He's the one who went there in the first place, though. And he certainly didn't come back to face the music once he realized Russia was the only country that would harbor him.

The difference between Snowden and an actual whistleblower is that whistleblowers are willing to face the consequences of their actions. The fact that people make Snowden and Assange out to be heroes makes me want to projectile vomit on them.

I tend to think that Snowden's probably just not that bright, and Russia was the only place he could escape the consequences of his actions.

I have no issue with ignorant people. Ignorance, in and of itself, doesn't hurt anyone else.

Besides, this isn't ignorance. When you're provided the information, and you still reject it in favor of your own fantasies, you've moved from ignorance to obstinacy.

... my "people are idiots" theory.
Can we just take all the anti-vaccine people and put them on an island, and wait for them to die out? Antarctica is a research area, right?

We only can only observe part of the universe anyway, right?

If there's structure everywhere we look in the universe, maybe it's the multiverse that's uniform. (Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist of any type. I'm just thinking out loud here.)

If I only had mod points for you. :)

Well said. There's a serious credibility gap that seems to grow every day.

The problem I have with this scenario is that this is the president's baby. I don't see why he wouldn't demand regular progress reports and/or demos to people he trusted.

I've been involved in a few website roll-outs. I've mostly done UAT testing and bug hunting. Why wasn't the site sufficiently stress-tested? Why were their multiple companies being dealt with, rather than the government simply picking a Web designer and saying, "Build this site"? And how did it happen that they picked a vendor so shady that they would hide major problems with the website rather than saying, "Look, we need more time"? It's not as if Web projects always run on schedule. The website being delayed would be the most ordinary thing in the world.

It just seems to me like the administration left it up to HHS, and HHS didn't exercise any diligence at all - let alone due diligence.

I can't really imagine the NSA spying on him, but I could certainly imagine political enemies wanting to do it. :)

I would hope that spying on another country's leader isn't something the U.S. would do as a matter of course - especially if that leader was an ally. How could something like that be done and the president not be told? It's an incredibly risky venture (as we can see now).

Spying on an Afghan leader might be just as bad morally, but it has nothing like the same international diplomacy consequences.

I can buy that, but spying on a world leader - and an ally - sounds like something that could get you into a sh*tstorm of trouble. It's hard for me to believe they wouldn't have to run that kind of thing up the food chain. We're not talking about spying on some Afghani village leader here.

Well, yes. Obviously if they spy on Obama, they're not going to tell Obama. :)

This isn't a surprise, right? I mean, what are the odds that the NSA would spy on a leader of another country and the president of the United States not even know it's going on? It sounds laughable to me.

I had Vista when it first came out. I never thought it was total crap, but it was more cumbersome than it should've been. They screwed up the user rights. Not every little thing you do should have required UAC. Plus, while I didn't have this problem, they should've done more with hardware compatibility.

The way Microsoft has positioned Windows 8 is just moronic, as far as I can tell. One version for the desktop, one version for tablets, and don't mess with the frigging Start Menu. Seriously, how hard would that have been? Now you've got millions of users for whom Windows 8 is a joke, because they don't have touchscreen monitors on their PCs, and worse, they put out two different versions of Windows 8 for tablets, one of which is just slightly less useful than a Cracker Jack toy.