"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

Setting up the infrastructure for a total surveillance state is simply beyond the pale. What Snowden has done is what any true American should have done. The machine that government is setting up must be stopped dead in its tracks while there is still time, or there will be no stopping it. And there will be no United States of America after that, only a spot on the map infringing a trademark. Snowden is a true patriot.

If King George had had the NSA, you'd all be speaking proper English.

Oh, yeah. He's living the life of Riley, in exile, over in Russia—where the toilets don't even flush. Surely, this was all a career move.

I find it remarkable that people fault Snowden for breaking the law but give a pass to the many in government, from the president and the last president on down, who break the law every day by operating unlawful, unconstitutional, un-American programs that put this entire nation and everything it stands for at risk in a way that no terrorist can. Let Obama stand trial. Let Bush. Let Cheney. Let the lawyers and cabinet members with their "secret interpretation" of the Patriot Act. Let Dianne Feinstein for her round-heeled sycophancy towards our intelligence agencies. Let that bastard Hayden and everyone else at the NSA. Let them all stand trial first.

Get your priorities straight. Snowden should stand trial no more than George Washington.

Let me guess...YOU live in the nation with the trustworthy government [...]

What's your point, seriously? Who cares! Look, I'm an American. I really don't give a shit what other countries do, and I don't care if they want to criticize us about this. It's really neither here nor there. Our government is doing something very wrong, something that undermines the whole American Experiment—irrevocably. That's the real topic of conversation here.

Frankly, with the way things are in this country, I hope it begins to pinch our wallets. It's the only way most Americans, from the corporate bigwigs to the politicians to the straphangers and soccer moms in the suburbs, ever take anything seriously. People need to wake up.

The question is, is the damage done greater than the damage prevented.

In a free country, such Utilitarian arguments take place only within the ruling principle of liberty. We don't weigh the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments against some kind of first year philosophy student's bullshit session. We've established a constitutional framework for very good reasons.

Those familiar with the C programming language will recognize that the first goto fail is bound to the if statement immediately preceding it; the second is executed unconditionally.

Sorry, but it needs to be said: this is sloppy, he-man coding. Is there a problem with using brackets? Is it your carpal tunnel syndrome? Are you charged by the keystroke?

This is how mistakes happen. For shame!

Next on the agenda, we clone Jem'Hadar and become galactic overlords.

I just left a job where we produced POS and back office software for specialty retailers and saw the same thing. The lock-in is just incredible when you're running a nationwide chain with X-number of registers. I think a customer was running Windows 98 on a box with 128 MB of RAM. In fact, if anything you worry about customers looking to upgrade, because if they're going to have to spend all the money to buy new hardware, they're going to reevaluate their software as well, and perhaps choose another vendor.

If I had to fail foreign languages, everyone else can fail a couple of semesters of computer programming.

This general attitude contributes significantly to what is wrong with this world.

Number one, the individuals who earn their money own their money; it's not "society's" money. So, reducing the taxes on any bracket is in no way at the expense of any other bracket. No bracket—no individual, actually—has a claim on any other. You know what would be a good idea? Stop spending so much money in the first place.

Number two, direct representation in the Senate undermines our federal system. You want to argue whether or not the Senate should be elected by the people or by the states, that's fine. But to just rule it out is to whitewash the centralization of governmental power that's been happening for something like the last 100 years. Some of us are not at all happy about that.

Now we all get to be Speed Racer!

You obviously don't understand what they are trying to do here. They are trying to make it harder for shit teachers to become un-fireable. Right now, once a professor gains tenure, it becomes ridiculously hard to fire him or her. In other words, once you gain tenure, you basically can't be fired for any reason short of breaking the law. The current regulations allow for crap teachers to continue teaching even when their students do not learn anything of value. This lawsuit is trying to change that by allowing newer professors to stay and by having the crap professors fired first.

I took the liberty of adding in capital letters, properly punctuating contractions, and mildly tweaking an awkwardly written and ungrammatical sentence.

I just realized that, if I follow the author's argument about decoding rather than reading, James Joyce's two major works don't qualify as literature.