While one doesn't lead to another, it doesn't surprise me when young kids who play GTA end up killing people with family members' guns while still young themselves. While almost no parents are perfect, plenty of parents are really, really, dreadfully awful. The parents who buy these games for young kids are often cut from the same fabric that leave loaded weapons laying around the house while unsupervised kids are running around.
And the parents who have a swimming pool at their house are generally more dangerous than those who have guns lying around.
Well.. this and the U.S. still has this puritan crap going on in the background that makes general violence and minimal amount of gore FINE but that showing too much of a boob (or anything slightly sexual) will TOTALLY CORRUPT MY BABY!
Seriously... killing people is fine but something that makes you feel good and is a gift to mankind.. NO WAY. OMG!!
The word you're looking for is ethics. No, not many people are aware of what they are, let alone have them any more. But yes, having a sense of ethics may make you inclined to point out that there is a reason why the game has an M rating to an adult clearly buying the game for a young child, and give them some examples.
Most stores won't sell an M rated game to a little kid. Most theaters won't let little kids into R rated movies unaccompanied. The industry does try to self-regulate here.
SSL is there to keep common snoopers (ISPs, potential identity thieves, punks on the corporate network with wireshark, etc.) from eavesdropping on you. Yeah, the vast resources NSA may very well have the ability to break it, but they're hardly the only threat out there. I'm far more worried about the potential for an identity thief to read my traffic than for the NSA to do so.
The NSA is hardly the biggest threat to your privacy and they're probably not the most dangerous.
The fact that a couple of antiquated cartels are trying to cling desperately to their obsolete business model isn't surprising. The only thing that is surprising is that the State of California is cooperating. If the MPAA / RIAA want to spread an anti-piracy message to children, let them buy advertising time on Nickelodeon, Disney & Cartoon Network. I don't really have a problem with their message, I just see no reason for the state to spend its resources to spread it.
Then there's the fact that charter schools are being pushed hard. These are schools which take public school funds, but are run by businesses, don't need to take any of the tests, don't require their teachers to have any sort of training in education, can pick and choose which students are allowed in. (Bad grades? You're out. Need special services? You're out.) Politicians seem to love charter schools so much and push them whenever they can.
I'm not 100% certain of what New York does for its charters but in most parts of the country, charters are either "first come, first serve" with waiting list and/or they use a random lottery drawing. In general, US special education law prohibits them from discriminating against students with learning or physical disabilities. New York City's famous "Harlem Success" charters use lotteries and actually report higher numbers of special education students than many of the surrounding schools.
I'm also not sure I'd say charters are popular with politicians. School board elections are, of course, highly political. Most run-of-the-mill voters are only vaguely aware of school board elections so voters generally tune out of school board elections and education policy. The special interest groups who do pay attention to school board races are teachers' unions. Big labor pumps in tremendous amounts of funding for school board candidates favorable to their cause and unions naturally hate charters since charters are generally non-union.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has already suggested using the "death penalty" for public schools that don't pass the overly hard tests. Of course, you can guess what he would replace them with.
And the alternative is? What do you propose? Should we simply throw more money at the problem? I would also point out that these "overly hard test" are still generally lighter than what colleges want.
I have every ounce of respect for Agnostics. Atheists in most cases are people with self-esteem issues.
There are two kinds of atheist. Most atheist see a picture of Jesus and it doesn't bother them any more than a picture of Santa would bother any of us. The ones that are the most vocal (especially on places like/.) are those with the religious akin to "daddy issues". There are a certain chunk of vocal atheist who were, in some way or another, screwed up by religion.
On the other side, there certainly are a large number of Christians, particularly "young earth" Christians who use their faith to shield themselves from their own insecurities. Most Christians aren't like that, but certainly a good many young earthers are.
My point is that atheist can hardly claim the title of being the rational ones. Personally, I'd consider myself an "old earth" Christian. I follow Christian teachings on faith but there are limits to the Bible's scientific accuracy because it was originally written by and for an audience that lived 2000 years ago. I must say though, that I have a lot of respect for agnostics. It takes some degree of courage to admit that you don't know everything. Anyone who claims to only believe in what is scientifically proven has to admit that mankind's knowledge of the very origins of life itself are somewhat limited.
If your belief system is incompatible with the facts, you will suffer for it.
Actually, evolution, with or without the presence of God, doesn't necessarily make you suffer for being wrong. Believing something that is false can help you. It's part of that whole "better to see a tiger where there is none than to not see a tiger when there is one".
