"Students of the Code.org tutorials have written 507,152,775 lines of code.

So *that's* how they fixed the ACA website. ;-)

The real problem there is there are a few Congress people that are on the NSA's side

Not just a few . . . a bipartisan majority.

Bullshit. The leftist "big gov't is always right" crowd wants to nail him just as much. How dare he have the audacity to paint the result of the granting of unchecked Federal power in a negative light to the serfs?

This is NOT a left- or right-wing issue. Both parties gleefully hate your freedoms and civil liberties and take turns shitting on the Constitution while playing people against one another with wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, and illegal immigration. And people like you who put the blame on one side but not the other are part of the problem.

You are bound to the city by the choice you made (to become a father) and by your own morals, not by some law of the land. Legally, you can get up and leave right now . . . but of course, there are consequences. For childless folks (and even for some folks with kids), it can indeed be that easy to move, whenever and wherever you want . . . I've done it many times. I'm not judging -- just pointing out a huge distinction.

This means you can be absolutely ruthless with the price . . . you can get the same thing anywhere else. Do your homework online and find the price that people are actually paying, and call every dealer within 150 miles and ask for their best price. Start playing them against each other, and eventually, one will work with you -- typically towards the end of the quarter when they're all trying to make their number, or at the end of a model year when they have excess inventory. If you don't get exactly what you want from a certain dealer, tell them to pound sand and walk. They prey on most folks' discomfort with the negotiation process -- you need to turn the tables on them and be a little opportunistic, but you can save many thousands if you do so.

Traditional car dealerships are owned by wealthy, powerful folks who've managed to preserve their monopoly via lobbying their local and state legislatures to force the auto manufacturers to sell thru the dealer chain. This forced "3 tier" system (a lot like the others many states enforce on commodities which throw off a lot of tax revenue, like alcohol, where a chosen few are granted a limited number of licenses) does nothing to help the consumer -- instead, it limits choice and artificially drives up the price. There's no practical reason for these laws in 2013, yet we still have them. I'm hoping that companies like this one and Tesla manage to disrupt the obsolete, 20th Century business model, but I have my doubts.

...as all of the other security theater they spend billions / year on. Why stop with SPOT? How many terr'rists have been caught by body scanners versus good old metal detectors? How many terr'rists have been caught by Freedom Gropes? Oh, I get it, travelers don't actually see SPOT in action. Carry on.

If you think the NSA isn't building a massive database of what metadata belongs to what person, you're painfully naive. They've lied at every turn -- their leader even lied under oath to a Congressional panel. Why would you ever believe them when tell you they're *not* doing something?

Because we (used to) have a reasonable expectation that private conversations would remain private, and in the 21st Century, things like phone calls are needed to, well, live. There's no fucking reason the NSA needs metadata about my call to Grandma. It's private and I don't want them to have it. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. And decades of horrible precedent have distorted the meaning of "legal" so that the 4th Amendment is able to be ignored by anyone in gov't who wishes to do so. It's time to start over.

Do not discount the impact of the Internet on the declining use of traditional mail services, or the fact that almost half of what is delivered is junk mail, almost all of which just gets thrown away. You can't only blame privatization while completely ignoring the most significant advance in communications technology in human history. Let's face it -- traditional mail services just aren't important as they were before the Internet.

. . . when they sat in the bubble-wrapped chairs and the interviewer asked about the chairs' significance, I seriously assumed the archivist was gonna say one of them was the one that Ballmer threw whilst ranting about Google.

As a gov't employee, you have the most ironic Slashdot username ever. :-)

That's funny . . . while all of the 800K furloughed gov't workers were getting paid vacations because the idiots in Congress couldn't (and still can't) agree on anything, my (privately owned) small business hired two new folks and signed a multi-year lease to triple our square footage. We *worked* while they sat around and did squat. A huge chunk of our productivity is being siphoned off to pay for the decisions of these entitled, rich, elitist, sociopathic jerks -- not only the less innocuous ones like shutting down the gov't, but big ones like wars and domestic spying. So spare me with the "inept private business" bullshit -- we're not the ones that have had all consequences removed from our lives. If I don't work, I don't eat.

. . . last time one of my friends visited Tokyo, he spent two hours (jokingly) asking directions to the Godzilla Victims Memorial. ;-)

And you should be aware that blue states also gerrymander . . . Maryland is a perfect example, which has several of the most gerrymandered districts in the entire nation and gladly subverts its citizens' rights right to fair representation just as fast as Texas.