That's been the reality everywhere, forever. It's cute that the founders of the USA actually believed their experiment in limited government was ever going to last. The USA is simply catching up to where the rest of the world has always been. It was inevitable.

It's really not that bad, considering most TV shows aren't really going to suffer that much by the loss of visual detail. Besides, if you can't see that well in the first place, isn't it all just blurry blobs on a big screen TV too?

Sorry Grandad, I'll get off your lawn now...

Anwar Al-Awlaki ringing any bells?

Link

I wish I could mod this up. "Competing governments" found out about this stuff merely as consequence of the American public being informed of what their government is doing in their name. Snowden's detractors try to argue that his intention was merely to inform foreign governments of the USA's intelligence tactics, rather than his stated intention of informing his fellow citizens. At this point, there is no reason to believe he was acting on the behalf of a foreign power. Believing otherwise is an unwarranted assumption .

You're absolutely right, he should have fled to one of the US lapdogs that would have returned him to their masters at the first opportunity. Or maybe some smallish country the US wouldn't have any hesitation about a missile strike or special forces operation. Nope, there couldn't possibly be a reason to go to one of the "bad guy superpowers" except because he's a communist stooge.

You're making the classic mistake of believing the two parties are anything but a political cartel, publically denigrating each other, privately scheming to keep their golden goose laying eggs. Conservatives and liberals alike are being played for fools by a corrupt and cynical political class dedicated to maintaining their power and privilege by any means necessary.

If you think about it a little more carefully you might come to the conclusion that China and Russia, despite their obvious shortcomings, are two places where he would be guaranteed that the US wouldn't do anything to get at him that would start WW3. Most anyplace else, they'd launch a few missiles at wherever they thought he was, write some letters of apology to the government there and move on.

I don't care to argue the merits of what he did, but those two countries are the safest possible places from the US federal government.

Don't worry, crazy people will have social justice advocates before long and then Crazy, even the batshit kind, will be a unacceptable term in the PC world. We don't call them crazy, we call them Differently Alligned with Reality

Looks like it might be somewhat unclear, the font of all knowledge suggests the etymology of the word is uncertain, although the Germanic origin theory is persuasive.

Ahh, the illusion of agency. We have no idea how our brains do what they do, but we're more than happy to take all the credit for it, as if we were somehow responsible for the particular configuration of neurons and electrical impulses that create whatever the hell sentience is. Don't get me wrong, I'm just a guilty of doing it as everyone else, it's just something I've thought about frequently. I've found myself doing things I can't explain enough times to realize there's more going on with sentience, will, and the like than meets then eye.

That would be Religion qua religion that is cheap. The Vatican or Joel Osteen are simply shysters that have are manifestations of Religion, and, acting in it's name, fleecing the faithful. In the case of the Vatican, they've been doing this for nearly two millennia. Osteen has a long way to go if he want's to rival the Vatican.

The fix for problems like this is not to ditch dynamic typing systems, but to use languages with strong types. You'll still have to wait until runtime, but once the code tries to use "five" as a number is going to crash and burn. Languages like Javascript or PHP that will happily do the wrong thing are pathological, there's no reason to allow such things. Unless your language is stupid simple and treats everything as a string or something, things have implicit types so use them!!

You're describing a weakly typed language, like PHP. Something like Python or Ruby would give similar errors as you described. And even Java, which is super finicky about types will have runtime errors that require you to do the same debugger-boogie as any other language.

Don't get me wrong, static typing can be a huge boon. But it can also be a huge pain, and in many situations hardly worth the hassle. The part I find most compelling about static typed languages is that you can understand a lot more from function signatures and the like. Seeing int foo(int bar) you know that, whatever the hell foo does, it's taking an int and giving one back. The compiler taking care of the sticky details involved in making sure that is always the case is a bonus.

While statically typed languages can be a pain, there are tangible benefits for using one. As far as dynamic typed languages, well, I'll settle for it being strongly typed. Weakly typed languages are awful.

Ugh, this is exactly what I've been dealing with lately. Got stuck using PHP for some project for reasons beyond my control. When I realized there was this "autoloader" thing magically loading and "linking" code without me explicitly having requested it, I understandably threw up my hands in despair. How are you supposed to know, at a glance, which parts of the project are being referenced by a particular class/file? Can you predict whatOh, right, "You need to know your framework," they say. But it's the frameworks that are full of this shit!!!

I've settled on accepting autoload as it is, since there's really no sane way around it. Which is very typical PHP: pathological solutions to insane problems. Throwing in use statements for every class you use is about the best you can do. Even those are a bit... off, but it sure the hell beats writing Foo\Bar\baz->doStuff($x); all over the place. And the PSR-4 guidelines seems to have caused many package maintainers to come up with... interesting namespace layouts.

Sorry about the rant. I'm pretty sure it's part of the grieving process, and Anger, Bargaining, and Depression are all co-incident.