Ah. So then there's no true Christian.

The word "meaning" describes a sort of mental state, so of course nothing intrinsically "has" any of it - not, that is, until I make some and attach it to its object. And even then that meaning still only actually exists within me.

Personally, I don't understand how those who do believe that there is some intrinsic or higher meaning manage the strain of living in a universe so apparently intent on proving them wrong.

That or if Obama had been trying to amend the Bush agreement in order to keep the troops there longer, but failed to do so because leaked information convinced the Iraqis to refuse Obama the terms he wanted:

Vote? You still believe in voting? Where the fuck have you been living these past ten years, and what's the immigration process like?

We may all be safe from official government sanction, but that data isn't just being thrown away, and you don't know who has (or will have) access to it. The people who work at the NSA are people like all others, subject to corruption and incompetence like everybody else. That can, in the absence of proper oversight (which doesn't exist for the NSA) situations like the following:

I have (well, had) a friend who grew up in the USSR. She told all sorts of lovely stories about how the guys running the archives where the secret police dumped the files of people they weren't interested in any more would skim through the data and then go around blackmailing people (including stuff like having young teens rob their own families for them if they didn't want all their embarrassing secrets told to all their peers - you can imagine what that did to some families), or selling blackmail material to neighbors with a grudge. They got so notorious for the actual secrets they'd revealed that they could walk up to people they had nothing on and get money out of them with remarks like, "Say, that's a lovely reputation you have there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."

Wikileaks (which you reference in your sig) has already shed light on some of the modern-day shenanigans our public "servants" are getting up to, as has the UK tabloid fiasco, and those are just two very recent examples. Do you seriously trust those people with all that data, even if you aren't breaking any laws? Could you trust your friends, family, and neighbors if all that data were to suddenly start "leaking" and it became trivial for others to blackmail them?

Seriously? You honestly believe that people's emotional responses are on handy little switches? That anyone who has a problem with losing privacy or freedom is just needlessly torturing themselves or a compulsive whiner? If that's the case then let's teach people to like being robbed as well - I mean who cares...the problem is that you think that you and you alone should get to enjoy having your grandfather's wedding ring. Stop worrying about who's that property is and just go take someone else's dead relative's wedding ring if you absolutely need to have one. And just think of all the misery and anxiety we could eliminate!

Diseases kill people? Diseases have always killed people. Nothing can, has, or will ever be done about this, so stop getting all worked up about it...

So when salaries go disproportionately to idiots who proceed to collapse my once-thriving industry, putting me out of work, I'm supposed to react by changing my life goals to "slowly starve as student loan repayments eat up all my revenue while the price of food continues rising" so that I can consider myself a success?

I get that attitude plays a huge role in personal happiness, but there are some pretty basic limits on what normal people can happily accept - a fact to which you seem oblivious. It must be nice living on a world where you could never conceivably run into them. Or where it's rational to ignore problems so as to not get upset when you can't seem to solve them. You'll have to let us know what color the sky is there.

When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as far out of its way as it does to support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.

I'm Canadian too, but apparently I pay more attention to US politics than you do. If your measure of a leader's success is whether he lives up to his campaign promises, then Obama should strike you as worse than Bush.

Define you.

Are you a troll, or do you genuinely fail to realize that a good half of the problems on your list are best solved using techniques based in calculus? I mean seriously, physics is a waste of your time, but you'd like to program robots. That's...that's just dumb.