An unintentional Code Geass reference would have knocked me out of my chair!

You know, that might be part of the problem, too. With a 60-80 hour work week, how much time do you think software engineers have to participate in the community itself? A neighborhood isn't just a set of nice buildings you drive past in-between work/sleep cycles.

Standards have never been as high as I'd like - typos and grammatical errors abound in articles - but noospeek is definitely a new low. I would suggest sacking the current editors and replacing them with Grumpy Cat and Happy Cat.

It is not only valid but required, so although your thoughts are appreciated, they are nonetheless wrong.

Actually, archaeology shows that only some societies are greedy. It happens that those are the societies that dominate, but that is a consequence of short term gains being militarily better than long term gains, in early history. You were very vulnerable back then and even small losses had large impacts.

Ultimately, though, it means that humans are not compelled to be a bunch of arrogant twits. At the very worst, some societies may have a genetic propensity for it, but that dictates nothing. Even if it did, sending the right-wingers to Mars (or, better, Venus) and using gene therapy or eugenics to reduce (not eliminate, that would be bad) violent tendencies should be sufficient.

The Pledge is an affront to all that school stands for. Unthinking obedience simply isn't compatible with intellectual growth or rational questioning. Obedience to a nation is also incompatible with the international semi-borderless worlds of science and art. Neither paints nor positrons have any respect for local laws or political boundaries. Boundaries exist to maximize the benefits within and minimize contagion from flawed systems, the notion of "loyalty" to any standard is relatively modern as society goes and has been a failure from start to, well, it hasn't finished yet but it's time for philosophers to stop poking at their navels and start thinking about metanations and paranations, how to draw on what has always worked (cooperation across strengths) to derive a notion that is functional, rational, sane and likely to (as an early Megadeth noted) work this time.

Not really. The NSA costs more to run than the national debt. Closing it would be one of the most cost-effective ways to save the nation from bankruptcy. Not that the US is anywhere near close. It will be, if it continues to not spend on the arts and sciences, but economies can remain entirely stable when running 110% of GDP, at least for a few years. Nations aren't like personal bank accounts and you cannot run economies as if they were private budgets.

At this point, the NSA has cost the economy not only its own expenses but billions in international trade (plus interest spanning decades), but can produce no evidence of any benefits. Skipjack is broken, as was SHA-0 (the NSA version of the algorithm). Cryptologists ignored Skipjack once it was determined to be faulty and spent a fair bit of time fixing SHA. These are additional costs, created almost certainly as a result of deliberate breakage by the NSA (it's either that or they're incompetent, take your pick).

When you have something very expensive with no direct or indirect return, you generally term it a failure. When something fails on that scale when your economy has been crippled by neocons and kept defunct by Tea Partiers, the sound fiscal move is to cut losses. When a ship is struggling to stay afloat, you dump the deadweight. The NSA is deadweight until or unless it can show value for money.

...The SCP Foundation.

Oh noes port forwarding and uPnP r so hard!!! :-(

...I don't think the death of privacy and commercialization of human relationships was worth it.

There was a time in England when you paid fire fighters insurance. They marked the houses that had paid. Houses that didn't pay - well, picture two Mafia heavies sauntering up the driveway, making comments about how combustible things are and what a pity it would be if an accident were to.... happen. (Terry Pratchett made a reference to this in his books because it is such a sick, evil and yet utterly predictable outcome.)

The service became one of the first truly national services because organized crime syndicates, even firefighting ones, are not approved of.

By moving mills away from slicing the arms off children to being run by trained adults interested in mill work, those children got to have this thing called education. Instead of being a burden to others, they became valued members of society, including scientists and engineers.

The left was arguably a major factor in the Enlightenment, without which no science could be done except in secret from the conservatives.

A large proportion of schools and universities in Britain were founded, funded and run by the left. No left, no Faraday, no Rutherford, no Turing, no Crick or Watson - name something you can't live without and I can show those components that would not exist without left-wing establishments, left-wing idealists and left-wing philosophies.

Can you name anything, anything at all, developed because of right-wing ideology?

I've actually seen (and smelled) a case of Fournier's Gangrene.

What you're looking at on Wikipedia is a little misleading, as it is actually the aftermath of a surgical procedure in which necrotic tissue has already been stripped away. The typical appearance of a case would involve something more like painful and massively swollen testicles, with discoloration that may initially be reddish but rapidly changing to bluish/greenish color, with a foul odor. Externally visible tissue breakdown will eventually start to happen, but most cases end up in surgery well before that happens.

The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such. (Scientists consider no result a result.)

In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.

Just cut back on projects. Starting with those involving spending money in districts whose politicians work to cripple NASA. Remember, we're coming up to yet another election year and there's no news like bad news to shape the outcomes.