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You're just hand-waving from ignorance.

Do you want to know why you didn't provide a link? Because you don't know the answer, and just assumed that since you believed the hollywoodism, it must be true. It is "common sense," right? Everybody knows it, right?

Had you checked, because you don't know, or attempted to provide a link to substantiate your claim, you would have discovered the truth. But you didn't. Because you were born yesterday, and don't know any better.

Educate yourself at the library, get off the lawn!

Starting with The Guardian, because it is British:
http://www.theguardian.com/med...

Here is a great Yahoo! Answers where one person gives a correct answer, and a dozen spew horse crap.
https://answers.yahoo.com/ques...
Knowledge isn't unheard of, just rare.

This one has lots of citations:
http://www.aleksandreia.com/20...
It covers American issues mostly.

One thing to note about the treaty protecting diplomatic missions is that there is strict context to the restrictions:

... are immune from any exercise of jurisdiction by the receiving state [i.e., the nation in which the embassy is located] that would interfere with their official use

Is harboring international fugitives really the official use of the embassy? This isn't a political thing, either; there is a valid interpol warrant. If you're part of the interpol system, then it is a matter of basic rule of law. And in the UK, they have a specific system whereby if a diplomatic mission is facilitating an activity other than its official use, they suspend its status. But that isn't strictly necessary under the Treaty; that is just the local system. Under the treaty, only entering to arrest somebody involved in an official use of the embassy is protected. Assange is not a member of the diplomatic staff, and is not a legitimate visitor. Since it is literally and legally UK territory, even inside the embassy, there is no way around the legal status of "fugitive from justice inside the UK." Ecuador might like to grant him status in their country, and they're free to issue him paperwork. But he is not actually in Ecuador.

See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And what, they should work for free?

I dunno, have EA and friends started paying overtime yet?

Robbers getting scammed isn't going to get much sympathy, especially when they're themselves trying to scam the public out of their resale rights. Let the games industry become respectable if they want to be treated with respect; and if they continue acting like a bunch of evil overlords, they should bloody well expect the public to side with the rogues looting their ill-gotten gains - their very products depict excactly that scenario over and over again.

But I guess no one likes admitting they are the villain in their own story.

I thought the swedish statute of limitations had expired. Doesn't that mean the arrest warrant is moot and he is free to leave?

Nope. His biggest problem is he broke his bail conditions

Yes and no. HBO also sell content to other broadcasters - like Sky in the UK - which are funded by advertising.

For example, BSkyB have a 275 million GBP deal with HBO over 5 years, and I doubt they're the only ones. Similarly, the BBC supplements their funding by selling their shows.

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

There was a fantiatic piece in the Guardian a few months ago detailing exactly this kind of thing. http://www.theguardian.com/new...

Yeah, because there are no subsidies for fossil fuels.... oh, wait... about $5 trillion a year.
http://www.theguardian.com/env...

BINGO! The West Texas plains were a boon to wind prospectors. Every energy company with any renewable aspirations bought/leased a patch of land and threw up a wind farm. Just one problem...nobody lives in West Texas. It's open range for hundreds of miles. The very conditions that made wind possible left a very real problem. All that electricity needed to get to Dallas but the power line to Dallas was at capacity. All those wind turbines producing electricity and nowhere to send it. Storage tech was prohibitively expensive (If electricity is selling for $0.09 kWh storing it at $0.10 kWh doesn't make financial sense.) so into the earth all that electricity went. So ERCOT set out to build more capacity around 2008. Those lines went live in 2013. Combine that with technology making CSP even cheaper and you've got the next gold rush on your hands.

Full disclosure, I work for Nextera Energy. Parent company of Lone Star Transmission who operates a stretch of those transmission lines.

TFA is lacking in details about how this works, but if you follow the link you get to a Guardian article which is lacking in details, but links to the projects website which excessively uses gratuitous Javascript and is lacking in details.

They talk about "plonkability" - that the mirror structures can just be plonked on the ground and will 'just work'. This suggests to me that somewhere in their system is some intelligence or calibration which is able to notice where each mirror is relative to the target and adapt its pointing accordingly. Their photos show the target tower having two rectangular surfaces pointed towards the mirrors. I suspect the plane white surface is there to aid mirror pointing calibration in some way, but I don't know.

