Software developers (especially at Google and Apple) do not make "at, or less, than minimum wage"; this is absolutely absurd. According to sfgate.com the average salary in San Francisco right is $110,950 for application developers and slightly higher for systems developers.

According to the same link, food service workers make and average of $22,180 a year in San Francisco. That's a very wide income gap, indeed.

So engineers at some companies work long hours, so what? Most engineers (myself included) love the work they do, and it's a far cry from working multiple jobs with little or no benefits to barely be able to feed your family and be unable to afford a nice place to live.

The time and place for activism: somewhere with a lot of impact and that probably means it should be extremely disruptive to a lot people. Sure it's a pain in the ass to have your commute screwed up by striking transit employees or something like this bus protest. But that's a cost of democracy, and we're all better off if people are free to protest and to be disruptive. Without disruption, protests are too easily ignored and the power of the masses is too easily constrained. To hell with "free speech zones" and protest permits. I agree that protestors shouldn't overdo it, or they'll lose the support of the masses. Unfortunately in the US, they rarely get any support at all. People cling to their sense of entitlement and have no willingness to stomach some inconvenience for the sake of the greater good.

I agree wholeheartedly. This program was a joke as a piece of journalism. It was just an extended advertisement for the NSA, with no counterpoints to anything that they presented. 60 Minutes has noticeably gone downhill.

In my experience, if I don't recline the seat about half way, I get serious back pain over the course of the flight. This is because the part of the seat with the headrest that angles forward is usually at the top of my back, which forces me to sit angled forward with my back at an awkward angle. So a very tall person's knees may hurt, but also consider some people may get back pain without reclining the seat.

We'll I'd mod you up if I could. I'm going to have to read up on this process (and stop spreading FUD)...

Any time I hear about underground CO2 sequestration, I think about the Lake Nyos Incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos Pumping mass amounts of CO2 underground would be a disaster waiting to happen.

I love the idea of bitcoin. In principle an anonymous, decentralized currency would be a very cool thing to have.

But its implementation is flawed in a way that will prevent it from being a useful currency. Here's a couple good articles that explains a few reasons why (there are many such articles out there by various economists):

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/bitcoin-is-no-longer-a-currency/274859/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/adam-smith-hates-bitcoin/?_r=0

I'm ready for a another attempt with the same goals as Bitcoin.

I agree with most of your points a great deal; that was a very concise summary of the greatest problems facing democracy in the US. The 4th point though, I don't agree with. If your other points were implemented and restricted the income sources of our elected officials while they are in office, I don't think they would need term limits.

Imagine if politicians could not keep any income that exceeds their government salary while in office, with some additional restrictions to prevent revolving-door type abuses. Then I would be OK with career politicians, because they would clearly be in the game for public service and not personal gain.

The energy industry need not be self sustaining. It can be run by the government as a public service and paid for entirely with taxes. No more govt sponsored energy monopolies.

This is exactly the direction we need to move in. That would be comparable to how medicare controls costs, while non-medicare patients get screwed by hospitals charging whatever they want. The gov't should dictate what Universities are allowed to charge in tuition to _all_ students, and also require that a certain percentage of the student body be from lower income brackets (and these disadvantaged student could pay even less).

Additionally, the government should limit how much employees of non-profit universities are allowed to be paid. It is very common to have university administrators making millions of dollars a year at so-called "non profit" universities. Sorry, you shouldn't be able to run a non-profit (tax-exempt) institution and also make yourself filthy rich.

Parse their words. They are denying a very pointed question that wasn't asked. They are all saying, "We don't allow the government direct access to our servers" This isn't the denial you think it is.

THIS. Notice that all their responses are very similar. They may have even asked the government "the press is asking about PRISM, how should we respond to this?"

"Direct access to our servers" could mean a lot of things, for example, they could be copying user data directly to NSA servers, and their statement would still be true.

Naginata have a long tang, which make them more durable than many of the Western polearms, not to mention the legendary sharpness from the Japanese blade-making process...

Assuming you were being sarcastic: compared to what, the US? Yes we certainly have a "vibrant, healthy workforce" (such great healthcare, such great labor rights)! And isn't it great that our government doesn't have any funding concerns right now like those darned Europeans...

On second thought... can't be per copy sold, for an expensive gun that's more than the 10% of gross we originally found incredulous.

I was skeptical about that statement as well. After re-reading it a few times I think they were trying to say that the license fee is 5-10% of the retail price of the gun they wish to license. Whether that fee is assessed per game published or per copy of the game sold wasn't clear...

Except unlike terrorism, guns actually kill a whole lot of people in the US every year; the threat of gun violence is clearly not just FUD.