Yes, we hate fucking Microsoft, it has been like that for a while. We cheer when something shit happens to them. If you are really having problems with this then go somewhere else.
Unfortunately for all its problems/. is still one of the more intelligent places on the web. You wouldn't think so, but go to yahoo answers or something, and we'll see you, sobbing, later that day.
I don't mind people being generally negative about MS. I can understand it. I don't have firm loyalties one way or another - maybe I should.
But I will say this: cheering on something evil in every victory against your favourite bugbear is stupid, short sighted, and self-defeating. That kind of nonsense shouldn't be welcome here, because it lowers the intellectual standard. We should always look to the good.
This is what they get for suing TomTom. What goes around.
This is slashdot, so an article in which someone does something generally accepted as bad but does it to Microsoft - and to their DRM, no less! - causes some kind of minor implosion.
Argghh.... Don't.... know... how... to feel...
It doesn't matter two shits what this means to Microsoft, and it doesn't matter two shits what this means to DRM. This is definitely not a situation in which two wrongs somehow magic up a right.
This is just another story about why patents are damaging innovation in the USA, and on a global scale. But don't think that innovation enjoys being held back like this. If this situation is not fixed, we'll suffer - at most - a few more years of this BS, before the rest of the world moves on without the US.
Don't think it can't happen. If anything the current financial situation makes it more likely. Who's got the time or money to sit around being scared of the US Patent Office?
Face Observation Opera Language == FOOL. quite obvious but a pitty, i'd like this feature !
I wouldn't have a problem with these April Fool's jokes if they were actually funny/unpredictable. But they keep dragging out the same tired old shit... it's like a Nintendo conference.
Which is why "chilling effects" are a favorite technique...
That's fucking brilliant. Anyone who thinks word play is not one of the higher forms of a self-referential intelligence, compare this to anything you've ever said, and then kill yourselves.
'Don't violate copyright law' has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: 'You are not about to get screwed.'
But then how will they screw us?
Frankly, this sounds like it could be bad for the industry.
If you have one or two that cover the vast majority of isolates, I wouldn't be ashamed to call that a universal vaccine.
I wouldn't be ashamed to take this large wodge of money and get my name in all the papers, but I reserve the right to be contrite, abashed, and sheepish. Sheepish, especially. That costs extra. First, you have to pay for the sheep - but then the shame takes care of itself!
However, some experts question whether a universal vaccine of this kind is even possible, since the human body has been unable to come up with an antibody solution.
No offence, I love the human body and all, but there are LOTS of things it has 'been unable to come up with', including the much needed ability to render stupid people unconscious by concentrating hard.
Being part of a system of evolution is not a panacea for disease; quite the opposite. Almost every positive thing you can say about our resistance to disease comes directly or indirectly off the back of people who didn't have a particular type of resistance 'taking one for the team', so to speak. There's nothing wrong with hunting for cures that DON'T involve the mass extinctions of the genetically unfortunate. There'll be plenty of time for it to all work itself out.
Yeah, those islands. That's where Great Britain used to be. A shame, really.
FYI, 'Great Britain' is just the name for the big island, the one with England, Scotland, and Wales. It's 'Great' as in 'big' not 'awesome' as you can, by now, probably tell.
The 'United Kingdon' includes GB, Northern Ireland, and a large number of itty bitty bitesize islands.
Putting aside Microsoft's own tainted reputation in the field of openness, is Ballmer right?
Two points.
Firstly, this is Slashdot. The chances of anyone putting aside Microsoft's past behaviour in a discussion of that same kind of behaviour, approaches zero. When that discussion was started by Microsoft, it is zero.
Secondly, even TFA spends more time slagging Microsoft for past behaviour than it does discussing what Ballmer has said. The disingenous suggestion that we're then going to discuss the statement from Ballmer on its own merits, isn't even a facade, it's a joke.
This isn't news, but it isn't even slashdot's usual one sided attack. This is a one sided attack pretending to be a serious discussion, and it's pretending so badly that it's frankly embarassing.
This is a gross publicity stunt from Newell, not a recalcitration of industry pricing tactics.
I remember being SHOCKED at the prices of games on Steam. They sold, and still sell, at the exact same price as games at MSRP, which as we all know is more than most stores, let alone online retailers. Yet, apart from the expense of running steam's servers/bandwidth, it looks very much like Gabe Newell just eats up what would have been the costs of distribution, media and the retailers approx 30% cut on top!
