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I like your plan. It is clear, concise and ends with the Sack of Rome, as all good plans should.

Small nuc plants
As many vehicles as possible running on batteries
Nuc supplied electricity to charge

These two items would be the biggest game changer. I do hope though that we will have a choice, whether to invite small nuclear into our own backyard (I certainly would being a survivalist) ... or, through the grid purchase a bit of big nuke energy a good ways from someone who has a big nuke in their backyard. As shown by the Dakotas' boost in median income as the rest of us hold the line or sink, oil/energy is a path to wealth creation, one of the only now that so much manufacturing and exports have gone. All it would take are a few states of the Union to go full nuclear. My own state of Oklahoma could literally light the country coast to coast with big nuclear and HVDC conduits to render it into properly synchronized AC on the interconnects. So far I have received the standard goose egg response to this idea.

Remaining Petrochemical stocks to produce plastics and provide machinery lubrication.

Don't forget fertilizer and energy for irrigation and farming, the two greatest Achilles' heels of modern life. Here is where a larger scale nuclear approach really could help, for the amount of process heat required to knock hydrogen from water and sequester nitrogen from the air to make ammonia could not easily be accomplished by the small nuke in your backyard. Which brings us finally to

Large scale effort to produce a fuel with high energy density and transportability to replace petrofuel in military uses like jets and planes. Our world is built on cheap accessible energy. Without it we will run the industrial revolution and civilization in reverse, and only stop when we once again party with the Visigoths.

I wish I could say that ammonia was the grail but it isn't really. My current angle is hydrogen knocked from water by nuclear energy (via heat and/or direct radiation) for transportation, but elemental hydrogen is really dangerous. We'll either deal with it (boom!) or find some way to stabilize it.

Your party hearty plan had me thinking of a barbarian horde arriving in... electric Goth carts.

The cloud - Computing's version of the housing bubble.

The Cloud Is My Master. I've been chosen.

He got a well-deserved heckling at BlackHat this summer: http://www.businessinsider.com/keith-alexander-gets-heckled-at-black-hat-2013-7

Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"

> Did that change the number of people that signed up?

They got the number of people signed up wrong. They also left out the salient detail that the site is not even online.

The only conclusion that is reasonable is they are liars.

> especially when it costs $300,000,000 for a state?

That is another lie. The actual cost was $43 million.

http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-blamed-for-oregon-obamacare-site-2013-11

The fact is the article you chose to submit a story on is a pack of lies.

> A charitable reading suggests that ObamaCare's net enrollment stands at about negative four million.

This is bullshit too. I know from personal experience. My son's health care policy was cancelled effective its renewal date sometime in May. That however DOES NOT mean he is going to be uninsured or needs to enroll in anything. What happens in this case is when his current policy runs out his insurer automatically puts him in the corresponding policy created for the PPACA. So fuck all the NET ENROLLMENT CHANGE FOR THESE PEOPLE IS ZERO.

The story you submitted, and your posting defending it are factually devoid of any correct, valid information. Since the actual facts are a matter of public record, you are lying.

I suppose like many things in life it will remain a mystery.

Russia Simulated A Large-Scale Aerial Night Attack On Sweden
Canadian jets repel Russian bombers

Canadian navy officer sentenced to 20 years for being Russian spy
Canadian Police Arrest Man on Trying to Spy for China

Bombs from thwarted B.C. terror plot planted among crowd of 40,000 Canada Day revelers

Do you have a source? According to Business Insider, the mantle is held by World of Warcraft (> $10 billion), but that may be unfair since it is a subscription model at $15 a month, on top of the inital $50-$100 dollar purchase (look at original WoW at $50, then 4 expansions at $40 a piece, worst case). Take a step back to console/pc single purchase, and it's CoD: Black Ops at $1.5 Billion. Or maybe the crown goes to GTA 5, which topped $1 Billion in sales in 3 days.

Or you could mean total sales. I see on wikipedia Wii Sports as the best with almost 83 million copies sold. Unless you look at the numbers released by Amazon.co.uk, which has the CoD franchise taking the cake. Or you could mean fastest selling, which was CoD: Black Ops. Though sales numbers don't really mean a whole lot, since they don't take development cost into account, or the fact that Wii Sports was bundled (i.e. how many were independant purchases? how many could have been?).

but if, for example, a government agent tries to enter your home by force with no warrant, it is legal and moral to defend yourself with violent force if necessary.