From what I've seen, Christians, in general, seem to be happier than atheist. True, I'd say most of the Christians I know fully acknowledge evolution as fact, but even those that don't generally seem to be happier. The friends I have that are avowed atheist seem to generally be miserable.
Satan put those so-called fossils there to confuse us and test our faith. Every intelligent being alive knows the world is only about 6000 years old.
Strangely, I'm not sure where this whole "6000" years thing comes from. There's no actual Biblical claim about the Earth's age yet a lot of Christians believe the Earth is just a few thousand years old. Most don't, but some do.
While Americans might be pissed off about this, they're not doing much about it. The rest of the world is looking on and asking hard questions about how much reliance we want on American based companies, given what that means for our data and the US Government's desire to spy on it.
Google doesn't have much of a choice but to try and fight this - to roll over is just to do serious damage to their international business interests. Same for any big service provider. If you're in Europe and you need to do something securely, would you even think about getting services from an American company anymore?
Not a chance. If they're not careful, the NSA is going to destroy the competitiveness of some very big companies.
Oh please. France, Germany & the UK snoop on their citizens too. At least America, in theory, has some degree of 4th amendment protection. The UK has essentially no constitutional limits other than what common law tradition dictates and France and Germany generally offer weaker protections than the USA against searches. I realize Europeans love feeling snobby and superior, but there certainly is no shortage of privacy violations on the other side of the pond.
Hell, if you want to talk about spying, talk about China. The Chinese have no qualms with spying on their citizens and, unlike the USA, they will imprison anyone who they think might challenge them. China's government colludes with its companies to engage in corporate espionage in order to steal trade secrets from American and European companies. I don't see companies pulling out of China in droves.
I'm not saying the NSA's not creepy. They are. I'm just saying the idea that companies will flee America in significant numbers because of it is ridiculous.
We now know that Google is an active partner of the NSA and the U.S. government...we should treat them *as* the NSA.
No, Google is in compliance with the law. There's a big difference between complying and supporting. Google's CEO and management don't have to like it, they just have to do it.
The thing is, Google can't be trusted but open source code produced by Google can. If you can view the source, you can quickly see any backdoors in the code. The NSA itself produced security enhanced Linux. Despite all the controversy that we've had surrounding the NSA, nobody points a finger at SE Linux because the code is public.
If my taxes pay for the NSA and using encryption will cost the NSA more money to decrypt. Then I'll have to give up more of my money to them decrypt my messages?
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." ~Milton Friedman
I don't really care about the philosophical implications. What I want to know is if I'll still need to download Xcode from the App Store to get a copy of GCC.
True. However, does Richard Stallman now seem so stupid for asking that everyone call "Linux" systems "GNU/Linux" systems? We now have Android/Linux as well as GNU/Linux, so the distinction actually turns out to be a rather important one to make. Everyone likes to joke about how RMS is a crackpot with bad hygeine, but it seems he's been right more often than not.
Being a crackpot and being right aren't mutually exclusive. Remember what they say about broken clocks being right twice a day.
For all the flak the Ubuntu project gets, Kubuntu is one of those rare gems. I use it as my main OS and there's nothing I'd rather use. I'm thrilled to see it get more support. I know there are Ubuntu fanboys but I'll confess, I'm a Kubuntu fanboy.
Unlike Ubuntu, Kubuntu hasn't tried to slip Amazon crapware into their OS. KDE 4 remains a beautiful UI unlike the hideous messes that are Unity and Gnome 3. Unlike MINT, Kubuntu doesn't theme everything or screw with the default settings for software.
Unlike SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo or Fedora, Kubuntu also has Debian's apt-get which I consider to be the most straightforward and effective package management system around.
Why not use straight Debian with KDE? Debian's a supurb server OS but their cult-like devotion to only using FOSS software and drivers makes setting up graphics cards, wifi cards and getting Flash, DVD and MP3 support annoying. I also have to find 3rd party repositories for the normal version of Firefox and WINE. Debian also has a slower release cycle and I like getting shiny new things. Almost every support article for Ubuntu applies to Kubuntu just as well. As awesome as Debian's community support is, Ubuntu's is even larger. Don't get me wrong, Debian is great but I still prefer Kubuntu.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Lubuntu (the LXDE variant) are both excellent systems.
