Whining that for some people it is "confirmed information" is useless. The whole point of Greenwald/Snowden campaign is to provide this "confirmed information" to the masses and make masses angry enough to force some change on behalf of government (and its corporate masters). This is the battlefield and TPTBs are perfectly aware of that. So you have information blackouts in various places (eg. filtering The Guardian site for US military personel, or W. Hague issuing publication ban for UK media using some "national security" as a pretext). Whining and trolling about "confirmed information" (a.k.a "nothing to see here") is clear indication of AC being either government/corporate stooge or uninformed citizen having his brain washed by government/corporate propaganda. IF you have heart at the right side, you should pass those "confirmed information" to as many people as you can, regardless of how long did you know about this.
Our corporate overlords are already dealing with those pesky users daring to hide their online activity from prying eyes of NSA. Expect more measures to dismantle last remains of privacy - including choking off privacy tool vendors, labeling users of such tools as 'terrorist suspects', somewhat skewed patent lawsuits, outright banning certain classes of tools etc.
Um, no. The real solution is dismantling for-profit prison industry in the US. Should you end war on drugs, they'll lobby for jailing people for other trivial "offences" like being illegal immigrant or publishing bad jokes on Facebook. Oh, wait...
It seems US govt propaganda department aparatchiks never stop. They'll repeat their shit over and over again, conveniently hiding behind AC. I'm sick seeing taxpayer money thrown into this. Fuck you.
It has nothing to do with what he wrote - that's just a pretext. It's about money. You're being jailed for non-crimes because some rich fucks are profitting of it. Since your penitentiary system has been "reformed" (privatized) in 80s, number of people jailed in the US has risen ten fold. Does anyone in his right mind believe that people suddenly started commiting 10 times more crimes than before ? Or is it just prison industry lobbying to incriminate more and more people in order to increase its profits ? Sorry to say this but your "justice" system looks more and more like nazi Germany used to look like. They also had corporations profitting of breaking human lives (and murdering them in later stages).
So if you complain that some corporation drilling in your neighborhood will turn your groundwated into shit, you'll be labeled terrorist, stripped of your rights and sent right to the nearest supermax prison. Welcome to the United Fascist States of America. Your corporate overlords don't like you compaining about shit they bring upon you to improve their profits.
Will be a bit off-topic but it is somewhat related to your questions and Snowden gave us a chance to fix this.
I've ran across this article and another one. Both in quite a reputable magazine that is around for 100+ years. While these are theoretical ones, I'm stunned by what they wrote. Theorizing whenever it is possible to dronebomb Snowden without even acknowledging how lawless and cruel such murder would be (yes, murdering, assasination - not just killing!). I'm even more stunned with comments below commenting technicalities of such act without any regard to criminality of such act. Face it folks ! You've been brainwashed to the point where your moral consciouness does not work anymore - you just take such crap for granted from your psychopatic, corporate media and then wonder why there is no outcry ?!? I haven't seen such levels of apathy anywhere in the world ! Add result of latest polls into equation (majority americans don't mind being spied by NSA) and see how sad state of affairs is. Your corporate government can manipulate you into anything it wants ! That huge data cache collected and stored in the NSA is propably the crucial tool it uses to achieve this goal. They can strip you out of everything (see housing bubble, bailouts, healthcare system bankrupting and killing people, fraudclosure, mass-jailing people for profit etc. etc.) and there is virtually no backlash from american citizenry. How this happens is just beyond my perception. I don't know what kind of science does it take to borg 330 millions people into submission, but I suspect it might be as advanced as science behind putting Curiosity rover onto Mars.
