I have looked at a lot comments concerning this and the surprising thing about it is the number of people who just assumed that everything that Snowden did is write and everything that the NSA did is wrong. I understand that this is predominantly liberal media, and believe it or not, I am predominantly liberal. I voted for Obama. I believe the Republicans are working very hard to destroy our Democracy. I believe many of the Democrats are eager to help them.

However, I can say this with absolute certainty. Who gave him the right? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.

Snowden, by any description, by any definition is the bad guy here. He is a traitor. It doesn't matter that his results are good. It doesn't matter that the NSA takes a couple of hits or did some bad things. He could mitigate his damage by coming home and facing the music but he doesn't. He threatens that the "Worst is yet to come." These are not the acts of a hero. These are not the acts of a man who should be given clemency.

Face it, this is a bad scary world. Russia and China are not our friends. They know that. They look out for their own best interests. When you don't look out for your own best interest as a nation then you turn into Portugal. A used to be great country with a few good Bed and Breakfasts and some really great Scenery.

Snowden will never be given Clemency. At this stage in his life I would suspect the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that there is the threat that something he has which might be "Really Big" hasn't been released. It's probably a pretty big something because if it weren't he might have an unfortunate accident. I for one wouldn't miss him.

Never. Why do you think Flashlights were invented? There is no genetic imperative not to be eaten by a Grue in the dark if you carry a flashlight.

I have met people who were not marveled by the display of the Milky Way in the night sky. I have met people who were scared by it. I would suggest that I know more people in New York City that are terrified of it then not. There is a reason they are willing to live in Manhattan and pay those prices living on top of each other. They like the comforting crush of other humans and it is very okay for them to think that for every one of them four or five or fifteen people toil in the fields, or seas, or whatever to supply their needs. The comforting crush of humanity, with ever present light and noise isolates them from the three things in this universe that most people cannot abide: Silence, Night (Dark, Lost), Alone.

You will have some freedom making light more friendly to the dark skies initiative but the moment people even begin to suspect that the Milky Way is out there they will want it walled away by lights again.

Thank you Mozilla....

Is this a serious question? Would you post Egyptian Hieroglyphic to illustrate some important fact about Egypt 3000 years ago? There are very few Math equations that people understand intuitively and they usually go something like this 5 + 3 = 8. Mathematicians will eat this stuff up. Physicists will appreciate it. Maybe some other math nerds might like it but in the end what will happen is the collective mass of humans will not even bother to shrug their shoulders before they move on.

I love big math formulae and I love equations in stuff but I realize that I am kind of a big nerd that way and the Gods honest truth is that I don't understand most of what I see. I guarantee that not only will most NY Times readers not understand what they are seeing, they will stop reading at that point ant move onto the next article.

My wife started using facebook because her coworkers were using it. She was working with them in close quarters all day and then she would come home and talk to them on facebook most of the evening. Its been a year since it ended and I don't yet know if this is going to end in divorce. What I can tell you is that we as people were never evolved to have someone whispering in our ear all day. What makes Facebook in particular and social networking in general dangerous is that you used to have to be close to someone to become attached. Now you only have to be texting them or chatting with them or whatever. It does what the phone never could do: It connects you to anyone you ever met that you can find online.

I'm not saying that this is neccessarily a bad thing. I am saying that we aren't wired for and we aren't prepared for this kind of connectivity.

If all Software and IT needs were being funneled into new projects and new features and new ideas then the Red Hat guy might be write. This is not the case however. Most Software development done in the world is based on specific needs generated by specific customers on existing IT systems. It is a painfully slow, deliberate process that sometimes produces astonishingly public failures. Most of the time what is produced is quite successes that for the most part do what the customer wanted done.

A couple of years ago my organization switched from Silicon Graphics workstations running an ancient C++ compiler to Red Hat Linux on Dell workstations. It took us about six months to migrate the code from one platform to another. We didn't develop new features that nobody wanted. We didn't create waste where none existed. What we did is exactly what the customer paid us to do.

Vendor driven software that is created with an unknown user in mind is usually pretty scary in that you are always going to get features you didn't want and features that you do want but they don't work well. Guess what, that's what you get for making a product that is designed for the general propulation. Cars are the same way. I want a Toyota Truck, and I want a really cool sound system. They don't sell them that way. I get the adequate sound system that Toyota provides, it kind of does what I want, but if I want better I am going to have to by better, and even then it make not work 100% in my truck, and it will most certainly do things I didn't want it to do.

This isn't, for the most part, waste. Waste is what you get when you contract a software system to build, it takes five years, costs 100 million, thirty developers, and then when you are two weeks from shipping sales tells you that they can't sell your stuff. However, for every one of those types of projects there are literally dozens that didn't get cancelled and were shipped to sometimes eager customers.