I will point out, though, that the majors are major because of proselytizing, and the minors are minors often because they do not. It's not that they're anachronisms (though the Druze and Zoroastrians certainly have long histories), but that their choice of interacting with the outside world necessarily limits their ability to become a major religion.
I'm not Jewish. I'm pointing out that your assertion that all religions "without exception" go for completely indoctrination when there are many that do not. Even your apology seems to be trying to hold your original view while barely admitting only a single caveat. The Druze and Zoroastrians are other examples of religions that do not actively seek to incorporate outsiders (and sometimes refuse to accept those that independently wish to join), and who will even often hide their religious affiliation from those they do not know. Other religions remain small not because they were or are oppressed, but simply because they don't feel the need to expand. Your absolutist view on religion is colored based on a few large ones and does not match the real world.
The content of contracts is legally regulated. You cannot, for example, sell yourself or your children into slavery. Any asset-entanglement contract such as you suggest would involve time with an attorney, possibly adding a not-inconsequential cost and adding to the potential burden to the courts down the line, as well as probably requiring a section of law to deal with such contracts when they are drawn up for terms of marriage, thus requiring the presence of marriage law anyway.
Further, rights accorded to spouses go far beyond simple asset sharing. There are hospital visitation rights, powers of attorney, and inheritance priorities, things that *can* be set by contract but are accorded a default status in marriage law based on traditions that go back centuries. While some of these powers were traditionally held by the males of the family (control over the wife, possessions going to eldest son, etc.), they've been balanced as females have been handed the same powers over time.
Imagine if you get word that your spouse was suddenly hospitalized and you race there, only to be prohibited from entering the room until you can produce your notarized contract that says you're allowed by your spouse to go in, something which you cannot find despite tearing apart your domicile while hoping you'll be there when your spouse awakens, and your original attorney is no longer available. Later, your spouse is on life support, effectively brain-dead, and you know your spouse wouldn't want to continue living like that *but you never got that legally attached to the contract*. You have to wait for the body to finally give out, days, weeks, or months later, and in the meantime, hospital bills are stacking up that you may have to pay, adding to the emotional burden. And then after your spouse dies, whatever possessions are left over go to...who? You can't find your contract, thereby having no way of proving asset entanglement.
For decades, the Supreme Court has required that the state show a compelling interest when it places limits on marriage. This came about most significantly in the anti-miscegenation cases of the 1940s through 1960s, culminating in Loving v. Virginia, and numerous others where the courts have placed limits on how the state can limit marriage, but it has never gone so far as to say that the state has no interest in the marriage of people within its jurisdiction.
Indeed, it has said the opposite, that the state does have a compelling interest in marriage, that marriage is one of the very foundations of our society in that it encourages the procreation of offspring necessary to perpetuate the society, and that the state may take reasonable steps to thus encourage marriage or, in relatively rare cases, to block marriage, such as when untreated diseases are present that may be spread to an unwitting partner. However, it has also placed significant limits on the state's powers over marriage, recognizing, among other things, that marriage need not lead to procreation to be valid.
The state does have an interest in providing a default framework for something that is so ingrained in our society that judges spend entire careers overseeing cases involving it. That framework, though it should exist, should be the minimum required to allow the institution to exist without unduly burdening those partaking in it.
There's not much going on in the way of Jewish proselytizing, and most Jews, including senior members of the more restrictive sects, don't want it to happen at all.
I've had a new phone see the battery drained completely because I forgot to put it in airplane mode and left it in my pack. It would get warm (much warmer than when in airplane mode), which I have always presumed was because the radio power was cranked up to max while it tried to find a usable tower.
I agree with you on needing some common sense, but the rules didn't allow for it, and the flight crew has little choice but to enforce the rules. It's one thing if they have some plausible deniability like being able to claim they didn't see the one passenger, but allowing everyone to use their devices will inevitably get out and the FAA would look into it, probably fining the airline and thereby getting the crew in trouble.
Keeping people from getting up is a different story. Pilots don't always get that warning of when they'll be able and expected to move. In that situation, an aircraft ahead of them might decide to return to the gate to refuel or disembark passengers. In that case, the entire line will move up, and the pilot gets only as much notice as the number of visible aircraft ahead that might be moving (which in heavy rain may only be a few planes). He's not going to call back to the cabin to make sure everyone is sitting down before releasing the brakes and spooling the engine.
