Interesting take on the difference between a Republic and a Democracy. Given that there is not a single country on earth that has an absolute democracy, you are essentially claiming that governments are either Republics or Monarchies. So China, India and the US are Republics, while the UK, Denmark, The Netherlands are monarchies. None are democracies.

Look up the word 'representative democracy' to understand how silly this distinction is. I know this is doctrine in the US, but it is demonstrably wrong.

He betrayed his country by showing other countries how bad his country was. So he is a traitor. He did this to help his countrymen. So he's a hero.

Something similar goes for the NSA. The are lying about what they do and they're treating the constitution as dirt. So they are traitors. They do this to help their countrymen against terrorist attack. so they are heroes.

Two sides. Both correct to an extent. There is absolutely a middle position here. I'd go with Snowden 80% hero and NSA 70% traitor. Where are you?

RMS has missed the boat. He's working under the assumption that open source code is written by brilliant volunteers that create fantastic software in their spare time. The reality is that the real good open source code is written by brilliant employees on the bosses time. What has happened is that many software corps allow their employees to contribute to open source software. But only if it is relevant to their business. So GPL software takes a backstep because employers are not stupid. Contributing to GPL code will make the work of their employers unusable. So nobody touches GPL software with a ten foot pole. What is done however is letting people, even on their employers time, contribute to MIT, BSD, or Apache license software. As they can sell their solutions using that software.

So, the GPL is dying, if not dead.

I think the point is that they are creating the system that produces welfare recipients, by depending on provably counterproductive moral principles such as abstinence and unlimited procreation in wedlock, regardless of income.

Atheists generally don't go on their knees and pray to a point of light.

I agree with you. However, we're talking about Snowden here, not the heads of the NSA.

I welcome you to see the merit of Brainfuck, Befunge, or any of a plethora of other programming languages that are objectively not suitable to solve any type of problem better than, say, C or Java. So your basic premise is false. It might be that Scala and Lisp both have their objective sweet spots, but it might equally well be that one is better than the other -- if tested correctly.

And BTW, this post was a valid Whitespace program until your renderer ate my tabs.

I agree. But we're talking about Snowden here, not the NSA and the rest of the US government.

I agree. But we're talking about Snowden here, not the head of the NSA.

Where else would he have to go to trial? As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Snowden is just a US dissident. No crime in that.

With secret laws and secret courts in place, there's no telling what will happen to Snowden if he would come back. Try to get a guarantee from someone high up the chain that Snowden would be tried in a court of law. Do you think that will happen? The US is long past the point toward an authoritarian state.

Both sides are equally treasonous, as they play for the same team. Running myself is tricky, as I'm not a good speaker. Also, if everyone would run as themselves, how many votes would each one get? I think your solutions are stale. Democracy has been hacked, and we need to find a way to get it working again.

I think it's even worse. Evolution theory shows that with the right premise (heredity, variation, geographic separation, competition), speciation happens. Simple computer models show that this is the case in that simple mathematical objects will form completely unrelated structures that bear no resemblance to their ancestors or their neighbors, i.e., species. At this point, Creationists are effectively arguing that God is working actively against evolution to occur, as the math shows that it will if the process was left alone.

I haven't however heard a cogent argument why God hates evolution so much to spend so much effort working against it.

They were obviously divinely inspired.

It's actually an interesting point you bring up. With the rendition practices where people are either tortured directly by the CIA overseas or are being handed over to 'friendly' torturers, legally approved water-boarding torture in the US, and who knows what else goes on, the CIA runs the direct risk of what the secret policy in the soviet era has undergone. When the job requirements are such that only thugs like it, only thugs will apply.

I'm pretty sure that this last decade, the CIA has gone through a transformation where people capable of doing actual intelligence work have left the bureau, and mostly people that know how to 'extract' info from others remain. Unfortunately, such info is typically useless, making the CIA just another device for oppression of brown people worshiping the wrong god, as intelligence they will not gather anymore.