IF by seeing this fiasco you don't realize that corporate "persons" are psychopaths, I don't know what will do. I'm reading their disgraceful lawyered-up damage-control non-apologies and I wonder if it is possible for them to actually take reponsiblity and fix things the way it should be done. They might be unable to do so by good will because psychopaths don't recognize good from wrong. Money is the only think they care, so asking them gently about fixing it won't work. Big enough stick is the only thing that will work. Turning their ad campaign into a messy blow by flooding their twitter/facebook/whatever with comments about them being thieves etc. is the best one we have - and I'm delighted to see it in full force. Hurting corporation's bottom line is the only way to force it to behave properly.
So it's time to fix it to be Java 7 ready. Pretty good distrinction between well written apps and crapware is number of difficulties when porting to Java 7. Most of my apps just worked, yet I always avoided (most of) crapola "enterprise" technologies like EJB etc. Switch to Java 7 is pretty good point to decide which of your apps should be depreciated (or undergo severe overhaul) and which are fit enough to still be maintained. It's called evolution.
It's also a good occasion to get rid of super-heavy "enterprise" crap and switch to lightweight frameworks (eg. java portal -> spring, play, clojure etc.). I think Oracle is shooting itself in a foot here as they make gobs of money from selling super-heavy "enterprise" legacy crap. This business might be in jeopardy if people realize that quite often rewriting part of system in lightweight, testable technologies is cheaper than maitaining legacy apps using some heavyweight "consultantware" solution.
Typical corporate hipocrisy and damage control measures. They realized their "principles" only after it has been revealed but were happy to ignore those "principles" earlier. Everyone, (especially non-US companies) should consider moving out of their (and Google's, and others) wiretapped clouds.
I hate to say that. Ed Snowden just threw his life for nothing becauze most Americans don't mind being spied by their government. In this circumstances your fucked up, murderous government is just what you deserve. It makes me so sad... and I wonder what would it take american people to stop being sheeple let alone become vigilant in defending their constitutional rights. You need thousands of Ed Snowdens ! You need people being more persistent than (most of) folks from Occupy Movement. You see, it took decades for Poles to fight off communism. And it happened almost a decade after anti-communist opposition took the biggest blow. Be prepared for MUCH harder fight because your corporate and bankster overlords have so much more to lose than those pesky polish communists (they've just stopped accepting orders from Moscow and started accepting orders from Washington and actually improved their standards of life). You HAVE to become active and you have to fight off this disease! If you don't do that, your fucked up government and your fucked up corporate mafia will lead you (and the rest of the world) the way Hitler led his III Reich - way of deception, violence and death.
Unless you count all corporate douchebaggery and scams - especially those in financial services. There are very few examples of innovative corporations. Innovation tends to come from smaller players that are then bought by big corporation that then boast about those innovations (thay actually didn't create). Most of big corps prefer sitting on a bag of profit-generating assets, praying that no innovation wipes out their valuable assets and actively fighting any initiatives to outinnovate them and their 'precious', outdated assets.
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
Quite tragic for iranian citizenry under shah regime. Britality of this regime caused 1979 revolution. Even more tragic during Iraq-Iran war, procured by US and western powers, led by Saddam Hussein, supported and armed by US right through hist worst atrocities. Still suffering due to harsh sanctions and surrounded by dozens of US military bases.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
The problem is that Iran is not so easy to invade. That's why Pentagon generals block every attempt of US politicians to invade Iran: this might end up in disaster for US even if they manage to wipe out iranian army. Economic consequences of blocking Hormuz Straits are just too severe. Risk of overstretching and losing control over Middle East is also great and IF it happens, you can kiss goodbye to US dollar as a reserve currency.
Just skimming quickly around your post I see that you still believe in 'right' vs 'left' dualism. This tells me you're being deluded. Our media and politicians like us to think in terms of 'left' vs 'right' and identify with either of these sides, so they can see us fighting each other and not paying attentions to their dirty games. It is also easy way to manipulate public: just tag someone (something) as 'leftist', 'rightist' or 'terrorist' and certain parts of society will hate this person (object, process, whatever). I'd urge you to educate yourself. Starting with developments in Iran since II WW might be a good start. Even wikipedia is a good start. Careful reading (with your noisy TV [FoxNews/CNN/whatever] turned off) is a key.