Why is this not coming back to us, at least in part? When we were told that one of the advantages of online distribution was a reduction in costs, were we expected to celebrate a rise in profits for industry players? I think we all rather expected online distribution to make games cheaper! Hell, Bioshock RAISED the price of games when it was released on Steam.
When you combine this with the fact that Steam has cut users off from their games who have LEGALLY saved on the price by buying from a different country, and you've got one of the biggest contributors to the high cost of games preaching about how games should be cheaper. To quote the movie Airplane: What an asshole!
What you are missing is that for the most part, all of the innovations you've touted so far in all these comments are about as useful as the fabled flying car and haven't been introduced in games for the same reason we don't have flying cars. I.E. They are pointless and inefficient.
Fine - you've got me there. I will try to have fun more efficiently from now on.
Well that's a bold claim. Thank you for explaining to me what I think. Shame you still completely don't get it.
you are so focused on coding in features that actually wouldn't mean shit to the game and waste precious CPU and developer time,
You must be a dev with that attitude.
Why on earth would I give a shit about development complexity or CPU cycles? I'm after an immersive, surprising, original experience. I don't expect that to be easy for a developer, and I don't expect it not to tax my CPU. Furthermore, I don't CARE if it's hard for a dev. It's their job, and they should do it well. You start caring about how tough devs have it, and the next thing you know you're accepting mediocre games, because good enough is good enough, and Johnny did an honesy days work for his pay. Fuck that - I want to be impressed!
I don't want an on rails shooter. For me, one of the many things that indicates progress is the level of immersion. I don't need an alien sitting on a toilet, or a shrink ray, to make me happy. I need something that surprises me like those things first did, when they were new.
Yes, I'm using examples of things that were - in the past - awesome advancements in immersivity in old games.
The reason I haven't specified what EXACT NEW THINGS I'm looking for should be obvious; it's not my job to think of new things, and frankly if I did they wouldn't be a surprise any more.
I've noticed that console games in general seem to be held to very different standards from PC games. I only rarely play a supposedly-great console game that would qualify as anything other than mediocre in the PC world.
The ones that are exceptional are the ones that have given us something new. Shadow of the Colossus - wow.
So, boiled down to it's essentials, your beef is that despite all the actual advances, evolvements, and improvements games have made in the past 13 years, you can't be truly innovative unless you cut and paste from a schlocky game that's almost a decade an a half old?
You have missed the point so completely that it must either be deliberate, or you're one of the developers of a current gen FPS.
I don't want the same again, same again, same again. That should be obvious. I don't even want the same, but better! I want NEW. I want FUN. I want the answer to the question 'Can I play with that thing?' to be 'Yes, and HOW!', not "No, it's scenery. No, it's detritus. No, it would have been hard to program'.
I want to be AMAZED by something other than graphics. I want to be amazed by the implications of a gameplay action, again. I want to be amazed by the details - not just the details of the pixels, but the details of how one action affects another. I want a game to do something I haven't seen before, and better still, didn't even think a game could do.
I understand your rant and share your opinion on many games lately but I don't think it applies to this one..
I disagree. I think my rant - and it is a rant, I recognise that - applies to the BETTER games more than it applies to the worse ones. At least the bad games are just bad, and there was never much to hope for them. No, my rant applies directly to F.E.A.R 2 and Killzone 2, and games of that quality and ilk, because these games are best-in-show examples of what we've come to expect from an FPS. They're expertly polished, and almost flawlessly presented.
And somehow that's supposed to be enough for anyone. But progress is about continuing to improve on ideas, not just on principles.
Do you have any IDEA how amazing it was to have a pool table where you could kick the balls around, in 1996? If we'd kept up with that level of innovation, I don't even know where we'd be today. Fully destructable environments, and phonecalls where you could have a realistic conversation with the AI via your headset, I would imagine.
It's almost exactly what you'd expect out of a triple-A first-person shooter -- no more, no less.
File under mediocre. I love my consoles, and I love the vast audience that have been introduced to gaming through their living room charms. But I've hated, hated, hated the way that, somehow, games like Halo have come to be seen as groundbreaking.
People - we have been here before. We have done it before. I do not wish to do it again, only this time prettier. That is not a game. That is a tech demo.
I am quite simply astounded that MOST games have not yet equalled the functionality or interactivity of Duke Nukem 3D, let alone surpassed it. The game is THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. It has been out for a number of years approaching half of my life, and we still don't see our reflections in the mirror in most games. And we still don't get blood dribbling down walls in most games. And we still don't get bloody, or slimy footprints, or shrink rays, or jet packs, or aliens sitting on fucking toilets.
