China isn't like the USA.
They tend to move purposefully and quickly when goals are set.

In the run up to the Olympics, China unilaterally closed coal power plants, various heavy industries, and took cars off the road, all in a bid to reduce pollution in Beijing.
It took the USA 40 years to tell grandfathered coal plants to either shape up or shut down.
  Compare to China:

The key idea here is that all this is happening unilaterally.
Their actions probably wouldn't even be constitutional in the USA.

This isn't true at all
The President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies.
The Congress has ultimate control of funding for the intelligence agencies.
Further, both houses of Congress have intelligence oversight committees that were formed in the wake of multiple scandals from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of this is new. FISA was written as a direct result of the US Army spying on domestic protests by American citizens.
The domestic and overbroad spying by the NSA is exactly the type of thing that FISA was originally intended to halt.

Every time we pass a law to stop some shitty corporate or military behavior, it gets slowly watered down over the years until it's incapable of meeting its original goals.

I'm not sure why you need a case study to support research that was originally done almost 150 years ago,
but If you'll accept "not allowing the undesirables to breed" as a proxy for "murder them,"
here's a more recent long term study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Or you could just read about Mendel's original research with pea plants and honey bees.

Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements.
And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.

And these are the carefully vetted selectors that are being used to not-spy on Americans.
It might be faster for the NSA to just make a list of the things they haven't publicly lied about.
What a farce.

The NSA will still be sniffing any traffic that crosses US borders.
In fact, the NSA might prefer that you store everything overseas,
as it gives them

I find the idea that Sherpas have a gene that helps them breathe at high altitude a little hard to accept. How long have the sherpas been up there carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers? Sure, they adapted to their environment... but couldn't this be a non-genetic adaptation? Have you seen how fast high-school and college swimmers can swim? Where does their fast swimming gene come from? Fish? Did high school and college students interbreed with fish a whole bunch of semesters ago?

You think bandwidth just grows on trees? Quite obviously, there is a bandwidth crisis. Bandwidth manufacturers are desperately trying to meet the demand with current processses, but they're falling short, which is why we so often have bandwidth outages. This high-profile push button topic inversely correlates to another well known problem no one can figure out how to even begin to solve, the data glut we've been in since our sensory organs evolved.

I can't get the linked PDF to load
This probably isn't the same thing, but it explains what they're trying to do and why
https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-11/Kennedy/BH_US_11_KennedyMuttik_IEEE_Slides.pdf

A bunch of people predicted it. They were ignored.
"Irrational exuberance" Greenspan called it

Here's a website devoted to documenting the people who predicted the bubble
http://investorhome.com/predicted.htm
They even quote Warren Buffet calling derivatives "time bombs."

There is one. Bookmark this in Chrome, same thing.

In the USA, laws are entirely based on trending topics.
Gay marriage is trending, so courts are continually overturning bans.
Marijuana is trending, so States are legalizing.
Women's rights are a perennial issue.

In a sane country, we'd enshrine these changes in the US Constitution, instead of leaving the Supreme Court to decide everything and then Congress or the Executive Branch crafting legislation/regulation in order to comply..

That seems like a reasonable statement to include in the Constitution.
Right?

Some how I doubt that.

I have downloaded before a full version, non-evaluation, fully working copy of RHEL before.... I believe this option still exists for those seeking it, but it is one of those well kept secrets and the link is burried deep somewhere at Red Hat's site. i.e. RHEL can be used for free, without support. It is possible Red Hat may have discontinued this for the "30 day evaluation" variety of free download, and that download link is gone forever, but regardless, Red Hat does not sell operating systems, they sell support, and that is what you pay for that costs. However, CentOS is identical to RHEL and is free to download and use, i.e. costs nothing. Oracle Linux is also RHEL, and also free to download and use, I believe. So no, if you don't pay for the support, using RHEL will cost you nothing.

That's not dumb or anything, but superfluous, considering this exists.

But if you ask the typical user of OS X that never questions anything and always insists on new shiney, any OS older than 2 years old is "obsolete." So this OS is obsolete 10x over!!

disclaimer: I am a UNIX/Linux Windows & OS X systems admin, and prefer OS X for desktop, and even I can't stand the moronic whiney bullshit that the self-proclaimed "expert" mac users puke out... please see comments here to see what I mean, as if you didn't know already.