What they should have done is built it on a high-end Atom CPU, and then created a hybrid interface that lets users choose between an iPhone-like interface for convenience and a real OS X desktop.
If Apple can create a fat binaries for PPC and x86, why couldn't they have updated the toolchain for the iPhone to let developers do a one click rebuild to support x86 as well?
is why people get so concerned about "wasting money" trying to develop a system that could make a significant amount of nuclear weapons functionally obsolete. Money spent on the missile defense systems is not even remotely analogous to the waste like when some senator tries to create 10k new jobs by ramming 500 new planes down the Air Force's throat or something like that. Most of it is trial and error, basic science and engineering, trying to figure out how to defeat a threat that could, in one blow, murder millions of Americans.
MAD got us to this point, but the knowledge that the US could, in 20 years, not only knock out all of your incoming warheads, but unleash its own reprisal would effectively end the threat of a large scale nuclear conflict between state actors. A successful missile defense system would mean that the enemy would have to use sneakier, harder tricks like slipping nukes into cargo containers. For state actors, that's a non-starter unless they get really lucky or have a death wish like the Iranian ruling class seems to have with their badly veiled threats against at least one nuclear power (Israel).
And if you read the 10th amendment at face value, nowhere is there authorization for quite literally the majority of the federal government. The very existence and authority of most federal agencies relies on the **spirit** of the Constitution's enumerated powers, not the actual hard letter.
Therefore, they should be required to abide by the **spirit** of the 4th amendment.
A thought crime in 1984 was anything that went against the orthodoxy of The Party. What you are calling a "thought crime" is identifying a class of people who want to radically alter, often through violence, the very culture, let alone system of government.
A free society is not a suicide pact, but that's what you make it when you extend freedom of speech to the point where immigrants cannot even be sent home for holding radically hostile views toward their host society.
Some of you merely inferred from my post that I believe that the British government should deport **citizens**, but I never said that. I said it should round up the immigrants. Most of these violent sermons they get in trouble for are straight up sedition, and sedition has never been legal. Even in the United States, it is currently a punishable offense.
Before you make a bigger ass of yourself by saying Sedition==Thought Crime, read what Wikipedia has to say about what sedition actually is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition
Hint: it's not calling out your government, but rather speech aimed at fomenting an insurrection.
Yes...yes! Maybe we could make them wear yellow crescents!
I bet you actually think that that was an intelligent response!
Your entire response below to benjfowler is indicative of how you missed my point which is that ignoring the radicals imperils those who are genuine moderates. They are the ones who get caught in the middle. The British government should infiltrate radical mosques and monitor them. Over time, if the agents feel that the congregation is too radical, identify the non-citizens and mark them for deportation.
That is the only way to draw a line in the sand without harming anyone. The moderates who just want to integrate will end up standing on one side, and the "moderates" who are closet sympathizers will end up on the other. Anyone who gets radicalized by that was not a true moderate to begin with under these circumstances.
These laws make it illegal to have or to share information intended to be useful to terrorists, and ban glorifying terrorism or urging people to commit terrorist acts.
I would hazard to guess based on the media reports that Britain's radical Muslim problem is only topped by the Netherlands (where prominent critics of Islam have been routinely murdered or credibly threatened with murder). There was even a survey done of the British Muslim population that said that about 40% of the young Muslims in the country want to live under Sharia.
The British government is going to have to start rounding up the radical clerics and deporting them. Hell, banish them from the United Kingdom altogether. The problem is, they know they'll inflame a lot of anti-British sentiment if they do that. Then they'll have to either start cracking skulls left and right or start en masse rounding up and deporting the Muslims who go to those mosques, deport them and put a marker on them that permanently marks them as a ne'erdoweller who has no business ever setting foot on British soil again.
The British National Party is getting support now precisely because the common man in Britain can see what the elites can't: you can't have two nations living inside the same country, especially when one nation is composed of hostile immigrants who won't adapt. The British government has two choices: either solve it now by harshly cutting out any part of the Muslim population that looks even remotely likely it sympathizes with Islamists, or face the prospect that in 20 years as demographics shift, a group like the BNP will stage a coup and take matters into its own hands militarily.
The political correctness of the British government is not doing genuine moderate Muslims any good because it's creating an environment where the extremists can thrive under "diversity" and the native population can be slowly radicalized against the entire immigrant population starting from the working class up (IIRC, the British working class were the primary support behind the BNP when it recently won a small, but worrisome amount of the vote for the first time).
