What changed everything was the ability to operate beyond visual range - that was really limiting.

How so? In America, Net Neutrality is regarded as a communist plot!

It does have the shape of those weeble-wobble inflatable punching bags we had as kids, doesn't it?

Thank god for China or you couldn't even buy a Inflatable Disney Princess Punching Bag any more!

The summary is misleading anyways. Greenwald does dismiss the possibility of true reform from US legislation anytime soon. But he says:

Those limitations are going to come from-are now coming from very different places:

1. 1. Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy.

In that section, it does say: "Instead, these changes are taking place because these companies are petrified that the perception of their collaboration with the NSA will harm their future profits, " from which the entire summary is evidently gleaned.

But he continues with a section on each of the following:

2. Other countries taking action against U.S. hegemony over the internet

3. U.S. court proceedings. A U.S. federal judge already ruled that the NSA's domestic bulk collection program likely violates the 4th Amendment...

4. Greater individual demand for, and use of, encryption

Obviously I left out a lot. But IMHO the summary is a big misrepresentation of the overall article.

I also don't see the article that representative government is a "lost cause," only that as things stand, America is a long, long way from getting meaningful reform out of today's Congress. (Hard to argue otherwise, is it not? Congress now legislates almost not at all. They don't even confirm Federal judges. )

Alternately, these might be Wal-Mart employees who've figured out how earn more than $15/hr by taking a cut of the fake savings, without appearing overtly guilty. At least, you for one are eager to assume they're too dumb to be guilty, which is probably true of their bosses also.

This is basically just price-tag switching. In the olden days of stick-on price tags it wasn't considered terribly clever to do this!

...leaving free fall gravity, finding another, landing on it, and taking off again to come back, all w/ people on board? That is a HECK of a lot harder.

I didn't say it wasn't - exploration is a succession of progressively more challenging objectives, and what the US accomplished in 1969 was certainly more advanced than what the USSR accomplished in 1957.

Picking one point in a never-ending evolution and calling the leader at that point "the winner (of all time)" is inherently rather false. But if you're going to do that, my argument is that putting the first object into orbit (or the first man in orbit - also USSR) compete very well as most significant firsts. At least, simply mentioning only the moon as if it's the only first that really counts strikes me as a bit silly.

Defining The Race as walking on the moon in the first place is also a construct that conveniently places us in first. The more significant "first" was not a person walking on the moon, but getting into orbit at all - a race, obviously, in which we finished second. The reason I say this is because we rely on satellites every day for many things (communications, GPS, weather forecasting, spying, hubble) whereas humans in space has no real applications for the foreseeable future. So, if we "won the space race," it is only due to anthropocentrism.

Minecraft allows people to run their own servers, for free, and is doing awfully well.

Online-membership-only is killing gaming for me. I'm not paying $120/year, forever, to link up my XBox 360s to play with my son sitting across the room. (I scrounge for games that support system link, but there are hardly any.) Nor am I going to watch a bunch of commercials before every game (mobile gaming). The deal is, I pay money for a game, which I can then play as much as I like. Take it or leave it. They're leaving it.

That's where we get it too!

Truffles, saffron, vanilla, good cheeses etc. all of which are very expensive comparatively.

In fact, very few people (globally) have the privilege of eating actual vanilla!

The aggregate global demand for real vanilla is estimated at 2,000 MTs per year, primarily for high-quality vanilla flavoring. Between 1965 and 1989, world consumption grew at an average annual rate of 2 percent. Between 1980 and 1989, demand expanded rapidly particularly in the United States, where it grew at 7 percent a year in volume. In Europe, the rate of consumption was more modest: 2-3 percent. Highest consumption per capita is found in Denmark (4.57 grams), the United States (3.85 grams), France (2.54 grams), and Canada (1.00 grams). Synthetic vanillin accounts for more than 90 percent of the U.S. vanilla flavoring market and about 50 percent of the French market (the lowest national share). One ounce of artificially produced vanillin has roughly the same flavoring power as a gallon of natural vanilla extract. Synthetic vanillin costs one-hundredth the price of the natural product and not only substitutes for vanilla but also supplements adulterated vanilla extracts.

I don't eat many store-bought baked goods because my wife and daughters like to cook and home-made tastes so much better! But you can't help but notice some of the ingredients cost real money. It costs a fortune to buy commercially-made equivalents with real vanilla and real butter and so on, and you never know when they will start cheating on you.

Taking your time in handing out a highly questionable tax break is pretty far from what blatant censorship actually looks like.

Ah, I was wondering, since MIRV ICBMs were developed in the late 1960's.

Also, bundles of cubesats launched in a P-POD.

If you haven't seen the documentary Last Train Home about the struggles of being a seasonal worker in China and getting home to visit your family once a year, I highly recommend it. For anybody who thought the overcrowded dystopian future feared in the 1970's failed to occur, China is one place where it already did.

Ha ha, welcome to America, land of the Free, where your actions and movements are never tracked. Laughable.

Just 20 years ago, I honestly believed that if we started to get security cameras everywhere like Great Britain was doing, they would just get shot out all the time. I actually thought that.