I'm afraid that the President does have this kind of power. The behavior of the NSA is a matter of policy. The President and his officers present the budgets for the NSA to Congress, and set the policies that are not a matter of already existing law. NSA practices like the monitoring of domestic, civilian communications with the excuse that it had a "50% or better chance of involving foreign communications" is a matter of policy, not law. And the policy for Guantanamo Bay prisoners to lack legal representation, for the names to be kept secret, and to review the cases of only those whom allied governments discover and raise concerns about, are all in the President's hands.

I'm afraid that Mr. Obama tries to seek consensus, full agreement from all concerned, in cases like these where a clear moral stance would show leadership and earn far more respect for his most important goals, such as health care plans or economic recovery work. It's left America without the much promised "change"" of his first campaign.

I'm afraid that I'm old enough to remember campaigning against Nixon, and wearing "I voted for McGovern" buttons as Nixon's behavior became more criminal and more power mad.. His resignation wasn't due to "sense of shame". His resignation prevented impeachment, and the immediate pardon after his resignation prevented criminal prosecution after his resignation.

The situation is not very comparable: enough personally criminal behavior, rather than unconstitutional policy, was exposed to leave Richard Nixon open to personal prosecution as soon as he lost his sovereign immunity. The NSA's behavior has been much more difficult to expose as individuals doing criminal acts.

Snowmobiles are irritatingly noisy. for homeowners in Arctic regions, for animals in their native habitats, for hunters or photographers exploring those regions, and even for kids and hobbyists tooling around for fun, reducing the noise impact of snowmobiles would be very useful. A much quieter snowmobile would have a ready market, as long as it wasn't ridiculously expensive.

That raises the question of "Why isn't there already a privately built such vehicle?". Do they face the problem we in IT constantly see, of people who think we're spending too much money because it takes us so long to do the first version of a new system, to test it, and to make sure it actually works in wet snow?

While reality does not need to match literature, the existence of literature including political campaigning from 500 years ago is a strong indication of its long history and common usage. Similarly, saying that "The Republic" describes justice and injustice does not mean that you are promoting injustice. It merely means that the concepts are old and commonly cited as guidelines for human behavior.

But since "The Republic" itself was a form of political advertising for standards of "justice", I hope that you can agree that political advertising or marketing is quite fundamental to human history or even human namture.

> That's because all along the rest of Egypt was desert.

This claim is not well founded. Much of what is now the Sahara Desert (which sourrounds the Nile) was once much more fertile, It was particulaly expended as desert by overgrazing, especially by goats (which eat grass down to the roots and can ruin ground cover very quickly.) The ecological studies of this, especially for the current growth of the Sahara, are widespread, and careful attention to the lat 30 years of National Geographic magazine provides many excellent and striking articles on modern and historical cases of such defoliation.

Given that campaigning for political office was well described by Macchiavelli in his book "The Prince", published 1532, it seems to have been a fundamental part of politics and of any leadership since the the invention of the printing press. I think we can safely say it's built into human society.

I'd want some "tree of life", but I'm afraid I'm already too old for it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree-of-Life)

GPLv3 has considerably better patent protections. The Apache 2.0 license eliminates all your copyright permissions to use Apache 2.0 licensed software if you file a patent lawsuit against anyone for any of your Apache 2.0 licensed software, even if the lawsuit of the target is not participating in or is in clear violation of the Apache 2.0 license. The GPL license, especially GPLv3, makes the patent protections much more clear. It allws lawsuits against parties who are in violation of the relevant GPL.

It's not merely "a story" that this happens to. I've seen instances of copyrighted code, shown to developers and admins who rejected it or whose managers refused to approve a license, and who later were caught copying the code into their own projects. It also remains a serious problem for outsourcing projects, where inexpensive developers are hired to replicate an existing project but cheaper and usually without the subtler capabilities or safety checks of the original project.

I'm afraid that calling this a solved problem is like saying that because we've successfully created nanofibers, we should already have a space elevator. There's an enormous gap between a mere accounting system to help balance a single checkbook, and the tracking and integration necessary to actually handle paychecks. And in a large government bureaucracy, the number of distinct systems and workflows that have to be replaced or integrated to will be enormous, and fought tooth and nail by people who perceive it as encroaching on their workflow. I'm afraid I've worked on similarly complex issues, though perhaps not as likely to work directly with so many distinct managers all at the same time. But I've some harsh experience that suggests that it can be _amazingly_ difficult.