Moral, yes. Legal, not anymore. There have been a number of cases where non-uniformed government agents have busted the wrong door (with no warning, much less presenting a warrant etc - and the warrant was for a different location at that, so in practice it was meaningless) and were shot by the owner, and the owner was found guilty of first-degree murder of a police officer as a result. A worse scenario is when the agents fire back and kill the owner, which has also happened (and they were not charged with murder or even manslaughter).

USA is long since a police state in a sense that getting your door busted by a bunch of uniformed SWAT/FBI/ATF goons who will break your door, shout at you, kill your dog, throw a flashbang grenade at you, break your arm, handcuff and arrest you, and occasionally accidentally shoot you (even if you're complying with every single order!), is a very real possibility that every citizen and resident has to contend with - even if you "haven't done anything wrong" whatsoever. Worse, they will lie about it to the media and in court afterwards. And you will not be able to do anything about it or meaningfully punish them for it by legal means; at best, you can sue the government for monetary damages.

The logic espoused by the quoted idea is the same as saying if police were to start strip searching everyone without cause, it would be reasonable simply because it always happens.

But they already have been doing that:
http://news.yahoo.com/police-turn-routine-traffic-stops-into-cavity-searches-201433510.html
http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/3rd-target-of-body-cavity-searches-comes-forward/
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/justice/new-mexico-search-lawsuit/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/troopers-texas-probe-genitals-women-traffic-stops-article-1.1414668

And dont have your dog along:
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/video?clipId=9513174&autostart=false
http://www.businessinsider.com/police-are-shooting-dogs-2013-7

Seriously people, wake the fuck up. This has happened before, we know where it leads. Technologies getting better though, this time around all the worlds armies my not be able to stop them. Why do we keep letting this happen?

According to this BI article: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-high-tech-gps-tracker-that-is-a-game-changer-for-police-2013-11

"High-speed pursuits cause nearly 400 deaths a year and cost the government more than a billion dollars a year in damages, lawsuits, and medical bills."
"... Fischbach says that in most pursuits a minimum of $3,000 in property damage occurs."

No system can guarantee anonymity. Bitcoin transactions are completely traceable. On contrast, DigiCash transactions were completely untraceable. However, neither of these statements tells us about how much anonymity one can achieve using them.

When you buy Bitcoin from a company by identifying yourself to them, and then directly transfer the money to, say, a publicly known donation address of Wikileaks, you surely are perfectly identifiable. However, anything slightly more complicated than this quickly becomes impractical to analyze. Even with a considerable amount of data, scientists who claim they can trace identities screw up:

http://www.businessinsider.com/silk-road-satoshi-paper-retraction-2013-11

Sure, they can use the system to try to gather some statistics about usage or try to infiltrate Bitcoin services to accumulate as much personal data as possible, but it's quite easy to fool these systems and people who have something to worry about can figure these out easily.

Let's begin seeing Bitcoin for what it is: A distributed decentralized notarization system. That's all there is to it. You can build all sorts of features on top of this. There are already implemented anonymization solutions, both third party and protocol-level, that work on top of Bitcoin. Or, maybe, what you want is some payment system that supports chargebacks? Sure, that is easy to implement on top of an irreversible payment system; Bitcoin supports different signature schemes at the protocol level. Maybe you don't need a payment system, but want to notarize a document? Sure, you can even use the blockchain to copyright your work. So an and so forth.

But I want to put my hand on the screen. In the glowing hand outline. Like in the movies.
Right after I have my destiny surgically altered of course.
I love living in the future.

For an example of superiority, think of the case of a government that invents a computer that can mine bitcoins at 1000000000 the rate of the rest of the world...

Well. That is not really possible since the whole network will limit the total number of coins... Of course a government could create something that would grab all the newly generated bitcoins but those would not be worth that much in comparison to the required hardware..

What could happen is that a government invests enough money in hardware to make the 51% attack (having more than 50% of the total processing power) possible and that way "break" the network... If that would ever happen there are still a few ways to limit the damage by branching off the chain at a globally accepted point and then sending out a new software update that could implement something else than sha-256 for proving the work done..... I would actually love to see a change from sha-256 to something like scrypt since that would make it too expensive to make an effective attack while at the same time level the playing-field of the new ASIC-miners.. IMO it would be better to have many million of users crunching away on their small parts than having a few thousand people doing most of the work, maybe even reduce the number of coins per block to allow a greater spread of the generated coins...

