"We already know you have sex with your wife, why does it bother you if we watch?"

No, the problem is that college costs so much in the first place. When you consider that many countries give away higher education to their citizens for free, expecting 18-year-olds to agree to take on a few hundred thousand in debt borders on insane. The problem is really that colleges spend too much damn money on things that don't matter to education - sports, dorms, lavishly funded clubs and activities - and pass those aggregate costs on to their students. Nearly everywhere else in the world social and cultural activities at school are funded through private membership and subscription, rather than tuition revenue.

You're thinking of Harry. William has been kept far away form actual combat; his closest brush with danger has been doing a joint mission with a US Coast Guard patrol that actually found some drug smugglers.

How the hell does that reduce inequity? That maximizes it, for any reasonable definition of income inequality.

You sort of see the opposite situation here in Europe. While top-tier residential service is generally slower, comparable plans here are vastly cheaper, often half the cost or less of what they are in the US, because there are many service providers. On the other hand, there are generally only a small number of mobile companies in a given country, and they create the illusion of choice by operating discount services under a variety of names - being careful, of course, to make sure their various services don't compete with each other. The end result has been similar to US broadband internet - glacial 4G rollout at exorbitant prices, while even in cities there are places that can't even get 3G connectivity. The solution in both cases is the same - authorities need to move aggressively against market entrenchment and anti-competitive behavior.

Yeah, but imagine if the Nazis had been able to hack Penske's database and track which dock all the weapons and fuel shipments were headed to, where merchant vessels were headed, what supplies Los Alamos was ordering, and so on. The military is built on top of the regular economy, not alongside it, so any compromise to everyday communications can potentially leak into military operations. If the power grid goes down, you can't manufacture munitions. And the thing with terrorists is, they have the advantage that they can always go low tech and fall of the radar, so to speak - all the SIGINT in the world won't catch a bunch of guys living in a mountain that communicate by riding a donkey to the next village. So, weakening public user security has a lot of downsides and no upside against either current or foreseeable future enemies. The NSA's actions really are a national security issue, just not in the way that its apologists think.

The problem is that there's no guarantee the people who want to do "us" harm will use the compromised security tools, and in the past (i.e. during the Cold War, arguably the greatest existential threat to the US since 1865), the NSA seems to have recognized this. But really, you're missing a crucial point.

It doesn't matter if the NSA and DoD have secret encryption systems that are even proof against quantum computing. Even attacking purely private sector systems, including defense contractors, telcos, power companies, banks, and think tanks has the potential to cause crippling damage to the American economy. Our defense forces rely on that economy, from soldier pay to logistic supply chains to fuel to military hardware. Our high tech military could be crippled if enough damage could be wrought on financial, information and communication systems within the country, and every weakened box, every backdoored security protocol, is a potential attack vector against that.

We already know that China and North Korea have state-funded hacker units going after government and industrial secrets; they build their own Linux systems so they won't be susceptible to the NSA's usual bag of tricks. If they repurposed those units from intelligence gather to electronic sabotage, that's bad for everyone the NSA is supposed to protect, from the President and Joint Chiefs down to little Timmy in Kansas City. Maybe you think the risk of random, illiterate terrorists destroying the country is so much greater that you're willing to run that risk to capture every nutcase the FBI can entrap. I certainly don't think so, and neither do most non-NSA cryptographers.

e^(0) = 1

What now, yourself. Tau is boring.