Unfortunately, when it happens, the good things about the USA will fall with it. I admit, I enjoy being in a place where I can live on a nice suburban street with minimal immediate worries, drive a comfortable car with air conditioning, gas it up when necessary, and purchase as much food as I need at the grocery store whenever I need it. When the house of cards comes tumbling down, the WHOLE house of cards will come with it. Of course, our runaway spending will probably topple it before the iron fist of the NSA. But when it does happen, it will hardly matter what the most immediate exciting cause was.

No one, or almost no one, gets that high in the political machine without having some serious skeletons in the closet. And who knows where all those skeletons are hidden? Oh, yeah. The NSA. QED

Actually, the saying is, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." It was H.L. Mencken who said it.

I don't know about that. I'm sure it's been about as successful as J. Edgar Hoover's mid-century communism witch hunts, which had more to do with propping up Hoover's own personal empire than with catching communists.

Then you need to study the history of the 20th Century, and eugenics.

Perhaps the answer is to remember that "information wants to be free," and therefore it's a bad idea to beat up some random guy because he spilled beer on your girlfriend if that's not the kind of reputation you want to have. In the meantime, other people can consider whether this 20-year-old assault charge is or is not relevant to their particular circumstances. If I'm looking to hire somebody where overall emotional sobriety and self control are important, I'd at least want to find out if he'd cooled his temper in the past 20 years. If I'm interested in the guy's credit before I complete a financial transaction with him, I couldn't care less about his 20 year old assault charge.

1. How do you find out about the band in the first place? Fact is, YouTube is the place for a lot of indies to make it big.

2. You haven't visited YouTube in a while, have you? Everybody has their official content there. You can even rent movies there.

"Don't be evil" is the Nobel Peace Prize of corporate slogans: It started out as a sincere, non-ironic effort, and then gradually morphed into the world's best parody of itself.

Bicycle?

You forgot step 1.5 : Login with your username and password that can be easily traced to the traffic, regardless of which physical device you were connected to.

How does it make any sense for Comcast to charge your for extra bandwidth that somebody used on their public WiFi network, not logged in as you? This may be a terrible idea, but not for that reason. Comcast is just using existing equipment to do something other than sit idle. This doesn't seem that nefarious to me. (I'm sure they'll try to prove me wrong later, but for now anyway).

Comcast will be just as liable as they are now. This is not Comcast giving people access to your private network. For this to be even technologically feasible, it's going to have to be configured so that every router broadcasts the same SSID. That means it's going to be a separate virtual network from your home network. So some random guy is not going to be able to log onto your shared folders and print to your printer. If somebody downloads porn, it's going to show that it was some user (with a username and login) that logged into the public Comcast network, and happened to do it from your router. (But more than usual, see my .sig)

That's not true at all, and is a bad analogy. You own your house. If the bank has a mortgage, then they have a lien on the house. If they want to take possession of it, they have to go through a foreclosure proceeding. They can't just walk into your living room and start watching TV. Your house is real property, which has lots of strong protections. Comcast, on the other hand, does own the router that they lease to you, which is a chattel and therefore subject to a different set of rights. No, they can't walk in and just take it (that would violate your real property rights). But they do own the network, and if their contract with you is written in a way that permits them to reconfigure a leased router to grant somebody else access to their network over wireless signals that you're leaking out into the air anyway, then yeah, they can do that.

You act like it's some crazy notion that people in government would covertly collect information on private citizens for purposes of blackmail to "keep them in line"---not because those citizens are breaking any law, but because certain officials deem them to be dangerous to their own personal agendas and power structure. Have you ever heard of a guy named J. Edgar Hoover? Perhaps you should look into that.

No, that's not true. The duty of preservation in a civil lawsuit is entirely different from a search warrant in a criminal investigation. And no, they didn't design the system to comply with the law. If they'd done that, they wouldn't allegedly have so much information that it can't be stored. They should be performing targeted searches related to actual criminal cases and threats to national security, not wholesale data mining on every man, woman, and child in the United States, regardless of how soon they delete it.