flyinRyan

I really do truly believe that. It's true that Russia or China would try to take their place but they'd have a much harder time because they don't have anything like the US military, the technical infrastructure, etc., etc. and the rest of the world has been so skeptical of them for so long they'd likely never achieve any of those things (well, perhaps military might).

Living outside the US as an American is pretty hard. It's one of two countries on earth that expects you to keep filing, and paying taxes even if you have never set foot inside the country (e.g. born in Spain to one American parent), you have to report any bank account you control to the US every year. That includes company accounts you have signing rights over, so forget being a stock trader in a "tax haven" country, etc. It's a lot of trouble and it gets worse every year since we're one of the few groups the politicians can demonize and exploit with no consequence at all. Anyone rich enough to have power isn't affected by these laws, practically speaking.

If you had removed that first sentence and the footnote, you'd have gotten an upvote (instead of a downvote) from me. This site isn't for your political/religious bashing. And btw, if you're going to talk about such things you should probably look into philosophy.

If you live inside the US for a bit, you'll get a feel for how isolated it is. Most Americans don't have a clue how the rest of the world views them and even more couldn't possibly care less because they imagine the rest of the world to be inferior.

What movie was this? I'd like to hear more about this.

Ok. That's odd, I thought Putin had made statements about wanting to protect him. If even Russia doesn't have his back I think it's time for an identity change.

Yea, and this was just one Snowden. Imagine if another popped up with some other program we don't know about. They'd likely get even more frantic and take an even bigger gauge shotgun to their feet. I have to imagine that inspires whistleblowers at least as much as it scares them.

>Even if you exaggerate the known Gestapo spying by one or two orders of a magnitude, Germany is nowhere near becoming a totalitarian state

Everyone believes this before and while it is actually happening. The US already has literally all required elements. All that is missing is scale.

How would we even know if something like this had already happened on a small scale?

Nothing has ever happened to me in the past and I have no reason to believe I'm under investigation for anything I've ever said. Yet I've already made the decision to never go back. The "lose" position is simply too high to make it worth it. As it stands, if someone decided to "make an example" out of me for some bizarre reason I could be detained indefinitely with no realistic recourse. I can't think of anything the US has (that other countries don't) that makes that sort of risk, regardless of how unlikely it is, worth it (in case that's not clear, what I mean is, my expected odds for getting kidnapped by the US might be one in 100 trillion trillion, yet if it happens my life could be over).

"prostitution avoids rape" isn't blackmail, it's just ignorance since rape is about power, not someone desperate for a lay.

Ironically, what they're actually doing is showing that leaking can cause them to make disastrous decisions. How many more Snowdens will it take before the US irreparably damages itself? From the looks of things, not that many more.

But where does this power come from? Now that other countries (and their citizens) see the "men behind the curtains", they will likely start taking steps to limit their exposure to this country and hopefully begin weakening its power.

The US gets away with much of what it does because of the enormous US market. But at some point other countries will realize that the cost of that market has gotten too high and then a large chunk of the the US' power will dissolve.

In the case of slavery, even subordination could lead to misery and death. What would have happened if every slave had simply stopped responding and refused to do work for even one minute? They'd be beaten and tortured but if they kept it up, their people wouldn't be enslaved anymore as doing so would just be a waste of money and time.

Obviously you couldn't get that many people to allow themselves to be tortured to death to prevent future enslavement, but the thought exercise makes it appear that the GP's assertion has merit even if it's not entirely practical.

Yea, he should have kept licking the jack boots like a good little nazi. He's clearly afraid of a country that has no problem assassinating US citizens, detaining people indefinitely, torturing people, etc.

Wow. I've seen some stupid things in my time but this really takes the cake. The constitution and bill of rights aren't that big of a deal. The US style of government isn't even that great so the "great minds" of the founding fathers didn't manage to produce a system of government even as nice as the land they rebelled against (e.g. at least 3rd party has some meaning in the UK system, even if the system is damaged by FPTP).

The bible, on the other hand, has inspired untold millions throughout the entire world, regardless of your stance on religion.