The whole water vapor thing has the nice effect that it should be reasonably reversable, and if it works might buy us a little time.

Time to do what? That seems to be reasonably straight forward at this point, the problem is the political will and the costs involved.

• Step 1. Build Gen 3+ PWR Reactors to replace all coal power stations currently in service. These are commercial designs that can be built today on a technology that we have 50+ years experience with in a commercial capacity, not some pie-in-the-sky Gen 4 tech that hasn't really succeeded past the research reactor phase
• Step 2. Build devices to concentrate and remove CO2 from seawater. We have already built research devices that can do this using a series of membranes to concentrate the dissolved CO2 and then using available industrial filters to remove the CO2 from the water. Can this be done on a large enough scale? that is a current research topic, but worth pursuing as the seas are already doing a fine job of removing the CO2 from the atmosphere where the warming effect is, rather than fixing the atmosphere and releasing all the stored CO2 in the ocean again.
• Step 3. Encourage cattle farmers to change their habits to increase grass growth. There's plenty of available desert in Australia, and no shortage of livestock there either, no doubt there are other suitable continents as well.
• Step 4. Subsidise electric cars and do a cash-for-guzzlers scheme to reduce inefficient cars on our roads

There are likely other little things we can do that will all add up, but that would make a fairly big dent right there.

Bullshit ass-hole. You like Condoleezza Rice should have known terrorists would hijack a plan and crash it into the Trade Towers.....

You mean the terrorists who hatched that plan and were working on it under the Clinton administration? Those terrorists? The ones who were answering to Bin Laden, a person that the Clinton administration let slip through their fingers more than once, even after his group and associates had already killed hundreds of people, including US Navy personnel? Yeah.

Or do you mean the Bin Laden family who have long ties with the Bush family?

• Bush ties to bin Laden haunt grim anniversary
• Ties Between the Bush Family and Osama bin Laden
• Bush-bin Laden family links

Or how the Bush family wealth comes not only from partnering and or owning everything from banks to Halliburton and selling or financing arms to the Bin Laden family as well as Hitler?

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

How War Made the Bush Family Rich

You mean *those* terrorists?

Just to be fair, alternate sources http://www.vulture.com/2015/08... and http://www.theguardian.com/boo.... Wired also did it but after the Manning incident, no just NO.

I have to say, somewhere in the eighties I pretty much started ignoring all the awards as marketing bullshit because they seemed to have lost all value in predicting a good read and came off as being something paid for in a back room some where as public relations exercise to sell more copies of which ever book paid the highest commission for doing so.

It seems more like people as a result of the internet and directly comparing real opinions have decide huge chunks of the system have been gamed and are just turning around and gaming that gamed system right back. Whether their efforts stick or it fail, they win by shutting down the corporate public relations game, so another exercise in modern marketing bites the dust, the awards game.

Perhaps someone should come up with a computer game that reflects the reality of public relations exercise in awards scams, be it books, or music or movies or plays or pretty much any kind of awards scam those public relations douche bags can take over.

Just from a risk perspective, I trust Google far less than a random Chinese company. But, even ignoring the risks in each and looking at it from a technical perspective: Google has more technica prowess, more brand power, more politicians on their side, and they've been repeatedly caught doing EXTREMELY sketchy shit.

You do realise wikipedia has banned feminist editors from articles to with gamergate, right? It can hardly be considered a reliable source when it comes to gender politics either.

As an American, I wish my fellow countrymen would stop beating their chest about this.

Except for the fact that I first saw this one the front page of The Guardian yesterday. Secondly, l agree that French, Dutch, German, or any other competent servicemen could have done the same, but most civilians don't have a fucking clue.

One thing I still value about my military training two decades later is that when you recognize a situation like that you handle it NOW. Having been in the US Army I can tell you that even our average sailor or airmen would have attempted to do the same. Recognition of the urgency of the situation and having experience closing with the opposition are key. Most civilians would have been dumbfounded or have frozen.

Who's willing to join me on a Right-to-be-forgotten campaign about the f***ing Kardashians?

But then who will Hillary Clinton hand out with during the republican debates?
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...

Only about %0.1 percent of the population cares about inheritance tax

You made that number up, right? You don't have a source for it, right? That's what conservatives always do.

