading them in for iPhones or Android phones.

Well you still have a foreign intelligence requirement, that's what the CIA was founded to do but now you have it splintered off into various sub agencies that all are pretty much redundant to one another. Putting them under one agency gives you the ability to consolidate them into one basket then watch that basket. Right now I think it's a bit unwieldy that you have the 15 other agencies in the US Federal Government that are chartered with intelligence gathering and analysis. All of these agencies have budgets and mandates that in some respects mirror that of their peers. So that begs the question: Why? A lot has to do with budgetary control and carving up your tax dollars in the name of separate missions but I also think it has to do with being able to hide the misdeeds and conduct operations under different hats to hide the cheese from the public. Congress has created legislation that has allowed this to happen so I would argue not that they are truly protecting the public but protecting donations from consulting firms and defense contractors all in the name of keeping power by getting re-elected. The people in this country need to start voting these people out of office and to break up the two party stranglehold that is killing our democracy.

IBM had something like this in Mainframes back in the 80s with DB2 and Hyperspaces. Back then I recall management wondering what they'd do with it.

This position has no teeth and will exist as a figure head when people and the "shocked" congressional delegates bring up questions of what the NSA is doing.

That way when congress starts up their faux hearings regarding NSA breaches of law and privacy you have put this figure head up there right next to the Director and when a question of Civil Liberties, violations of privacy etc. come up he can just deflect and say "Let me turn you over to our Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer who will address your questions."

The NSA needs to go and the CIA needs to absorb the foreign intelligence functions that the NSA is supposedly mandated to perform. What still stinks to high shit is the recent budget that was passed in the house curiously doesn't de-fund the NSA so consider all the members of congress as violators of your rights and in violation of protecting and defending the Constitution. Considering there's an election in 13 months for Congress and 1/3 of the Senate seats, it's time to start sending a message to these arrogant fucktards that our Privacy and Civil Liberties should not become bargaining chips for passing legislative acts, they're rights we all need to fight for. Send money to the EFF and the ACLU and start getting your friends, family and colleagues informed about the issues we all face and frankly, vote all of these morons out of office because the constant money machine in politics and congressional re-election rates (over 70%) is killing your rights.

I agree with most of your points but there's still the issue of public data sets that the governments either provide for a fee or are required to provide open access to by law. For example in most states when you buy a car, your state's department of motor vehicles will sell that information to anybody willing to pay for it. Oklahoma and Ohio ando other states for example sells residents personal data, along with your birth dates etc. to pretty much anyone to generate revenue. In most cases you can't opt out. Now if you take one of those anonymized data sets, like the census which includes economic and other demographic data it's pretty easy to tag somebody by name, what your home is worth, how much you make and so on. That's not conspiracy theory it's a fact and companies like Spokeo and Intelius make a lot of money mining public information that anybody can access for a nominal fee. Another area of big concern are license plate scanners which effectively catch every license plate they can, not just scofflaws with parking tickets or criminals and the data collected on your movements. Since it's local government agencies keeping that data, they know who you are. If you carry a cell phone along with that I could take that anonymous data and correlate your position from what the GPS tracked license plate scanner says and come up with a very, very close approximation of your location and what you do day in and day out. The problem is most of these enabling technologies are both a blessing and a curse and where your data privacy is concerned it' as you point out, like living in a small town where everybody knows your business. The problem is you don't know who's doing the talking behind your back or what they're talking about where you're concerned. Marketing is one thing but having my government track me just because I'm going about my daily, lawful routine is only 1 degree of separation from a totalitarian state. Cheap access to data and better and better mining techniques and algorithms are making this all possible, it's just that our legislators have either not kept up with it or have ignored our privacy in lieu of padding the coffers of the state or in the Federal governments case the "War on Terror" which also now means "The War on Drugs" ... and "The War on you."

The only way to stop it is to start enacting a privacy bill of rights and start to hold the assholes in the Federal and State Governments accountable for keeping your private data truly private. The NSA needs to be abolished, completely; there is no level of public trust that can be re-attained by an agency of guys thinking that they're James T. Kirk.

Anonymity != Privacy because we're in the age of big data where large data sets can be cross-correlated to profile an individual. From stores that track your cell phone while you're shopping to big chain stores figuring out you're pregnant, big data techniques are invading your privacy in more and more ways. If you think that anonymous data collection is safe, it's still data collection and despite people's best efforts, we are of course creatures of habit and your repetitive habits allow people to build fingerprints about you. If you have enough data points, even anonymous data points, you can build a profile of an individual, their habits, their likes, their dislikes and where they go on the Internet. If you can take that profile and match it against an individual using other correlating data you've been identified. This has been proven for example in the 2007 Netflix prize competition where anonymous movie reviewers were tracked down. There's lots of examples on this and over the past few years, techniques have become much better at picking individuals out of anonymous data sets.
  More chilling is a study released this year showed that using in analyzing anonymous cell phone tracking data, 95% of 1.5 million individuals could be identified.

What this means that as long as companies are able to collect data about you, whether tagged or anonymous, you're still being tracked somewhere and that is no guarantee that your privacy is protected. What has to happen to provide privacy is to stop all of the tracking and I don't see companies nor governments giving up that mechanism anytime soon.

Read the articles, that's not what's happening. I think you'll see some recession in terms of new businesses moving into California. Sure there will be start-ups and people working for themselves but frankly, given the high taxes and the infrastructure issues California isn't as attractive as it once was. Sure, it's a great state but still it's a lousy place to start or run a business unless you have the concession on beachfront bungalow rentals.