You are making the flawed assumption that the amount of resources available to a "united" project would be the total of the resources available to each project. That's simply not true. Many projects are started as a response to perceived flaws in another project, and leads to resources being made available that wouldn't otherwise be there. Many of the Gnome developers would never have bothered working on a desktop project if it wasn't for the QT debacle, for instance.
Many projects are also started because another, similar projects demonstrates that something is doable, or give people a chance to gain experience that they can build on in a fork that may have different goals.
Yes, there is a lot of duplication, but this also means that the risks are lower - if a development strategy turns out to be a dead end, people will just move to another OSS project that didn't screw up, or fork, and you will still be able to leverage any good code in the failed project, and if you really need support or enhancements for the failed project because you can't migrate immediately, "anyone" can pick it up and support it for you (at a cost, but this opportunity wouldn't be there for a proprietary end-of-lifed product or a proprietary product from a bankrupt company)
Contrast that with proprietary software, where you are entirely at the mercy of a company that may go out of business leaving you without support, which may end-of-life it's products at any time, which may refuse to fix problems you have, and where all the resources that went into the product have been wasted if the product disappears off the market.
Forks means that you get an alternate product that starts of a possibly mature, well tested base, instead of the wastage of the proprietary world where most competing products have to be written from scratch. Look at the variety of vastly different Mozilla/Gecko based browsers for an example - writing a browser from scratch means spending huge amount of resources getting the basic rendering right. If this guy is against wasting resources by forking, does he also think that free market competition is a waste?
Also forks in the open source world also often gets reintegrated. Look at EGCS vs. GCC for instance: GCC stagnated, got forked, got competition, and the end result was that GCC was revitalized and the projects merged again. This is again something that would be unlikely to happen with proprietary software, leading to more wasted resources.
Since when did Windows get "consistent"? I keep seeing the GUI changing in each version, and tons of apps with their own widget sets (INCLUDING Microsoft apps using internally inconsistent GUI's - Office vs. Project and Visio vs. Outlook springs to mind).
Windows seem somewhat consistent because the widget sets people try to look relatively close to the "official" look, but that make differences in behaviour even more annoying - should I use Alt+F4 or Ctrl+W to close an application window, for instance? There are no safe visual clues to indicate that an app is likely to behave different.
Woz had left Apple by the time the Mac was introduced. But for personal computers in the 80's it was common to include relatively comprehensive schematics in the reference manuals. This included both Apple, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga - don't know about the Mac
That's way to simplistic. I don't know the current XBox prices, but let's say it's been on average $200, and would have been on average $400 without NAFTA. What you need to ask yourself is: how would the $200 difference have affected sales? (it likely would have destroyed any chance the XBox had) If the alternative was US production and a price of $400, would the box really be manufactured in the US without NAFTA, or in the far east? (likely Taiwan, Korea or China, not the US) Where will people spend the $200 they "saved" because the production was done outside the US? (A large portion of world trade is with US companies, so a significant chunk of it will likely go to companies that employ people in the US) How will the increased XBox sales affect the US economy? (It will have helped electronics and games retailers increase their revenue, and hence create more jobs, and it will have increased revenue and jobs at games manufacturers and likely add jobs at Microsoft).
So you see, it's by now means a given that moving jobs to a cheaper location will result in a net reduction of jobs where you move the jobs from, assuming they'd ever be there in the first place.
Similar issues arise with development outsourcing - companies that save money by outsourcing will be more competitive, and so might end up growing more and ultimately create more jobs.
Of course these are not guaranteed effects, but possible, and need to be taken into account if you want to objectively assess the result of moving functions offshore.
Bugfixes != upgrades. Nobody will complain of deployng bugfixes occasionally. Particularly not if they use Red Carpet or some other remote deployment mechanism so that upgrades can be done by IT staff from a central location. People DO object to have to pay upgrades on a regular basis that change functionality and require users to relearn software, or it staff to spend time configuring new stuff or handle new types of problems.
Sun can make this promise because they make their money in these deals from support contracts, while Microsoft primarily make their money of the sale of software and leave support to third parties. Microsoft needs to force users to upgrade, because if they leave customers on the same software platform and give customers the ability to live with that just with support contracts Microsoft won't make any money.