Given the existence of the Google Summer of Code projects, the ongoing publication by Google of Java patches, and the contribution of Google employees to fascinating projects on github.com, quite a large percentage of Google employees both use and publish open source and freeware. Numerous business partners and collaborators work with it extensively, especially when they see me publishing my patches or updated code and see that they benefit from my ongoing involvement. And they are willing to pay my company more because our projects are available, as source, so that work can be evolved or continued even if one of our developers changes employment.

I've certainly helped engineers try to reverse engineer software without source 10 years later, and it is _barbaric_. The last time, I fortunately found that the developer had actually cannibalized software I'd written decades ago to build the application. It was a reminder of why a GPL can be so much more powerful than an Apache or BSD license: the developer had not chosen to publish their modifications to their clients, for various legal and workflow reasons.

You've brought back memories of my youth, and occasional partners I've worked with., and of the entire academic research community. You can do a great deal of fascinating and useful work with such loose social standards. It doesn't always scale well: Tasks that need to be done absolutely correct, and absolutely consistently, for reliability, for scientific publication, o for human safety, or just for inventory control can wind up a bit slapdash. And a major difficulty can be _keeping_ anyone more than 10 years, especially the senior people with spouses or kids to raise.

But I agree that workplace comfort, both physical and social, can keep great people at much lower rates than industry standards. That's why I stay where I am: I would be _very_ expensive on the open market, but relish the changes and the great people I work with, and the chance to train others.

> Today we know that the main nutritional problem is excess fructose

As opposed to malnutrition from poverty? Think again.

As for nutrition causing heart disease, wait a few years. I'm afraid the cause will be "discovered" to be something else. The last few decades have seen the blame cast on smoking, excess preservatives, excess sucrose (not fructose!), excess protein, excess fat, excess trans-fatty acids, excess salt, excess liquor, excess body fat, excess work, excess processed food, excess caffeine, lack of vitamin C, lack of exercise, or poor sleep habits.

The claim that humans are "not supposed to eat animal products" is even less well founded. Humans have incisors and canine teeth, like other omnivors, for rending flesh. We also have rather short intestinal tracts and livers that handle animal proteins and fats reasonably well, neither of which are so common to herbivores.

Pay the departing sysadmin for their time, by any legal means, to provide additional information. I've had to work with companies where a core admin had just departed, and had to help hide that we then hired one such admin as part of our company with a different title in another group, partly so we could tap them legally for information about their old company's environments. We got a good engineer, they got a good contract to help out while they looked for a permanent role, and were able to factor in undocumented aspects of the old company's security practices and backup systems which they were flat-out lying about.

Find out why that admin is leaving, without their manager in the room or any witnesses. Don't take "no" or "we'll get that to you" as an answer: go behind the company's back if you have to, because if they're hiding it, it's probably _vital_ to know about.

Do a complete hardware inventory, both of material they're directly responsible for and of devices _connected_ to those. Include the names of the people responsible for services, and who need to be contacted for issues, for every single system.

Verify that the backups are complete and that they do in fact work. This is a very good time to get that backup server, or that failover switch, that has been awaiting the right time to install, and ideally perform the restorations on those.

Warn the managers that there are likely to be service interruptions, and ensure that the monitoring system works well to report them.

Do not change the default scripting language or configuration management system or source control system or account management tools until an opportunity to learn the old one is at least 80% completed.

Then understand that that they do not arrest people for the same rason they do not sign US treaties or sign bills into law. It's not their job to arrest people, even if they cooperate with and provide intelligence for the people who do and are in some ways responsible for such arrests or for what treaties get signed or what laws get passed informing the people who'd do such tasks.

I was careful to answer the question from aNonnyMouseCowered, not to say the NSA is innocent of wrongdoing or of providing leads for the FBI or or the US State department and US Customs to harass attendees at BlackHat or to block the visas of international attendees. It's vital to answer the people that people actually asked.