The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
As opposed to so many way more brutal dicatorships US government supports (far too many to list them all here) and sometimes even gives them technology to build nuclear weapons (Pakistan).
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention. Regarding threat of Irans's nuclear capabilities, all we see and hear in western corporate media is crap and propaganda. Should they acquire some, they wouldn't be able to use them in other form than a deterrent. Their army contains of (mostly) defensive forces. Their defence strategy is to block Hormuz Strait and then look for diplomatic solution ("you stop invading us, we ublock your oil"). There was a publicly available Pentagon document describing it, yet I don't remember where I downloaded it. Use your favorite search engine to find it if you want.
Almost everything you see of hear about Iran in western media (maybe except of them being quite brutal theocracy) is a crap. The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
This is common among all those corporate drones, especially high end ones. They seem to be unable to think in human(e) terms at all so they suffer blow after blow and tons of stupid gaffes. I mean, it does not take rocket science that acting like a douchebag to save few thousands bucks is really a detriment to them and their company. This characteristic is common among sociopats and psychopats of all stripes - those people are unable to distinct between right and wrong in the same way crippled people are unable to run. Does it mean that these days in order to be a CEO of a big multinational one has to be sociopath ?
Your lovely government is trying ot crack down on investigative journalism as we know it. They want you to see only government sanctioned news in the media. It will make them easier to lie you into yet another war (Iran, anyone?) or pursue whatever dirty deal they want with impunity. I don't care who is the victim: Fox News, Wikileaks, AP, CNN or some lefty outlet - this is BAD, period. In all such cases your government uses easy to vilify targets first to set precedent and then extend opressions to everyone - this so called "war on terror" is prime example on this. You should stand up against it, whoever their target is because it is guaranteed you'll be next. It happened in almost every case of free country descending into oppresive regime and I don't see things to come out in a different way in USofA unless citizery stands up and stops this process in its tracks.
In the western world we tend to perceive corruption as simple bribery. In my opinion, this thinking is way to narrow - but it keeps us in a kind of comfort zone, that in western world we have much less corruption than anywhere else. BUT if we add regulatory capture and start measuring corruption (simple bribery plus regulatory capture) in terms of human costs, world starts to look totally different. Broken intellectual property law - in this case hindering efforts to fight off a (potentially) deadly virus - is one of many examples of this. I'd rather call it legalized corruption than involve in debating rights and wrongs of this particular (narrow) issue. The same with patented cancer genes, software patents, financial institutions being out of control, monsanto force-feeding us with their toxic crap, legalized tax evasion etc. All those things are legal! Yet until we won't recognize this as ("legalized") corruption, these things won't be solved as root cause of all of this (regulatory capture) will still be there. It will cost us money, health and ultimately lives until we recognize that western countries - especially US - are propably the most corrupt ones in the world just because of sheer scale of this "legalized" corruption and its effects in terms of human costs. If you include all those banana republics we (western countries) imposed corrupt broken regimes just to steal their wealth, the whole picture looks even more grim. Stop debating rights and wrongs of narrow issues - it plays well to the hand of our corrupt corporate overlords. Get up and start fighting corruption in all its forms, including "legalized" one.
In few short years (three, maybe four) they went from being innovative company creating groundbreaking products to being a pain in the ass. Now they represent the worst aspects of corporate America: from tax evasion to legal system abuses to price fixing to screwing up their own customers on every possible occasion. With their innovation pace fading and their products increasingly lagging behind competitors. Maybe it's time to fire their management and hire some less parasitic, more innovative CEO ?