It's a major weakness of being a software company as opposed to an IT services company that happen to have it's own software and hardware products, such as Sun and IBM. They've gotten away with it because they've had a monopoly situation. Now they're starting to see the downside. At the same time they CAN'T start branching massively out into services, for two major reasons: it would cause lots of anti trust attention and it would force all their major system integrators to consider pushing Linux much harder to reduce their reliance on Microsoft.
On the other hand, where is Windows today? Without Netscape being as threatening as they were, Microsoft might never have cared about the web, and the internet would have been nowhere near as widespread.
But the paradox here is that Netscape's achilles heel was that Microsoft could afford to give away a product that was competing with their main revenue source, forcing them to dramatically rework their business model. In the case of open source, Microsoft is on the receiving end of the same medicine.
It really doesn't matter that much. If they do it to get a better deal, then MS will see their profit margins plunge and they'll be less able to aggressively attack their competitors. If they do it to genuinely switch, then obviously it will hurt Microsoft more immediately, however if they just squeeze MS, and succeed, this is going to be business as usual for ALL large companies.
On a regular basis you announce you're "looking" at Linux, and make MS go crazy, and negotiate an improved contract.
Whereas if they switch to Linux, MS can counter it with "yeah, but that was the NHS - you know those incompetent government agencies, and besides they use their IT infrastructure vastly differently from you, and can make it work only because they have a whopping 800.000 machines". MS might be able to explain away a few large migrations like this to their customers, but the moment it becomes common knowledge that they have started giving discounts to prevent Linux migrations they'll be swamped with people renegotiating prices.
And even better: If Microsoft tries getting tough to stop it, some companies will go along with migration studies to back up their negotiations, and some of them will likely come out of it with a decision to go ahead with the migration even if it wasn't what they intended to start with.
Yeah, because supporting 800.000 desktops is trivial and won't take any resources that's worth any money, and as the National Health Service you really ought to spend your time on employing and managing IT staff instead of just contracting with someone to do it for you. Has it occurred to you that growing their IT staff sufficiently to handle something like this might be significantly more costly than paying Sun?
On the other hand, this resistance to change is a major plus for Sun in this case. With Microsoft agressively end-of-life'ing their products faster and faster, they are now in a position where they either go onto a perpetual upgrade carousel where they'll find it difficult to even complete one upgrade cycle before having to start the next, or they make one painful transition, which they can stage over time, and then they can set their own pace.
My greatest fear with biometrics based authentication is that it can't be changed. What if someone find a way to trick the security system? What if they find a way of synthesising your voice? Of creating a mask that resembles your face closely enough? Of fooling the retinal scanner or fingerprint machine (possibly including the use of your own bodyparts)?
And what if you yourself are no longer able to authenticate using the appropriate biometrics, because of accidents etc.?
A cornerstone of safe authentication is that it needs to be safe even if any unalterable or hard to alter parts are compromised. Imagine a world where your username was your password - if someone found out your username on a system they had free access, and the only way to prevent it would be to get a new account and tell everyone you've changed.
Now imagine that all or a significant part of the username was tattoed on you, and it could only be done once.
That is in effect the security level of biometrics the moment someone finds a way to fool the machine.
The second problem caused by this is that even if additional verification is required, such as a passphrase PLUS your fingerprint, it still now means that a potential violent person that wants access to something you have will either NEED or find it significantly easier to use force to get you to authenticate for him instead of "just" stealing your wallet.
I for one would prefer that all my authentication tokens can be easily and quickly disposed of so that I could get away from a robber as quickly as possibly before something goes wrong.
As the sex.com lawsuits showed, a domain name is even less than that. You don't have ownership to the string - you have rights of use. And even the rights of use are limited only to cases where your rights to the name is not successfully challenged either through arbitration or in court. In the sex.com cases the court found that domain names aren't property, but are service designators of the same character as phone numbers.
They don't prove ownership to a name. In fact they don't prove ownership to anything, and they don't even prove you have the right to have the domain name itself.
That is irellevant. Publication of Linux Gazette independent of SSC seized in '96 when the magazine was "handed over" to SSC.
