The contraposition of this story with the fate of John Corzine deserves to be highlighted.

Here we have the a US intelligence agency, saying it needs to snoop on millions in a supposed effort to protect them from threats. And yet John Corzine, who openly stole customers money, is not being prosecuted, despite the reams and reams of records and evidence against him and MFGlobal.

What we see here is that information does not correllate with prosecutions, or effectiveness at protecting people from harm.

Comments like this aren't actually cynical anymore. The rule of law is breaking down all over the Western world as connected people are increasingly allowed to live outside it.

Again Mossad is not the problem. In fact, the NSA or Mossad developing a virus to sabotage Iranian centrifuges or what have you is also not the problem. This is what spy agencies are for. The problem is when the NSA develops viruses which affect, or engages in espionage on, the US public. The NSA is not supposed to do that.

Again, I raise the analogy of the US military dropping bombs on US citizens; they don't do it because they're not supposed to. The same rules should apply to the NSA and its espionage bag of tricks.

Amen. It's obvious that most "modern" interfaces and "apps" are being designed by people who have no real idea of what they are doing, delivering, and are simply winging it on bluff.

Engelbart's tradgedy is the same tradgedy that is giving us substandard tablet interfaces, less usable UI's like Unity, and which is walling us off in restricted private gardens like Facebook instead of offerring us the wider potential of the web.

A notorius Irish Judge recently gave a man a two year suspended sentence for raping a women in front of her children. He's done worse, and so have other Irish judges.

The supreme court is particularly notorius, with at least one judge on it having never sat behind a bench before. They've done everything; from ruling that mens only golf clubs are non-discriminatory, to making it legal to keep people imprisoned even if the law that convicted them is later ruled to be constitutional -- Google the Mr A case (tl;dr "teh pedos!!"). Members of the court are not above public dust-ups with the executive, on their own behalf or for anyone else they favour.

In Ireland, we don't have laws. What we have are more like customs. And he who pays the most for the festivities decides what those customs are.

Son, have you ever considered a career in Intelligence?

"I think the GPs point was that it does not have to be a all or none - that you can have SSL of a self signed cert without the error message and without giving any "expectation of [high] security" (to quote GP "no full secure icon")"

Can you, really? I mean, we have a big enough problem with training users to type credentials in a login box served by http://www.myfavoritebank.com/ all insecure-like. This area where security intersects user interaction design is a tricksy one.

Adding new rules to the Meta pages doesn't count.

Wonder what he's getting under the table for his "selfless sacrifice"?

Well, he's had his passport revoked, is being hunted around the world, and is being vilified in almost all public media.

Oh, wait....

Whether you agree with what Snowden did or not (I for one do not), dude is a serious drama queen. This is somewhat typical of his generation. Everything is just so much more bigger and more important because it happens to them .

Being from Snowden's generation -- I'm the same age -- I have to say that I for one am personally shocked by the entire NSA spying incident and the subsequent witch-hunt of Snowden himself. Not surprised, but still despite myself, shocked.

Despite having grown a warty hide of cynicism over the last decade, despite having watched western society fail again and again over the last 10 years, despite having suspected the truth for many years already, the sheer scale and nakedness of the NSA's programs has pierced right down to the soft kernel of hope for the world instilled in me during the 1990s. The brazen outrage of the NSA and US military, the absurdly exaggerated charges against Snowden, and the relentless and petty retaliation by the US government have cast present reality back into a past which I was raised to believe would never reoccur.

Snowden is a hero. He's a straight up hero. He gave up reward, riches, happiness, and his own future for the sake of his principles and his fellow countrymen. People in the US should build a statue in his honour. Instead, they're howling like fascists for satisfaction.

If Snowden returns to the United States, I don't think he will get a day in open court. I doubt he will see a military tribunal. After everything that has happened, after just how wrong the world has become, it would not surprise me if Snowden was simply disappeared. It would shock me yes, but not surprise me.

What happened to paying in cash?

This is what you get when you believe that ever freer markets will do anything and everything more efficiently than ever before -- Chaos.

Any company that cannot handle its own payroll should not be licensed to trade. It's that simple.

The GPL is all about preserving access to code. If you use GPL code, you have to publish that code. If you make changes to it, you need to publish those changes as well. This is to stop people "proprieterizing" GPLed code by making a few incompatible changes and releasing it.

Well then the GPL has failed because that is exactly what these people are doing. They're altering the GPL code, offloading code to proprietary files, then releasing the whole thing as a finished product. I presume this can be done with split .c files as well, in which case the GPL has this flaw from the start.