The policy of saying "If it was anyone else than USA it would be worse" is simply ridiculous. Or even to mention concerns about terrorism to justify such spying.
As many are forgetting, let's summarize the real reason for such anger: industrial spying (towards Petrobras, Brazil's biggest company) and spying over a government with more than a century of friendly relations.
The article points this as well: "As host to the UN headquarters, the US has been attacked from the general assembly many times in the past, but what made Rousseff's denunciation all the more painful diplomatically was the fact that it was delivered on behalf of large, increasingly powerful and historically friendly state."

It's the birthplace of Pat Metheny. Thank alone makes it deserve Google fiber.

What happens today when a person winds up under a car because of a human driver error?

Spoken like a true non-parent.

There are NO parents who watch their children "at all times". How long does it take for a child to pick something up, put it in their mouth, and swallow it? About a second, perhaps. If you really "need" to watch a toddler "at all times", think about all the things that are difficult to do because you have to be hawk-like hovering over the child like a neurotic poltergeist without even one second of inattentiveness. Things like: cooking, watching the road (instead of the child) while driving, sex, and probably most importantly, watching your other children.

Monopolies are bad, government or otherwise.

End it.

This is not what the patent system was intended to do, this is madness.

On the contrary, this is precisely the intended effect i.e. elevation of power and profits of the only group that really matters in this: the lawyers. You will take note that irrespective of what comes out of this (Apple loses, Samsung loses, whatever) the lawyers (and bankers - all that money has to get deposited somewhere - also just think of the magnitude of "transaction fees") get their money. A huge pile of money.

In a society run by lawyers the only people who really count are lawyers. Every other activity (such as producing something actually useful) must somehow benefit the true power holders. Thus "rules" are made, which from your perspective might appear "insane", which advertise themselves as "justice" or "promotion of this or that noble goal" to make them defensible to and palatable by the plebs, but simply say "you shall suck a lawyer's dick" once you decipher all the implications of the lawyerly priesthood's "legalise" code in which these "rules" were written.

And since most Western societies are overrun with a whole pyramid of classes of parasites such as lawyers or "financial industry" creatures the pooch is pretty much screwed - at least until the next Great Fuckup (probably an economic collapse the way things are going but its anyone's guess really).

I jailbreak my IOS device for one very important reason: /etc/hosts. This is VERY important to me. If I access an internet resource, there's nothing stopping it from telling my device, "Hey, also get this other resource without asking the user for permission!" In other words, it speaks on my behalf. My right to free speech also means freedom from compulsory speech. /etc/hosts means that I can control which resources are accessed on my behalf.

Apple (and all other money-making enterprises) hate this notion because it interferes with their potential profit. This is why we have to rely on jailbreaking to restore these free speech rights. My IOS5 device is jailbroken, but I cannot get an untethered jailbreak for IOS6.

IANAL. Doesn't matter. This is a philosophical issue.

Does anyone want Facebook? How is it that Facebook is free?

When users want "privacy", they want to make sure that their location isn't tracked ... until they want to be able to share that with their friends and know where there is an available parking space. To say that by sacrificing our privacy we will have a much richer lifestyle is a tautology by this point. For example, it's happened more than once that I found someone on the Internet using a service that they didn't expressly consent to, and they were delighted that I found them because they had been looking for me and were unable to find me. What was more important -- that I respected their privacy, or that we have a newly-kindled friendship?

When RMS talks about "privacy", keep in mind the monk-like lifestyle he leads. http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I'd be willing to accept an "apples and oranges" rejoinder.

It is only a "fallacy" until comes true.

First of all economics is not a science but something akin to a bunch of voodoo followers and witch doctors trying to find "scientific" justification for their pre-conceived ideologies so one must take their opinion on what is and what is not a "fallacy" with a sizeable grain of salt.

And then it is quite obvious that growth in "productivity" in the last 30 years in the most industrialized countries actually lowered (the actual as opposed to superficially perceived) standard of living. Sure on the surface things are more shiny, everyone has an i-dinky, a mcMansion and a car with a GPS. But what most people do not think about is that everyone is up to their ears in debt, one paycheque away from bankruptcy, most of that shiny stuff they think as "theirs" actually belongs to banks/credit card companies and what was once the standard "american dream" - a single income household with a mortage paid in 10 years, fully paid car, children educated without student debt, a stable for-life job and generous pension afterwards, etc -is now something available to the denizens of Wall Street only - if that.

Is this "progress"? Well the concentration of wealth in much fewer hands surely progressed. And workers in China got a lot of menial jobs they did not have before...

But from the perspective of the US worker the "lump of jobs" "fallacy" is looking less "fallacious" by the minute.

Also, closer to 100% automation we get, more broken the assumptions of economists become. At 100% automation a singularity occurs in their equations and the outcomes become unpredictable for average member of society. Given the whole of human history and the nature of people I bet on total dystopia. I don't think I am in a very great danger of losing that bet.

Did you even read his post? Did the "offer unconditional base income (generated from those automated low-level jobs)" part somehow go over your head or did all the foam coming from your mouth block your vision?

That is the standard "carrot on the stick" cop-out offered by various apologists.

Use your head! If Germany actually did it they would make Greece look like a maven of fiscal responsibility and frugal governance in a very short order.

Also how would those "base income" recipients look like? Think "the housing projects" ghettos in the US, complete with burning garbage heaps and graffiti-covered concrete jungles. That is because providing a "base income" in a greed-driven economy instantly devalues everything until that "base income" only guarantees absolute shits for a "life-style".