So PROVIDED that SSC could get a court to agree that that handover was done in a way that gave them property rights to the magazine assets (which given the nature of it as a non-commercial volunteer based magazine where authors retain copyright would be mostly goodwill and any trademark rights) and effectively "owned" the magazine, the court would also likely agree that any claim the Linux Gazette contributors had to the name as an independent entity prior to SSC taking it over would either have been transferred as part of the handover OR have been lost due to disuse (since Linux Gazette has not been operated as a separate entity from SSC during that time and trademark rights are weakened and eventually lost if you don't use or protect your mark).
Note that the big sticking point is whether SSC were transferred any rights to begin with, and possibly whether they gained any rights (alone or as contributors alongside the rest of the people involved) as a result of their activities since they got involved.
If a court decides SSC was effectively the owner after it took over, then asserting '96 as the start time just serves to try to point out that their control over the name and publication was not challenged for many years, and that they were regularly using the mark in that time, which is important to assert the strength of protection they should be afforded.
Mote that I don't like what SSC has done here, and from what I've seen so far I like the Linux Gazette volunteers more than SSC - I'm just pointing out why the use of the name prior to 1996 doesn't necessarily mean a thing.
There's nothing fishy about the filing date. If you have a non-registered trademark and end up in a conflict, the first thing you should do is register it (you'd been better of registering it earlier, then maybe the conflict wouldn't have arisen in the first place, but that's another matter). Registering the trademark is a way of forcing resolution about who owns the mark - if the Linux Gazette staff doesn't object, or does not convince the USPTO that the mark shouldn't be granted, it will be significantly easier for SSC to sue for infringement.
That said, if SSC had been smart and filed in '96 when Linux Gazette was moved to them, their trademark would have been "incontestable" now (which doesn't actually mean it's completely incontestable, but the burden of proof to have the mark declared invalid would be substantially higher)
Who filed what when isn't the point. Filing the trademark application is a formality to make it easier in a potential court battle, but trademark protection is primarily linked to use of the name and how much effort you have put into protecting it.
You're assuming that SSC has legal control over Linux Gazette the magazine in any form. Unless you KNOW that to be fact you are jumping to conclusions, as you have no basis for knowing whether SSC have any trademark rights in Linux Gazette, and whether the staff has. Notice that we're talking about a non-commercial publication with volunteer staffers, not a commercial magazine.
If IBM agreed to host an open source project, IBM wouldn't magically get trademark rights to the open source projects name, and if the people working on the project decided to, they could freely take the project AND the name elsewhere. Now which of the analogies are closer? Unless there is a written agreement in place handing over rights to Linux Gazette, the analogy I mention above could very well be a lot more fitting.
Of course us foreigners get the same style of questions on the landing cards each time we fly to the US. Fun stuff like "Were you a war criminal in World War II?" "Ever commited genocide?" "Are you a drug smuggler?" "Are you a member of a terrorist organisation?" And I'm not kidding, though I don't remember the exact wording of the questions. Along with it usually comes a friendly warning that if you've ticked "yes" in any of the boxes you may be denied entry and should talk to the immigration officials immediately upon landing.
I find it amusing that several people seem to take this as a massive criticism of the hiring process. While there were certainly a few snide remarks towards the NSA, he did want to work there before going through the process, and most of the complains circled around the polygraph, but some gripes are to be expected from someone who took a personal risk and didn't get the job. Most of all it was a description about how the process works and what to expect that was fairly neutral.
If I'd ever applied for a job like that, and I ended up with the "dentist chair" reaction to the polygraph, I would've screwed up exactly the same way as him - if I'm trying to stay still and calm my breathing subconsciously slows A LOT, and 20 seconds between each breath would certainly not be unusual (I tend to suddenly notice because I get out of breath)
I'd certainly be unhappy if I thought that was a reason for a rejected clearance - if I'd been prepared in advance I would have concentrated hard on breathing regularly, as I wouldn't see any point in trying to lie or evade questions (if I did go for an interview with the NSA, I'd expect them to figure out any lies by secondary means, and would assume that I should focus on ensuring that no dirty little secrets show up during interviews or other background checks without me having already disclosed it to them directly, so lying would be counterproductive), but I know it would be unlikely to be my natural reaction.
