It is a great time to own a restaurant in Munich...think of all of those dinners and "best of the best" bottles of wine and/or brandy that Microsoft and/or Microsoft's "partners" are buying for all of those "conservatives"/"traditionalists" (i.e., traditionally, they're accustomed to being wined and dined, minimally, if you want corporate/public money diverted into your pockets)....

E.g., Google "exam cheating india". And efforts to rig outcomes are not limited to India...

It isn't an efficient law or action. E.g., it is illegal to rob convenience stores - but does that stop convenience stores from being robbed? Keeping that indisputable fact in mind, who would expect criminals - let alone terrorists - to comply with laws or regulations on the encryption algorithms and methods "permitted" for use? As another example, it is also illegal to 'jack airliners - and has been since well before 9/11.

IMHO, the NSA would be better off (from the perspective of accomplishing their mission) investing the time, money, and resources into developing ever better decryption methods and into the ability to detect the use of encryption techniques - be they known or new to the NSA - in the flood of traffic that is "the 'Net", thus weeding out what needs further analysis from the chaff.

(By the way: Would I care if the 'Net was reconfigured to completely block those nations and states that repetitiously source/harbor/fund crackerz and terrorists? Nope.)

That is something of an obvious conclusion given excerpts such as

from articles like NetworkWorld's Cisco reorgs trimming SVP ranks .

Separating engineering from marketing's' "Yes, we can - and by tomorrow night, too!" is far and away the best primer for a vaporware pump.

But hey...corporate longevity is as nothing compared to the need to provide current senior executives and large shareholders with maximum returns; somebody else can part out the wreckage.

Good thing my principle purpose wasn't the provision an example of the correct usage of the word "principal".

The reality is that any human-made system will fail because of either fatal defects or accumulated non-fatal defects. Linus' mission is to keep Linux both running and flexible (to support improvement/new features) - and both goals require that no single developer diverts everybody else in the world away from maintenance and/or new feature development backwards to accommodating bugs/defects introduced by that single developer.

If you want to be treated with kid gloves, think back to high school: Resolve your petty differences/behavior problems before you get kicked up to the school principle (Linus, in this case). Merely being kicked up to that level indicates both that your behavior is causing significant problems and that everybody else has already given up on you

It is AT&T that is "arrogant".

Comments such as this one make it plain that AT&T believes that they've bought enough members of Congress and enough of the FCC to be able to safely ignore those famous "free market" principles which would otherwise supposedly protect the American consumer from monopolistic practices - e.g., sending Netflix to the bottom of the priority stack on AT&T-controlled comm links.

The greatest arrogance lies in the fact that AT&T believes that they can publicly reveal - even boast of - the extent of the corruption that they've fostered without repercussion.

Too true. The two things I've gathered that are simply not taught at America's B-schools are innovation and ethics.

Did Greenwald just say that if you disagree with him, Snowden, or Snowden's pals in the PRC and former USSR you're a "government shill"?

I'd note, by the way, that injecting misinformation into "stolen government documents" after the fact isn't only a piece of cake, it's old hat.

Legal says "No - and would you like a job in the mail room better?".

Seems the solution is Google builds "dense urban housing" on their campus a la Foxconn. They save the money for the shuttles, their fuel, and the shuttle drivers and return it to the shareholders - and the rest of San Francisco doesn't have to worry about upward pressure on rents, the blasting of their neighborhoods with "dense urban housing", or the Congo.

Handy double-edged sword, that "shareholder value".

(P.S. Note to personnel about to be bugged [NPI] by increasingly nervous politicians: Never tell a politician that they don't have "the need to know" - or cover something up so that they cannot see it especially if there is anybody in the vicinity who appears to be unaware of just how very important they are. Even though you, the politician, and the wall all know that the politician leaks for any reason from revenge to financial advantage to impressing that pretty young thing to free dinner on the WaPo, that just makes 'em mad and they'll take it out on you/the program/the nation's security.

Instead, pull an Alberto Gonzales and select one of the nearly infinite variations of "I forget." or "I don't know.". And remember: For anybody but a politician, those are just delay tactics. You will be expected to be capable of learning new tricks.)

Or did another/other member(s) of Congress put it into his head out of fear that Congress' insider trading, graft, legislation-written-directly-by-special-interests, and so on is actually all on NSA hard drives somewhere?

I'd feel better about Hayden's opinion if I didn't get this visual of Hayden saying "This is the intelligence we have." and then nodding compliantly as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & PNAC, LLP said "Well, this is what we'll say we have - and this is what you'll say it means." And Voila! - we're in Iraq with too few, too under-armored, for too little justification...and consequently taking too many casualties for too long at too great of an expense in both dollars and world opinion.

There are many - to include me - who despise Snowden for turncoating...but the reality is when you must watch the very top of the food chain betraying the nation for purely selfish reasons - just to hurt "labor" a.k.a. the American people and further enrich the top of the energy and financial food chains - you don't have to be an analyst to project that others further down the food chain will follow that leadership example.

That is what leaders are for: To set the example. Sell-outs shouldn't bitch about other sell-outs.

lolll...oh, yeah: And there is some concern that what Corporate America does to make money and influence our government just might be going to hard disk somewhere.