But most importantly the OP and you ignore the pivotal issue: who gets to control these 100% automated factories of this Brave New Future? Given the current trend of concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the mechanics of access to mass-scale advanced technology it will be the plutocratic owners of mega-pan-national corporations who will leave everyone else dirt poor and begging for life's necessities instead of being "liberated from menial tasks" and free to be "creative".

Also, all these language translators who all complained about "soul-sucking" jobs are nearly extinct from ... tongue cancer, surely?

The goal here is, to free humanity from primitive low-level jobs, so that they can concentrate on cool and interesting challenges.

Like diving through dumpsters for your next meal....

Newsflash:

a) the opportunities for truly "cool and interesting challenges" - as opposed to desperate rat-races with ever exponentially increasing demands for "education" and "retraining" and ever exponentially diminishing returns disguised as "challenges" - are orders of magnitude less than the population size. Only those who wish to establish a slavery system based on stratification of the society into "thinkers" and "the rabble" where the gap between the two is unbridgeable (say 40 years of "education" and minimum 12 PhD titles to get your first paying job) are trying to pretend otherwise .

b) most people are unable to deal with, unwilling to and uninterested in "interesting challenges" because these "interesting challenges" usually disrupt their lives beyond repaior and destroy their families,

c) many of those who can deal with these "challenges" when forced to do so find them far less "interesting" and find their lives becoming miserable, unhappy and begin to question the point of this whole societal exercise that trades simple, boring but secure and predictable lives for chaotic, psychotic, insecure, stressful, hand-to-mouth existence in a sadistic competition to meet "interesting challenges" or perish.

And so on.

Your position is that of a corporate shill who tries to pretend that the so-called "progress" (as long as accompanied by vast wealth increases for very few "right people") is self-justifying and that any social cost is acceptable, especially when the cost is placed on the backs of everyone but those select few.

Technocrats and corporatists have stood the whole thing on its head! It is "happiness" that is the goal of the whole exercise and "progress" and "technological advancement" are to be only used in service to attaining happiness. Forcing everyone to meet "interesting" (in the opinion of the few privileged individuals) challenges so that "progress" (for these same individual's bank accounts) can be achieved is only going to in the long run result in "interesting challenges" for the likes of you that involve guns and lining up against walls....

Not that I agree that it is a bad thing. A line should be drawn somewhere, and age 18 seems as good a place as any.

18?!! What, are you a pervert?! Its 80 that's reasonable and not a second younger.

Everyone knows people one second younger then 80 cannot make reasoned decisions as to sex (or anything else for that matter). Proof? Why, just look at the daily Google news around the globe! QED.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a sick pedophile who is only arguing otherwise so he can have sex with immature people to ruin their young, innocent lives. Are you a sick pedophile? Are you? Are you? Yes? Yes?!

Actually the "process" is the primary method by which powerful tyrants deny justice to meaningless peasants.

He was supposed to file in DC wasn't he? Why exactly? Does the court in Florida belong to a different nation? The moon was in an incorrect astral sign? Wind was coming from the wrong compass point?

When he files in DC (at his own expense of course and on his own time - but I am sure everyone gets many days free time fully paid from his/her job to proudly challenge an entire multi-trillion dollar agency in any state of the agency's choosing) he will promptly find out that while DC was the correct court, the "process" requires him to wait 2 years for a decision, which will be that he "does not have standing" (being a mere peasant) or that he is "not a party" (not being a member of the government) etc and so on.

Due process my ass.

The whole point of this exercise is the pretense that average citizens have any say whatsoever in what the government or other wealthy powers do to them. The US courts have been rubber-stamping the aristocracy's decisions for a long time now, all the while creating ever more byzantine "process" in order to insure that the lower classes have to jump through so many hoops as to make participation of anyone without 40 lawyers and 100 paralegals pointless.

The beauty of this system is that technically everyone can participate but in practice only the very wealthy can do so effectively. And bonus: more byzantine the rules, higher paid and numerous becomes the priesthood that attends to them: the lawyers.

Everyone wins, well except the average peon who gets to pay for this fun in more ways than one.

Oh so now we are at the "But, but, they did it too!" kindergarten-level argument.

But then again by switching to that old canard it seems that you gave up on the idea of pretending that Christians are somehow less violent, less greedy, less power-hungry, less hypocritical or more charitable than everybody else and that they are miraculously immune to ideology-motivated insanity, unlike everybody else and that everybody who does something despicable is magically not a "true" Christian, even though he/she self-identifies so.

Progress, sort of.

That would depend on your definition of "atheist".

Some who I would describe as "agnostics" think themselves "atheists" for example.

Some of those for example believe in God but insist that his existence is by definition unknowable, undetectable and that God once having created the Universe never again interacted with it and does not care nor sustain sentient beings after death. Are they "atheists"? They would say so since their position is that for "practical purposes" God does not exist and that from our perspective God existing and not are indistinguishable.

As to self-declared Christians, the problem with religions is that not only are they muddled piles of self-contradictory goobledey-gook to begin with, there are also no objective authorities that can arbitrate between people believing themselves this or that. This however apparently does not stop avery member of every obscure spinoff of every religion calling everyone else "Heretics! Apostates!" and themselves "the only true adherents of {fill in your wacky religion name here}".

And so if Breivik calls himself a "Christian", then he is one pretty much by definition, no more or less than "reverend" Jones or one Adolf from Austria were.