But apart from a few gripes relating to their personell policy, I didn't see any condemnation of the NSA, or of what they do - on the contrary.
You're making the assumption that he wrote under a pseudonym to prevent the NSA from finding out who he is. Frankly, if that is the reason he is a complete idiot, as it would be extremely hard to write something like this without giving himself away to someone with inside info.
For what you know he might have cleared this with the NSA in advance.
What's a more likely reason for the pseudonym is that he made very clear choices as to which information he think is acceptable to post, and that he don't want to enter into any discussion, or don't want people to try to trick him into revealing anything he shouldn't be revealing.
Writing under a pseudonym makes this a one way communication that is very restricted in scope. Apart from which specific tests they are using, the write up reveal very little that could be useful for anyone. And even that information would have little relevance, as someone intending to trick their way into an intelligence agency would presumably expect psychological profiling and be briefed on, or read up on, the most common tactics to handling them.
He also makes some assumptions on the interpretation, but fact is he don't KNOW the profile they are looking for, and hence can't reveal it - he doesn't even reveal his own profile so we don't even have a single data point of someone who was rejected.
He assumes they want someone that don't exhibit significant tendencies in any way on the test, but that's not necessarily correct. They obviously want someone "safe", but without knowing the details of the position it's hard to say anything more. They might be looking for a risk taker, and someone with moral inclinations that wouldn't give them a problem in massively invading peoples privacy (which is certainly a big part of NSA's work, at least outside the US). Hence being "bland" might be just as wrong as being a paranoid schizophrenic.
Frankly, while the paper was a good read, it didn't tell me anything that you couldn't likely find out or guess by looking at publicly available information and some social engineering to find people who might have been through the process and be willing to talk about it. If they felt they had a great need to keep any of this secret they'd been much more careful about it.
What this guys description is indicating is that it's hard unless you know what you go to. If you care enough to read up on the tests used you'd likely significantly improve your chances, whether you're a security risk or not, which might also explain why they are so thorough - better to exclude a huge amount of suitable candidates than accept unsuitable candidates.
The problem at the moment isn't propulsion systems. It's the cost of the shuttle. Launching the shuttle cost many times of what it costs to launch a simpler craft like the Russian Soyuz.
The shuttle is simply ridiculously inneficient, and if the US space program keeps relying on it, you WILL be surpassed by the Chinese (and the Russians too, if they had been able to afford it) simply because they'll be able to justify a lot more launches.
And there is a fundamental difference between the ISS and a moon base: A moon base would at least have access to some material "locally", and sale of returned rock and minerals could at least offset some of the costs.
Why? High speed rail lends itself best to short to medium distances: On long distances, the speed advantage of planes make competition more difficult. On shorter trips takeoff and landing combined with typical long travel times through and from the large airport hubs eat up the speed advantage of planes, and make transportation where terminals can be built relatively unobtrusively in city centres much more desirable.
Relatively low population density countries with long distances such as the US make it much tougher to economically justify high speed rail than markets where population density is extremely high and concentrated in a low number of key locations, distances are too short to be efficiently served by planes or short enough that planes don't have a speed advantage, and where space for large airport hubs near the city cores is non-existant, extremely expensive or difficult to justify for other reasons.
No. First of all, they can call it a retrial all they want, but it is NOT. In a retrial the case starts from scratch. In an appeal, all previous findings stands unless specifically reversed by the higher court. Add to that that an appeal always go to a higher court, and the Norwegian court system only have three levels, and the supreme court usually only hear matters of law, and it's not a case of a series of retrials.
It's an appeal that will revisit limited parts of the case, and where the decision can be appealed on matters of law to the supreme court, who, IF it decides to hear the case will have the final say.
Very different from full retrials, and quite limited both in number and scope.
In that case I think you'll find NO civilized countries, and certainly not the US. As for the specific case of double jeopardy, you are taking one tiny aspect of differences in the legal system and trying to present it as a massive change in favour of the state, when I'm quite confident that you'd find that most people in the European countries that allow appeals on aquittals would be many times more concerned about facing trial in the US than their home country.