Do YOU care about inheritance tax? WHY? FREE MONEY COMING SOON???

I care about the inheritance tax, just like Bernie Sanders does, because without it, the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 90% combined. http://www.theguardian.com/bus...

I wouldn't care if the rich simply used their money to buy yachts, diamonds and cars, and fly around the world vacationing in their mansions and at five-star hotels, eating at five-star restaurants. I don't care about their enjoying luxury (even though Adam Smith thought that it was wasteful and the rich should be taxed more).

I care about the rich because they're using their money to buy influence (that is, bribe politicians), and run the country.

It's not enough for them to be rich. They have to create a fantasy in which they got rich because they were hard-working and deserved it (even though most of them inherited their money), and the poor are poor because they're lazy and don't deserve it. They have to destroy it for the rest of us. They maliciously enjoy making the rest of us suffer.

I think we have to take away the money from the rich to disarm them, because they're dangerous to the world. It's like taking nuclear weapons away from Iran.

People with mental issues should be unemployable as police or security officers.
Timothy Loehmann, who shot Tamir Rice, simply joined police force in a different city after he resigned facing termination for "emotional instability".

The other thing that should not be allowed to happen is the militarization of police force.
Neither through pumping surplus military weapons and equipment through billion dollar "reutilization programs", nor through military tactics and training.

It's Special Weapons and Tactics, not POLICE weapons and tactics.
If all your cops act or look like SWAT teams do... That's not policing crime.
That's a country/state/county/city trying to control its citizens through "superior force".

And police will get BOTH military tactics and training AND mentally unstable police officers when it starts dipping into the pool of military veterans, coming home from a decade or so of war.

The annual fund manager convention must just be putting up pictures of regular people and laughing profusely.

No, actually they discuss safe-house locations for when they finally cause the shit to hit the fan.

I didn't see anybody breaking up a fight in that video. When the video starts, the fight is already over. All I saw were two handcuffed black men and a couple of off-duty cops waiting until the NYPD got there.

Okay, fair enough it doesn't show the breaking up...
But do notice how they ask the detainee if he is alright, if he is hurt... and so on...
Notice that they don't sit on the guy, they hold him, yes, they apply force, but they do so respect and dignity (as trains professionals).

Here is another normal day in the US: http://www.theguardian.com/us-...
Notice how police officers sit on a guy with a prosthetic leg... And how when more arrive they seem to stand around more concern about covering for the video.

I particularly note that when they start talking to him it's "I bet you have a gram of dope in your pocket". Rather than asking if the guy is hurt they escalate the conflict further.
It doesn't matter if he has dope in his pocket, the officer can discover and resolve that later when you are sitting down at the station... But instead they try to intimidate him with at this stage unfounded and unnecessary accusations.

Oh lordy! Everybody's a critic. I was really just saying that some parents are lousy teachers... Please, officer, don't shoot!

"It pays better to stay outside their borders, lend their governments money, get them hopelessly in debt, and force all their citizens to work for you at rock-bottom pay for the rest of their lives".

See, for example, Joseph Stiglitz' explanation here:

http://www.theguardian.com/bus...

It seems they are finally interested in talking to him at the embassy. Why would they now be interested if he is häktad?

That's the thing. There's enough weirdness and logical inconsistency to cast a shadow over the whole thing, including a refusal to formally commit to not sending him to the U.S.

You mean both of them who didn't say that? One of them said she wanted him to face trial. She's conflicted about it, like most rape victims - the longer it takes to get to trial, the more they want to put it behind them.

Claes Borgström, a Stockholm lawyer who represents one of the women whose allegations against Assange will now never be tested in court, said the woman was ambivalent about the situation. “On the one hand, she wanted Assange to face trial and answer for what he has done. On the other, she wants to put this behind her.”

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

Bolded for attention. I wish both, you sweden apologist and the assange supporters would stick to the truth.

I wish you blind assange supporters would at least stick to the truth. But of course this has never been about the truth.

Claes Borgström, a Stockholm lawyer who represents one of the women whose allegations against Assange will now never be tested in court, said the woman was ambivalent about the situation. “On the one hand, she wanted Assange to face trial and answer for what he has done. On the other, she wants to put this behind her.”

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

The weight of the passengers shouldn't matter by a very wide safety margin.