Besides, what's the difference between "If you vote for a big expenditure on a local ballot like a new bond, I want the government to personally assess you a new tax" and "If you vote for a big expenditure on a local ballot like a new bond, I want gather up a posse and teach you rough justice"?
What's the difference? I expect the IRS or state revenue agency to send you a tax bill if you pledge to support a bill that meets a voter quorum at referendum, just like a charity's lawyer can send you a bill for donations you formally pledge.
If the body politic imposes a duty on you, you can legitimately complain about the costs. If you raise your hand and say, "I'll support that $50M new budget increase for local schools," guess what buddy? If a majority of voters agree, then you should get a tax bill assessed to you. Why should you be able to thumb through my wallet when decide how much of my money you're going to pledge on something like this?
Or perhaps we can just split the difference by passing a constitutional amendment that requires Congress to not exempt certain classes of citizens from paying taxes. How about a minimum 5% income tax that doesn't get refunded so that no citizen can demand anything of the state without putting some of their own hard-earned money into it?
That one benefit to allowing the government to track how people vote on referenda and then hold them personally accountable would be that people would actually wake the hell out on how much government costs. The first time the working class and lower middle class get pounded back into the stone age financially for voting for expensive new programs would be the last time they'd automatically vote themselves largesse from the treasury!
since this is the country that first made the secret ballot mainstream.
I have a better idea for reforming Western politics: allow anonymous speech, but get rid of anonymous voting, especially on referenda.
If you vote for a big expenditure on a local ballot like a new bond, I want the government to personally assess you a new tax so you can put your money where your mouth is if I decide to vote "no" on it.
The fact of the matter is that secret ballots don't protect people from reprisal where it counts. If an employer wants to fire you for your views, they'll find out soon enough based on conversations at work. Employers scummy enough to scan through public voting records are also going to do the same for Facebook, etc. so there is no point in even wasting one's breath trying to preemptively stop them.
And here is where the news falls down. Who says it was a screw up?
The media explained it in the initial reports. I merely summarized it because it would have taken an additional paragraph or two to fully explain to those too lazy to Google it.
Now then, the media reported that the police knew that drug dealers were shipping marijuana to people's houses where they would discretely pick it up from the address. They actually monitored this particular delivery, and raided the homeowner. A Brewyn Heights cop showed up and mentioned to them after the raid that they just raided the mayor's home and the police were actually quite surprised by that.
The point is that it was a typical "we followed procedures, so sue us, oh wait, you can't because we have qualified immunity" reaction from the police that followed. The media could have made it frontline headlines, whipping up a frothing-at-the-mouth anger at the police in the public over this, which they should have, by sensationlizing the hell out of it.
It has to do with the fact that in most jurisdictions, homeschooled kids being out and about during school is treated as prima facie evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the parents and can subject them to having their kids forced back into public schools or even taken away in some areas.
And the kids are told all about that, which is why they aren't entirely at ease.
I've dealt with several homeschooling peers; when they were adults they were perfectly fine at social interactions.
Raised by two definitely "fundamentalist" (ie religious conservatives) who also happened to be engineers. Actually, rather hardcore engineers based on some of the projects I know they've worked on. At any rate, they homeschooled my wife who graduated with an extremely high GPA in Computer Science, a minor in Math, 3 credits from a minor in Physics and along the way when she took 3 sections of engineering Calculus, she not only got As in each section, but the professor remarked that she was quite possibly the best student he had in at least 10 years.
I know, what a shock that there are "fundamentalists" who don't regard Math as the arcane language in which "that thar Satanic science is writ in."
In the case of Ryan Frederick, when the public caught wind of what went down, the public outrage was so high that the prosecution desperately tried to move the trial to another region of Virginia because the public was so incensed that they seriously feared that they would get a nullification.
The media is brilliant at manufacturing controversy in cases like Natallee Holloway. Now, if only they'd turn that power to good instead of evil, they'd be able to do a two-fer: a public service and bring in the viewers/readers. In any given community, there's always something rotten going on with which they could whip up the public like they do with stories of pretty white girls going missing.
For God's sake, the media in Maryland could have had a field day when the Mayor of Brewyn Heights was thrown to the ground and forced to lay handcuffed, in his boxers, in the blood of his two dead dogs by Prince George County police after they raided his house over a monumentally stupid, obvious drug bust screw up. If that can happen to a mayor, that can happen to any white or asian middle class family.
