You could agree and then record/watch lots of Teletubbies or Barney Miller reruns while you aren't home. That will shew their data and maybe they will eventually give up.

Add to that, slavery was totally acceptable mere fractions of an eon ago. People still hunt (kill animals for no need) for sport the the pleasure of killing. We purposely dump our waste into the oceans because its easy.

I wonder if they are taking into account whether the people involved will want to procreate with each other. Just because there are enough bodies to maintain adequate diversity, doesn't mean everyone will happily pair up to make that happen. That is a much more difficult calculation. That being said, if you have a short list of potential breeding partners, some people will become less picky.

"False imprisonment.
Failure to read miranda rights."

School in general could be classified as "False imprisonment". That's its nature when you are a minor. You can't leave because you want to. You generally have to even ask if you can go to the bathroom!

You only need to have your miranda rights read when you are under arrest. To my knowlege, she was never under arrest.

"There are far too many stories of people getting out of the ghetto or out of the mining town"

While we could theoretically have everyone escape the ghettos, we need some people left in the mining towns. Without someone mining coal, rare earth metals, salt, etc we wouldn't have the world we live in today. Same goes for people working in McDonalds and other menial jobs. What if everyone maximized their education? We would still need garbagemen, people working the checkout at grocery stores, miners, movie theater ticket salespeople, and people doing all the other basic tasks to keep the world working like it is today. Then what? Do we pay them all poverty level money still, or do they make a living wage?

"most of those crimes are committed with guns that are not purchased legally, registered, or anything else of the sort"

Where do these guns come from? I would assume they were originally purchased legally, but then sold illegally, stolen, or lost. If that is the case, then keeping them unavailable would keep them out of the bad guys' hands via this trickle down phenomona. I'm not sure how to explaing their (illegally purchased weapons) origins otherwise, unless there are illegal gun factories making illegal weapons to sell/give to criminals that the police aren't aware of.

"How many acres of hard drives would it take to store everyone's cellphone conversations?"

That can be answered with a few assumptions and some basic math.

First, let's say "everyone" consists of all US citizens. Let's say there are 320M citizens in the US. Let's add another 30 million tourists and/or illegal aliens bringing the total to 350M.

Now let's say everyone talks to each other 1 hour per day on average. That would total 175M hours of conversation to record per day, or 10,500,000,000 minutes. MP3 can easily store about 1Mb/minute. Therefore, it would take about 10,500Mb or 10Pb per day to store every conversation for a day. That would mean you need ~ 3650Pb to store a year's worth of conversations. That could be stored on about 1M 4 TB drives. If you can get them for $200 a pop, that could be bought for about $200M plus the hardware to park them in. I suspect you could do this where it's searchable, raided, and usable for well under $400M and store it all in a medium sized facility. It would take about 4000 racks to store it all, but that could be a 62x62 configuration. To answer the original question, this could all be stored on a single acre.

In reality, you would need a lot less space. Everyone doesn't have a phone. Everyone doesn't talk on the phone for an hour. I suspect the average is 1/10 of that. I'm doing good to talk an hour a month.

There could be others...

5) the NSA did something wrong and people reported and there was change Snowden wasn't aware of
6) the NSA did something wrong and people reported and there was change in the pipeline
7) the NSA did something wrong, people reported, there was percievable change, and Snowden wasn't satisfied with the scope and/or pace of the change

Here's a cheap easy solution (assuming you can write some basic scripts)

1. Start by taking an MD5 of all your pics.Save the results.
2. Backup everything to a 2nd drive. Take MD5s and be sure they match using basic scripts.
3. Perioducally scan drive 1 and 2 and compare against their expected MD5 value. If one has changed, copy it from the other (assuming it is still correct)

You could expand this with more drives if you are extra paranoid. You could do this cheap, check regularly, and know when bitrot is happening.

"But the problem is what this leads to: it means that out of the civilizations, none of them are trying anything on a large scale, not even the few more ambitious ones."

What if a more advanced civilization learned that to achieve immortality or whatever it is they want, that you go small instead of large. The learn to download their brain into a computer and live in there. There may then be no need for insane amount of power from a Dyson sphere. They may exist in ships the size of an m&m, tooling around the universe undetected. Also, if humans could be shrunk to that size and not require food, water, etc, we could use much less resources and potentially travel easier and last longer as a whole.

Manufacturing jobs are easy to replace. Just watch Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs and you will see there are plenty of jobs left that can't be replaced until robots with human form factor and agility are available. That day will come, but its still decades off.

It will truly get ugly for the current economy when robots can mine ore, smelt it, run factories that build robots, and assign them tasts.

"Each time you play a song you love, that picks you up or motivates you, you should give a penny or more to that artist. Think about what they just did for you."

Everytime you are tired and sit down in that comfortable Lazy Boy chair, you should give a penny or more to the craftsman who designed it. Think about what they just did for you.

"Real musicians work hundreds of hours a week"

Last time I checked, there were only 176 hours in a week, and most people sleep 50-60 of them.

You have a point. It would practically be impossible to turn on such a beacon remotely.

I have no fear of guns. I own a rifle and have fired severl types of rifles, pistols, and shotguns. I admit they can be fun to use.

Still, I would consider it a burden to keep a gun on my hip when I don't really need it. They can weigh a few pounds. Pretty much no one sits around the office with a sword on their belt. That's a right (assuming its ok with your employer) and they don't have to justify it, but its the same principle. He is wearing it for some reason and he decided to share the fact that he is wearing it with the world. He doesn't have to answer, but I was wondering what the motivation is for going through the effort of attaching the weapon and additional ammo to his side while sitting in an office environment. Perhaps he isn't afraid. Maybe he is extremely brave. It could be a fashion accessory. There could be roving gangs of canibals in his neighborhood. He could use it as a counterbalance for an inner ear disorder. Who knows?

Frankly, I would be afraid if everyone in my office carried a gun on their hip. Sooner or later a dispute would arise and rather than a punch in the nose someone's going to get shot. People get in fights. Things escalate. I can't say I've ever seen a fight at work, but the ability to level the playing field with a gun could change that frequency. If weapons are available they may get used. Additionally misfires happen. People with excellent gun safety skills and knowlege have had accidental discharges.