And you base your claim on your extensive knowledge of the engineering of aircraft or flight experience?

Seems that you would be wrong. Dead wrong.

And for what it's worth, underestimating weight can also be hazardous.

Interesting book by Paul Mason is saying something similar but in a broader context. Things are changing due to technology and better access to information. It's hard to control information. Technology is eroding the price of information. Non-market social organizations are replacing capitalist organizations.
"The neoliberalist capitalist model has resulted in civil wars and economic disaster, and it’s only going to get worse. Unless, Paul Mason argues, we take advantage of the technological revolution we are living through and create a postcapitalist sharing society. If we let prices fall and delink work from wages, we can save the world from disaster"

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

"There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx."

http://www.theguardian.com/boo...

"The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next."
It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago."

Interesting book by Paul Mason is saying something similar but in a broader context. Things are changing due to technology and better access to information. It's hard to control information. Technology is eroding the price of information. Non-market social organizations are replacing capitalist organizations.
"The neoliberalist capitalist model has resulted in civil wars and economic disaster, and it’s only going to get worse. Unless, Paul Mason argues, we take advantage of the technological revolution we are living through and create a postcapitalist sharing society. If we let prices fall and delink work from wages, we can save the world from disaster"

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

"There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx."

http://www.theguardian.com/boo...

"The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next."
It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago."

With 4,600 here and Airbus sending up 900.

LMOL, ummm no thanks for playing. Nobody trusts Putin.

What about Steven Seagal?

http://www.theguardian.com/fil...

What's even scarier is that this was apparently the standard deal for all her predecessors. Still, at least they might be able to claim some degree of ignorance - but I think it's safe to say that by 2008 anyone with half a clue could have explained what a colossally stupid idea it was, especially given that the private email servers for both the Obama and McCain campaigns had already been hacked prior to the election:
http://www.theguardian.com/glo...

There have multiple cases of warrantless domestic spying by both the NSA and the FBI:

FBI:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

NSA:
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Apple, Google and other tech/communications companies also believe that the USA Federal Government is abusing the FISA warrants for both domestic and international cases:
https://www.google.com/search?...

The USA Government has long used evidence that is gathered without a warrant to direct their case so that they know where to look with a warrant. If they get caught they have to prove that they could have obtained the information a different way. After you know what you are looking for that is a pretty low barrier to overcome.

Not saying this is write or wrong, but it is definitely documented.

The article where I first read this news said the same thing:

http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

All shares of Google will automatically convert into corresponding shares of Alphabet, which will continue to trade under the stock ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL. Shares in Google soared 5% in after hours trading. The new structure is said to be similar to Warren Buffettâ(TM)s Berkshire Hathaway, which wholly owns a number of diverse holdings and has stakes in several others.

as well as making sure the criminal being put to death is actually guilty

...which in the US fails (conservatively!) in about 4% of cases. Is that really worth it?

RIAA/MPAA/monopolistic-whatever could wipe peer-to-peer communications off the face of the earth (and out to geosynchronous orbit) and piracy rates would stay the same. Same for DRM. The underlying issue is that bits are fungible. If you can copy a document file you can copy a film or music file. This even precedes bits: they used to make dual video decks so that it was really easy to make illegal copies of video tapes.

So going after a specific piece of software or protocol is flat out stupid. All it does in screw up legitimate users. Those who want to cheat remain unaffected.

What the monopolists would like is the solution being tried in North Korea: house to house searches.

“The local propaganda departments are getting inminban [people’s unit] heads to collect cassettes and CDs from people’s homes and are combing through them,” a source speaking from inside the country claimed. “If even one song from the banned list is discovered, they incinerate the whole thing.”

The RIAA is jealous. They keep trying to get the equivalent system started here.

Trackers come in many forms, and you can't really stop them without software like this. If you think a tracker is on there in error, you can always override the settings. Just be aware that many organizations don't own every domain with their name on it.