Why does he actually need to get out of Russia?

Well, it's related to game theory, but in game theory you're only logical move is the one that gives you the middle result. In this case the options are "pay a fair amount of money now and hopefully never again" or "keep paying small amounts indefinitely", and that for all possible players. You don't come out ahead if you "screw" other players as in game theory and you don't come out further in the hole if another player screws you as in game theory (well, aside from more litigation coming but they have that consequence as well).

>If some percent of stories that make the government look good are misleading / planted / etc, then logically, some percent of those which make them look bad are likely wrong too.

That doesn't follow at all. If the government is actively trying to ensure stories make them look good, they certainly wouldn't want any to make them look bad. They certainly wouldn't be creating/planting/whatever stories to do that unless they were provably false and would be used to advantage later (e.g. "look at this bias reporting!").

Hacker news isn't for politics so please keep your horrible political ignorance off of here. You don't appear to have any clue what you're talking about and probably don't understand most of the terms you used. There's no point in discussing it, just please don't do it here anymore.

Twitter should run this ad: "Osama Bin Laden died because he wasn't on Twitter! Sign up today!"

I think that era was actually over decades ago. It's just that thanks to the internet, Americans (like me) are beginning to realize it.

Wow, avoided the airport because of this kind of insanity? We brought it to your house! I remember just a few short months ago, making fun of the British for arresting someone for tweeting...

I wouldn't do that unless you have a really old car with no electronics to drive.

Your conspiracy-theory-mocking is misplaced here since we have actually found a lot of scary conspiracies related to the US government lately.

I also laugh at people who believe in flying saucers and so on. But I'd probably stop if an actual flying saucer landed on the highway and started blowing things up.

The future! I can't imagine how anyone could say that. I started out with Smalltalk, then started doing C# professionally and eventually started doing CL in emacs. CL/SLIME/Emacs was by far the worst of that trilogy. I can't think of one single thing that the emacs combo did better or even as good.

Both Smalltalk and VS+Resharper have great refactoring tools. Both have great debugging tools (and in Smalltalk I can even do a lot of development right inside the debugger and watch how the code is reacting while I'm writing it). In the CL/Emacs setup debugging is so bad most people recommend not to even bother; just use tracing. And I can't understand why it needs to be like this, CL is closer to Smalltalk than it is C# (that is, CL is a "live" language as Smalltalk is or at least it very much can be. Even a compile-only CL like SBCL).

The other issue is project management. In Smalltalk it doesn't really come into play as much since the image is your "exe", but despite this Smalltalk has great tools for organizing classes, methods and so on (and Dolphin's way of letting your image be a "solution" and you make individual exes from that that drop everything they didn't use was absolutely brilliant). In VS, I create my assemblies, make dependencies and so on and the IDE just handles all this for me.

Contrast that with CL/Emacs: CL has ASDF files that can manage all your dependencies for you (people complain about it, but I've used them for several years and never had any problems) but you have to manage all this stuff manually. If you want a nice way of saying "create new package" or "create a new file that is in this package" you'll need to write all that handling, UI, etc. yourself. And after you write it all, what will you have? The interface will be hideous no matter how you do it because you're restricted to just text. In Visual Studio you can have the disapearable side bars approach, the "old school mac" approach of different info windows floating all over the desktop, etc. With emacs you'd be restricted to doing that stuff via ascii art or popping up more windows with ugly ascii art in them.

The only way I could see CL/Emacs as the future is if we're talking post-apocalyptic.

Not nearly as common as retaliation from companies to unions. Ask Florida Daisy employees.

Sounds like they have legit grievances then.

And the ability to actually kill someone you don't like and not go to jail (though you could lose your job) is quite a perk as well.

Obviously not. If they had left the space alone it would be fine now. Instead they "googled" it: came in and undercut everyone else, got a monopoly or near-monopoly position in the space and just canned the product. It would be like Walmart coming to your 2k-person town, opening a super center and then closing it down a few weeks after the last mom-n-pop owners shut down and moved away.