And me too 'lost' bitcoins... selling about 1000 of them when they where ~0.7USD :(

Just wonder what the the guy that bough this pizza says now... and if the pizza-place owner still have the bitcoins :)
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-infamous-bitcoin-pizzas-are-now-worth-6-million-2013-11

So, the middle class are to blame for their debt load. I guess that is true. However, when you think your house is worth 15 times your yearly income, and its dollar value is rising faster than the money you make from your two household jobs, it makes that debt seem like nothing. Until the crash. Median debt in the US was $70k in 2010, as opposed to $50k in 2000. Most of that is real estate loans. Total debt has been going down since 2009, for obvious reasons. More Info.

Americans have ALWAYS consumed too much. That is what drives our economy. Larry Sommers gave a talk at the IMF recently where he made the claim that we only consume enough to have full employment during bubbles. Otherwise, we are in 'secular stagnation', meaning, basically, not enough demand to employ everybody. He is right, and other economists have been saying this for years. Given the current economy, we need MORE consumption, not less.

Unless we can give up the dream of full employment, and migrate to some sort of post-scarcity economy, we are doomed to these binge-purge cycles, and everybody wanting a new IPhone and Xbox One. If only they weren't so damned cool.

You say that raising minimum wages causes poverty and reduces employment as if you have some facts to back this up. Unfortunately for you the facts say the opposite: Higher wages won't increase unemployement, no harm when wages raised, "another study says you are wrong.

How exactly does raising minimum wage not hurt the economy? I personally don't disagree that it probably doesn't have much of an impact on the unemployment rate. Businesses need the amount of personnel that they need to operate. I can't however ignore what I have personally seen every time minimum wage has been raised in my lifetime. Minimum wage increases a bit and cost of living increases far more.

Quote statistics and experts to your heart's content. If you can honestly deny that minimum wage increases are anything but forced inflation you either have no understanding of business and economics or you are generally blind as a bat. Businesses aren't simply eating these cost increases especially massive corporations employing hundreds of thousands and/or millions of people many of them at or slightly above minimum wage. They decrease the quality of their product or service and increase the price to make up for the lost revenue. There is more to it than that but that is the general effect on the average Joe.

Further, how exactly do you think raising minimum wage works out for those making between minimum wage and the amount to which it was raised? I can tell you this much I didn't get a 29% raise when it was raised from $5.15 to $7.25 and hour as a late teens factory worker. Instead I got a $.25 raise above minimum wage raise which was a decent raise from a dollar perspective but was far less than the resulting inflation from the minimum wage increase. In short those people end up back at minimum wage or very slightly above it. Employers aren't going to give raises across the board equal to the percentage of the minimum wage increase.

So how then does a minimum wage increase not result in an increase in poverty?

You say that raising minimum wages causes poverty and reduces employment as if you have some facts to back this up. Unfortunately for you the facts say the opposite: Higher wages won't increase unemployement, no harm when wages raised, "another study says you are wrong.

Not per various sources - puts the truck 5 years out - making 2018/9 closer than 2015.

As for towing - you have my attention at "100% torque at 0 RPM".

This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here, though it is more than a year old now.

Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN represents.

For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"', but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.

I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory. :-)

This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here, though it is more than a year old now.

Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN represents.

For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"', but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.

I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory. :-)

Wake me when they get to 9 million in a single weekend.

Once you accepted that you can have secret laws to force providers to not tell something, how far is that from forcing them to keep updating that metatag or lying? Before that becomes a standard or something popular enough the law covering that chance will follow.

The system is broken already, there is no possible trust if you have secret laws to force even the most trustfully provider to follow their orders, stop playing boiling frog.

And if you think that things are bad enough already, think that we know so far a few of the 200000 documents leaked by Snowden.

Appropriate.

Nathan Myhrvold is also the man behind intellectual ventures, the company that buys out patents and sues companies making products based on them. I wonder if a lawsuit is on the way.

But when all of those orders start getting cancelled, and new ones stop coming, don't stand around wailing about how unfair it is that people have decided they can't trust you and don't want your stuff.

IBM sales just dropped 22% in China, in a quarter where they expected growth. IBM CEO said they don't know why that happened.

NSA Revelations Kill IBM Hardware Sales In China

The NSA Leaks Have Been Crushing US Tech Sales In China

Emerging markets ... likely need enterprise class equipment too.

Well, yes and no, but reportedly 98.9% no in the case of at least one huge deal that fell through.

SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half and there was little you could do about it.

The main thing they've got left to compete with is the trust in their brand, the idea that they're a safe bet and no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco. They're in trouble even without all the NSA publicity, but if their own government is damaging their established brand, it doesn't exactly help their situation.