Re " It was the product of billions of dollars in government spending, hundreds of the world’s top scientists working in concert, in secret, in a city built from scratch in the desert, and a bygone patriotism united by common, Manichean cause: stop Hitler, defeat the Japanese.""
Japan was defeated, seeking a way to surrender into 1945 and the US had a 2 versions of a new weapon to test on undamaged, populated cities.
The "experiment" part was to find two cities that still remained intact in Japan.
The US "patriotism" was a cover to stop a re emerging France and the helpful UK from placing conditions or laws on US mil and civilian nuclear expansion after 1945.
The US did not want to have to share any control with the UK or be forced to pay some France patent for early nuclear work.
The UK wanted to offer a lot of tech to the US but for that early deal wanted equal say in nuclear use, policy and profits after the war.
The only secret was how the UK was cut of out late design work and had to race to secure its own methods, experts and designs before the US removed UK top staffs clearances.
Thankfully the UK had Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... who was able to secure the UK manufacture, design and raw materials away from the US just in time.
The UK had its MAUD Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... later used the Tube Alloys codename https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and with Canadian help was able to break free of US nuclear restrictions.
Churchill's Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics (Friday 20 September 2013)
http://www.theguardian.com/boo...
The main lesson the UK, Canada, Australia and France learned was that the US would take their early nuclear work and ideas but it was a one way deal.

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Clearly, the brain works like other tissues in the body where the individual cellular interactions at a smaller scale exhibit emergent properties at the organ scale. The human brain has a complexity that no one person could ever hope to understand, and large teams of scientists struggle to understand small bits of the puzzle. Take a look at these videos of a new technique for looking at the micro-structure of the mouse brain. This is a fascinating technique that required the work of many neuroscientists and computer programmers.

http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

The complexity surrounding a single portion of one dendritic shaft is mind boggling. You will love the video, I promise.

See this from The Guardian.
Especially the short movie 1/3 down.

I live nearby and can testify that it is very used during your normal rush-hours - even to the extend that you cannot cross the bicycle lane (outside the bridge) without running.

I thought about the NHS program when posting this, described as "the biggest IT failure ever seen". After £10 billion+ was spent, Her Majesty's government largely abandoned the effort, though the linked article notes Computer Sciences Corporation declaring victory as 3 of 220 NHS trusts managed to use portions of the system. I first heard this story a couple of years ago on a shuttle bus to the headquarters of a large privately held EMR vendor in Wisconsin, when I noticed the accents around me weren't American (like me). I was sitting amongst a group of friendly pharmacists from Oxfordshire. They were going to adopt this proprietary system for their NHS trust (ignoring, I suppose, the large chunk of it that dealt with billing).

Besides the air of defeat of all those pounds sterling going down a lot of oddly designed British toilets, they had given up on the idea of interoperability with the systems of other NHS trusts adopting different systems from other proprietary vendors. Back in the US, we have all kinds of government prodding to promote interoperability and many self-congratulatory health IT standards organizations that have national meetings in sunny placed. But, the farthest we've got with inter-vendor communication in my medical office after 3 years of promises and finger-pointing is faxing documents to an image server from the speciality clinic 100 feet away into inscrutably named files. Then, I can hand transcribe the important bits by hand about my patient's heart conditions and colon tumors in order to have a hope of retrieving that information again when I need it.

If we all went vegetarian and killed off the domesticated cattle, then we'd make a huge difference! Kill a cow today!

Well cow-meat does have a relatively large carbon footprint. It makes sense to use chicken or pork instead.

Also, Fukushima is only rendering about 500sq miles uninhabitable for (currently optimistically estimated) 25 years while Chernobyl is about 900sq miles for over 25 years so far. It won't return to average radiation levels for over 20,000 years. You can live there now... if you don't want to have children and accept a higher risk of cancer. About 600 elderly live there now. The animals in the area have mutations, stillbirths, etc. But, those that survive handle the radiation better as time goes on and thrive from the lack of human predation and habitat destruction.

The Chernobyl radiation area 's sort of butterfly shaped tho and due to wind pattern there is a second 'wing' / exclusion area which is also uninhabitable of similar size- so about 1800sq miles total.

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/...

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Uber and the lawlessness of 'sharing economy' corporates

I think these are some scary developments. Google is declaring itself a law unto itself. While it might be able to point to some unjust laws in some countries, for it to just declare itself above the law countries like France enact to protect its citizens is scary.

Has Google declared itself the supreme justicar of the Internet?

One Nation under advertising, indivisible, with liberty and CISA for all.
Other parts of the world may want to consider what CISA will be about on any US provided connection.
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act
"How Big Business Is Helping Expand NSA Surveillance, Snowden Be Damned" (Apr. 2 2015)
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
"A government surveillance bill by any other name is just as dangerous" (13 June 2015)
http://www.theguardian.com/com...

