'Twas gallows humor. In reality, I'm not stupid enough to buy a Kindle, and I do use Project Gutenberg.

After all, you could turn the cops laser right back at him...

Oh personally I think collisions between people who don't look where they're walking and run into each other are highly necessary. Some people need to feel that they're acting stupidly.

I'm done fighting, arguing and whatnot. I offer to you what I offered everyone so far: I move inland, you move to the coast. If you're right, you get a wonderful piece of seaside real estate. If I am right, I get to shoot you if you try to escape drowning.

Deal?

That's pretty much what would happen in most countries in Europe. I am not aware of a "poisoned well" provision in our laws over here. If there's evidence against you and it's neither fabricated ("planted") nor required an incentive from law enforcement so you commit the crime (agent provocateur), it's a-ok to use it against you.

What keeps police in check is that they essentially have a job for life once they're in, they get a LOAD of job perks (official ones and "less official ones") and breaking the law to get evidence is almost certainly the end of that rather comfy job, and even if you don't get locked up (with all the nice guys that you got in there first...), what's left for you is some sort of mall cop crap job.

Seems to work really well.

Where to draw the line? And who gets to pick and choose what crimes are worse than others. The egoist in me would say that a government employee ignoring the privacy of citizens is a bigger threat to me than any pedo on the planet. Because he may be a threat to me, the pedo most certainly won't be. I'm kinda too old for that...

This just to illustrate that "worse crime" is highly subjective. I'm fairly sure if you ask the RIAA, the crime behind trading pedo pics is the potential copyright infringement.

Oh, I'm sorry, being a non-native speaker I took "at worst" to mean "if he did anything wrong at all"...

On one hand, of course we see a problem with this! But on the other hand, if you decided to use Apple products, you should have known what you signed up for...

There is a huge amount of FOSS that has an entire "front" web page that tells people in exquisite detail what changes have been made, who contributed, how others can get involved and what bugs are outstanding without ever mentioning what the hell the project does, or what benefits it brings the world.

Quoted for truth!

That said, "KDevelop" is pretty self-explanatory: it's the word "develop" with a "K" in front of it, which pretty obviously (to Slashdotters, at least) means a development environment for KDE. I've never used KDevelop, and in fact haven't even used KDE in at least a decade, but instantly understood anyway.

Now, if we were talking about Gimp or Konqueror or any number of project names pulled straight from /dev/random, then yeah, you're absolutely right.

Anonymous anything will be the first to go!

What do mean, "will be?" Anonymous anything is gone, because Comcast is judge, jury and executioner. Since the Bill of Rights applies to the government but not corporations (to the extent that it applies at all, but I digress...), moving internet service from corporate control to government control is a way to get anonymity back.

Sure, illegal government surveillance could continue, but that situation is already infinitely bad, so it can't get any worse.

The next issue is going to probable cause, uploading to much? Well you must be a criminal copyright violator and their will be be a warrant to search your computer so fast your head is gonna spin.

What, and you think this isn't already the case?! At least if government were the ISP then the police would have to get a warrant to find out how much you're uploading; right now Comcast will just voluntarily tell them!

You don't want Government to have that kinda of control Look at Turkey's internet crack down!

And you think Comcast would act any differently?

Here's the bottom line: you're saying government control is bad, and I would tend to agree. However, my point is that we already have that, except the enforcement has been outsourced to crony capitalists in order to do an end-run around Due Process!

There is no difference between Comcast and the government, except that the government has to at least pretend to respect your rights.

What they were doing may not have even been illegal, which is the whole problem.

Bullshit. What they have doing has always been illegal -- any plain reading of the Constitution shows it. The issue is that people in power (possibly including the Supreme Court) refuse to acknowledge the law, not that it doesn't exist!

After all, if he didn't raise concerns, then how could they have possibly known there were any issues.

Well, for starters, they could have listened to the last several whistleblowers (e.g. Binney and Drake) who did try to use "official channels" instead of marginalizing them and ruining their lives.

If Snowden can show that he applied due diligence by going through the channels to discuss his concerns and was ignored or he felt threatened, he can still try to use whistle-blowing as a defense.

Otherwise, he may have had legitimate concerns, but bypassed normal procedures and just ran off with the stash and caused them to be made public, which is a federal offense, whistle-blower or not.

What are you talking about? Snowden doesn't need a defense, because he'd be an utter moron to ever willingly come back to NSA jurisdiction again.

Aside from that, Snowden knew damn well that "going through the channels" directly results in the NSA ruining your life and burying whatever you were trying to be a whistleblower about. How did he know this? Simple, by learning about what happened to the last few people who tried to be whistleblowers using the "channels!"

In other words, the "official channels" don't work, so trying to say Snowden is guilty because he didn't use them is specious. Any court that accepts such an argument is of the "Kangaroo" or "Star Chamber" variety.