And why were the cops even involved? I insulted plenty of school faculty and staff when I was a kid. If I had been overheard, I would have expected detention, not the police.

If the authorities really want to reduce speeding, they should be happy about this. When drivers are warned of a speed trap, they slow down. Mission accomplished.

They also did this with offline caching. It used to be I could cache up to five map areas offline on my tablet. Inexplicably, they took it away. Then they brought it back but it's not in the menu of commands, you have to type "ok maps". I suspect a patent issue but it would be nice if Google gave an explanation. Removing useful features seems counter intuitive to say the least.

The silence from the left is deafening.

Yes, the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, and others have been completely silent. Wait, no they haven't.

I'd like to see an NSA that we could be proud of again

I'm not sure that ever existed. The NSA was happy to spy on Americans Nixon didn't like, just because he asked them to.

"Right now, since there have been no abuses..."
NSA employee spied on nine women without detection
NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
No abuses, General?

Writing to employees' families and referring to his organization as a "national treasure" both give off a sense of defensiveness. As another poster said, they will almost certainly weather the political storm and continue doing what they do, but this letter doesn't make them look any better.

They won't attack the US, they'll attack the US government. Completely different. These guys remind me of mafiosi who try to claim prosecutors going after the Mafia are going after all Italian-Americans.

Me, too.

Right, because every gamer lives in a developed area with available high-speed internet. Because internet connections never go down. Because it makes any kind of sense at all to require an always-on connection for a single-player game. What a jerk.

Right, because importing hard drugs is morally equivalent to circumventing censorship.

Persecution? I only pointed out the same thing you did - that the Genesis story was written by people who didn't know anything more about the creation of the universe than anyone else at the time, so there's no reason to try to reconcile it with science. Islamic creationists are just as stupid as Christian creationists.

Well, there are all the other texts that also claim to be knowledge of God conferred to a human to write down. But I would think a claim as extraordinary as "This book was written by a man who was in direct communication with God" would need some evidence supporting it before we would be expected to take it seriously.

Wouldn't it make more sense to believe that Genesis was written by people who had no more idea about how the earth, sun, moon, and stars formed than anyone else who was alive at the time? Why perpetuate the idea that some guy got knowledge directly from God and then wrote it down?

What you're proposing would not be considered "common ground" by the proponents of creationism.