I can't quite sort out why I have been modded troll. The issue of data leaks is a big issue, even for organizations that do good (again, however you define that. I agree that Snowden was morally right to do what he did, but try to imagine a situation in which an employee nicking your data is doing it to blackmail you or sell to a competitor?

Not every person stealing your data is some glorious warrior of freedom. Most are, well, to put it bluntly, just plain criminals, and as with any kind of theft, frequently those best placed to steal your data for nefarious ends are your own employees.

Yes, well, perhaps in La-la Land. Here, in reality, no matter how good your organization may be (for whatever definition of "good" you choose to use), you may still end up with bad employees. The question of securing your data shouldn't be about good or evil, or any particular moral judgment, but simply about how to make sure you're critical and confidential data doesn't end up being ripped off.

"Can i bring my reader to their store and walk out with an ebook loaded?"

I don't really disagree with what you've said, but I have no idea why you would want to go to a specific place to get an ebook. That's a use case I don't understand. Why would that be good?

True...absent monopoly interference.

That's a business decision by one business (who happens to be going out of business). So, yeah, not the same.

Concur strongly: data have their shapes. Some are tabular, some are tree-shaped, some are graph-like.
Two strategies for dealing with a syntax (perhaps naively) designed for easy non-nerd legibility:
a) Encase the sillier bits into strings, and interpolate (safe) data into the strings for execution,
b) Use an API against pre-compiled command objects, where the string interpolation/compilation is a performance bore.

Two words; hot grits.

Yes, but if you can sufficiently undermine him personally, it becomes a lot easier to undermine what he has to say. People happily shoot the messenger all the time.

like Socrates, he will be forced to drink the hemlock tea.

If slavery was going to end in the South, why were the Southern states so keen to make sure a large ratio of future states bring formed out of the Western expansion would b slave states?

The slave states didn't want just accommodation, they wanted to expand and further entrench slavery.

For a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing, if not a purchase, I'm leery about any doctrine not maximizing the individual in terms of body, mind & soul.
Because while pursuing Christ is the ultimate goal of any Christian, maximizing oneself in all three dimensions is certainly the bi-product.
Things like Calvinism or heavy navel-gazing seem like Satan's judo, where the devil can't corrupt people directly enough, so they are sidelined with mumbo-jumbo.
But I haven't read the book, so I can't really get too punky about what's said therein.

Well, if it's anything other than the Gospel as written, and let's not kid ourselves--there is a vast swath of people labeling themselves Christian whose doctrine is sheer hooey--then those purported Christians are going to be Crush-tians.

Don't forget about the landing fuel you have to tote with you along your whole trip. That is not trivial weight.

Well, capitalists are always going to want to draw a harder line between the source code and other client code.
Mostly to support some business model, but also for performance: note that even GNU Emacs, in all of its glory, compiles a significant amount of the grungy code down to native binary, for performance reasons.

You make these assertions about "terrible language" -- what is it about the design goals of SQL you don't like?
and
"just not designed for object persistence" -- do you mean all of the overhead of normalizing data and casting it to canonical data types, as opposed to just dumping it to some key/value store a-la MongoDB?
I mean, sure, there is no universal tool that scales from a boot image to a data center. Yes, fanbois are tedious. But, other than PHP, I can find a little something to love in just about anything.

Right, but the point about the Lisp interpreter is that wandering back and forth across the line between the source code and the live data (mostly impossible with other systems) is readily attainable with Lisp.