lucker

Ah, but the thing is, they built the domestic surveillance infrastructure based on "feelings" — after all, the real threat of terrorism is minor compared to all sorts of other dangers the resources could have been spent on.

And the idea that they really did it because of terrorism is pretty much the most charitable interpretation of why they did it — it is easy to devise darker ones.

If they don't pardon Snowden, then they are saying (yet again) that it is alright for the government to waste our tax money — in secret and in order to spy on us, no less — based on feelings.

I doubt it. Trump has praised NSA surveillance in the past and has hinted that Snowden should be executed. Unless he was just saying such things to try to get the intelligence community on his side pre-election, he's in favor of authoritarian tools.

for (x = 0; x < N; x ++) { for (y = 0; y < N; y ++) { newSquare[x][y] = oldSquare[y][N-1-x]; } }

Of course, in certain representations of the square (such as using a 1-d array) even simpler algorithms can be used.

I actually love going on long walks, so the thought of walking a half hour to buy groceries if I don't buy a car seems ok.

I've spent the last decade or so in San Francisco, and none of the local scenes really attract me. There used to be some cool artists around, but a lot of them got priced out. Maybe some other city has a more thriving cultural life, but San Francisco's isn't doing anything for me. I just have to figure out where to move.

Well, I hope that we both manage to figure out a way of life that is good for us.

I think that the reason why there is so little enforcement of any conduct rules might be more practical than political, though. To effectively enforce conduct rules would probably require there to be an extra government employee on each bus or train. The driver can't really be expected to do it, nor would it be a good idea to try to get them to split their attention in such a way.

Hmm. Well, I certainly hope that they don't make some other Act in the future that defines terrorism to mean anything that hurts the government or society.

Well, at least brutalism isn't as ugly or wasteful of money as the HTML/CSS combo, and unlike the latter at least brutalism is not fundamentally wrong, so there's that.