The lack of a decent public defender system in the US makes it more or less essential to spend money on a private defense if at all possible, while you have very good chance of getting a top notch lawyer (from a private law firm) assigned to you as a public defender in Norway and may face much less financial problems as a result.
Combine that with MUCH longer sentences in the US, and things start getting interesting (Norway has a MAXIMUM sentence of 21 years + 10 years of reporting regularly to the police, a sentence that is only rarely handed down, and then usually to multiple murderers, and normally you would be eligible for, and get, parole after serving 2/3rds of the sentence).
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Many projects are also started because another, similar projects demonstrates that something is doable, or give people a chance to gain experience that they can build on in a fork that may have different goals.
Yes, there is a lot of duplication, but this also means that the risks are lower - if a development strategy turns out to be a dead end, people will just move to another OSS project that didn't screw up, or fork, and you will still be able to leverage any good code in the failed project, and if you really need support or enhancements for the failed project because you can't migrate immediately, "anyone" can pick it up and support it for you (at a cost, but this opportunity wouldn't be there for a proprietary end-of-lifed product or a proprietary product from a bankrupt company)
Contrast that with proprietary software, where you are entirely at the mercy of a company that may go out of business leaving you without support, which may end-of-life it's products at any time, which may refuse to fix problems you have, and where all the resources that went into the product have been wasted if the product disappears off the market.
Forks means that you get an alternate product that starts of a possibly mature, well tested base, instead of the wastage of the proprietary world where most competing products have to be written from scratch. Look at the variety of vastly different Mozilla/Gecko based browsers for an example - writing a browser from scratch means spending huge amount of resources getting the basic rendering right. If this guy is against wasting resources by forking, does he also think that free market competition is a waste?
Also forks in the open source world also often gets reintegrated. Look at EGCS vs. GCC for instance: GCC stagnated, got forked, got competition, and the end result was that GCC was revitalized and the projects merged again. This is again something that would be unlikely to happen with proprietary software, leading to more wasted resources.
Windows seem somewhat consistent because the widget sets people try to look relatively close to the "official" look, but that make differences in behaviour even more annoying - should I use Alt+F4 or Ctrl+W to close an application window, for instance? There are no safe visual clues to indicate that an app is likely to behave different.
The "consistent" Windows UI is a myth.
Xouvert IS a X server.
Woz had left Apple by the time the Mac was introduced. But for personal computers in the 80's it was common to include relatively comprehensive schematics in the reference manuals. This included both Apple, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga - don't know about the Mac
So you see, it's by now means a given that moving jobs to a cheaper location will result in a net reduction of jobs where you move the jobs from, assuming they'd ever be there in the first place.
Similar issues arise with development outsourcing - companies that save money by outsourcing will be more competitive, and so might end up growing more and ultimately create more jobs.
Of course these are not guaranteed effects, but possible, and need to be taken into account if you want to objectively assess the result of moving functions offshore.
Since when did any of those become hardware?
Sun can make this promise because they make their money in these deals from support contracts, while Microsoft primarily make their money of the sale of software and leave support to third parties. Microsoft needs to force users to upgrade, because if they leave customers on the same software platform and give customers the ability to live with that just with support contracts Microsoft won't make any money.
It's a major weakness of being a software company as opposed to an IT services company that happen to have it's own software and hardware products, such as Sun and IBM. They've gotten away with it because they've had a monopoly situation. Now they're starting to see the downside. At the same time they CAN'T start branching massively out into services, for two major reasons: it would cause lots of anti trust attention and it would force all their major system integrators to consider pushing Linux much harder to reduce their reliance on Microsoft.
But the paradox here is that Netscape's achilles heel was that Microsoft could afford to give away a product that was competing with their main revenue source, forcing them to dramatically rework their business model. In the case of open source, Microsoft is on the receiving end of the same medicine.
On a regular basis you announce you're "looking" at Linux, and make MS go crazy, and negotiate an improved contract.
Whereas if they switch to Linux, MS can counter it with "yeah, but that was the NHS - you know those incompetent government agencies, and besides they use their IT infrastructure vastly differently from you, and can make it work only because they have a whopping 800.000 machines". MS might be able to explain away a few large migrations like this to their customers, but the moment it becomes common knowledge that they have started giving discounts to prevent Linux migrations they'll be swamped with people renegotiating prices.
