Why does everyone assume that this is a first-person account? If you have access to things, you probably know other people who have access to other things. Perhaps these people talk to one another. Snowden could know these things the same way we know them: someone else spilled the beans.

We are! The key is to use words in a certain way. You just won't listen, and that is why you keep dying. It is heartbreaking, really.

If everything comes down to a cost benefit analysis, we lose everything that isn't profitable. Have you ever worked for a company that valued its "profit centers" at the expense of the rest of the workforce? It is a narrow and short-sighted viewpoint, divorced from reality. Not everything needs to be approached as a business.

It seems to work the other way around; game developers look at their audience and build to that. The scenario you describe already didn't happen - nobody bought Vista, so very few games required DX 10, so nobody bought Vista.

Neither did anyone else; Google had a technical solution to a problem that some people had, people liked it, now it is going away. There are other people with similar solutions, and we're each trying to figure out which one fits our needs best.

My use of a reader solves a slightly different problem; I personally do not follow all that many sites but many of the ones I do follow update irregularly, so it is easier for me to simply be notified when they do update than to uselessly visit a page that has nothing new. Even the ones that update regularly but not daily lend themselves to a feed reader for me; I don't need a scheduled stop on M-W-F for Site A and M-F for Site B, and just Mondays for Site C; they all just pop into the reader whenever they update, and I don't particularly care when that is. A reader also makes sure I don't miss anything, because it keeps track of what I've already read.

Meanwhile, bookmarks work just fine and none of this impacts you at all; what's the problem?

I've been on Feedly since the announced shutdown of Google Reader, but just switched to The Old Reader because it's simple, fast, and clean. Thanks to the people who recommended it here.

Everyone is always defending themselves, that's the magic of combining Selfishness with Point-of-View.

That doesn't make sense in the long run; if the result is that ubiquitous, then the stigma will become less severe. It is difficult to achieve widespread notoriety in a world where everyone is posted online, all the time - witness the lengths YouTube attention whores have to go to already, and you'll see that someone recording you eating like a pig at Uno's just won't be newsworthy at all.

That trade-off (losing rights to gain happiness) is the basis of our civilization.

Most people, even in the incarceration capital of the world, make it to their 30s without being arrested at all. This makes the event (somewhat) notable, doesn't it? Notable things are the things we talk about.

I think your point is that this crime is trivial enough to warrant expiration, but then where do you draw the line? I believe that the published lists of sex offenders is abusive and contrary to what are supposed to be American values, but a moratorium on talking about it at all seems equally unjust. Who decides how much time must pass before being bankrupted is no longer relevant when talking about a businessman? Do we have a list of crimes, or does this situation only apply to rich people, each of whom can decide for themselves when their reputation should no longer be marred by their actions? Should a convicted drug dealer be able to not only legally conceal the fact on his resume, reasoning that he hasn't dealt drugs in a while, but also be able to prosecute anyone who reveals the fact to his prospective employer? How about a thief applying to a security firm?

The fact is, his complaint is that a salient business event in his life is affecting his business. Isn't this exactly as it should be? How is this not a ludicrous complaint?

I think you missed his point.

His point was that, if he executed the program manually, he could communicate in Chinese just as the AI does. He would be performing the exact same steps and getting the exact same answers, and yet he would not, in the process, learn Chinese. The point being that the AI could be capable of communicating in Chinese without understanding anything it was saying. In that event, the AI would not be a mind, because communication without understanding isn't intelligence.

I guess I don't understand your point. Let's say you are completely correct; so what? Aren't we, as Americans, supposed to hold ourselves to higher standards of behavior, particularly in terms of tolerance of different races and belief systems? Saying that a militant theocracy acts in a certain horrific way doesn't mean we get to act that way, too;. it means that it's a good thing we're not a militant theocracy. Additionally, criticizing another nation for not adhering to our standards of behavior seems pointless to me, while criticizing ourselves for the same reason seems like a good idea.

What am I missing?

No, but not because it's the nice thing to do. I wouldn't say that because art is about expression, not competition. It doesn't matter at all that her sister is better.

It is fear; what you are seeing is overcompensation. Americans have been bombarded constantly with fear by our media, politicians, and even entertainment for a couple of decades now, at least. We are a terrified nation, and that is why we have so much bluster. There are things for which we can rightly be proud, but we've lost all perspective. There is no purposeful evil behind it; it has made a few people very, very wealthy. That's all.

If the student failed to learn, the teacher failed to teach.