It's been thirteen years and every time a new game does ONE of these things it's hailed as a goddamn miracle.
I know that, with the switch to true 3D, a lot of these things got harder to do. But it has been THIRTEEN YEARS. We've come far enough to tackle some of them.
Hard go for certain conjoined twins under your definition. Just because one is dependent on the
other doesn't mean they belong to the other.
I think you miss the point. I didn't define anything, I simply refuted a faulty definition. That places no onus on me to suggest an alternative definition.
The issue of abortion relies on the concept of identity. Both mine and and your examples show that there is a lot of grey area in identity.
It is precisely because there is no clear answer that I think we need to be open-minded on this issue.
OK, Republicans are against abortion, and for the most part, always will be. You see, we see it as killing babies. You may not think it's a baby, but a simple DNA test will prove that it really is a separate human than either the mother or the father.
Bad luck for identical twins, then - they're really only one person by that logic. Does that mean that it's okay to kill one of them? It's only murder if you shoot the second, too?
Before a certain age a fetus can't survive without the mother any more than my finger could survive by itself, if I cut it off.
You can't separate the fetus and mother, and you can't use DNA as a proof of individual identity. That kind of runs you out of options for 'proving' that a fetus counts as a person.
Apple is a hardware company.
Keep repeating until you figure out why they will not sell you OS/X for your white box PC.
I'm sorry, but that's bs. They're not JUST a hardware company. Hell, it's deabtable if they're even *primarily* a hardware company.
See, they also sell software.
You can buy it without buying hardware.
Some of it you can download for free.
Some of it is even cross platform.
As a matter of fact, there are very few items of Apple hardware that you can buy without Apple software. A few peripherals, and that's about it.
Every ipod comes with Apple software built in, and is useless without iTunes - yet more apple software. You can buy new apps for the ipod touch, and download new software updates. Not FIRMware, you understand. SOFTware. You might have gone through three or four differently aquired pieces of Apple software before you've finished synching your ipod touch with your 'White box' PC
- The more recent games have been released with more bugs than the earlier games
- Even though they started with more bugs, the more recent games have received fewer patches, fixing fewer bugs and often the patches added more bugs than they fixed
Battlefield 2142 was the worst offender, and the strongest indication that EA loves money and hates customers.
This was a game released hot on the heels of a broken Battlefield 2. Instead of attempting to resolve the issues with Battlefield 2, they shipped a brand new game, using the same engine, with all of the same issues.
ObCarAnalogy: That's like if Ford made a car with faulty brakes, but instead of issuing a recall, they made another car... with faulty brakes. And then sold it to the people that had written off their cars due to some mysterious and untraceable brake issue.
Put like that, it's not just Ford that are at fault. Stop buying the damn cars, idiots!
It could also be used to search for "suspicious behaviour" by searching Government databases, Credit card companies' databases, credit bureau databases, Choicepoint's, telecommunication companies' databases, airlines, and any other firm that the Government bullies into giving access.
Well, that's not as paranoid as you might think. The case against is quite simply the publicity that's been given to this behemoth of a machine, so I really don't think it's too likely in this particular case.
However this is EXACTLY how you go about putting together a machine for intelligence purposes. The key to running an intelligence service is deniability at as many levels as possible, and keeping anyone from seeing the big picture.
So you comission some huge piece of hardware, with a benign-but-complex sounding (usually simulation) function.
Then you get the low leve software put together for the platform. If that can be done in modular fashion, so much the better. You don't mix the platform with the real world data during design.
At the final stages, and presumably in house, you can write your overlaying interface (which intelligence employees will use), and only then is the pure function of the suite necessarily made apparent.
Of course there are lots of people in the design process that have a notion of how things are being put together, what they will interface with, etc, who can take a stab at the function. And sure, everyone signs an NDA just because. However, since nobody sees all of it, and the big picture is never confirmed outside of a very small number of people, and nobody is going to break an NDA to talk about part of something that MAY have some function... you essentially reduce the risk of leaking your cababilities, system spec, and intention by a not insignificant amount.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you'll confuse and worry them. Do what you like and try to get paid for it.
Do it, do it, do it, until you hate it.
That'll take about six months. Enjoy the other 44.5 years before retirement.
They have every reason to be worried: life sucks, and they're just about to find out how badly.
