Most of the horrendous violence unleashed by various Christian sects of the centuries occurred before the advent of bombs, but if you want to talk about the cost:benefit ratio, the Christians have caused far more deaths in the name of their religion than the Muslims. Islamic terrorism is largely a result of a particular brand of fundamentalism unleashed in the 20th century. The Christian history of mass atrocity goes back centuries.

If you're asking which is objectively worse, I'd direct your attention to the genocide of every indigenous culture in South America, explicitly in the name of Christianity, as only one example of many that make Christianity objectively worse over the course of the last several hundred years. The Muslims are going to have to step their game up to even be in the same league.

You overlook the single most important difference between Muslim fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists. The Christians don't feel compelled to conduct bombings etc in order to make political or religious points - they're still largely in charge of the political machinery. There's no point conducting mass action terrorism when you can rely on your political institutions to more or less protect your rights.

The day American Christian fundamentalists start feeling like a true oppressed minority, is the day they stop shooting abortion doctors one by one and instead turn to mass bombings.

  Of course, it doesn't help us with the Muslims when they actually participate in the political system fairly and then we all cheer when they get dethroned in a coup that we would condemn in a second if the government were anyone but fundamentalist Muslims. Now that we've proven to them that the democratic system actually doesn't work, I expect them to turn to more direct methods.

Fundies are fundies, and their tactics differ largely only in how much power they have.

I'm very honest and direct with the people who work with and for me. And yet magically I'm not an asshole like Linus. If you're incapable of delivering an honest and direct message without abusing people, then you're a shitty human being.

Honest and direct: "This is not good enough. The logic is flawed and the code is sloppy. Go back and do it again".
Asshole: "How fucking stupid do you have to be to write something like this crap".

See the difference?

If anyone spoke to another person in our office the way Linus does, he'd be taking his teeth home in a paper sack.

Linus has the protection of the intarwebz to prevent him from suffering the natural consequences of treating people the way he does.

Man, that happens to me all the time. One time, I reached for the skim milk and accidentally drank a 40oz bottle of vodka.

Another time, I was making a peanut butter sandwich and accidentally injected heroin into an artery.

Someone should pay!

Let us know when you figure out a good definition for "non-hostile" and a way to determine which countries are, and will always remain, non-hostile.

Wait, so you think that the details of legal (your presumption in this case) intelligence gathering operations should somehow be "transparent"?

How exactly do you imagine that working?

There of course needs to be government/legislative/judicial oversight, but by definition successful covert intelligence operations can't be transparent to the general public.

If I could, I would repeal the internal combustion engine, for it has lead to the scourge of drunk driving which claims thousands of lives a year. Sure, people claim that the infernal explodo box is valuable because it makes possible the rapid transport of people and goods around the world, but won't someone think of the children?

Life was better back in the day. Bah Humbug.

I always love how people simultaneously believe that the NSA is so technically brilliant that it can collect and analyze every message sent by every random person on earth, but also so stupid that they name their secret backdoor key _NSAKEY.

I'm not sure anyone here can help you with that. Have you considered seeking a sense of humour transplant?

Shame on you for harming future generations of girl coders! I must tweet your picture and publicly shame you!!!!

In this case, they are "wiretapping" in much the same way that I am "wiretapping" the comments on this forum.

Without talking about what the US government is doing, I would just point out that what is nonsensical in the original post is that monitoring what people say on Twitter isn't "wiretapping" any more than reading what you chose to post on this forum is "wiretapping".

Civil rights may well be under attack, but not by people looking at a Twitter or Instagram stream, looking for comments about where protests are being held.

In this case, the OP if full of shit

Oh good grief. They didn't declare Iceland to be "terrorist".

They used a law called the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (note how two of those three things aren't "terrorist") to freeze the assets of an Icelandic bank branch in the UK. They did so under provisions of the law that involve preventing actions harmful to the UK economy.

One can certainly question whether this was warranted or not, but it had nothing to do with terrorism. Nice try though.