And even better: If Microsoft tries getting tough to stop it, some companies will go along with migration studies to back up their negotiations, and some of them will likely come out of it with a decision to go ahead with the migration even if it wasn't what they intended to start with.
Yeah, because supporting 800.000 desktops is trivial and won't take any resources that's worth any money, and as the National Health Service you really ought to spend your time on employing and managing IT staff instead of just contracting with someone to do it for you. Has it occurred to you that growing their IT staff sufficiently to handle something like this might be significantly more costly than paying Sun?
On the other hand, this resistance to change is a major plus for Sun in this case. With Microsoft agressively end-of-life'ing their products faster and faster, they are now in a position where they either go onto a perpetual upgrade carousel where they'll find it difficult to even complete one upgrade cycle before having to start the next, or they make one painful transition, which they can stage over time, and then they can set their own pace.
And what if you yourself are no longer able to authenticate using the appropriate biometrics, because of accidents etc.?
A cornerstone of safe authentication is that it needs to be safe even if any unalterable or hard to alter parts are compromised. Imagine a world where your username was your password - if someone found out your username on a system they had free access, and the only way to prevent it would be to get a new account and tell everyone you've changed.
Now imagine that all or a significant part of the username was tattoed on you, and it could only be done once.
That is in effect the security level of biometrics the moment someone finds a way to fool the machine.
The second problem caused by this is that even if additional verification is required, such as a passphrase PLUS your fingerprint, it still now means that a potential violent person that wants access to something you have will either NEED or find it significantly easier to use force to get you to authenticate for him instead of "just" stealing your wallet.
I for one would prefer that all my authentication tokens can be easily and quickly disposed of so that I could get away from a robber as quickly as possibly before something goes wrong.
They don't prove ownership to a name. In fact they don't prove ownership to anything, and they don't even prove you have the right to have the domain name itself.
So PROVIDED that SSC could get a court to agree that that handover was done in a way that gave them property rights to the magazine assets (which given the nature of it as a non-commercial volunteer based magazine where authors retain copyright would be mostly goodwill and any trademark rights) and effectively "owned" the magazine, the court would also likely agree that any claim the Linux Gazette contributors had to the name as an independent entity prior to SSC taking it over would either have been transferred as part of the handover OR have been lost due to disuse (since Linux Gazette has not been operated as a separate entity from SSC during that time and trademark rights are weakened and eventually lost if you don't use or protect your mark).
Note that the big sticking point is whether SSC were transferred any rights to begin with, and possibly whether they gained any rights (alone or as contributors alongside the rest of the people involved) as a result of their activities since they got involved.
If a court decides SSC was effectively the owner after it took over, then asserting '96 as the start time just serves to try to point out that their control over the name and publication was not challenged for many years, and that they were regularly using the mark in that time, which is important to assert the strength of protection they should be afforded.
Mote that I don't like what SSC has done here, and from what I've seen so far I like the Linux Gazette volunteers more than SSC - I'm just pointing out why the use of the name prior to 1996 doesn't necessarily mean a thing.
That said, if SSC had been smart and filed in '96 when Linux Gazette was moved to them, their trademark would have been "incontestable" now (which doesn't actually mean it's completely incontestable, but the burden of proof to have the mark declared invalid would be substantially higher)
Who filed what when isn't the point. Filing the trademark application is a formality to make it easier in a potential court battle, but trademark protection is primarily linked to use of the name and how much effort you have put into protecting it.
If IBM agreed to host an open source project, IBM wouldn't magically get trademark rights to the open source projects name, and if the people working on the project decided to, they could freely take the project AND the name elsewhere. Now which of the analogies are closer? Unless there is a written agreement in place handing over rights to Linux Gazette, the analogy I mention above could very well be a lot more fitting.
Of course us foreigners get the same style of questions on the landing cards each time we fly to the US. Fun stuff like "Were you a war criminal in World War II?" "Ever commited genocide?" "Are you a drug smuggler?" "Are you a member of a terrorist organisation?" And I'm not kidding, though I don't remember the exact wording of the questions. Along with it usually comes a friendly warning that if you've ticked "yes" in any of the boxes you may be denied entry and should talk to the immigration officials immediately upon landing.