As someone from Gen Y, I'm getting tired of being lectured to by aging boomers. In their opinion, my generation is narcissistic and entitled though the boomers, in general, seem to be the most narcissistic of all the generations. If you want to talk about who is "entitled" then lets talk about entitlements. Polling data shows GenY'ers are the most open minded of all voting generations towards entitlement reform while boomers are generally adamant that nothing ever be done to Social Security or Medicare until they go bankrupt (and a good chunk of the boomers I talk to also adamantly deny the programs are in trouble, no matter how obvious the math is). I'm also told my generation is materialistic despite the fact that GenY, which is growing up in the post 08 economic crash, is possibly the most frugal generation since the greatest generation who grew up during depression and war.
As a millennial, I offer this advice: don't fucking have anime as your desktop wallpaper, don't have an interest in Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh. If you're older than 12 and still playing with that shit, your coworkers will think you're a wimpy bitch as best and a creepy pedophile at worst. Seriously, guys, we're grown men here.
-- Ethanol-fueled
You could certainly do worse than anime. For instance, you could be a brony.
It's not a perfect solution, but the Tor Project's attempt to answer the problems faced by Tor with their Tor Browser bundle. Basically, it's a copy of Firefox tailored for Tor usage. It's set to use Tor by default. It also comes with HTTPS everywhere, an extension the EFF makes that redirects web traffic to use SSL when possible. Some websites don't support SSL and some don't implement it well, but it helps solve part of the problem with exit nodes being able to sniff traffic. Exit nodes can still see where that traffic is going but actually looking at contents is difficult. NoScript is installed and plugins are disabled to keep javascript and plugins from leaking your IP. StartPage is used as the default search engine rather than Google because StartPage doesn't log what users do and they are based outside of the USA.
Ideally, the increased attention the Tor Network is getting will result in more people volunteering their equipment and bandwidth to serve as exit nodes.
Yeah, things like Farmville aren't exactly thrilling, but you can collaborate to a degree and help each other build. Plus, you don't have to be online at the same time. I think some of the newer versions of Animal Crossing also have these sorts of features.
Geek community is stupidfied... we read all the articles about PRISM and you STILL recommend *skype*? WTF. Why not jabber, jinny, linphone, anything else?!
Because I doubt the NSA really cares about what your girlfriend did at the office today.
Gender dysphoria is considered a legitimate psychological condition generally, so he'd have a case, but I don't know if it is life threatening or meets the usual criteria.
Emotional trauma over being overweight is also real. Some people get emotionally sensitive about other aspects of how they look too. As far as I know, prisoners don't get free liposuction, nosejobs, LASIK, breast enhancements, et al. Why should being insecure about the appearance of your genitals be treated any differently than insecurity about the appearance of any other aspects of your body? If a male prisoner who wants to be a woman declares that he needs breast enhancements for his emotional health, why should he be given any preference over a flat chested female prisoner who says she doesn't feel sufficiently womanly due to her small breast.
If Manning wants to use his own money, or if any other group wants to foot the bill, I'm fine with it but, at the end of the day, this is just a surgical procedure to make him feel better about how his body looks; to make him look like how he feels he should look. It is, in that sense, cosmetic.
Why is what they did wrong? Snowden should be held accountable for his actions and he should be tried on all charges they want to throw at him. They are doing their job to ensure that he is. He'll probably be found guilty of some.
THEN we call our senators, congressmen, presidents, popes, PTA members, florists, undertakers and anyone else that will list, and demand he be given a full pardon. Assuming of course his crimes were simply spilling the beans on evil activities of our government.
His life is a wreck no matter where he hides he knew that when he made his decision. He may as well do it here and let US citizens stand by him, or crucify him, as it is nominally our interests he was trying to protect. By running and hiding with our enemies, he looks very guilty.
Snowden should be tried. I'm not sure whether or not a jury would convict him though, which is exactly why he ought to go to trial. If the government can prove that what he did was a breach of the law, then he should go to jail, if not then he walks.
I have mixed feelings about the NSA program. Something like FISA and metadata logging seems necessary, but I'm concerned this might be too broad. The thing is, regardless of how I feel about FISA and the NSA, I believe that a court should make those decisions and not a rouge contractor. America's courts are not perfect but they are a better alternative to vigilantes like Snowden taking the law into their own hands.
Slashdot Mirror
While one doesn't lead to another, it doesn't surprise me when young kids who play GTA end up killing people with family members' guns while still young themselves. While almost no parents are perfect, plenty of parents are really, really, dreadfully awful. The parents who buy these games for young kids are often cut from the same fabric that leave loaded weapons laying around the house while unsupervised kids are running around.
