Who are these three people?

I'm pretty sure that is not true. Do you really think Fox News calls up the White House to ask them how President Obama would like their broadcast today to go? Do you think the Washington Post does?

Your post does not contradict mine.

Getting from Hong Kong to Ecuador (or wherever he was going) without flying over any US or allied territory requires strange routes - just go to a flight booking flight and notice that the returned results mostly involve changes in the USA.

Taking such a route was wise - look at how US allies forced down the presidential jet of a LatAm leader just to search for Snowden.

But I'm really not sure why you're arguing with me about this. What happened to Snowden is a matter of public record, it's not something that's up for debate. He got stuck in Russia because the USA revoked his passport and he then wasn't allowed to board his onward flight. But once it became clear that no plane was safe, not even those with diplomatic immunity, if it flew over any US allied territory, he would have been an idiot to leave anyway because that would have been a direct flight into a lifetime of solitary confinement.

Fox News is the last place anyone would turn to learn about abuses of power by the government, especially with anything related to national security. It is however VERY effective at making it look like there's real accountability and competition in governance, by turning everything into a personal popularity contest between two men who are little more than figureheads.

Congratulations. Your post wins the "who can represent the worst stereotypes about Americans" prize for this thread.

Let's recap. Snowden revealed gross abuses and illegality in your government. Doing this results in the same sort of punishments as it does in many other countries with overly authoritarian leadership: lifetime in jail, as you request. So to do the big reveal you admit is something you "really needed", he had to run. His first choice was Hong Kong, but when it appeared the Chinese might hand him over or keep him jailed for years in diplomatic limbo he decided to go to Latin America, probably Ecuador. He was en-route there when the US Govt revoked his passport, leaving him stranded in Russia which happened to be on the way.

Your post and general mentality have multiple failures, but don't worry, they are correctable.

1. An absurdly strong "us vs them" complex.
2. A garbled and factually incorrect belief about events in very recent history.
3. A desire to see someone who did something "really needed" severely punished because he did it for "the wrong reasons", you of course don't elaborate on what those wrong reasons were. He has stated his reasons many times: he saw illegal behaviour and knew it had led to dangerous territory and serious abuses. He did not do it for personal fame or fortune, as evidenced by the fact that he is now broke and vanished from the scene almost entirely for months after he got let out of the Russian airport. Pretty hard to argue he had the wrong reasons.
4. Finally, a strong quasi-religious belief that the USA is better than Russia, despite the fact that they are both remarkably aggressive and corrupt societies, run by oligarchies, in which democracy is barely functional and anyone who challenges the status quo has to run away lest they end up with a life sentence from a kangaroo court. In addition, the populations of both countries are easily manipulated by telling them how glorious and special they are. There are far more similarities than you dare imagine.

There's a simple fix for your predicament - never use the word "traitor" ever again. It describes a state of fevered flag-waving tribalism which allows your own government to blind you and switch off your critical thinking. The people in power are not better than you or anyone else, they are just ..... the people in power. Your country is not better than other countries, it's just .... the place where you were born. Your rulers deserve no loyalty, no special breaks. They are corrupt and untrustworthy to the core, they need to be watched constantly lest they abuse the powers they were temporarily granted for some purpose or another. You cannot be a traitor to such people, the concept simply has no meaning.

Once you get into this mentality, your recollection of historical events will probably improve.

He didn't choose Moscow. He chose Latin America and got stuck in Russia when the USA revoked his passport. It's the US governments fault he's now in Russia and yet they try and paint him as a traitor who ran to the Russians - yet more US hypocrisy and propaganda.

You wont be arrested for insulting or protesting Obama. You wont be arrested for reporting on his failings; there are huge websites dedicated to it.

Of course you will. The Obama administration has prosecuted journalists and leakers at a far higher rate than before. How is one supposed to report on his failings, if the act of revealing them triggers immediate accusations of being a traitor and guaranteed prosecution? The US based papers who reported the Snowden leaks took big risks to do so, and of course their source is now in exile ...

These propaganda sessions for Putin are pre-staged so Snowden has allowed himself to be used as a "propaganda tool". Considering how freedoms are curtailed in Russia, it seriously deminishes Snowden's reputation.

No it doesn't.

Snowden asked a simple and direct question, as is the norm at Putin's Q&A sessions (he does them with press corps too). Putin gave a simple and direct answer. Whether you believe the answer is a lie or not, it's a question that anyone could have asked and got the same response.

Also, do you actually know these sessions are entirely pre-staged? Can you give a cite for that? Putin had to ask for help with a translation of Snowden's question, why would he make himself look linguistically weak like that if it was all pre-staged and he already knew the question was coming? Far better for him to look fluent.

Are you kidding?

