If I had the points, I would +1 this one for sure.

Niche products do not have capitalization larger than oil companies. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-crowned-no-1-with-biggest-market-cap-2011-08-10 You are correct about the old apple of the pre-2000's. These days Apple OS X is long past niche.

Gives new meaning to plantation worker. There was an open source tome about working on a plantation (aka commercial software environment) v an open source one. Does anyone remember it?

+1 - Bureaucratic Barrier of Entry exists in all industries.

No, it is a lead. But releasing innocent people's names associated with such a thing does no one any good. I think they need to be really careful, which is probably why the police aren't acting on it immediately.

Sounds good until someone uses your stolen identity for a login and payment.

Not to mention one would be a complete dumbass to use their real name.

I wonder how many Barak.Obama99 and George.Bush99 (or your country leaders) are logins?

How many stolen credit cards are logins?

Hopefully they are not releasing the names of people victims of identity theft thereby adding more to their woes...

If people cannot see the potential of this... so much for slashdot being for programmers...

Sounds like a good reason to bring IT jobs back home (whether European or Americas) to me. Otherwise just let India read your emails and web based applications on demand. That'll be good for proprietary information I am sure.

Or checkpoints against drunk driving
Police cameras on the roads
"Zero Tolerance" in schools
Drug testing
ID requirements for just about anything, including purchasing cough syrup

When was the last time one heard "Go ahead, it's a free country!"

-----
Would George Washington taken his boots off?

No malware for my IBM 5120. The old are far to wise for that malarkey!

Cross operating system compatibility. I can put something (like my tax info) on a true crypt disk on my Mac, and then email it to my mom (an accountant) who can open it on her windows PC.

Which leads to another benefit, my mom is no system administrator, but she can open a file, enter a password, and double click the file within.

Further more, if I want to deal with it - I can put it on my Linux machines.

Finally, if a technician needs to fiddle with the system, I can unmount the drives and let them in with (less) worry about what they may find. (Tend to deal with health care information.) In other words, I can compartmentalize who can see what.

I have worked at two start-ups which succeeded to the point of needing professional management. One failed and the other has shrunk back down (pre-recession) to the management skills of the founder.

I think this describes a lot of whats going on:

"About 21 percent of Silicon Valley’s Class A office space is vacant, as is 20 percent of low-rise so-called flex or research and development space for offices or manufacturing, CB Richard Ellis said."
  -- http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRGUhtl3yHIM

"Unemployment in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area that includes Silicon Valley was 11.8 percent in November, down from the August record of 12.1 percent, according to California’s Employment Development Department."
-- ibid

(Source is from 2010, but I don't think it has changed that much.)

I do hobby and open source stuff, a project here and there when they pay up front. After 20 years of doing some high falutin tech on systems transacting millions of dollars of business per day and gigabytes of data, I have gone back to school for a business degree.

The EFF recently found massive abuse of the system by the FBI, but it's not exactly new news. The ATF lied about the Branch Davidians (saying they were drug runners) in order to get all that nifty heavy military equipment you saw at Waco, but they were never held accountable for their lie.

Timothy McVeigh said the actions on the Branch Davidians was part of the reason he bombed the federal building. So in a way, they were held accountable. And we haven't seen an action like Waco ever since. I am not saying it is right, I'm just pointing it out.