Yes, we hate fucking Microsoft, it has been like that for a while. We cheer when something shit happens to them. If you are really having problems with this then go somewhere else.
Unfortunately for all its problems /. is still one of the more intelligent places on the web. You wouldn't think so, but go to yahoo answers or something, and we'll see you, sobbing, later that day.
I don't mind people being generally negative about MS. I can understand it. I don't have firm loyalties one way or another - maybe I should.
But I will say this: cheering on something evil in every victory against your favourite bugbear is stupid, short sighted, and self-defeating. That kind of nonsense shouldn't be welcome here, because it lowers the intellectual standard. We should always look to the good.
This is what they get for suing TomTom. What goes around.
This is slashdot, so an article in which someone does something generally accepted as bad but does it to Microsoft - and to their DRM, no less! - causes some kind of minor implosion.
Argghh.... Don't.... know... how ... to feel...
It doesn't matter two shits what this means to Microsoft, and it doesn't matter two shits what this means to DRM. This is definitely not a situation in which two wrongs somehow magic up a right.
This is just another story about why patents are damaging innovation in the USA, and on a global scale. But don't think that innovation enjoys being held back like this. If this situation is not fixed, we'll suffer - at most - a few more years of this BS, before the rest of the world moves on without the US.
Don't think it can't happen. If anything the current financial situation makes it more likely. Who's got the time or money to sit around being scared of the US Patent Office?
Face Observation Opera Language == FOOL. quite obvious but a pitty, i'd like this feature !
I wouldn't have a problem with these April Fool's jokes if they were actually funny/unpredictable. But they keep dragging out the same tired old shit... it's like a Nintendo conference.
The problem is that, despite what people like to think, experimentation and innovation don't often make for very good games.
Luckily, treading the same tired old shit over and over again is a winning formula.
Which is why "chilling effects" are a favorite technique...
That's fucking brilliant. Anyone who thinks word play is not one of the higher forms of a self-referential intelligence, compare this to anything you've ever said, and then kill yourselves.
What's next, 'Lonely Midwest teenager would like to be next winner of American Idol'?
'Don't violate copyright law' has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: 'You are not about to get screwed.'
But then how will they screw us?
Frankly, this sounds like it could be bad for the industry.
Great to see that common sense has at last prevailed.
Because ONE man in power is not a complete asshole? What if he gets hit by a bus?
If you have one or two that cover the vast majority of isolates, I wouldn't be ashamed to call that a universal vaccine.
I wouldn't be ashamed to take this large wodge of money and get my name in all the papers, but I reserve the right to be contrite, abashed, and sheepish. Sheepish, especially. That costs extra. First, you have to pay for the sheep - but then the shame takes care of itself!
However, some experts question whether a universal vaccine of this kind is even possible, since the human body has been unable to come up with an antibody solution.
No offence, I love the human body and all, but there are LOTS of things it has 'been unable to come up with', including the much needed ability to render stupid people unconscious by concentrating hard.
Being part of a system of evolution is not a panacea for disease; quite the opposite. Almost every positive thing you can say about our resistance to disease comes directly or indirectly off the back of people who didn't have a particular type of resistance 'taking one for the team', so to speak. There's nothing wrong with hunting for cures that DON'T involve the mass extinctions of the genetically unfortunate. There'll be plenty of time for it to all work itself out.
Yeah, those islands. That's where Great Britain used to be. A shame, really.
FYI, 'Great Britain' is just the name for the big island, the one with England, Scotland, and Wales. It's 'Great' as in 'big' not 'awesome' as you can, by now, probably tell.
The 'United Kingdon' includes GB, Northern Ireland, and a large number of itty bitty bitesize islands.
Putting aside Microsoft's own tainted reputation in the field of openness, is Ballmer right?
Two points.
Firstly, this is Slashdot. The chances of anyone putting aside Microsoft's past behaviour in a discussion of that same kind of behaviour, approaches zero. When that discussion was started by Microsoft, it is zero.
Secondly, even TFA spends more time slagging Microsoft for past behaviour than it does discussing what Ballmer has said. The disingenous suggestion that we're then going to discuss the statement from Ballmer on its own merits, isn't even a facade, it's a joke.
This isn't news, but it isn't even slashdot's usual one sided attack. This is a one sided attack pretending to be a serious discussion, and it's pretending so badly that it's frankly embarassing.