And the parents who have a swimming pool at their house are generally more dangerous than those who have guns lying around.
Well.. this and the U.S. still has this puritan crap going on in the background that makes general violence and minimal amount of gore FINE but that showing too much of a boob (or anything slightly sexual) will TOTALLY CORRUPT MY BABY!
Seriously... killing people is fine but something that makes you feel good and is a gift to mankind.. NO WAY. OMG!!
GTA V has plenty of both.
The word you're looking for is ethics. No, not many people are aware of what they are, let alone have them any more. But yes, having a sense of ethics may make you inclined to point out that there is a reason why the game has an M rating to an adult clearly buying the game for a young child, and give them some examples.
Most stores won't sell an M rated game to a little kid. Most theaters won't let little kids into R rated movies unaccompanied. The industry does try to self-regulate here.
Exposure to women will happen. Women are not fantasy and we interact with them every day
Clearly you are not a part of slashdot's target audience.
SSL is there to keep common snoopers (ISPs, potential identity thieves, punks on the corporate network with wireshark, etc.) from eavesdropping on you. Yeah, the vast resources NSA may very well have the ability to break it, but they're hardly the only threat out there. I'm far more worried about the potential for an identity thief to read my traffic than for the NSA to do so.
The NSA is hardly the biggest threat to your privacy and they're probably not the most dangerous.
The fact that a couple of antiquated cartels are trying to cling desperately to their obsolete business model isn't surprising. The only thing that is surprising is that the State of California is cooperating. If the MPAA / RIAA want to spread an anti-piracy message to children, let them buy advertising time on Nickelodeon, Disney & Cartoon Network. I don't really have a problem with their message, I just see no reason for the state to spend its resources to spread it.
Then there's the fact that charter schools are being pushed hard. These are schools which take public school funds, but are run by businesses, don't need to take any of the tests, don't require their teachers to have any sort of training in education, can pick and choose which students are allowed in. (Bad grades? You're out. Need special services? You're out.) Politicians seem to love charter schools so much and push them whenever they can.
I'm not 100% certain of what New York does for its charters but in most parts of the country, charters are either "first come, first serve" with waiting list and/or they use a random lottery drawing. In general, US special education law prohibits them from discriminating against students with learning or physical disabilities. New York City's famous "Harlem Success" charters use lotteries and actually report higher numbers of special education students than many of the surrounding schools.
I'm also not sure I'd say charters are popular with politicians. School board elections are, of course, highly political. Most run-of-the-mill voters are only vaguely aware of school board elections so voters generally tune out of school board elections and education policy. The special interest groups who do pay attention to school board races are teachers' unions. Big labor pumps in tremendous amounts of funding for school board candidates favorable to their cause and unions naturally hate charters since charters are generally non-union.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has already suggested using the "death penalty" for public schools that don't pass the overly hard tests. Of course, you can guess what he would replace them with.
And the alternative is? What do you propose? Should we simply throw more money at the problem? I would also point out that these "overly hard test" are still generally lighter than what colleges want.
I have every ounce of respect for Agnostics. Atheists in most cases are people with self-esteem issues.
There are two kinds of atheist. Most atheist see a picture of Jesus and it doesn't bother them any more than a picture of Santa would bother any of us. The ones that are the most vocal (especially on places like /.) are those with the religious akin to "daddy issues". There are a certain chunk of vocal atheist who were, in some way or another, screwed up by religion.
On the other side, there certainly are a large number of Christians, particularly "young earth" Christians who use their faith to shield themselves from their own insecurities. Most Christians aren't like that, but certainly a good many young earthers are.
My point is that atheist can hardly claim the title of being the rational ones. Personally, I'd consider myself an "old earth" Christian. I follow Christian teachings on faith but there are limits to the Bible's scientific accuracy because it was originally written by and for an audience that lived 2000 years ago. I must say though, that I have a lot of respect for agnostics. It takes some degree of courage to admit that you don't know everything. Anyone who claims to only believe in what is scientifically proven has to admit that mankind's knowledge of the very origins of life itself are somewhat limited.
If your belief system is incompatible with the facts, you will suffer for it.
Actually, evolution, with or without the presence of God, doesn't necessarily make you suffer for being wrong. Believing something that is false can help you. It's part of that whole "better to see a tiger where there is none than to not see a tiger when there is one".
