Higher than it would ever be if no one had ever illegally leaked.

True, but that's not what the parent is talking about. The parent is saying that the likelihood of change if Snowden had blown the whistle legally was very low. Unfortunately there seems to be no public knowledge of "the many who have tried before him" to validate whether or not the parent is accurate.

In Soviet Russia, nukes use you for power.

You mean, we pay to ship it to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina because we never could agree on a permanent storage solution at Yucca Mountain. We won't be completely rid of it for many, many years.

Until the 1600s, the common interpretation was that those were not literal days. The Hebrew word used has an alternate meaning as "a period of time", and the passage uses it before the sun is created. Young Earth is a relatively new interpretation within Christianity.

Facebook allows a granularity of advertising targeting that was hard to get before. For example, I've been involved in a community organizing effort that had trouble getting media attention and had no real budget for advertising, and I've found that $50 in Facebook advertising targeted to our zipcode got us about ~5000 views and ~150 clicks. That was about as much participation as we got in months of free community newspapers articles, and we largely hit a different audience.

My first thought was that someone was open sourcing a fictional implementation of the Point of View Gun from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

If you make such a statement AND the case goes to trial, then absolutely you should expect something like this. Why? The posed question is supposedly asked by the prosecution and phrased to get this exact response. The question is not, "Read me the transcript of the interview." It is up to the defense to present the other side of the case. This is the way the system is designed to work, and it is a reason to have a competent attorney, not a reason to make fundamental changes to the system.

If you had a circle (as opposed to a chain) of predator/prey relationships with strengths and weaknesses that balance, then there would be a chance at stability, but that seems like a very remote possibility, not a normal combination.

This reminds me a lot of the problems that differential equations model. We have a complex system with inputs and outputs, steady states and extremes. If we knew every bot in the system, perhaps we could model it and tell where the steady states and extremes are, maybe modify the rules to make it safer. But we can't unless we register every bot, review them, and regulate every deployment these firms do on their systems. It would be nearly impossible to get anything done.

If it were up to me, I'd outlaw electronic trading algorithms completely. Too dangerous to have unknown systems governing our markets. If a tall building didn't have this kind of modeling done to determine that it wouldn't blow over in a strong wind, we'd never let it be built. Our stock market with the savings of most of our country and many around the world, on the other hand....

What will they call it? AArdvark?

If you're looking at voters and not politicians, yes, it was a mass migration. If you are looking at politicians, then you're right they mostly died off. Not many politicians survive politically long enough for it to be an issue. How many southern politicians do you think were relevant at the state level or higher all the way from the 40s pre-civil-rights-movement (Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 over the racial split) to the 80s when the Reagan Democrats consolidated the swing in voting patterns? Thurmond and Byrd are about the only 2 that I can name.

As a southerner, I can say from talking with my parents and others of their generation, as well as reading the historical data, yes they did flock en masse from the Democrats to the Republicans. While there was certainly a racist aspect for some (particularly in the 60s), there was also a moral aspect (a dominating factor after Roe v. Wade). A few Dems like Byrd did survive, but others made the switch like Sen. Strom Thurmond of my home state.

It appears that what is happening is that the government is applying pressure to anyone who enables communication in a way where the government cannot detect who is talking to whom. This is a logical extension of the methods that Snowden leaked. He showed that they already have full coverage of the metadata of phone calls, texts, emails, and webpage views routed through the US. The leaks have pressured the US to close the loops. This is a very dangerous threat to our Constitutional rights. Secrecy does not equal guilt, and our founders went to great lengths to enshrine that principle in our Bill of Rights.

In Republicrat America, if rail were popular you'd have to get there an hour or more in advance too, because someone just might want to hurt someone else.