All the media fuzz around about that spreadsheet, but the real interesting and relevant information is always missing: it's the salary distribution (e.g, a graph that shows the salary range on the x axis, say grouped by 1000 dollar steps, and the frequency of salaries within that group on the y axis... then more detailed data by department or task as well as other factors... so one could have an actual idea of how much google pays and what factors might influence the pay. So where can i get either that data (can be anonymized, i don't care about the names)... or, if not available.... where can i download the spreadsheet?

Quote from the Wiki article (*):

(*): accents removed since slashdot seems unable to handle them

The full report (pdf linked at the end of the article) repeatedly insists on the importance of the quality of the pretext:

• "a major difference this year was in the quality of the pretexts employed by our contestants."
• As in the previous years, part of our contestants' success appeared to have been related to the choice of pretext
• Our winner this year [...] developed an excellent pretext, and was fully prepared prior to the contest

On the other hand, the report gives close to no information about what makes a good pretext, aside from mentioning that the best pretext scenarios were usually based on posing as an employee, whereas posing as a student or conducting a survey seems to be less promising for collecting relevant information. What would _really_ have been interesting is some details about how the winning pretexts were constructed.

had you actually tried it out and tasted the cardboard box, you would have noticed, that - as disgusting as it may taste - it's still the best tasting and best quality part of what you get when you pay for a burger at McDonald's.

Been there, met quite a couple students from Tunisia, Algeria and Marocco. That's outside the EU. Most of those students coming from these countries to France for their studies (as opposed to those who were born in France or already lived there) were entirely funded by scholarships including tuition, housing and medical bills. That is, a scholarship from the French state, not from their state of origin. One of them even came from a really rich family. Still the French state paid for everything. Now I'm not saying that it was a bad investment for the French state. I don't know if it was or not, and some of these guys were really good. But there are far more students from the mentioned countries coming to study in France than the other way around and it's definitely wrong to believe that "foreign students pay tuition fees" applies to all non-EU countries

The IRS of course! D'Oh, McAffee must really be a dopehead to not have figured it out: Imagine if every rich entrepreneur were to flee taxes by moving to some Caribbean or South American tax haven. That's the IRS's wooorst nightmare. So in order to prevent that, they have to make an example so that the others who are flirting with tax motivated expatriation fantasies are afraid and prefer to stay and pay.

It's funny how Bennett thinks that the release of diaspora as open source would be a step forward towards the success of that platform. The sad reason behind that release is that the money is out and the developers don't see a way that diaspora would give them any income, so they couldn't continue working full time on that project and had to move on.

Of course, they're not gonna say it's dead but "release it as open source" (after all, some other guys could continue the work, right?) but there's not gonna be any full time core team behind the project simply because it's not a viable model to pay the rent/mortgage.
IIRC, the initial funding about 2 years ago was about $200000 for 4 devs. That's $25000 per dev per year. It would take a lot of idealism to continue working full time as a dev for that money, and even more so for $0 now that that money is gone and there's no income in sight.