dreamfactory

or buying a product

CQ5 looks better (but isn't).

You might also reasonably ask why tptacek and friends weren't blowing the whistle as this is huge news to most.

It could maybe be described as hidden in plain sight. If you dug around there were pieces in the public domain that you could put together. But if you suggested this, you would have been dismissed as a tinfoil hatter by most people.

More to the point, the fact that it is a huge story in the news across the world proves that most people were simply unaware. So it doesn't mean much to say that this was already known when to most it wasn't. That could be taken to imply that there is nothing to see here and that people who are bringing it up are a little slow - which is simply disingenuous. The fact that my mother doesn't read every page of every newspaper doesn't mean she should be disenfranchised. And it also doesn't change the fact that many businesses are only now changing their behaviour and moving away from US companies and reconsidering architecture for IT projects and business operations.

It's news to my mother. Half of the UK and US government are saying it's news to them. The world's press seems to think it qualifies as news.

1984 wasn't really about predictions. Orwell was writing about Britain and Russia in 1948.

I'm a bit surprised that there isn't a diy upgrade market for ipads at least.

From what I've seen in enterprise java, SOA tends to just refer to internal services at a very low level of granularity - basically seems to be OOP with classes described as services. (This may well be a mangling of a good concept.)

MVC manages it and is possibly the most common pattern in web dev.

A transaction should be the lowest level by definition e.g. it's not an API if you are just proxying CRUD on your db tables. Agree on smallest API possible (otherwise you will die in maintenance hell after you pick up a few clients) - but your API should be the only point of contact for your site and other clients.

It's an opportunity to improve performance as the abstraction gives you a caching boundary which is appropriate to the application.

They need to stay there to collect intelligence.

For web at least, in some ways it's a cop out. All the developers I worked with are self-taught and in any case colleges in the West tend to be way behind industry practises.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_(2009_film) is a great film where the streets of London are almost like a central character.

And they might buy any other service in future

I look at it as technically informed product ownership - merging business and technical domain knowledge to make the right tradeoffs. How else can you execute effectively?

I think it's justified on the basis of a rising tide lifting all boats - particularly for a country moving into a skills/knowledge economy.

going by the upvotes, we aren't the only people to have seen this anti-pattern...

So maybe a relevant question as we move away from desktop computing is whether your mobile device can be identified through online activity, such as commenting, searching, email etc. This would be useful for locating dissidents.

Before 1998 in the UK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_King...)

> Think student loans never existing.

You mean free tuition for all like we used to have?

Makes me wonder if he wasn't a prolific tech debt producer who was seen by management to GTD.

> Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.

They are key to graphic design. Though even in the West, web designers have only been waking up to formal graphic design in the last few years.

> Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing?

The real money now is in commerce, and Japan is well-known for being behind in online commerce due to trust issues with plastic money. I guess that leaves them with old model of ads which would explain the 'million-dollar homepage' look.

That's a big part of what you're paying an agency for. The whole point of elance is diy management.

Aligning business reqs and technical implementation is a harder and more expert job than the development part. These sites assume it doesn't exist and leave a client and dev to scrap it out in a zero sum game.

> if the system wasn't in place, there would be many, many more incidents of this type

Because it was happening all the time before

> I think it's likely that there are actual results that help NSA leadership rationalize these sorts of programs

AKA paying the mortgage

..and while the intelligentsia are busy debating the theoretical possibility of the existence of said teapot, the powers that be are acting decisively and defining the reality.

Last time I checked, they weren't being run at a loss by a charity specifically to avoid commercial conflicts of interest.

Unlike the companies you mention, The Guardian operates more in the social economy sector (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_economy) than the private sector.