No. Obamacare is crony capitalism.

This is Socialism.

Actually it's fascism

No. Obamacare is crony capitalism.

This is Socialism.

I believe he is referring to this story that slashdot referred to in the recent past. I don't know if they ever followed through or not as I can't seem to find any further mention other than repeats of this story.

I keep seeing the seeing these paranoid critters screaming bloody murder about being forced to use Google+. What exactly is the issue with creating a Google+ account and not adding any information you do not want to share? Please enlighten me!

Has the privacy disaster that is Facebook not once entered your brain after all these years?

People are losing jobs, and failing to get jobs, because of this nonsense, people are being forced to turn over social network account passwords, and the accounts, with or without passwords are being mined, not only by advertisers, but also by government agencies.

Look, its fine that you buy into this stuff, but don't drag me into it, just because you don't see a problem in your little world. Even teenagers are starting to realize facebook is a trap.

There is simply no reason to believe Google+ is going to be any different. You can see the creeping invasion already.

The XBox unit is profitable. ...

You sure about that? Microsoft Is Making An Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties

Mod parent up!
For those not willing to read the article:

Microsoft is probably losing $2.5 billion on Skype, Xbox, and Windows Phone. Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform.

Apparently 90% of their sysadmins. http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-firing-sysdadmins-2013-8

The XBox unit is profitable. ...

You sure about that? Microsoft Is Making An Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties

Please try again. This time plot revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. I'll save you some time, go here to see it.

You are correct that spending is up, even as a percentage of GDP. The budget should be reviewed, as some of the causes are cyclical (the recession) and will "self solve" as the economy improves, while others are structural issues, like devoting an ever larger chunk of the budget to military and war expenditures over the past decade.

But it's just as important to realize that as a percentage of GDP revenue is down. Those tax cuts mean the government is taking in a smaller percentage of economic output. So when inflation drives up the cost of guns/tanks/healthcare/office space/contractors for the government there isn't a corresponding increase in revenue to off set it, because we've chosen to end taxes on a number of things that get inflated (like the wealthiest 1%'s salaries).

Your bottom line is wrong. Revenue is up in dollar amount, but down as a percentage of the economy. Spending is up by both measures. Revenue has not kept pace with economic growth. To solve the debt and deficits we must both lower spending and raise tax revenue, ideally by closing loopholes and credits, rather than raising the marginal rates.

oh, none of us who are aware of thre reality would weep any tears if the tsa, nsa and even cia went away tomorrow.

I'm curious, does the "reality" you inhabit have foreign nations simultaneously revealing their nuclear submarine force along with state media published maps of nuclear strikes against the US?

Does your "reality" include another foreign nations probing the defenses of the US and its allies with nuclear bombers?

Russian bombers buzz U.S. territory — again
Russian Bombers Perform Simulated "Strikes" on Sweden, U.S.
US scrambles jet fighters after Russian nuclear bombers circle American airspace over Guam
Pictured: The moment RAF jets intercepted Russian bombers flying in British airspace

Do US allies in your "reality" worry about invasion or blackmail by rearming adversaries?

NATO stages exercise as rearming Russia worries some allies

Did the TSA in your "reality" keep 1,549 firearms off planes, not to mention other weapons?

TSA Finds Guns on Hundreds of Passengers Each Year

all those opaque cant-see-thru orgs have no reason to exist other than TO exist and keep themselves in power. blech! the american public (and world public) has had enough of this BS!

The TSA, CIA, NSA aren't "in power." They answer to the government in power, just like the FBI, Interior Department, Coast Guard, Social Security administration, and a host of other government agencies.

The price of uranium is about $35/lb ($77.16/kg) at the moment, and it costs about $40/lb ($88.18/kg) to produce the stuff at the moment[1]. 1kg of uranium gives you 83TJ of energy, the same as 3464 tonnes of coal. Coal costs $71.34 per tonne[2], so to get the same amount of energy from 1kg of uranium in coal, you would need to spend $247,133.65.

The fact that uranium is currently selling for less than the cost of production suggests that there is a massive surplus of inventory in the channel at the moment, not that resources are limited.

Sources:
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/uranium-is-set-for-a-violent-move-higher-2013-10
2. http://dawn.com/news/1053697/rising-coal-prices-to-hit-profit-margins

The SEC under Bush. They decimated it, and helped bring on the Great Recession.

You are completely wrong on this.

