My favorite feature of markdown is that it can easily be used to collaborate with people without having them learn a complicated syntax. "Use the same formatting as I did" is all they need to know.

Switching sides when comfronted to new data is a desirable behavior.

I agree. All I have to add has been in my slashdot signature for years.

Trends... USA does become a more closed and strictly controlled country, however, it is very hard (though possible) to have political opinions censored in America. If every country in the world suddenly aligned their policies on USA, that would be a tremendous step forward.

The more it unfolds, the more I feel like Snowden is a counter-intelligence operation to stop talking about Assange. Snowden teaches us nothing new, makes vague claims, redacts useful contents.

People who are suprised by this behavior from Apple in 2013 deserve what happens to them.

Luddites (contrary to more recent neo-luddites) was not an anti-technology group. They were depicted this way by their political enemies but actually they only protested to the way many workers were fired and obsoleted without any kind of safety net. There has been some machines destruction, but their revendications were social, not technological.

That's what the masses killed in the Paris Commune of 1871 thought too...

Not anymore. 2008 was the last year this was true. And consider that this table only shows the added value in dollars, not any kind of intrinsic value: for $1 you can manufacture more things in China than in US.

If you think about what this means, it means that wages will go down and prices will go down. Depending on which goes down fastest, it could resulg in global wealth of record inequalities.

Snowden could snoop through emails and is considered a criminal by the US government.

Hear, hear! Before dismissing it as partisan politics and easy wealthy-bashing, think about it for a second: generalized automation means that there won't be enough work for everyone. It either means unemployement for most people or it means shorter work weeks. Free market does not care to choose between these two alternative, the choice will only come from politics and from rules we make.

This is really a problem that US citizens need to solve quickly. Free market and automation won't lead to a techno-utopia without putting a brake on the concentration of capital. Automated industries are capital-biased instead of labor-biased (your output depends more on the amount of funds you can invest rather than on the labor you manage to hire) and therefore will worsen inequalities.

To be fair, I am not sure it would have been a worse idea than outsourcing it to private companies filled with people like Snowden who were not considered trustworthy enough to work in the NSA...

Understanding the system, using it, subverting it, is totally fine. But some people will always confuse "having a use for something" with "loving this system".

IP laws are despicable, costly to mankind, dangerous for research and harmful for the economy. I am still making business plans that rely on these bad rules of the game, just like I would include corruption in my plans if it was unavoidable in my country.

Yes, rethinking copyright laws would force us to rethink all the open source licences. We would do that happily. Software patents can disappear overnight, OSS would not break a sweat over that. And trademarks are currently the less problematic aspect of IP laws.

Did he get a seat?

Ok, I am sick of people missing the point totally. This is not about saying "oh! nasty US! we should team up with Russia instead!". This is not about saying how easy or hard it is to break into a company's network

This is about TOR, this is about what TOR is supposed to be and this is about why it is unacceptable that the NSA can break a key in a few hours.

You are totally free to not care about security, but understand that in many fields, this mean lost contracts and millions wasted.In all IT wompanies where I had admin rights, and I did this job as a side attribution, a few hours a week, none of the tricks you proposed would have worked : network was switched, passwords encryted, local machines not trusted, printer maintenance was made internally, crucial technical information was not accessible by non tech-savvy people, and in two of them, offices were locked during lunch breaks. Basic security is easy and cheap, and some people do it well. Some of us take security seriously, and TOR is a tool that should be trustable in such a context. It is generally and, honestly, we were aware that it was probably not 100% NSA-resistant, but it aims at being, and in that context, this problem is a big problem.