From what I've seen, Christians, in general, seem to be happier than atheist. True, I'd say most of the Christians I know fully acknowledge evolution as fact, but even those that don't generally seem to be happier. The friends I have that are avowed atheist seem to generally be miserable.
Satan put those so-called fossils there to confuse us and test our faith. Every intelligent being alive knows the world is only about 6000 years old.
Strangely, I'm not sure where this whole "6000" years thing comes from. There's no actual Biblical claim about the Earth's age yet a lot of Christians believe the Earth is just a few thousand years old. Most don't, but some do.
While Americans might be pissed off about this, they're not doing much about it. The rest of the world is looking on and asking hard questions about how much reliance we want on American based companies, given what that means for our data and the US Government's desire to spy on it.
Google doesn't have much of a choice but to try and fight this - to roll over is just to do serious damage to their international business interests. Same for any big service provider. If you're in Europe and you need to do something securely, would you even think about getting services from an American company anymore?
Not a chance. If they're not careful, the NSA is going to destroy the competitiveness of some very big companies.
Oh please. France, Germany & the UK snoop on their citizens too. At least America, in theory, has some degree of 4th amendment protection. The UK has essentially no constitutional limits other than what common law tradition dictates and France and Germany generally offer weaker protections than the USA against searches. I realize Europeans love feeling snobby and superior, but there certainly is no shortage of privacy violations on the other side of the pond.
Hell, if you want to talk about spying, talk about China. The Chinese have no qualms with spying on their citizens and, unlike the USA, they will imprison anyone who they think might challenge them. China's government colludes with its companies to engage in corporate espionage in order to steal trade secrets from American and European companies. I don't see companies pulling out of China in droves.
I'm not saying the NSA's not creepy. They are. I'm just saying the idea that companies will flee America in significant numbers because of it is ridiculous.
We now know that Google is an active partner of the NSA and the U.S. government...we should treat them *as* the NSA.
No, Google is in compliance with the law. There's a big difference between complying and supporting. Google's CEO and management don't have to like it, they just have to do it.
The thing is, Google can't be trusted but open source code produced by Google can. If you can view the source, you can quickly see any backdoors in the code. The NSA itself produced security enhanced Linux. Despite all the controversy that we've had surrounding the NSA, nobody points a finger at SE Linux because the code is public.
If my taxes pay for the NSA and using encryption will cost the NSA more money to decrypt. Then I'll have to give up more of my money to them decrypt my messages?
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." ~Milton Friedman
I don't really care about the philosophical implications. What I want to know is if I'll still need to download Xcode from the App Store to get a copy of GCC.
True. However, does Richard Stallman now seem so stupid for asking that everyone call "Linux" systems "GNU/Linux" systems? We now have Android/Linux as well as GNU/Linux, so the distinction actually turns out to be a rather important one to make. Everyone likes to joke about how RMS is a crackpot with bad hygeine, but it seems he's been right more often than not.
Being a crackpot and being right aren't mutually exclusive. Remember what they say about broken clocks being right twice a day.
For all the flak the Ubuntu project gets, Kubuntu is one of those rare gems. I use it as my main OS and there's nothing I'd rather use. I'm thrilled to see it get more support. I know there are Ubuntu fanboys but I'll confess, I'm a Kubuntu fanboy.
Unlike Ubuntu, Kubuntu hasn't tried to slip Amazon crapware into their OS. KDE 4 remains a beautiful UI unlike the hideous messes that are Unity and Gnome 3. Unlike MINT, Kubuntu doesn't theme everything or screw with the default settings for software.
Unlike SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo or Fedora, Kubuntu also has Debian's apt-get which I consider to be the most straightforward and effective package management system around.
Why not use straight Debian with KDE? Debian's a supurb server OS but their cult-like devotion to only using FOSS software and drivers makes setting up graphics cards, wifi cards and getting Flash, DVD and MP3 support annoying. I also have to find 3rd party repositories for the normal version of Firefox and WINE. Debian also has a slower release cycle and I like getting shiny new things. Almost every support article for Ubuntu applies to Kubuntu just as well. As awesome as Debian's community support is, Ubuntu's is even larger. Don't get me wrong, Debian is great but I still prefer Kubuntu.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Lubuntu (the LXDE variant) are both excellent systems.