-Google and T-Mobile now have to sell an expensive, otherwise new, phone as a refurbished phone. -T-Mobile can't justify shafting its employee's commission because you broke the contract. -Call it a $200 fee for the phone or a $200 fee for breaking the contract, it's still $200 for walking away one way or another. -You signed the damn thing without finding what remedies the other parties had against you? Oh wait, this is how we got into the whole mortgage fiasco!
This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report? Case in point, what happened to Ryan Frederick. Absolutely questionable and "juicy" from the beginning. At the very least, the papers should have made a scandal about why the police would be so moronic as to raid a small-time pot user 3 nights after a man with a vendetta against him burgled his home. If that isn't a public interest scandal right up there with "sex offenders are in your neighborhood," then I don't know what is because when the news poured out about what really went down, it made a lot of his community deeply uncomfortable about what the police would do to "protect them" (BTW, it gets worse, like the police using men who are active burglars to get them evidence).
Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine that caters more toward the assumption that the only thing people want to read about is celebrity news and what pretty white girl got killed after hooking up with 3 strange men in a foreign country.
Set aside the industrial espionage charges. Who benefits from the hacking of the activists' and journalists' accounts? The PRC and its enemies. The usual suspects like the Russian mob, Nigerians, etc. have little, if anything, to gain from this and certainly not enough to offset the harm that could happen if a company with Google's expertise brought scrutiny to them.
1) A legal environment which bitch slaps parents who bring frivolous lawsuits.
2) A competitive market for services.
3) Less politicization.
For God's sake, schools are considering getting rid of science classes because they "need more money for struggling minorities." That is how severe the need for privatizing and depoliticizing the process is. The politically correct would rather pull everyone down so that no one is left behind (because we're all not moving forward) than see a less equal, but more competitive (and eventually cheaper) marketplace for educational services.
A country that can build weapons and assault vehicles on par with ours has the engineering talent to write its own software that can complement those systems. To a large extent, the real problem is not the threat of them learning how to make their own real-time OS or modify Linux to (probably badly) guide a cruise missile or ICBM, but them learning the proprietary secrets that lead to the manufacturing knowledge of building the actual hardware (which is where the real threat exists).
The US doesn't want to face up to the fact that the only way to keep very serious, proprietary technology out of the hands of hostile states is to severely punish those in the US who facilitate the transfer. So instead, it adopts security theater here much like it pretends that it is fighting child exploitation by posting cops all over chat rooms to entrap people who have a passive interest in jailbait at best instead of actually hunting for real, serious child molesters. This allows the national security hawks to believe that we're "being tough," when in fact if we were tough, we wouldn't give a shit about SF.net, but would instead be executing men like this (just read it before attacking me, it was the first Google search result) without a second thought.
This won't do **anything** except deter some students in these countries who don't know how to find a foreign proxy. It certainly won't stop foreign intelligence officers who try to get actual weapon systems and other serious munitions.
that don't see deep cultural penetration of their products as an unqualified good. They could take a cue from Microsoft and learn that even piracy brings value by making your product be what's on people's minds in a desirable way. Yes, Microsoft may lose business, but they maintain marketshare. Likewise, a label whose songs are remixed in fan videos or used as background music in a YouTube video is keeping its product out there at no cost to itself, which at least keeps it in the minds of more music buyers.
I don't like it as much as the next guy, but there are limits on the use of National Security Letters and the FBI doesn't pay attention to them. The Inspector General has cried foul on numerous occasions about this, but Congress is too busy debating "more important things" like redistributions of wealth of to the health insurance industry to care.
The US has significantly more large, densely populated cities than Canada, and AT&T also has to hook up a lot of small towns. There are over 270 cities in the US that have at least 100k people living in them, and AT&T doesn't stop there with trying to provide full 3G service; I routinely get it in places like Harrisonburg and Warrenton in Virginia where the population is about 50k.
From late 2007 on, the federal government has been "quietly" laying off contractors left and right. It just so happens that most federal engineers are contractors...
Bitch all you want about the state of things, but the fact is that it's cheaper for the federal government to outsource this work. Contractors can be fired without mercy and don't require a pension (more pay up front in exchange for no pension is a deal for the tax payers, especially as life spans climb.)