I remember being SHOCKED at the prices of games on Steam. They sold, and still sell, at the exact same price as games at MSRP, which as we all know is more than most stores, let alone online retailers. Yet, apart from the expense of running steam's servers/bandwidth, it looks very much like Gabe Newell just eats up what would have been the costs of distribution, media and the retailers approx 30% cut on top!
Why is this not coming back to us, at least in part? When we were told that one of the advantages of online distribution was a reduction in costs, were we expected to celebrate a rise in profits for industry players? I think we all rather expected online distribution to make games cheaper! Hell, Bioshock RAISED the price of games when it was released on Steam.
When you combine this with the fact that Steam has cut users off from their games who have LEGALLY saved on the price by buying from a different country, and you've got one of the biggest contributors to the high cost of games preaching about how games should be cheaper. To quote the movie Airplane: What an asshole!
What you are missing is that for the most part, all of the innovations you've touted so far in all these comments are about as useful as the fabled flying car and haven't been introduced in games for the same reason we don't have flying cars. I.E. They are pointless and inefficient.
Fine - you've got me there. I will try to have fun more efficiently from now on.
Nope, I've pretty much pegged you exact.
Well that's a bold claim. Thank you for explaining to me what I think. Shame you still completely don't get it.
you are so focused on coding in features that actually wouldn't mean shit to the game and waste precious CPU and developer time,
You must be a dev with that attitude.
Why on earth would I give a shit about development complexity or CPU cycles? I'm after an immersive, surprising, original experience. I don't expect that to be easy for a developer, and I don't expect it not to tax my CPU. Furthermore, I don't CARE if it's hard for a dev. It's their job, and they should do it well. You start caring about how tough devs have it, and the next thing you know you're accepting mediocre games, because good enough is good enough, and Johnny did an honesy days work for his pay. Fuck that - I want to be impressed!
I don't want an on rails shooter. For me, one of the many things that indicates progress is the level of immersion. I don't need an alien sitting on a toilet, or a shrink ray, to make me happy. I need something that surprises me like those things first did, when they were new.
Yes, I'm using examples of things that were - in the past - awesome advancements in immersivity in old games.
The reason I haven't specified what EXACT NEW THINGS I'm looking for should be obvious; it's not my job to think of new things, and frankly if I did they wouldn't be a surprise any more.
I've noticed that console games in general seem to be held to very different standards from PC games. I only rarely play a supposedly-great console game that would qualify as anything other than mediocre in the PC world.
The ones that are exceptional are the ones that have given us something new. Shadow of the Colossus - wow.
So, boiled down to it's essentials, your beef is that despite all the actual advances, evolvements, and improvements games have made in the past 13 years, you can't be truly innovative unless you cut and paste from a schlocky game that's almost a decade an a half old?
You have missed the point so completely that it must either be deliberate, or you're one of the developers of a current gen FPS.
I don't want the same again, same again, same again. That should be obvious. I don't even want the same, but better! I want NEW. I want FUN. I want the answer to the question 'Can I play with that thing?' to be 'Yes, and HOW!', not "No, it's scenery. No, it's detritus. No, it would have been hard to program'.
I want to be AMAZED by something other than graphics. I want to be amazed by the implications of a gameplay action, again. I want to be amazed by the details - not just the details of the pixels, but the details of how one action affects another. I want a game to do something I haven't seen before, and better still, didn't even think a game could do.
I understand your rant and share your opinion on many games lately but I don't think it applies to this one..
I disagree. I think my rant - and it is a rant, I recognise that - applies to the BETTER games more than it applies to the worse ones. At least the bad games are just bad, and there was never much to hope for them. No, my rant applies directly to F.E.A.R 2 and Killzone 2, and games of that quality and ilk, because these games are best-in-show examples of what we've come to expect from an FPS. They're expertly polished, and almost flawlessly presented.
And somehow that's supposed to be enough for anyone. But progress is about continuing to improve on ideas, not just on principles.
Do you have any IDEA how amazing it was to have a pool table where you could kick the balls around, in 1996? If we'd kept up with that level of innovation, I don't even know where we'd be today. Fully destructable environments, and phonecalls where you could have a realistic conversation with the AI via your headset, I would imagine.
It's almost exactly what you'd expect out of a triple-A first-person shooter -- no more, no less.
File under mediocre. I love my consoles, and I love the vast audience that have been introduced to gaming through their living room charms. But I've hated, hated, hated the way that, somehow, games like Halo have come to be seen as groundbreaking.
People - we have been here before. We have done it before. I do not wish to do it again, only this time prettier. That is not a game. That is a tech demo.
