For a while, I was thinking of purchasing a gun and putting it in a holster so it would be visible to people coming up on me from behind.

I honestly believe that that would have been effective, the thought being "wow, he is more than just some squishy thing I can run over".

"Yes, because bicycling down the middle of a street in complete black and with zero lights or reflectors is not asking to be run over."

    Was he cycling in the middle of the street? Probably not. And if he was?
    Was he in complete black? Probably not. And if he was?
    Did he have no lights or reflectors? Probably not. And if he was?

    I doubt seriously he was asking to be run over. As someone who used to ride seriously, you can make your bike up like a Christmas tree and still not be seen. You can be not seen in perfect daylight conditions. And you can, as a cyclist, be perfectly well seen and have someone decide they are going to run you over, deliberately. I have been the victim of that ( obeying the rules of the road ) on several occasions. Roll a few miles in a cyclist's pedals before you judge ( no, I don't think those "cyclists" who run red lights and disobey the rules as OK. Not OK to run them over, but I personally dislike intensely when I see a cyclist disobeying. )

"This accident very well might of ruined the other guy's life as well, and might of been totally not his fault, for all we know."

    It might well be as you say, but then, why not stay? Why not try to help?
    We dont know.

"And no amount of driving skill can protect you from invisible stupid bicyclers."

Try riding a bike for about a year, seriously. You will start to think "what will protect me from blind, stupid car drivers".

"Or they did not want to go to jail for 20 years for a no-fault accident"

Mind made up already? From what I have read, it sounds like the car driver was at fault.
He was hit from behind, and the driver slowed, and swerved
And then drove off. Could be either at fault. With the hit from behind part, it is hard to seriously argue is was the cyclist at fault.

Again the key here is "enough support" - OWS was a teeny-tiny minority of the population. If they want relatively unimportant offices, no problemo. The religious right has been doing that for decades. Maybe after a few decades of minor offices and OWS party could start reaching for higher office. But by then they'd be where the religious right is today - co-opted by the people with money.

"a lot of the cyclists around here are either stupid or have a deathwish, judging by how flagrantly they violate right-of-way laws"

Stupid, I think.... But I, as a former cyclist, have been seeing more of this around me, and I hate it.
Just remember all, not all cyclists are like that, as not all car drivers are like the ones who commit vehicular assault.

In my short, but ignominious career on a bicycle, I have had
    A couple drivers chase me all over the place, deliberately trying to hit me
    Several incidences where cars tried to nudge me around ( one I caught and explained things to ( no, really, rationally and all that ), response was "oh, I see" ), including one where the car ( a taxi, in this case ) actually hit the rear wheel of my bike with his fender. I am super lucky I didn't fall ( with the additional push from the car ) into a parked car. I called the taxi company about it, they hung up on me.
    Many "I didn't see you" moments, including it broad daylight ( which is why I don't buy the "wear white" thing, some of them *just* *don't* *look* ).
    I remember riding at night ( with lights and all ), and having a couple in a van pull up next to me and tell me that I shouldn't ride at night, because the driver of the van was legally blind..... No, really.
And that is just what I can remember from 30 years gone.

For sufficiently insignificant political offices "anyone" can be elected.

For anything important the cost of entry is prohibitive - if it takes a couple of billion dollars to run a presidential campaign then practically the only people who can run are the ones that very rich people permit to run by funding their campaigns.

In theory anyone with enough "support" anyone could raise a couple of billion dollars, but that's a case of, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."

Oooh, typo flame. Such heady intellectualism.

Let's see, which one make sense?

> I get the impression people accuse me of being a zealot quite frequently.
or
> I get the impression people accuse you of being a zealot quite frequently.

Rorschah test and you failed...

What is really interesting here is you. Snowden eh, you could have substituted anyone else who has done some interviews and everything I wrote would have been the same. But you, you are such an interesting specimen. What is it that motivates you to such levels of irrationality?

Are you mentally ill? I try not engage with the mentally ill so much because its just mean-spirited to poke at their reality-impairments. Would you even know it if you were mentally ill?

Or are you just one of those people who love hierarchy so much that they take anything that threatens the hierarchy to which they belong as a personal attack? An attack that provokes an emotional rather than a logical response? Sure you might try to use the forms of logic but when the ideas of your words don't actually follow in any logical manner it seems like just a veneer, an attempt to appropriate the language of a higher moral stage than what you are actually functioning at.

What is it that makes your clock tick so erratically and yet so emphatically?

I get the impression people accuse of being zealot quite frequently.

Only to someone so hyper-sensitive that anything not derogatory must be supportive. In other words someone with such a massive hate-on for Snowden that he can't see the world in any other terms besides pro-Snowden and anti-Snowden.

No need to, I'll do it for you:

I said nothing one way or the other about Snowden's character. The only, even unasked, question was why the OP lied. Your responses suggest that he lied because he thinks Snowden sucks and therefore lying about people you think suck is fine.

So to summarize - what you wrote has absolutely nothing to do with the post you responded to.

While all the "don't be evil" responses are cathartic and fun, the real issue here is that you can't simultaneously give someone access to data and prevent them from having access to the data. You can make it more difficult to access the data but the price is that it is more difficult to access the data. You can't read minds so intent is not something you can reliably build into the system.