I've been looking at phones specs for the last couple of months, after my first android phone died, (Okay, It was my fault, I forgot I had it in my pocket, back off OK?), I've been researching this so I can get the most bang for my buck.

But phone specs don't make any sense!, and most "normal" users have never really understood them, and they're not advertised either. You can get a cheap phone with a quad core processor at 1.3 Ghz with a gig of ram for like a 100 bucks, but nowhere on the box does it say that the quad core processor is an A7, which is relevant when gauging performance, and just try to find out the GPU on that thing, sure its a Mali400 but that means nothing if there are no specs for it since a lot of phones have that same gpu but at different speeds and even with single or multiple cores! It doesn't matter if its a cheap chines phone or the latest Samsung "flagship" phone, specs are hype, I've actually found it more useful to look up videos on youtube of people doing demos and running apps on their phones.

Point is, hopefully, people will stop being impressed with the marketing hype of "specs" and can worry about screen size, resolution and battery life.

Hey, just don't forget that they were one of the bigger backers for DRM in HTML5. Sure, I'd want to ditch Silverlight too, but not at the expense of the Internet.

Well, forget the 70's for now and lets go back a little bit, from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

During the Cold War era, the United States feared the spread of communism and, in some cases, overthrew democratically elected governments perceived at the time as becoming left-wing or unfriendly to U.S. interests.[1] Examples include the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, the 1973 Chilean coup d'état and the support of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

And of course, Cuba.

This started, for lack of a better word, a policy to attempt to control the political life of Latin America, where some places they used force, others it was easier to coerce them through other means, including bribery. this served both political and economic interests of the US.

This is pretty well documented history, as a quick Google search will show.

Relatively peaceful?
I get your point but they were never peaceful, even relatively.
I lived in Tijuana and while you would not expect to be caught in the middle of gang violence, (And this was true even in the middle of the worse part of the conflict), you knew that should you get involved with these people, they were going to be ruthless if you crossed them.

Anyway, I agree with drinkypoo. Because of the US policies in the 70's to destabilize latin america, corruption and fraud are a direct result of that.

Even more important, this is one study, with 50 people.
You can't take it seriously just yet, can these results be duplicated? We don't know.
Would the sample size make a difference in the result? Very likely.

Did someone call MC front A Lot?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3w1_E1V46M

" Everybody in other countries with an ounce of brains in their heads could reasonable assumed that this is going on"

Two things:

People in other countries are outraged, so your opinion on what people in other countries think does not hold. (You might as well say that, since (you assume) they already know and don't say anything,then they probably love it (In either case you ignore the fact that they are powerless to do anything about it))

Saying that this is not news does not make it right.
If you use the ounce of brains you allow other people and use it to think of something other than yourself, you'll soon come to realize that people in other countries might very well view the secret spying of the united states government in pursuit of its own interests as one thing, and the brazen F U that is the pervasive surveillance state, that we now KNOW to be the built around the world, as something else entirely.

Interesting, this could work.

The reasoning you use is correct, the flaw is that you can't assert that its not somebody else's decision to make and at the same time propose a solution for other people to take.
I'll argue that making a specific course of action available to others needs to be debated as more than personal choice, otherwise, you would just develop this test yourself and apply it yourself as well, but asking others to create something for you is not about personal choice, that's the thing about living in a society, you cannot leverage the benefits of a society purely for personal gain and ask everyone else to back off. Once available, then its definitely a personal choice.
In this case, your answer is smarmy in the sense that it objects to the morality of deciding for somebody else while not addressing the morality point raised by the other person.
(Its a mind trip, I know)

It doesn't work, when I get to the comments, they won't load, I have to reload a couple of times before anything comes up!
that is of course the most obvious failure I can think of but there's just so much to dislike!!!

Think about it, someone who does have good communication skills, is telling you, you need to get better communication skills, and you're telling us, you don't need to pull your punches.
Sounds like you misunderstood, because he/she was not communicating as you do.

This is hard, you need to stop being a jerk but you probably do not realize what makes you a jerk in the first place.
you probably judge people too hard. so you should probably look into learning how to make value neutral statements. That is, learn to be direct about what you mean.
Most people I've met with communication problems are either very direct about how they feel or repress what they feel as if it had no value. But neither of these talks about the work at hand, they tend to conflate their feelings with their talking points and tend to say things like, "you suck" and stop there, when they should say, "that doesn't work and here's why and here's how to fix it"

While you learn these skills don't second guess yourself either, just watch if what you are saying gets you anywhere.

Sure, some people are not shocked, but nobody cares about their outrage either so... shouldn't they still be asking if this spying was performed thanks to the extended powers they got so they can catch Terrorists?
Because then this would be a misuse of these powers right?

A company that works in recruitment claims to know how to select personnel...

This is spurious on its face.

They didn't fire him because he made inappropriate comments, if anything he was fired for telling the truth. Are we really expecting these companies to screw us over as long as they lie to us?
And then we complain when those companies employees say the truth by saying they are evil?
Just because Orth left, that wont change the fact that Microsoft will still go ahead and do what he said and do it with the same attitude, "You don't like it? deal with it!"

There's a real sense in which Orth failed at his post, and he may yet deserve being fired, but it also means that we want to be lied to, and we expect company employees to hide the truth from us.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Most "suits" are already familiar with some form of version control involved in quality assurance processes commonly something like ISO 9001, just explain that this is the computer version of this.