They intentionally hide infringing patents behind NDA, walking from vendor to vendor and shaking up money from. In normal, non-corrupt system this should qualify as racketeering and should be prosecuted as such. Unfortunately, in dysfunctional US legal there is nothing big corporation could be successfully prosecuted and properly fined. If you look at such fiascos as HSBC drug cartels money laundering operation (those fucks created dedicated organization for this purpose and essentially walked out scott free!), Microsoft's patent racket looks like small potatoes in comparison.
So they chose someone who was in this company for 30 years, almost half of it as engineer. I would call it smart move - especially if you compare them to, say AMD or HP - both suffering from somewhat randomly chosen CEOs interested in their bonuses and golden parachutes. Long term thinking is clearly in Intel's DNA - even if they occasionally slow down and get outinnovated by competitors (eg. AMD64). They'll be always there whatever happens - not by their sheer size but by quality of their management.
There are more and more stories like this one. It seems that US overgrown prison system has run out of suspects to jail, so they're now after anyone. Lots of Americans deny it but reality seems to be more cruel than beurocracy/stupidity/paranoia of those in power. This is for-profit cruelty instigated on US citizens by US corporations (as opposed to opressing 3-rd world citizen for profits in the past). You're being harvested by corporate prison complex installed by Bush senior in Reagan years. Sadly, this process seems to be advancing: people are being jailed for more and more trivial things and corporations operating this scheme are now profiteering on prisoners' work - which effectively converts US prisons into US prison camps and makes even more incentives to lobby/bribe officials to jail even more souls. In its way, US corporate economy found a way to compete with China prison camps or Burma prison camps - I'm sorry for if it looks cynic but it is what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Whining that for some people it is "confirmed information" is useless. The whole point of Greenwald/Snowden campaign is to provide this "confirmed information" to the masses and make masses angry enough to force some change on behalf of government (and its corporate masters). This is the battlefield and TPTBs are perfectly aware of that. So you have information blackouts in various places (eg. filtering The Guardian site for US military personel, or W. Hague issuing publication ban for UK media using some "national security" as a pretext). Whining and trolling about "confirmed information" (a.k.a "nothing to see here") is clear indication of AC being either government/corporate stooge or uninformed citizen having his brain washed by government/corporate propaganda. IF you have heart at the right side, you should pass those "confirmed information" to as many people as you can, regardless of how long did you know about this.
Our corporate overlords are already dealing with those pesky users daring to hide their online activity from prying eyes of NSA. Expect more measures to dismantle last remains of privacy - including choking off privacy tool vendors, labeling users of such tools as 'terrorist suspects', somewhat skewed patent lawsuits, outright banning certain classes of tools etc.
Um, no. The real solution is dismantling for-profit prison industry in the US. Should you end war on drugs, they'll lobby for jailing people for other trivial "offences" like being illegal immigrant or publishing bad jokes on Facebook. Oh, wait ...
It seems US govt propaganda department aparatchiks never stop. They'll repeat their shit over and over again, conveniently hiding behind AC. I'm sick seeing taxpayer money thrown into this. Fuck you.
It has nothing to do with what he wrote - that's just a pretext. It's about money. You're being jailed for non-crimes because some rich fucks are profitting of it. Since your penitentiary system has been "reformed" (privatized) in 80s, number of people jailed in the US has risen ten fold. Does anyone in his right mind believe that people suddenly started commiting 10 times more crimes than before ? Or is it just prison industry lobbying to incriminate more and more people in order to increase its profits ? Sorry to say this but your "justice" system looks more and more like nazi Germany used to look like. They also had corporations profitting of breaking human lives (and murdering them in later stages).
Country with the biggest prisoner population in the world "the freest" ?!?
So if you complain that some corporation drilling in your neighborhood will turn your groundwated into shit, you'll be labeled terrorist, stripped of your rights and sent right to the nearest supermax prison. Welcome to the United Fascist States of America. Your corporate overlords don't like you compaining about shit they bring upon you to improve their profits.
Will be a bit off-topic but it is somewhat related to your questions and Snowden gave us a chance to fix this.