Slashdot Mirror
What they should have done is built it on a high-end Atom CPU, and then created a hybrid interface that lets users choose between an iPhone-like interface for convenience and a real OS X desktop.
If Apple can create a fat binaries for PPC and x86, why couldn't they have updated the toolchain for the iPhone to let developers do a one click rebuild to support x86 as well?
is why people get so concerned about "wasting money" trying to develop a system that could make a significant amount of nuclear weapons functionally obsolete. Money spent on the missile defense systems is not even remotely analogous to the waste like when some senator tries to create 10k new jobs by ramming 500 new planes down the Air Force's throat or something like that. Most of it is trial and error, basic science and engineering, trying to figure out how to defeat a threat that could, in one blow, murder millions of Americans.
MAD got us to this point, but the knowledge that the US could, in 20 years, not only knock out all of your incoming warheads, but unleash its own reprisal would effectively end the threat of a large scale nuclear conflict between state actors. A successful missile defense system would mean that the enemy would have to use sneakier, harder tricks like slipping nukes into cargo containers. For state actors, that's a non-starter unless they get really lucky or have a death wish like the Iranian ruling class seems to have with their badly veiled threats against at least one nuclear power (Israel).
And if you read the 10th amendment at face value, nowhere is there authorization for quite literally the majority of the federal government. The very existence and authority of most federal agencies relies on the **spirit** of the Constitution's enumerated powers, not the actual hard letter.
Therefore, they should be required to abide by the **spirit** of the 4th amendment.
A thought crime in 1984 was anything that went against the orthodoxy of The Party. What you are calling a "thought crime" is identifying a class of people who want to radically alter, often through violence, the very culture, let alone system of government.
A free society is not a suicide pact, but that's what you make it when you extend freedom of speech to the point where immigrants cannot even be sent home for holding radically hostile views toward their host society.
Some of you merely inferred from my post that I believe that the British government should deport **citizens**, but I never said that. I said it should round up the immigrants. Most of these violent sermons they get in trouble for are straight up sedition, and sedition has never been legal. Even in the United States, it is currently a punishable offense.
Before you make a bigger ass of yourself by saying Sedition==Thought Crime, read what Wikipedia has to say about what sedition actually is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition
Hint: it's not calling out your government, but rather speech aimed at fomenting an insurrection.
I bet you actually think that that was an intelligent response!
Your entire response below to benjfowler is indicative of how you missed my point which is that ignoring the radicals imperils those who are genuine moderates. They are the ones who get caught in the middle. The British government should infiltrate radical mosques and monitor them. Over time, if the agents feel that the congregation is too radical, identify the non-citizens and mark them for deportation.
That is the only way to draw a line in the sand without harming anyone. The moderates who just want to integrate will end up standing on one side, and the "moderates" who are closet sympathizers will end up on the other. Anyone who gets radicalized by that was not a true moderate to begin with under these circumstances.
I would hazard to guess based on the media reports that Britain's radical Muslim problem is only topped by the Netherlands (where prominent critics of Islam have been routinely murdered or credibly threatened with murder). There was even a survey done of the British Muslim population that said that about 40% of the young Muslims in the country want to live under Sharia.
The British government is going to have to start rounding up the radical clerics and deporting them. Hell, banish them from the United Kingdom altogether. The problem is, they know they'll inflame a lot of anti-British sentiment if they do that. Then they'll have to either start cracking skulls left and right or start en masse rounding up and deporting the Muslims who go to those mosques, deport them and put a marker on them that permanently marks them as a ne'erdoweller who has no business ever setting foot on British soil again.
The British National Party is getting support now precisely because the common man in Britain can see what the elites can't: you can't have two nations living inside the same country, especially when one nation is composed of hostile immigrants who won't adapt. The British government has two choices: either solve it now by harshly cutting out any part of the Muslim population that looks even remotely likely it sympathizes with Islamists, or face the prospect that in 20 years as demographics shift, a group like the BNP will stage a coup and take matters into its own hands militarily.
The political correctness of the British government is not doing genuine moderate Muslims any good because it's creating an environment where the extremists can thrive under "diversity" and the native population can be slowly radicalized against the entire immigrant population starting from the working class up (IIRC, the British working class were the primary support behind the BNP when it recently won a small, but worrisome amount of the vote for the first time).