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/enough-of-this-nonsense-george-bush-grew-the-sec

The SEC grew in size and scope under Bush. What you probably meant was the repeal of Glassâ"Steagall. But this was under Clinton with the Grammâ"Leachâ"Bliley Act. I cannot say for sure if this was what you meant because with you being factually incorrect in your statement, I can only assume based on facts that are true within it. But rest assured, of all the things that caused the "Great Recession" failing to fund the SEC or shrinking it was not one of them.

Ok, my iPhone 4S does 1080p out through HDMI and so has every iPhone since. Better screens in some models, usually the more expensive ones. Personally, I see NFC as just another attack vector and would never use it. Better camera is subjective. Does it take better pictures or just bigger pictures? Again, I think the person behind the camera makes a big difference as well. Better software is also subjective as Android has proven to be less secure as an OS. Yep! costs less but so did VHS but that didn't make it better than Betamax.

Half of all the profit in the smartphone market goes to Apple, the other half to Samsung.. Everyone else is losing money. It's an alarming situation for smartphones. Google can afford to stay in the game to keep Android going - they're basically selling the Nexus line at cost- but I'm not sure that the rest can. The idea of a Samsung-Apple duopoly controlling smartphones does not appeal.

Happy Halloween

...that I have to wonder who is guiding them. How would Snowden know exactly how to publish this data to maximum effect? He's a sysadmin, not a PR expert. This seems more like one of the successful KGB misinformation campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s.

That inference has been made.

It's Now Clear That Russian Intelligence Speaks For Edward Snowden
Defector Describes Russia’s Handling of NSA Leaker Snowden
The Russians were involved with him long before it was acknowledged in Moscow.
Report: Snowden stayed at Russian consulate while in Hong Kong

Definitive? Not quite. Suspicious? Very.

This is why a lot of people say it's better to do government operations as close to the people as possible. That is, if it can be done at a city level, do it at a city level. If it can be done at a state level, do it at a state level. Only a few things should be done at the national level.

The farther things get from the people, the easier it is for them to be corrupted (or rather, if some town gets corrupted, it doesn't affect people outside that town).

That's great in theory, but in practice it often doesn't work that way. Local and state governments are often far more corrupt than the federal government. Illiinois has had several of its former governors go to jail, and I don't really need to comment on the corruption Chicago is known for. What is less well known is the rampant corruption in places like Normal, IL, East St. Louis, IL, etc. Other states have similar issues, some far worse than Illinois and Chicago, and many if not most far worse than the corruption we see at the federal level (though I admint, with the NSA surveillance state, FCC corporatist revolving door, and a supreme court acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of our corporate masters, this may be changing).

It is not bullshit that Amazon is selling at a loss. They have never made a profit.

As long as you don't count 15 billion gross profit as a profit.

Gross is of no interest. Take a look at this graph on net: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-a-long-view-of-amazons-profits-2013-8

You can run the Tesla Model S on the amount of electricity used to refine the gasoline for an equivalent car. Or put another way: a gasoline car uses as much electricity as pure electric, PLUS the gasoline.

"Chris: It's funny they make that argument, because they're one of the largest users of electricity in the country, to refine gasoline. That's why the power cords go into refineries. Something like 4 to 6 kilowatt hours of electricity to refine every gallon of gasoline. They're pulling that electricity from the same source as they're critiquing on electric cars and they get much less result out of it.

Elon: Exactly. Chris has a nice way of saying it which is, you have enough electricity to power all the cars in the country if you stop refining gasoline. You take an average of 5 kilowatt hours to refine gasoline, something like the Model S can go 20 miles on 5 kilowatt hours. You basically have the energy needed to power electric vehicles if you stop refining.

BI: 5 kilowatt hours, that's to refine and transport one gallon of gas?

Elon: Chris, does that include transportation?

Chris: I think it's just refining. It does not include transporting it from the Middle East or Venezuela. The more efficient your refinery is, the lower that number is. The lowest number in the DOE study I read was 4, and the highest was 7, it depends on what your refinery is."

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-and-chris-paine-explain-how-the-electric-car-got-its-revenge-2011-10

I don't doubt the code can be repaired with enough effort. [But] the real code running the show (the legalese in the ACA law) may have a fatal flaw in it

As you recognized, law too is code. Get enough Democrats into state legislatures and they might have a chance of reversing REDMAP, the RSLC's organized redistricting effort that produced the inkblot-shaped districts that turned a Democratic popular vote into a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, which should make it possible to patch this bug in PPACA.