If I'd ever applied for a job like that, and I ended up with the "dentist chair" reaction to the polygraph, I would've screwed up exactly the same way as him - if I'm trying to stay still and calm my breathing subconsciously slows A LOT, and 20 seconds between each breath would certainly not be unusual (I tend to suddenly notice because I get out of breath)
I'd certainly be unhappy if I thought that was a reason for a rejected clearance - if I'd been prepared in advance I would have concentrated hard on breathing regularly, as I wouldn't see any point in trying to lie or evade questions (if I did go for an interview with the NSA, I'd expect them to figure out any lies by secondary means, and would assume that I should focus on ensuring that no dirty little secrets show up during interviews or other background checks without me having already disclosed it to them directly, so lying would be counterproductive), but I know it would be unlikely to be my natural reaction.
But apart from a few gripes relating to their personell policy, I didn't see any condemnation of the NSA, or of what they do - on the contrary.
For what you know he might have cleared this with the NSA in advance.
What's a more likely reason for the pseudonym is that he made very clear choices as to which information he think is acceptable to post, and that he don't want to enter into any discussion, or don't want people to try to trick him into revealing anything he shouldn't be revealing.
Writing under a pseudonym makes this a one way communication that is very restricted in scope. Apart from which specific tests they are using, the write up reveal very little that could be useful for anyone. And even that information would have little relevance, as someone intending to trick their way into an intelligence agency would presumably expect psychological profiling and be briefed on, or read up on, the most common tactics to handling them.
He also makes some assumptions on the interpretation, but fact is he don't KNOW the profile they are looking for, and hence can't reveal it - he doesn't even reveal his own profile so we don't even have a single data point of someone who was rejected.
He assumes they want someone that don't exhibit significant tendencies in any way on the test, but that's not necessarily correct. They obviously want someone "safe", but without knowing the details of the position it's hard to say anything more. They might be looking for a risk taker, and someone with moral inclinations that wouldn't give them a problem in massively invading peoples privacy (which is certainly a big part of NSA's work, at least outside the US). Hence being "bland" might be just as wrong as being a paranoid schizophrenic.
Frankly, while the paper was a good read, it didn't tell me anything that you couldn't likely find out or guess by looking at publicly available information and some social engineering to find people who might have been through the process and be willing to talk about it. If they felt they had a great need to keep any of this secret they'd been much more careful about it.
What this guys description is indicating is that it's hard unless you know what you go to. If you care enough to read up on the tests used you'd likely significantly improve your chances, whether you're a security risk or not, which might also explain why they are so thorough - better to exclude a huge amount of suitable candidates than accept unsuitable candidates.
The shuttle is simply ridiculously inneficient, and if the US space program keeps relying on it, you WILL be surpassed by the Chinese (and the Russians too, if they had been able to afford it) simply because they'll be able to justify a lot more launches.
And there is a fundamental difference between the ISS and a moon base: A moon base would at least have access to some material "locally", and sale of returned rock and minerals could at least offset some of the costs.
Relatively low population density countries with long distances such as the US make it much tougher to economically justify high speed rail than markets where population density is extremely high and concentrated in a low number of key locations, distances are too short to be efficiently served by planes or short enough that planes don't have a speed advantage, and where space for large airport hubs near the city cores is non-existant, extremely expensive or difficult to justify for other reasons.
It's an appeal that will revisit limited parts of the case, and where the decision can be appealed on matters of law to the supreme court, who, IF it decides to hear the case will have the final say.
Very different from full retrials, and quite limited both in number and scope.
The lack of a decent public defender system in the US makes it more or less essential to spend money on a private defense if at all possible, while you have very good chance of getting a top notch lawyer (from a private law firm) assigned to you as a public defender in Norway and may face much less financial problems as a result.
Combine that with MUCH longer sentences in the US, and things start getting interesting (Norway has a MAXIMUM sentence of 21 years + 10 years of reporting regularly to the police, a sentence that is only rarely handed down, and then usually to multiple murderers, and normally you would be eligible for, and get, parole after serving 2/3rds of the sentence).