News to me considering the founders of the United States fought a war partially over this. Ever hear of the Bill of Rights?

Irrelevant to what? His stated purpose was to make the public aware of what the NSA was doing so that there can be a public discussion rather than a backroom one. For that purpose, his leaks are highly relevant,

10Mbps for broadband is garbage now.

The constitution was never meant to be imutable; it was meant to be supreme. Because it is supposed to be supreme, the rules for modifying are much greater than the rules for creating/modifying lesser laws. The problem is that many of the government's parts do not want to treat it as supreme because it is so hard to modify. They would rather do what they think they can get away with constitutional or not.

Not sure you second statement is true. By opening the patents of his super charging systems, it encourages other parties to put up more stations. This would make Teslas more enticing to prospective buyers. Sometimes, pro-society and pro-profit are not mutally exclusive.

The point is that if a flaw exists, when found, it can be quickly fixed in open source. You can also do your own security audit on open source software if you are really security conscious. With closed source, you have to wait for the vendor to both find and fix it (if they ever do). That said, assuming the vendor is trustworthy and would rather shut down than backdoor their software, heavily auditted close source software could easily be more secure than lightly audited open source software. If the audit levels are the same, open source wins. Part of the problem is that until recently a lot of open source security software/libraries like OpenSSL have not gone though enough auditting and vunerabilities are overlooked.

A whistle blower's exclusion of their name is likely only going to protect them for so long. It is better to be seen as a hero than just to disappear or be cleverly murdered one night. Also, revealing themself as a source adds validity to the information leaked.

I would argue that having any government move to open source is good for everyone. I don't know if it will be cheaper but I do think it will like give the people more bang for their buck. Instead of those dollars going into one person's pockets, they can not only still be used to solve the government's software problems but also provide software libraries and frameworks for other to bulid off of.

But what if they don't get squished? Think about the intelligient alien species that might be on the other side! Do you really want to curse another intelligent species with such a disease?

What's funny is that a lot of thiests probably thing the same thing about you.

Until the last human dies, the pig species will survive, because we like bacon.

While I don't know what made Minecraft initially popular, I think its prolonged success was a happy accident. Notch decided to write the Minecraft client and server in Java which is a relatively easy to decompile language. This encourage a few hacker types to make their own mods. This eventually evolved into third-party mod APIs like Bukkit and Forge which further encouraged third-party content. I don't know what the percentages are but I would guess there is a lot more people playing modded Minecraft than vanilla Minecraft. Since there is not an official modding API, I don't think Minecraft would be nearly as popular today if it had been written in C or C++ because there would much less likely be such a rich modding community for the game.

Also, since the entity that is issuing the tickets also has no say on whom that funds are allocated to, there is a much smaller chance of corruption. Unfortunately, where money is involved. There is always a chance of corruption. I suppose the government could lie on how much ticket revenue they bring in.

The points was to split the entity that is issuing tickets from the entity that is benefitting from them. Right now, they are, more or less, one and the same.

I think all funds generated through traffic tickets should go to an untouchable fund. Once a year citizens of the jurisdiction have the options of submitting a charity in which they would like the funds to go. Once the submissions are counted, the fund is split amoung the submitted charities based on the percentage split of the submissions, That way government jurisdictions can't use traffic violations as a means of funding.