It's not a Boolean AND, it's distributive, as in 'the installation of an amateur station must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft and the operation of an amateur station must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft.' Whether it's physically installed to the aircraft or not, you need the pilot-in-command's permission to operate it, something that you're certainly not going to get on a commercial aircraft.
I've been in IT for coming about 18 years, working with end-users to one degree or another the entire time, and I've never met anyone who didn't understand that the apps they used under Citrix, RDP, or VNC were running remotely and just being drawn locally. They may have been frustrated that they couldn't access local resources (this can be good or bad), but few if any of them thought the programs were installed locally.
It should be dead simple for most people to use a remote desktop capability without much thought on how to set it up because most people are not interested in anything other than the apps appearing on their screen. Microsoft has refined this well enough that it's used in enterprise environments large and small with enough auto-configuration that it will adapt to the local capabilities but can be overridden by a power user if so desired. Anyone who wants to see Microsoft's dominance at least challenged should accept that this is the way it needs to be.
I understand that X does its job well. But there are those who believe that the system in place does not do it well enough. Wayland's devs are in that group and are trying to address it. What concerns me is the group of people who refuse to accept that it should be done any other way and actively try to shoot down alternatives, even before they've had any real chance to use it. That contradicts the foundation of the open source community.
I agree that we have an existing solution, but to claim that there's no reason to replace it is to claim that no one can come up with something better. I agree that it's well-supported, that it can perform well, and that VNC is a hack. But I'm not sure that it's true that it's well-understood, especially given that people are far more likely to handle remote desktops with VNC than with X, even in environments where people largely use Linux instead of Windows. That prevalence of VNC over X suggests to me a serious gap in understanding of the community at large.
This leads me to think that while X is still a good solution, it may not be the best solution, and that's why I'm watching Wayland with curiosity.
They have definitely attempted to tackle it at a technical level. Part of installing Blizzard games is giving consent for it to look for cheating programs. Support for macro keys such as found on Logitech keyboards has been broken numerous times (and I think is broken right now) as they allow a keyboard macro to perform exactly one action that would be performed as a player clicking a button. It can be a keypress combination (such as Alt-Shift-4 or whatever you have it mapped to), but especially for combat, they don't want that one keypress doing a string of actions, especially not timed.
They've also been going after bots since well before their peak player count. I've seen news of lawsuits going back for at least six or seven years.
WoW is certainly in decline (if they could upgrade the entire game's graphics to be like Pandaria, it might draw a few people in or back, but the cost probably exceeds the potential income) and they need something to take over, but these enforcement actions aren't new by any means.
If they detect it, they can disable or delete the account using it. That doesn't completely stop its use, but it does mean that a lot of effort has been for naught for that player.
I'm not sure what part of California would have homes without furnaces. Every part of California I've lived in or visited has the capability of daytime peaks of around 50F and nighttime lows in the mid-30s, and that's in the warmer parts. Deserts often reach freezing temps during the winter, and the hills and mountains can get pretty chilly, too. Even San Diego can get some winter temps low enough to justify a house heater of some sort.
It depends on the treaty involved, but generally one cannot be extradited for an act which is not a crime in the hosting country. As you mention, someone in the US (even a German citizen) who posts something pro-Nazi is protected from extradition to Germany because the First Amendment applies to anyone in the US. A US citizen who goes to Europe and has sex with a 17-year-old has broken US federal law, but not necessarily the laws in some countries in Europe, and so might not get extradited to the US.
Extradition law gets complex, though. Even where there is overlapping criminal law, there can be subtleties in the laws broken, whether there would be enough evidence if the crime occurred in the hosting country, etc.
These often require one to get involved in the very corruption that people decry within the US, only on a much more local scale. Many people in these areas must bribe their garbagemen to get regular service--when there are such services. Other than that, getting a government clerk to respond to a form within weeks or months often requires a bribe, getting the police to ignore you for something petty requires a bribe (and bribing them too low may result in much worse charges).
There are countries where someone can live quietly off the grid for a long time. I'm told that Belize is one of these countries. But for a modern technogeek, it gets much more difficult.
