WOW, or Way Out West.

When Gates and others push to have ALL of their money given to philanthropy, I just shake my head and say what fools. It will be spread around and do little good.
OTOH, ppl like Paul Allen is the one that pushed the cable companies to carry the internet. Likewise, he funded Scaled Composites jump into the X-Prize and winning it. This was the real start of private space going forward.
Now, we have Ellon Musk building up companies such as PayPal, Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX.
Between these 4 companies, he employs more than 100K ppl. BUT, more importantly, all 4 have changed society for the better.
Paypal helped bring retailing to the net. Prior to paypal, few wanted to put their CCs on the net (in fact, only idiots did).
Solar City was key to bringing down the costs of solar installs. The reason is because they focused on getting the INSTALLATION to be cheap and fairly quick, while buying from various makers and forcing their prices way down. Now, they are building MULTIPLE factories that will do 1GW/year of solar modules.
Tesla has forced ALL of the other car companies to produce hybrids and electric cars. In fact, Tesla has made such an impact on the car makers that all of the majors are banding together to push fuel cells. In the mean time, Tesla has installed over 300 super chargers around the world, and will almost certainly have 600-1000 units by end of next year. In the mean time, they are busy producing a line of factories in which the first one will more than double the production of li-ion batteries.
Now, he has SpaceX which has created the world's cheapest launch system. But, he is not content to stop there. He is working on recovering the first stage of F9 and 3 stages of FH. If this is successful, then sometime next year, he will cut the prices up to 50% off. And again, he is not interested in stopping there. He is instead focused on creating a rocket that will launch 200+tonnes to LEO, so as to send ppl to the moon and mars. All of this is forcing other companies and govs. to change.

The author has a point that many of the billioniares are doing NOTHING productive with their money. The right solution is to drop taxes on new companies that are solving issues. This would encourage others to jump into these kinds of ventures. And it far far better to have 8 failures combined with 2 successes in new arenas, then to simple have the money sitting around doing nothing.

There is a reason for railguns and lasers.

We were out to stop AQ not Taliban. Has AQ attacked the west in awhile? Nope.

Our development of these are for stopping just this situation.

What ollie north was doing was prevented by CONgress. As such, it was whistle blowing when pointing it out.
When Snowden spoke about NSA breaking laws and even our bill of rights, when dealing with Americans, that was whistle blowing.
When he spoke about NSA spying on none americans that are out of the nation, well, that was what NSA was set up to do, and it was 100% legal.
Technically, even the spying on Merkel was legal (though I am opposed to that since germany is a direct ally).
As such, when snowden speaks about, even the use of jabber, he is committing treason. Plain and Simple.

As to Russia/Ukraine, you are right that it was building up. However, to be fair, W and O have been foolish WRT to Ukraine. We promised Gorby that we would leave the bordering nations out of NATO. And when some where added, Russia, even with Putin, pushed to also be part of NATO, even if on the fringe.
If we knew what Putin was thinking, we could deal better with him. Back in the 80s when I was a cold war warrior, it was known that we were LOADED with Soviet spies. BUT, they were not trying to steal tech, as much as figure out what our pols were thinking and doing. It actually calmed things (BTW, note that the Chinese spies are NOT about learning what Politicans are thinking, but about acquiring tech, as well as finding how to defeat our military).

Actually, compared to when he started, the world is much better. So is america.

First off, quite a bit of a stretch there. You will find psychiatry, biology, ecology, etc dominated by women. It is 90-10, but more like 60-70% women. OTOH, if you are talking the hard science, then yeah, that is a sausage fest.

He is simply doing the same thing as any neo-con/tea* is doing.

Both North Korea and GOP love to call O names and blame him for everything, while denying that he ever does any good.
Both are total trash.

Nope.
He took a loyalty oath. When he gave up information about abuses of spying on Americans, he was a whistle blower. He should have stopped there.
Instead, he went on to give information about spying on AQ, North Korea, China, Russia along with spying on friendlies as well. THat was treason pure and simple.

I am no longer connected to that world. However, I find it hard to believe that AQ , ISIS, etc have not made massive changes to avoid all of the issues that Snowden released.
As such, he has made this world a much deadlier place. In fact, I would not be surprised to find out that part of why Russia is invading Ukraine in the way that they are and pushing things is because we no longer know what they are thinking and how putin is reacting to various deals.

I am all for whistle blowers. These are ppl that report ILLEGAL actions, or abuses of powers against citizens (that may actually border on the edge of legality).
But telling other nations our capabilities to spy on them, all of which was what the NSA was set up for, is out and out treason.
When most other nation's citizens do this, they execute them. But all will lock them up for this.

First off, as I said elsewhere, this is not about pat act.
Secondly, I am not sure that O or even the regular dems outside of the security committees knew about this.
Third, Udall had been trying to bring it up without breaking his oath. He more than hinted at it for a LONG time.

Fourth, being a dick does not help your case. It simply makes you like Juvenile. And Faux News is just that. Faux.

They said that they were looking into a number of alternatives, BUT, he has not invested into any thorium operations yet.

Which does not matter. Patriot act is not the issue, nor the problem. Nearly all aspects of pat act were and continue, to be needed.

the real issue is that the congressional oversight committee of 2002-6 PURPOSELY allowed us to create systems that did NOT have safety controls in place. Had we done the correct system, it would have had controls to prevent a number of abuses.

Now, not only has snowden told enemies how to evade us, but we have the same sets of neo-cons that allowed the abuse in the first place screaming bloody about this. Worse, a number of u idiots have called for the NSA, a relatively powerless entity( no ability to arrest, etc), to be disbanded and then for the tech. To be handed over to FBI and CIA. If u neo-cons ever get that, not just america, but world will be in deep trouble.

Seriously, all h1b, L1b, etc should be stopped. Instead, we should increase the number of green cards and they should be based purely on national needs. If we are short software ppl, then bring them in. It does not matter what nations. Just who is the best in the fields that are needed.