What's going on in places like Yemen and Afghanistan where lots of people are heavily armed is exactly the reason widespread gun ownership in the USA makes no sense. You can't beat modern governments by having lots of people own light weapons, it's a stupid idea. If one lone gunman decides the Feds have overstepped and takes them on, he ends up shot or committing suicide and being described as mentally ill (was he? hard to tell now he's dead). If a group of people try to build a conspiracy to attack government installations the NSA will find them and they'll be prosecuted for terrorism or simply vanished before they even make the first move.

The second amendment is obsolete and should just be deleted entirely. The USA is quite clearly not Switzerland, which has a notable absence of mass shootings. A heavily armed population has not stopped the US Govt sliding more and more towards full-blown authoritarianism, nor is it going to. So there are no benefits to this rule. Other countries that got serious about gun control have seen positive results over the long term (eg UK and Australia)

I was going to suggest going North Korean on his ass. Death by mortar fire, death by flame thrower or death by hungry dogs? It's just so damned hard to choose.

What if Sprint or T-Mobile buy that spectrum? AT&T already tried to buy T-Mobile and was shot down by the DOJ, so it's silly to think that the big two could buy either T-Mo or Sprint in order to get that spectrum. With set-asides, T-Mobile and Sprint are in effect having their cost of doing business being subsidized by taxpayers, which - depending on your view of competition in cellular - may or may not be worth your taxpayer dollar.

Technically, it is a more like a very long term lease rather than a perpetual sale. Ultimately, those frequencies are still under the discretion of the FCC to allocate or revoke subject to certain conditions.

To answer your question about why carriers don't "rent" it annually, it's because there is an ecosystem around those frequencies that require huge multi-year investments. Let's say that you're carrier X and you just bought the rights to the LTE "C Block" frequencies. You need to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of LTE equipment that runs is the C Block, site your towers to match the RF propagation characteristics of that particular frequency band, have all your smartphone vendors that you commit to buy XXX millions of units from have their devices support that spectrum block, etc. etc. Every radio band that you add to a piece of tower equipment costs money, and adding additional bands to phones takes up motherboard space and adds extra costs, so on both sides there is a monetary cost to supporting additional spectrum bands.

If you could lose that spectrum next year to another bidder - you have literally spent hundreds of millions of $$$ on equipment and devices that are worthless to you - or, worse - are only worthwhile to customers who will use the network of your competitor who just bought that spectrum. If carriers could not lock up spectrum blocks long term, the uncertainty would mean that they would pay far, far less for it, so the government would extract far less money from them for that spectrum. So "selling" the spectrum under long-term leases means more $$$ for the government vs. trying to "rent" it year-to-year.

Here's the problem: the more customers you have, the more spectrum you need. If you have lots of spectrum today and continue to grow, then you will need more tomorrow. If Verizon and AT&T had more and enough to spare, do you think they would be lining up to shell out $X billions of dollars for this instead of improving next quarter's profits? Given Slashdot's consensus that all corporations are obsessed with short term returns, why would the mega-carriers be shelling out huge sums of cash that could otherwise be pocketed by shareholders or executives if they didn't actually need it?

The true situation is that all carriers, big or small, can use more spectrum to increase their LTE spectral efficiencies and decrease cost per bit/customer and increase capacity. It's an interesting quandary for the FCC. AT&T and Verizon can and will pay more for the spectrum to be auctioned. That means US taxpayers get more money, which is what is supposed to happen when the government is selling public airwaves. If the government reserves some of that spectrum for smaller carriers, it fosters competition at the cost of getting paid less for that spectrum than (by market demands) it should have - in effect, subsidizing the operations of these smaller carriers at the expense of taxpayers. Do you as a taxpayer want to in effect provide free profits to Sprint or T-Mobile's shareholders - even if you don't use those carriers - because you think it's good that they are around to provide more competition? That's the fascinating question that makes this debate interesting since it has no objectively correct answer: where is the right balance between taxpayer duty and fostering competition?

That may be true in some countries, but not in America.

In America you have to actively refuse help in order to be in continual pain or homeless.

I HAVE been poor, there is no excuse for hunger or suffering in the US, there are programs to help.

The problem is not that they are poor, its that they don't want to be helped, the reason for this could be any number of things from simple depression to severe mental disorders, but it IS NOT because help is unavailable.

A severe tooth abscess can be handled by the ER if its that bad and no publicly funded ER will turn down you down, its illegal. I know, I've been in EXACTLY that spot. And for reference, alcohol does pretty much nothing at all for tooth pain, you're far better off packing clove powder around it to numb it and treat the infection than drinking yourself silly, unless you drink enough to pass out ... in which case you have to stay drunk or the sobering up process will be FAR worse.