I've ran across this article and another one. Both in quite a reputable magazine that is around for 100+ years. While these are theoretical ones, I'm stunned by what they wrote. Theorizing whenever it is possible to dronebomb Snowden without even acknowledging how lawless and cruel such murder would be (yes, murdering, assasination - not just killing!). I'm even more stunned with comments below commenting technicalities of such act without any regard to criminality of such act. Face it folks ! You've been brainwashed to the point where your moral consciouness does not work anymore - you just take such crap for granted from your psychopatic, corporate media and then wonder why there is no outcry ?!? I haven't seen such levels of apathy anywhere in the world ! Add result of latest polls into equation (majority americans don't mind being spied by NSA) and see how sad state of affairs is. Your corporate government can manipulate you into anything it wants ! That huge data cache collected and stored in the NSA is propably the crucial tool it uses to achieve this goal. They can strip you out of everything (see housing bubble, bailouts, healthcare system bankrupting and killing people, fraudclosure, mass-jailing people for profit etc. etc.) and there is virtually no backlash from american citizenry. How this happens is just beyond my perception. I don't know what kind of science does it take to borg 330 millions people into submission, but I suspect it might be as advanced as science behind putting Curiosity rover onto Mars.
IF by seeing this fiasco you don't realize that corporate "persons" are psychopaths, I don't know what will do. I'm reading their disgraceful lawyered-up damage-control non-apologies and I wonder if it is possible for them to actually take reponsiblity and fix things the way it should be done. They might be unable to do so by good will because psychopaths don't recognize good from wrong. Money is the only think they care, so asking them gently about fixing it won't work. Big enough stick is the only thing that will work. Turning their ad campaign into a messy blow by flooding their twitter/facebook/whatever with comments about them being thieves etc. is the best one we have - and I'm delighted to see it in full force. Hurting corporation's bottom line is the only way to force it to behave properly.
So it's time to fix it to be Java 7 ready. Pretty good distrinction between well written apps and crapware is number of difficulties when porting to Java 7. Most of my apps just worked, yet I always avoided (most of) crapola "enterprise" technologies like EJB etc. Switch to Java 7 is pretty good point to decide which of your apps should be depreciated (or undergo severe overhaul) and which are fit enough to still be maintained. It's called evolution.
It's also a good occasion to get rid of super-heavy "enterprise" crap and switch to lightweight frameworks (eg. java portal -> spring, play, clojure etc.). I think Oracle is shooting itself in a foot here as they make gobs of money from selling super-heavy "enterprise" legacy crap. This business might be in jeopardy if people realize that quite often rewriting part of system in lightweight, testable technologies is cheaper than maitaining legacy apps using some heavyweight "consultantware" solution.
Typical corporate hipocrisy and damage control measures. They realized their "principles" only after it has been revealed but were happy to ignore those "principles" earlier. Everyone, (especially non-US companies) should consider moving out of their (and Google's, and others) wiretapped clouds.
I hate to say that. Ed Snowden just threw his life for nothing becauze most Americans don't mind being spied by their government. In this circumstances your fucked up, murderous government is just what you deserve. It makes me so sad ... and I wonder what would it take american people to stop being sheeple let alone become vigilant in defending their constitutional rights. You need thousands of Ed Snowdens ! You need people being more persistent than (most of) folks from Occupy Movement. You see, it took decades for Poles to fight off communism. And it happened almost a decade after anti-communist opposition took the biggest blow. Be prepared for MUCH harder fight because your corporate and bankster overlords have so much more to lose than those pesky polish communists (they've just stopped accepting orders from Moscow and started accepting orders from Washington and actually improved their standards of life). You HAVE to become active and you have to fight off this disease! If you don't do that, your fucked up government and your fucked up corporate mafia will lead you (and the rest of the world) the way Hitler led his III Reich - way of deception, violence and death.
