I'm very honest and direct with the people who work with and for me. And yet magically I'm not an asshole like Linus. If you're incapable of delivering an honest and direct message without abusing people, then you're a shitty human being.

Honest and direct: "This is not good enough. The logic is flawed and the code is sloppy. Go back and do it again".
Asshole: "How fucking stupid do you have to be to write something like this crap".

See the difference?

If anyone spoke to another person in our office the way Linus does, he'd be taking his teeth home in a paper sack.

Linus has the protection of the intarwebz to prevent him from suffering the natural consequences of treating people the way he does.

Man, that happens to me all the time. One time, I reached for the skim milk and accidentally drank a 40oz bottle of vodka.

Another time, I was making a peanut butter sandwich and accidentally injected heroin into an artery.

Someone should pay!

Let us know when you figure out a good definition for "non-hostile" and a way to determine which countries are, and will always remain, non-hostile.

Wait, so you think that the details of legal (your presumption in this case) intelligence gathering operations should somehow be "transparent"?

How exactly do you imagine that working?

There of course needs to be government/legislative/judicial oversight, but by definition successful covert intelligence operations can't be transparent to the general public.

If I could, I would repeal the internal combustion engine, for it has lead to the scourge of drunk driving which claims thousands of lives a year. Sure, people claim that the infernal explodo box is valuable because it makes possible the rapid transport of people and goods around the world, but won't someone think of the children?

Life was better back in the day. Bah Humbug.

I always love how people simultaneously believe that the NSA is so technically brilliant that it can collect and analyze every message sent by every random person on earth, but also so stupid that they name their secret backdoor key _NSAKEY.

I'm not sure anyone here can help you with that. Have you considered seeking a sense of humour transplant?

Shame on you for harming future generations of girl coders! I must tweet your picture and publicly shame you!!!!

In this case, they are "wiretapping" in much the same way that I am "wiretapping" the comments on this forum.

Without talking about what the US government is doing, I would just point out that what is nonsensical in the original post is that monitoring what people say on Twitter isn't "wiretapping" any more than reading what you chose to post on this forum is "wiretapping".

Civil rights may well be under attack, but not by people looking at a Twitter or Instagram stream, looking for comments about where protests are being held.

In this case, the OP if full of shit

Oh good grief. They didn't declare Iceland to be "terrorist".

They used a law called the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (note how two of those three things aren't "terrorist") to freeze the assets of an Icelandic bank branch in the UK. They did so under provisions of the law that involve preventing actions harmful to the UK economy.

One can certainly question whether this was warranted or not, but it had nothing to do with terrorism. Nice try though.

I was an immortal for a long time on a MUD and this never happened. We were very careful who became an immortal (i.e. not everyone who reached max level) and none of us except the creators had any kind of filesystem access. I had access to the build system and immortal game mechanics, but you'd have to be an idiot to give everyone who reached max level access to your code base.

While I agree with the sentiment, part of the problem is that it now takes hundreds of people to create the current semi-static MMO environment and keep it running while occasionally adding new content. To create the kind of constant-flux world environment you are talking about would be at least an order of magnitude harder, what with the need to be constantly adjusting everything for the new realities on the ground. It would be astronomically expensive to build and maintain, and I can't begin to imagine the nightmare that would be QA testing.

I can't imagine what you'd have to charge monthly to maintain such a world, while competing with free-to-plays.