I am quite simply astounded that MOST games have not yet equalled the functionality or interactivity of Duke Nukem 3D, let alone surpassed it. The game is THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. It has been out for a number of years approaching half of my life, and we still don't see our reflections in the mirror in most games. And we still don't get blood dribbling down walls in most games. And we still don't get bloody, or slimy footprints, or shrink rays, or jet packs, or aliens sitting on fucking toilets.
It's been thirteen years and every time a new game does ONE of these things it's hailed as a goddamn miracle.
I know that, with the switch to true 3D, a lot of these things got harder to do. But it has been THIRTEEN YEARS. We've come far enough to tackle some of them.
Hard go for certain conjoined twins under your definition. Just because one is dependent on the other doesn't mean they belong to the other.
I think you miss the point. I didn't define anything, I simply refuted a faulty definition. That places no onus on me to suggest an alternative definition.
The issue of abortion relies on the concept of identity. Both mine and and your examples show that there is a lot of grey area in identity.
It is precisely because there is no clear answer that I think we need to be open-minded on this issue.
OK, Republicans are against abortion, and for the most part, always will be. You see, we see it as killing babies. You may not think it's a baby, but a simple DNA test will prove that it really is a separate human than either the mother or the father.
Bad luck for identical twins, then - they're really only one person by that logic. Does that mean that it's okay to kill one of them? It's only murder if you shoot the second, too?
Before a certain age a fetus can't survive without the mother any more than my finger could survive by itself, if I cut it off.
You can't separate the fetus and mother, and you can't use DNA as a proof of individual identity. That kind of runs you out of options for 'proving' that a fetus counts as a person.
Apple is a hardware company. Keep repeating until you figure out why they will not sell you OS/X for your white box PC.
I'm sorry, but that's bs. They're not JUST a hardware company. Hell, it's deabtable if they're even *primarily* a hardware company.
See, they also sell software.
You can buy it without buying hardware.
Some of it you can download for free.
Some of it is even cross platform.
As a matter of fact, there are very few items of Apple hardware that you can buy without Apple software. A few peripherals, and that's about it.
Every ipod comes with Apple software built in, and is useless without iTunes - yet more apple software. You can buy new apps for the ipod touch, and download new software updates. Not FIRMware, you understand. SOFTware. You might have gone through three or four differently aquired pieces of Apple software before you've finished synching your ipod touch with your 'White box' PC
Sure they're a hardware company.
- The more recent games have been released with more bugs than the earlier games - Even though they started with more bugs, the more recent games have received fewer patches, fixing fewer bugs and often the patches added more bugs than they fixed
Battlefield 2142 was the worst offender, and the strongest indication that EA loves money and hates customers.
This was a game released hot on the heels of a broken Battlefield 2. Instead of attempting to resolve the issues with Battlefield 2, they shipped a brand new game, using the same engine, with all of the same issues.
ObCarAnalogy: That's like if Ford made a car with faulty brakes, but instead of issuing a recall, they made another car... with faulty brakes. And then sold it to the people that had written off their cars due to some mysterious and untraceable brake issue.
Put like that, it's not just Ford that are at fault. Stop buying the damn cars, idiots!
It could also be used to search for "suspicious behaviour" by searching Government databases, Credit card companies' databases, credit bureau databases, Choicepoint's, telecommunication companies' databases, airlines, and any other firm that the Government bullies into giving access.
Well, that's not as paranoid as you might think. The case against is quite simply the publicity that's been given to this behemoth of a machine, so I really don't think it's too likely in this particular case.
However this is EXACTLY how you go about putting together a machine for intelligence purposes. The key to running an intelligence service is deniability at as many levels as possible, and keeping anyone from seeing the big picture.
So you comission some huge piece of hardware, with a benign-but-complex sounding (usually simulation) function.
Then you get the low leve software put together for the platform. If that can be done in modular fashion, so much the better. You don't mix the platform with the real world data during design.
At the final stages, and presumably in house, you can write your overlaying interface (which intelligence employees will use), and only then is the pure function of the suite necessarily made apparent.
Of course there are lots of people in the design process that have a notion of how things are being put together, what they will interface with, etc, who can take a stab at the function. And sure, everyone signs an NDA just because. However, since nobody sees all of it, and the big picture is never confirmed outside of a very small number of people, and nobody is going to break an NDA to talk about part of something that MAY have some function... you essentially reduce the risk of leaking your cababilities, system spec, and intention by a not insignificant amount.