Regards from Poland,
boorack
Unless you count all corporate douchebaggery and scams - especially those in financial services. There are very few examples of innovative corporations. Innovation tends to come from smaller players that are then bought by big corporation that then boast about those innovations (thay actually didn't create). Most of big corps prefer sitting on a bag of profit-generating assets, praying that no innovation wipes out their valuable assets and actively fighting any initiatives to outinnovate them and their 'precious', outdated assets.
And deficits will still rise. This "austerity" thing should be called corruption.
Iran's current state is an indirect result of the 1953 coup. It's a direct result of the 1979 revolution and the idiocy of leftists teaming up with Muslim groups. They used the Muslim groups as the muscle and assumed they would step aside and let the leftist intellectuals rule when the dirty work was done. Quite a tragic miscalculation, though obvious in hindsight.
Quite tragic for iranian citizenry under shah regime. Britality of this regime caused 1979 revolution. Even more tragic during Iraq-Iran war, procured by US and western powers, led by Saddam Hussein, supported and armed by US right through hist worst atrocities. Still suffering due to harsh sanctions and surrounded by dozens of US military bases.
That's a common theory but it doesn't make sense.. if anybody wanted to invade Iran, why wouldn't they do so RIGHT NOW before Iran has nukes? And yet it doesn't happen...
The problem is that Iran is not so easy to invade. That's why Pentagon generals block every attempt of US politicians to invade Iran: this might end up in disaster for US even if they manage to wipe out iranian army. Economic consequences of blocking Hormuz Straits are just too severe. Risk of overstretching and losing control over Middle East is also great and IF it happens, you can kiss goodbye to US dollar as a reserve currency.
Just skimming quickly around your post I see that you still believe in 'right' vs 'left' dualism. This tells me you're being deluded. Our media and politicians like us to think in terms of 'left' vs 'right' and identify with either of these sides, so they can see us fighting each other and not paying attentions to their dirty games. It is also easy way to manipulate public: just tag someone (something) as 'leftist', 'rightist' or 'terrorist' and certain parts of society will hate this person (object, process, whatever). I'd urge you to educate yourself. Starting with developments in Iran since II WW might be a good start. Even wikipedia is a good start. Careful reading (with your noisy TV [FoxNews/CNN/whatever] turned off) is a key.
The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.
As opposed to so many way more brutal dicatorships US government supports (far too many to list them all here) and sometimes even gives them technology to build nuclear weapons (Pakistan).
Regarding Iran, their current, rather precarious condition their citizenry suffers is direct result of US and Britain intervention. Regarding threat of Irans's nuclear capabilities, all we see and hear in western corporate media is crap and propaganda. Should they acquire some, they wouldn't be able to use them in other form than a deterrent. Their army contains of (mostly) defensive forces. Their defence strategy is to block Hormuz Strait and then look for diplomatic solution ("you stop invading us, we ublock your oil"). There was a publicly available Pentagon document describing it, yet I don't remember where I downloaded it. Use your favorite search engine to find it if you want.
Almost everything you see of hear about Iran in western media (maybe except of them being quite brutal theocracy) is a crap. The only reason western powers fear so much of iranian nukes is that since Iran acquires some nukes, US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
This is common among all those corporate drones, especially high end ones. They seem to be unable to think in human(e) terms at all so they suffer blow after blow and tons of stupid gaffes. I mean, it does not take rocket science that acting like a douchebag to save few thousands bucks is really a detriment to them and their company. This characteristic is common among sociopats and psychopats of all stripes - those people are unable to distinct between right and wrong in the same way crippled people are unable to run. Does it mean that these days in order to be a CEO of a big multinational one has to be sociopath ?
