To bear the blame if things go wrong. Oh, you want quality? Sorry, in the modern everything-must-be-done-yesterday-at-no-cost IT sector, quality is usually not an option. There's no market for quality.

They left a message: "So long, and thanks for all the plastic"

Well, they did not send an X-Do-Not-Spy HTTP header, so they obviously agreed.

That's the problem of politics today: when so much money is at stake, it is plainly impossible to put that money where your mouth is. It literally doesn't fit...

"You have just been erased."

They don't. They operate at different levels, so they may be listening to an extra "backup" data flow. I rather think they use each other. It is too convenient for "intelligence" agencies not to tap into the already existing camera and audio feed from another spy.

There, fixed that for you. By the way, that is a good thing for an actual economy, as it is stopped from drowning, draught, etc. Some of these fairy tales are already fairly convincing.

Indeed. It was probably the mortgage bubble that was responsible for this.

Well, you may laugh about that, but in the past that is exactly what happened, and we try to cover it up now in scientific circles.

It took a religious liberation to stop people to adhere to ancient texts that could only be interpreted by priests. People started looking for the Creator by investigating the creation. This religiously motivated search has added tremendously to science. For example, the Frederik Ruysch collection in the KunstKammer in St Petersburg is from that period.

Alas, we like to think that science is "neutral", just observing and deducing. Any other motives are left out of the educational system. So we learn that Newton saw an apple falling and wrote his laws. And then deduce Kepler's laws from them. It actually was the other way around: Kepler thought that the creation had to be "harmonic" and therefore brilliantly simple. So planet movements could not be governed by more than second order formulas. That (and being brilliant in measurement of position of celestial bodies) led him to discover his laws, from which Newton derived his.

Now I am not in favour or against religion, but I am very much against rewriting history. Especially in science. Some problems are much easier solved with one school of thought than with another. For example, Pythogoras' theorem is easily solved with greek math, and very hard with arabic math. Even schools of thought that you might considered "flawed" can accidentally yield insightful results. Suppressing any school of thought in science is a crime to science itself, and making even making science into a form of religion (with believers in "neutrality").

At least, thanks to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, we know that Earth is a Vega. Or has that theory been busted as well?

Ah. We have a new film title: The Resuscitator.

Finally a "slime mold" can be made by putting slime into a mold.

You say it yourself: your crime is forgotten in real life. Only if one knows where to look and take a lot of trouble, it could be found again. Not so with Google. Heck, I could just type in the name of a village and find the article describing a domestic murder from 20 years ago. That is way different. Information can hurt. Even information that is not true.

So if the NSA now knows of backdoors, it must inform the military so they can be patched, who will then be forced to publish the fixes. Right?