What happened to paying in cash?

This is what you get when you believe that ever freer markets will do anything and everything more efficiently than ever before -- Chaos.

Any company that cannot handle its own payroll should not be licensed to trade. It's that simple.

Do you still feel that he's a "patriot" because whether willingly or not he told nations that are, ahem, "unfriendly" to the US about efforts to spy on them? How do you feel about the fact that whether he knows it or not, his laptops have almost certainly been copied by Russia and China? That information is a gold mine to them. He is no patriot simply because you get your panties in a wad over the NSA. He'll get his asylum and my gut feeling is that he'll never be held accountable for his treasonous, yes, treasonous actions. I'll just have to be content with the US government reducing the number of contractors who have the potential to do this kind of thing in the future.

Do you at least find it interesting that NOBODY in Russia or China has any secrets that they are willing to give Wikileaks? I hope you don't believe that those societies are so perfect that they have nothing untoward going on at all.

The GPL is all about preserving access to code. If you use GPL code, you have to publish that code. If you make changes to it, you need to publish those changes as well. This is to stop people "proprieterizing" GPLed code by making a few incompatible changes and releasing it.

Well then the GPL has failed because that is exactly what these people are doing. They're altering the GPL code, offloading code to proprietary files, then releasing the whole thing as a finished product. I presume this can be done with split .c files as well, in which case the GPL has this flaw from the start.

Part of me understands why you'd ask, but part of me realizes that this is mostly just anti-America bashing you're doing before you even move here. Great way to start off things.

I'm American. I travel internationally at times. I bring ripped CDs with me to listen to in an old portable CD player I have that also plays MP3 tracks on CDs so that's what I mean by bringing "ripped CDs" with me. I went to China in 2011 and it was for less than a week for tourism. I had no business at all there. I had been to China a year earlier, also for tourism not business. I had another Chinese visa in my passport for a trip that was actually not ever taken (long story not relevant here). When I got back to the US from my 2011 trip, the guy at Passport Control at my US airport was obviously a naturalized citizen. He was Afro-Carribean (I could tell by his speech) and he decided that he had found himself a smuggler who was bringing herbs illegally into the USA because I had 3 Chinese visas in my passport and he didn't like my reason for going there (tourism) and he was sure I was lying. So he took that entrance card we all have to fill out on the plane and show at Passport Control and specially marked it. I was actually a bit amused by this because I knew it would be a complete and utter waste of time for them to go through my baggage, so I went over to the special area. A young guy asked me if was bringing back any herbs or medicine and I said "No". He went through all of my luggage and he was quite a bit annoyed at having to search them because - wait for it- he found nothing I wasn't allowed to bring back and I had no herbs or medicine. He did ask about my CDs and tried to get me to admit that they were "counterfeit" but I told him that I ripped them myself and he let it go. So unless you do something to call attention to yourself at Passport Control, they're not going to go through your luggage. If they're on a phone or iPod, I have never heard of those being confiscated.

The DMCA in the USA does explicitly forbid breaking anti-copy mechanisms to rip even your own purchased discs, but nobody ever gets held accountable for doing this for personal use because the MPAA greatly fears another court case that would make the process legal akin to the famous "Betamax case" that legalized home VCR use in the USA. So the reality is that nobody in Passport Control gives a crap nor will they confiscate your ripped music or films.

Against what? The NSA spying on US citizens?

The Laffer curve is on record as having been dreamed up on the back of a napkin by Donald Rumsfeld during lunch hour. I am not making this up.

Not if the NSA's intent in doing so is to spy, directly or indirectly on US citizens. As I said, they can spy on me or random Russian/Saudi/Chinese guy no problem. But they're not meant to be snooping on US citizens any more than the US airforce is meant to be dropping bombs on Atlanta suburbs.

Meanwhile geeks, who do understand how computers work, instead of developing technologies supporting encryption and pricacy by default, have instead hopped into bed with big data and the NSA. There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.

The more I think back to the likes of the whole Firefox self signed certs debacle, the more I see the NSA survellance apperatus collectively roaring with laughter at geekdom's heedless self-destruction of itself and the internet.

I don't know if you're illiterate, lazy, or just an ass -- but had you read the linked post, you would know that the very first thing she tried to do was contact the police, and she stuck at it for hours until she was able to get them to show up. Turns out, this can be difficult to accomplish late at night, in a foreign country where you don't speak the language, in a former Eastern Bloc country.

She was unable to get an outside line from her hotel room phone. The hotel desk clerk claimed not to understand English well enough to place the call when asked. Her own cell phone had been damaged in the attack; she eventually was able to have a friend contact the U.S. embassy, who were able to - finally - reach the Polish police.

Had he stopped at saying "The US government is spying on its own citizens!" you might have a point. But he told the Hong Kong press that the US was spying on both Hong Kong and China. You could make a legal case that informing China of this secret information was "giving them aid". It certainly weakened Obama's "Stop hacking us and stealing our stuff! We're victims of agression!" argument to Xi. And whether you like/agree with Snowden or not, and I for one do not, he admitted stealing 4 laptops full of data that I am 100% sure his employment contract denied him the ability to take. Whether he's found guilty of treason or not is unsure. My gut feeling is he'll beat that charge, if he ever faces it. But he will for sure be convicted for taking the 4 laptops with him. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Some analysts think that China will just let the Hong Kong courts handle this and live with their decision. I think it will be tied up in the courts for years in Hong Kong. He'll ask for political asylum and those cases take many years to resolve.

Reading history, you frequently come across periods where you wonder "How could people put up with this?" or "Why didnâ(TM)t they just do X" where X is the solution which was eventually reached 20 years later.

Looking at the modern world, I realise I'm living in just such a period. A pity I'm not longer "smart" enough to figure out what the current X should be. I guess I may have been a little too hard on all those "stupid" societies in the past.

Then again, maybe it's not wrong to think that they and we are just, actually stupid.

you know, I'm really upset and concerned about spying on me because I feel it violates my 4th amendment rights and is a slippery slope, but I'm relatively indifferent to spying on foreigners. Isn't that the point of the CIA/NSA anyway?

Yes it is. That is their whole point, and it should be only the whole.

I'm from Ireland, so it's actually OK for the NSA to spy on me and my communications. Americans should actually expect that the NSA is up to this and indeed a few shady activities abroad. That is what a spy agency is for, and should be paid for,

However, a spy agency is not for spying on domestic citizens. The NSA and CIA are absolutely not supposed to monitor domestic US citizens. That is not what they are for, or what they should be paid for.

This isn't very complicated. The NSA is an intelligence weapon, and can be compared to a missile or bomber. Americans might argue about targets, but most will agree that the US should have missiles and bombers and should use them abroad when nessessary. Most Americans would be outraged to discover that those missiles were being used at home on US citizens, and should be equally outraged that the NSA is being used at home as well.

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." If Snowden hasn't committed treason using this definition, I don't know what is then.

You're probably trolling, but the simple answer here is

a) He has not levied war against any of the States or the whole of them, and
b) If he has given aid or comfort to enemies, then you should be able to name those and state the aid and/or comfort given them.

If you can spin either of those into a charge that will hold up in court, I'll be impressed.

The NSA is charging Snowden with spying?

I suppose " the logic of their position demanded it."