What's the difference? I expect the IRS or state revenue agency to send you a tax bill if you pledge to support a bill that meets a voter quorum at referendum, just like a charity's lawyer can send you a bill for donations you formally pledge.
If the body politic imposes a duty on you, you can legitimately complain about the costs. If you raise your hand and say, "I'll support that $50M new budget increase for local schools," guess what buddy? If a majority of voters agree, then you should get a tax bill assessed to you. Why should you be able to thumb through my wallet when decide how much of my money you're going to pledge on something like this?
Or perhaps we can just split the difference by passing a constitutional amendment that requires Congress to not exempt certain classes of citizens from paying taxes. How about a minimum 5% income tax that doesn't get refunded so that no citizen can demand anything of the state without putting some of their own hard-earned money into it?
That one benefit to allowing the government to track how people vote on referenda and then hold them personally accountable would be that people would actually wake the hell out on how much government costs. The first time the working class and lower middle class get pounded back into the stone age financially for voting for expensive new programs would be the last time they'd automatically vote themselves largesse from the treasury!
since this is the country that first made the secret ballot mainstream.
I have a better idea for reforming Western politics: allow anonymous speech, but get rid of anonymous voting, especially on referenda.
If you vote for a big expenditure on a local ballot like a new bond, I want the government to personally assess you a new tax so you can put your money where your mouth is if I decide to vote "no" on it.
The fact of the matter is that secret ballots don't protect people from reprisal where it counts. If an employer wants to fire you for your views, they'll find out soon enough based on conversations at work. Employers scummy enough to scan through public voting records are also going to do the same for Facebook, etc. so there is no point in even wasting one's breath trying to preemptively stop them.
The media explained it in the initial reports. I merely summarized it because it would have taken an additional paragraph or two to fully explain to those too lazy to Google it.
Now then, the media reported that the police knew that drug dealers were shipping marijuana to people's houses where they would discretely pick it up from the address. They actually monitored this particular delivery, and raided the homeowner. A Brewyn Heights cop showed up and mentioned to them after the raid that they just raided the mayor's home and the police were actually quite surprised by that.
The point is that it was a typical "we followed procedures, so sue us, oh wait, you can't because we have qualified immunity" reaction from the police that followed. The media could have made it frontline headlines, whipping up a frothing-at-the-mouth anger at the police in the public over this, which they should have, by sensationlizing the hell out of it.
It has to do with the fact that in most jurisdictions, homeschooled kids being out and about during school is treated as prima facie evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the parents and can subject them to having their kids forced back into public schools or even taken away in some areas.
And the kids are told all about that, which is why they aren't entirely at ease.
I've dealt with several homeschooling peers; when they were adults they were perfectly fine at social interactions.
Raised by two definitely "fundamentalist" (ie religious conservatives) who also happened to be engineers. Actually, rather hardcore engineers based on some of the projects I know they've worked on. At any rate, they homeschooled my wife who graduated with an extremely high GPA in Computer Science, a minor in Math, 3 credits from a minor in Physics and along the way when she took 3 sections of engineering Calculus, she not only got As in each section, but the professor remarked that she was quite possibly the best student he had in at least 10 years.
I know, what a shock that there are "fundamentalists" who don't regard Math as the arcane language in which "that thar Satanic science is writ in."
In the case of Ryan Frederick, when the public caught wind of what went down, the public outrage was so high that the prosecution desperately tried to move the trial to another region of Virginia because the public was so incensed that they seriously feared that they would get a nullification.
The media is brilliant at manufacturing controversy in cases like Natallee Holloway. Now, if only they'd turn that power to good instead of evil, they'd be able to do a two-fer: a public service and bring in the viewers/readers. In any given community, there's always something rotten going on with which they could whip up the public like they do with stories of pretty white girls going missing.
For God's sake, the media in Maryland could have had a field day when the Mayor of Brewyn Heights was thrown to the ground and forced to lay handcuffed, in his boxers, in the blood of his two dead dogs by Prince George County police after they raided his house over a monumentally stupid, obvious drug bust screw up. If that can happen to a mayor, that can happen to any white or asian middle class family.
-Google and T-Mobile now have to sell an expensive, otherwise new, phone as a refurbished phone.
-T-Mobile can't justify shafting its employee's commission because you broke the contract.
-Call it a $200 fee for the phone or a $200 fee for breaking the contract, it's still $200 for walking away one way or another.