In 2007 he was busy banging a journalist, writing her wikipedia entry for her, and embezzling money from Wikimedia Foundation.

http://gawker.com/362814/the-goodbye-email-from-jimmy-waless-girlfriend

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/3/is-wikipedia-s-jimmy-wales-really-an-embezzler-

Oops...missed the previous LINK above to the Acxiom and Facebook program to help make sure they know who you are, no matter what names you use.

Yet another revelation from Snowden that reveals Top Secret American foreign intelligence activities that have no relation to the rights of Americans.

When will people come to understand that his goal was not simply protecting the rights of Americans? Isn't it clear from who his Russian spokesman was?

Maybe they just wanted to know how many French cars would burn this year, set ablaze by.....guess who?

More than 40,000 vehicles are burned each year in France...

Here is one for China. I'll leave the rest to you.

Snowden: 'There's A 0% Chance' The Russians Or Chinese Received Any Classified NSA Documents

Snowden also insisted he was able to protect the documents from China’s spy services because he was familiar with that country's intelligence capabilities through his work as an NSA contractor.

In his job, he had targeted Chinese operations and taught a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence.

I thought Snowden was just crusading for the Constitutional rights of Americans? But his actions keep disclosing intelligence gathering of foreign sources, and the actions of America's foreign allies, which their governments consider highly damaging. At the same time he claims to know all about China's and Russia's intelligence, but where are the disclosures there? Surely if he is an expert on it, as he claims, it must be based on documentation? Where is that documentation? Where are the reports on China and Russia? It's almost as if more than is claimed is going on. I wonder if we'll hear from his spokesman in Russia?

Turning documents over to journalists, or anybody employed in any other profession, does not make them magically uninterceptable, unreadable, or unposessable by Russians, Chinese, or anybody else. He has no control over the distribution after he hands it off to anybody, and the people who have the stuff might not even know if someone else is reading it.

That is assuming that he is even telling the truth now after spending a long time lying so that he could get access to the documents. Lies about his adventure continued when the Russians said they didn't know he was coming when he in fact had a birthday party at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong prior to his departure, and made arrangements there. When he got to Russia, an FSB spokesman was speaking for him. Then there is this gem: "(On June 23 Izvestia, a [formerly] state-owned Russian newspaper, wrote that the Kremlin and its intelligence services collaborated with Wikileaks to help Snowden escape from Hong Kong.)" ... It looks to me that there is far more going on than most people want to believe.

Turning documents over to journalists, or anybody employed in any other profession, does not make them magically uninterceptable, unreadable, or unposessable by Russians, Chinese, or anybody else. He has no control over the distribution after he hands it off to anybody, and the people who have the stuff might not even know if someone else is reading it.

That is assuming that he is even telling the truth now after spending a long time lying so that he could get access to the documents. Lies about his adventure continued when the Russians said they didn't know he was coming when he in fact had a birthday party at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong prior to his departure, and made arrangements there. When he got to Russia, an FSB spokesman was speaking for him. Then there is this gem: "(On June 23 Izvestia, a [formerly] state-owned Russian newspaper, wrote that the Kremlin and its intelligence services collaborated with Wikileaks to help Snowden escape from Hong Kong.)" ... It looks to me that there is far more going on than most people want to believe.

Turning documents over to journalists, or anybody employed in any other profession, does not make them magically uninterceptable, unreadable, or unposessable by Russians, Chinese, or anybody else. He has no control over the distribution after he hands it off to anybody, and the people who have the stuff might not even know if someone else is reading it.

That is assuming that he is even telling the truth now after spending a long time lying so that he could get access to the documents. Lies about his adventure continued when the Russians said they didn't know he was coming when he in fact had a birthday party at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong prior to his departure, and made arrangements there. When he got to Russia, an FSB spokesman was speaking for him. Then there is this gem: "(On June 23 Izvestia, a [formerly] state-owned Russian newspaper, wrote that the Kremlin and its intelligence services collaborated with Wikileaks to help Snowden escape from Hong Kong.)" ... It looks to me that there is far more going on than most people want to believe.

UPS dropping spouses from coverage due to the ACA: http://www.businessinsider.com/ups-dropping-spouses-health-coverage-2013-8 [businessinsider.com] (to name just one of many such outcomes).

"UPS has decided, as a result of increased costs and provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to stop covering employee's spouses who can get coverage from their own employer..."

Why do you see that as a problem? It only makes to me that they would want to quit carrying burdens that other employers should be shouldering.