Your lovely government is trying ot crack down on investigative journalism as we know it. They want you to see only government sanctioned news in the media. It will make them easier to lie you into yet another war (Iran, anyone?) or pursue whatever dirty deal they want with impunity. I don't care who is the victim: Fox News, Wikileaks, AP, CNN or some lefty outlet - this is BAD, period. In all such cases your government uses easy to vilify targets first to set precedent and then extend opressions to everyone - this so called "war on terror" is prime example on this. You should stand up against it, whoever their target is because it is guaranteed you'll be next. It happened in almost every case of free country descending into oppresive regime and I don't see things to come out in a different way in USofA unless citizery stands up and stops this process in its tracks.
The worse crisis they have, the more military equipment they buy. Have you noticed that ?
In the western world we tend to perceive corruption as simple bribery. In my opinion, this thinking is way to narrow - but it keeps us in a kind of comfort zone, that in western world we have much less corruption than anywhere else. BUT if we add regulatory capture and start measuring corruption (simple bribery plus regulatory capture) in terms of human costs, world starts to look totally different. Broken intellectual property law - in this case hindering efforts to fight off a (potentially) deadly virus - is one of many examples of this. I'd rather call it legalized corruption than involve in debating rights and wrongs of this particular (narrow) issue. The same with patented cancer genes, software patents, financial institutions being out of control, monsanto force-feeding us with their toxic crap, legalized tax evasion etc. All those things are legal! Yet until we won't recognize this as ("legalized") corruption, these things won't be solved as root cause of all of this (regulatory capture) will still be there. It will cost us money, health and ultimately lives until we recognize that western countries - especially US - are propably the most corrupt ones in the world just because of sheer scale of this "legalized" corruption and its effects in terms of human costs. If you include all those banana republics we (western countries) imposed corrupt broken regimes just to steal their wealth, the whole picture looks even more grim. Stop debating rights and wrongs of narrow issues - it plays well to the hand of our corrupt corporate overlords. Get up and start fighting corruption in all its forms, including "legalized" one.
In few short years (three, maybe four) they went from being innovative company creating groundbreaking products to being a pain in the ass. Now they represent the worst aspects of corporate America: from tax evasion to legal system abuses to price fixing to screwing up their own customers on every possible occasion. With their innovation pace fading and their products increasingly lagging behind competitors. Maybe it's time to fire their management and hire some less parasitic, more innovative CEO ?
They intentionally hide infringing patents behind NDA, walking from vendor to vendor and shaking up money from. In normal, non-corrupt system this should qualify as racketeering and should be prosecuted as such. Unfortunately, in dysfunctional US legal there is nothing big corporation could be successfully prosecuted and properly fined. If you look at such fiascos as HSBC drug cartels money laundering operation (those fucks created dedicated organization for this purpose and essentially walked out scott free!), Microsoft's patent racket looks like small potatoes in comparison.
So they chose someone who was in this company for 30 years, almost half of it as engineer. I would call it smart move - especially if you compare them to, say AMD or HP - both suffering from somewhat randomly chosen CEOs interested in their bonuses and golden parachutes. Long term thinking is clearly in Intel's DNA - even if they occasionally slow down and get outinnovated by competitors (eg. AMD64). They'll be always there whatever happens - not by their sheer size but by quality of their management.
There are more and more stories like this one. It seems that US overgrown prison system has run out of suspects to jail, so they're now after anyone. Lots of Americans deny it but reality seems to be more cruel than beurocracy/stupidity/paranoia of those in power. This is for-profit cruelty instigated on US citizens by US corporations (as opposed to opressing 3-rd world citizen for profits in the past). You're being harvested by corporate prison complex installed by Bush senior in Reagan years. Sadly, this process seems to be advancing: people are being jailed for more and more trivial things and corporations operating this scheme are now profiteering on prisoners' work - which effectively converts US prisons into US prison camps and makes even more incentives to lobby/bribe officials to jail even more souls. In its way, US corporate economy found a way to compete with China prison camps or Burma prison camps - I'm sorry for if it looks cynic but it is what it is.
Should Europe try to regulate the hell out of them, US would try every trick to prevent this. "Bringing democracy" included (propably).