-You signed the damn thing without finding what remedies the other parties had against you? Oh wait, this is how we got into the whole mortgage fiasco!
This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report? Case in point, what happened to Ryan Frederick. Absolutely questionable and "juicy" from the beginning. At the very least, the papers should have made a scandal about why the police would be so moronic as to raid a small-time pot user 3 nights after a man with a vendetta against him burgled his home. If that isn't a public interest scandal right up there with "sex offenders are in your neighborhood," then I don't know what is because when the news poured out about what really went down, it made a lot of his community deeply uncomfortable about what the police would do to "protect them" (BTW, it gets worse, like the police using men who are active burglars to get them evidence).
Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine that caters more toward the assumption that the only thing people want to read about is celebrity news and what pretty white girl got killed after hooking up with 3 strange men in a foreign country.
Set aside the industrial espionage charges. Who benefits from the hacking of the activists' and journalists' accounts? The PRC and its enemies. The usual suspects like the Russian mob, Nigerians, etc. have little, if anything, to gain from this and certainly not enough to offset the harm that could happen if a company with Google's expertise brought scrutiny to them.
What they need are the following things:
1) A legal environment which bitch slaps parents who bring frivolous lawsuits.
2) A competitive market for services.
3) Less politicization.
For God's sake, schools are considering getting rid of science classes because they "need more money for struggling minorities." That is how severe the need for privatizing and depoliticizing the process is. The politically correct would rather pull everyone down so that no one is left behind (because we're all not moving forward) than see a less equal, but more competitive (and eventually cheaper) marketplace for educational services.
A country that can build weapons and assault vehicles on par with ours has the engineering talent to write its own software that can complement those systems. To a large extent, the real problem is not the threat of them learning how to make their own real-time OS or modify Linux to (probably badly) guide a cruise missile or ICBM, but them learning the proprietary secrets that lead to the manufacturing knowledge of building the actual hardware (which is where the real threat exists).
Since the PRC accounts for about 25% of the human race, while the US accounts for about 5%!
Let the Chinese steal from us and then start innovating on their own. We'll then just start stealing from each other.
The US doesn't want to face up to the fact that the only way to keep very serious, proprietary technology out of the hands of hostile states is to severely punish those in the US who facilitate the transfer. So instead, it adopts security theater here much like it pretends that it is fighting child exploitation by posting cops all over chat rooms to entrap people who have a passive interest in jailbait at best instead of actually hunting for real, serious child molesters. This allows the national security hawks to believe that we're "being tough," when in fact if we were tough, we wouldn't give a shit about SF.net, but would instead be executing men like this (just read it before attacking me, it was the first Google search result) without a second thought.
This won't do **anything** except deter some students in these countries who don't know how to find a foreign proxy. It certainly won't stop foreign intelligence officers who try to get actual weapon systems and other serious munitions.
that don't see deep cultural penetration of their products as an unqualified good. They could take a cue from Microsoft and learn that even piracy brings value by making your product be what's on people's minds in a desirable way. Yes, Microsoft may lose business, but they maintain marketshare. Likewise, a label whose songs are remixed in fan videos or used as background music in a YouTube video is keeping its product out there at no cost to itself, which at least keeps it in the minds of more music buyers.
I don't like it as much as the next guy, but there are limits on the use of National Security Letters and the FBI doesn't pay attention to them. The Inspector General has cried foul on numerous occasions about this, but Congress is too busy debating "more important things" like redistributions of wealth of to the health insurance industry to care.
The US has significantly more large, densely populated cities than Canada, and AT&T also has to hook up a lot of small towns. There are over 270 cities in the US that have at least 100k people living in them, and AT&T doesn't stop there with trying to provide full 3G service; I routinely get it in places like Harrisonburg and Warrenton in Virginia where the population is about 50k.
From late 2007 on, the federal government has been "quietly" laying off contractors left and right. It just so happens that most federal engineers are contractors...
Bitch all you want about the state of things, but the fact is that it's cheaper for the federal government to outsource this work. Contractors can be fired without mercy and don't require a pension (more pay up front in exchange for no pension is a deal for the tax payers, especially as life spans climb.)
I didn't see anything in there that was actually a cause-effect relationship between the "RPG elements" and taking away from the games.
Personally, I love the blending of genres. Now we get games like Mass Effect which combine action similar to Gears of War with a real RPG feel.