As someone from Gen Y, I'm getting tired of being lectured to by aging boomers. In their opinion, my generation is narcissistic and entitled though the boomers, in general, seem to be the most narcissistic of all the generations. If you want to talk about who is "entitled" then lets talk about entitlements. Polling data shows GenY'ers are the most open minded of all voting generations towards entitlement reform while boomers are generally adamant that nothing ever be done to Social Security or Medicare until they go bankrupt (and a good chunk of the boomers I talk to also adamantly deny the programs are in trouble, no matter how obvious the math is). I'm also told my generation is materialistic despite the fact that GenY, which is growing up in the post 08 economic crash, is possibly the most frugal generation since the greatest generation who grew up during depression and war.
As a millennial, I offer this advice: don't fucking have anime as your desktop wallpaper, don't have an interest in Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh. If you're older than 12 and still playing with that shit, your coworkers will think you're a wimpy bitch as best and a creepy pedophile at worst. Seriously, guys, we're grown men here.
-- Ethanol-fueled
You could certainly do worse than anime. For instance, you could be a brony.
It's not a perfect solution, but the Tor Project's attempt to answer the problems faced by Tor with their Tor Browser bundle. Basically, it's a copy of Firefox tailored for Tor usage. It's set to use Tor by default. It also comes with HTTPS everywhere, an extension the EFF makes that redirects web traffic to use SSL when possible. Some websites don't support SSL and some don't implement it well, but it helps solve part of the problem with exit nodes being able to sniff traffic. Exit nodes can still see where that traffic is going but actually looking at contents is difficult. NoScript is installed and plugins are disabled to keep javascript and plugins from leaking your IP. StartPage is used as the default search engine rather than Google because StartPage doesn't log what users do and they are based outside of the USA.
Ideally, the increased attention the Tor Network is getting will result in more people volunteering their equipment and bandwidth to serve as exit nodes.
Yeah, things like Farmville aren't exactly thrilling, but you can collaborate to a degree and help each other build. Plus, you don't have to be online at the same time. I think some of the newer versions of Animal Crossing also have these sorts of features.
We are now happily married and looking forward to L4D3 :)
That's a terrible name to burden a child with. At least pick something pronounceable.
Or, if you're gonna use a name that's tough to pronounce, at least use the name to perform an SQL injection attack.
Geek community is stupidfied... we read all the articles about PRISM and you STILL recommend *skype*? WTF. Why not jabber, jinny, linphone, anything else?!
Because I doubt the NSA really cares about what your girlfriend did at the office today.
Gender dysphoria is considered a legitimate psychological condition generally, so he'd have a case, but I don't know if it is life threatening or meets the usual criteria.
Emotional trauma over being overweight is also real. Some people get emotionally sensitive about other aspects of how they look too. As far as I know, prisoners don't get free liposuction, nosejobs, LASIK, breast enhancements, et al. Why should being insecure about the appearance of your genitals be treated any differently than insecurity about the appearance of any other aspects of your body? If a male prisoner who wants to be a woman declares that he needs breast enhancements for his emotional health, why should he be given any preference over a flat chested female prisoner who says she doesn't feel sufficiently womanly due to her small breast.
If Manning wants to use his own money, or if any other group wants to foot the bill, I'm fine with it but, at the end of the day, this is just a surgical procedure to make him feel better about how his body looks; to make him look like how he feels he should look. It is, in that sense, cosmetic.
Why is what they did wrong? Snowden should be held accountable for his actions and he should be tried on all charges they want to throw at him. They are doing their job to ensure that he is. He'll probably be found guilty of some.
THEN we call our senators, congressmen, presidents, popes, PTA members, florists, undertakers and anyone else that will list, and demand he be given a full pardon. Assuming of course his crimes were simply spilling the beans on evil activities of our government.
His life is a wreck no matter where he hides he knew that when he made his decision. He may as well do it here and let US citizens stand by him, or crucify him, as it is nominally our interests he was trying to protect. By running and hiding with our enemies, he looks very guilty.
Snowden should be tried. I'm not sure whether or not a jury would convict him though, which is exactly why he ought to go to trial. If the government can prove that what he did was a breach of the law, then he should go to jail, if not then he walks.
I have mixed feelings about the NSA program. Something like FISA and metadata logging seems necessary, but I'm concerned this might be too broad. The thing is, regardless of how I feel about FISA and the NSA, I believe that a court should make those decisions and not a rouge contractor. America's courts are not perfect but they are a better alternative to vigilantes like Snowden taking the law into their own hands.
The trick is to educate them on the issues
If the last US election taught us anything, I'd say the trick is to simply promise them free crap.