In most of the Middle East there is no political freedom. You can't be a politician unless you work for the current government. So they take on the clothes/speach of a devout holy man and do their politics in Gods name. In western nations holy men are expected to refrain from politics, and so we see these men as radical clerics instead of politicians.

It's a bidding war. They are shaking the money tree and finding out who cares the most (dollars) about net neutrality.

No, we need to "Edit" the religion, and stamp out the practices we find incompatible with our culture. Just as was done with Christianity (stoning adulterers and witches, killing homosexuals etc)

Could you set up your own Stingray in a rich neighbourhood and then publish lists of who people call? It's just meta-data, from a public place, right? So fair game to anyone, without needing a warrant.

If they don't decrypt the call, then they can't tell who you call. For a stingray to get meta-data from cell phones it must be able to recover your voice call. A stingray connects to your phone, decrypts everything (including voice), then passes everything on to a real cell phone tower for delivery. It's entirely up to the maker (or the police) what data they take.

What about text messages? You can text people in public without anyone else being able to read your texts.

America was never a strong "Science" country. The education system sucks (on average), the people don't care about science (on average), STEM gets no respect (in general). But America had a secret weapon, money. They could recruit the best and brightest from the whole world and fund the R&D and Apollo projects that nobody else could or would. Now that the money is gone America has to rely on its own capabilities, and that's not looking so good.

Manned space flight is a luxury, the amount spent on it should rise and fall with our economy- Unless we have a specific goal, worth suffering for, to justify a continuing budget. Robotic spaceflight and exploration (actual science) should be continually funded, because it happens over a very long time frame and a gap in funding would ruin the investment.

If you pay people to lie, they will.

The use of mercenaries is bad for a nation. Mercenaries are only loyal to their paycheck, not your country. The Roman empire fell because they switched their military to mercenaries.

1-The second world war taught us that there are no front lines. Even a guard at a war memorial is now a target of attack. 2-There is street cred in being a trained soldier. If you don't get that they have to pay more to attract the talent.

If we don't have jobs then we don't have money. No money means we don't buy anything. (I suppose we could have a subsistance/barter economy) No buying means the corporations go broke. (They still pay taxes so automation won't eliminate their costs) Bankrupt corporations means the Government nationalizes everything. (Yay! Entitlement society means free stuff!) Government can't run everything without money, so they conscript workers. (Communist Russia, here we come)

Quality of life consistently goes up with population density. People in the third world don't leave their farms for the big city because they like the smog.

If Americans wanted to help the Third World out, they could eliminate their agricultural subsidies. That would lift most of Africa out of poverty in a single year.

1- Ban Address spoofing. Every packet from your address will have your IP address overwritten (with correct number) by your ISP. Just being able to find the source of the problem would be huge. Would also stop most spam. 2- Require ISP's to investigate reports of abuse/spam. Not sure how you'd keep the recording companies from abusing this to take down The Pirate Bay. 3- Every ISP would have a banned IP address list. Hopefully there would be a method to get your address removed after you purge the botnet off your home pc.