I hope you take comfort from the fact he truly made a vast difference to the lives of people in a way that most people can only dream about.

Four out of five elderly people given CPR end up dying within days. Many of them with prolonged and intense suffering due to CPR prolonging the inevitable.
And in some cases CPR is given when it's not warranted, breaking ribs, collapsing lungs or otherwise causing serious and sometimes fatal damage.

It's a useful tool for saving lives when not used indiscriminately. But that's how we use it. If I keel over, please don't resuscitate unless there is at least a 50% chance of long-term success, and less than a 50% chance of causing long-term damage. It's just a life.

Do you feel that creators of web applications should be obliged to make their source code available?

Yes, web applications should be free. You are a bad person if you are employed as a web application developer AND that the published web app doesn't adequately respect the users' freedom.

""Afghanistan there's possibly in the range of 250K deaths, and a lot of the country is still under Taliban rule.""
I'm not seeing a problem.

Seriously? A quarter million dead people and you don't see a problem? I'm going to hope that's just short hand for "oh it's terrible but it's worth the cost for the part of the country that's more free than before".

This presupposes that the Russian empire would not seek to restore past territory at some point in the future.

There's other ways to protect against that, principally not treating Russia like an enemy to contained.

The assumption was that it was safe to treat Russia like a potential enemy and surround then with NATO forces because they wouldn't dare thwart American power. Clearly that was not the case, Putin turned hostile, and Ukraine is now paying the price.

That war was predominantly desired by the Europeans and not the Americans. Our assistance was invoked by the French etc because they lack the logistics to project power even so far as north africa without our support.

I'm not sure what you're laying at our feet here. What did you want the US to do?

Possibly not get involved.

I admit it's not easy to see an atrocities and simply let it progress, I was partially in favour of a Libya intervention and I'd probably decide the same way over again, but helping is a lot harder than dropping some bombs so the "good guys" win and it's hard to see what the destabilization might do.

Read the rhetoric coming out of people that are highly critical of US middle east policy and it often gets anti Semitic. When it comes from middle easterners it is guaranteed to get anti Semitic but shockingly you'll see that out of French and English people as well. Its kind of sad.

There's definitely antisemitism, though it's ironic that you're mentioning it after that response to 250k dead Afghanis.

But there's also a lot of very legitimate criticism of how the Israeli state came to exist and how it's acted over the last 40 years, especially with regards to the settlements, that has nothing to do with antisemitism.

As to your experience... I'll refer you to your line about people not understanding their own misdeeds. You don't really know why you're saying things sometimes. You don't see the layers of influence and supposition in it all.

Possibly, but so far I'm doubtful you have better insight into my motivations on this subject.

As to drone strikes... its a weapon and a tool. No more capable of creating a terrorist than a pistol shot to the back of someone's head. They're not going away. Get use to them.

As to the notion that killing one terrorist leads to 5 more. Not in our experience. They tend to come from places that have no family connection to the person being killed. The reason person X becomes a terrorist is almost never because we killed his friend or his brother or something. Typically they're radicalized somewhere and they would have come or done something no matter what because they were radicalized.

I'm not talking about the dead terrorists, I'm talking about all the innocent civilians getting killed around them.

Would you find it acceptable to kill ten Americans to kill one terrorist? There's a very clear message that the lives of those Muslims don't really matter, it's not hard to see how that message would create a lot more Muslim terrorists.

I don't follow. It appears that when you use the word consequences and I use the word consequences we are talking about different things.

You are correct on both points. Snowden is facing the consequences of his actions, he will be for the rest of his life - he made it clear that he knew that from the start. You see only the legal consequences, and I doubt you see them clearly (whether out of optimism or naivety I don't know).

It's possible Snowden could have just leaked the documents and kept his name out of it. He has discussed the reasons why he did not (it would be the act of a coward, it would have less effect, he'd be unable to influence the carefully vetted and staggered release of the documents). The idea that it was an option seems credible - if you trust some of the what the government reaction has been (we don't know what he took). It's almost certain that there are other, anonymous NSA leakers. So he may have even gotten away with an anonymous dump.