You can't win by moving to another country. As much as Germany got up in arms about the NSA spying on it, German intelligence agencies have also been found to be skirting their own laws regarding monitoring people. If you want to move you have to find a country that is: * Not part of UKUSA (knocking out United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK) * Not part of NATO (knocking from the list Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey) * Not extremely friendly to or reliant on US intelligence assets (removing Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, and much of South America) * Not part of the former Soviet Union (even Ukraine is working closely with Moscow these days) * Not making a public point of monitoring its residents (China, India, and others) * Still reasonably democratic and not horribly corrupt (seriously, US corruption has nothing on most of the world)
The list gets very small at this point. You have Finland and Sweden, but they're not trivial places to move to weather-wise unless you've lived in, say, Alaska or Maine, and Sweden may have been working with the NSA and/or monitoring its residents. Switzerland is also a possibility. But these require some very significant personal choices, involve massive lifestyle changes, and may not be possible as even the short list of nations that do fit the bill don't make immigration easy.
The bank account in Las Vegas means that he was paying for (and perhaps profiting from) the servers. That provides US jurisdiction no matter where the data was being stored. The same thing happens around the world: if part of an action happens within a given country and it's illegal in that country, jurisdiction applies. They may have to work through extradition, but in this case, France may also look to get a piece of him, especially if he's not convicted in the US. France may then go through extradition to get him into their courts for storing child porn on French soil.
If there's a court order behind this, it's less problematic in my mind. Not all court orders are publicized even by normal courts; search warrants aren't provided to the targets to challenge before execution precisely so they can't hide or destroy evidence.
The problem I have with this operation is that it was conducted on servers located in France, which means that either French law enforcement was also involved (very possible) or the FBI is hacking servers across international boundaries. That puts at risk any agents involved as they could be tried under French law for such trespass, though given that it was to deal with child pornography, the political result is that it probably wouldn't result in much more than a warning.
Not all fleets keep their vehicles in the same spot. Rental car fleets are dispersed throughout the country. When new registrations come up, the cars have to be tracked down and pulled from service for the amount of time it takes for the registration sticker to be delivered. That's lost revenue, and since many fleets have tens of thousands of cars, it's a potential loss of millions of dollars.
The article mentioned one possible practical use: fleet vehicles. As it stands, either tags have to be manually applied or plates changed out, and even done every so many years, this can become a management hassle for larger fleets. Electronic plates would, depending on their durability, remove this requirement. Many fleet vehicles are already tracked via data networks, so the privacy issues aren't as strong as for a personal vehicle and the ability to display a message indicating theft could be useful. Then, of course, there could also be ads for the fleet owner on it, but I think that's pushing into tacky territory.
I don't see this catching on, though, at least not for a while yet. The technical hurdles are just too high, and California has a history of not being able to implement their computer projects on time or budget. It will be a novelty for the trial period and then quietly go away when not enough people sign up for it.
Chemical weapons are a problem because they usually do not kill. It takes a LOT of chemicals and the right environment to kill. But they do tear up lungs and eyes and nervous systems. So the casualties may be able to move themselves but they cannot pick up their old lives again.
I read somewhere that the overall cost of chemical weapons and conventional weapons per casualty work out to be the same. Chemical weapons on a per-round basis may be more effective (when used to the greatest tactical advantage, and a wind shift can affect that quickly), but the resource costs (additional training, transportation, storage, and protective costs) associated with chemical weapons neutralizes the advantage overall. That military foes will almost certainly already be trained and equipped to deal with a chemical attack further reduces their effectiveness.
Their only effective use remains as a terror weapon, or at best an area denial weapon on retreat to slow the enemy (it's much harder to move as quickly when you're wearing a mask and possibly other gear).
I think the biggest player that keeps people locked into subscription TV is ESPN, and they know it. Everything else can be found via acceptable delays whether it's Netflix/Hulu/whatever, DVD release, or even torrents. But most fans still strongly prefer to watch sports live.
Most people I know who still subscribe would gladly ditch cable/satellite if they could stream ESPN even if it cost $20/month, which is far more than ESPN gets from the cable companies and would allow them to offer features they can't run through non-interactive media. The number of people who have cut the cord (or know how to) hasn't reached critical mass yet, but once it does, ESPN is either going to be able to start dictating higher fees from cable companies or will take a shot at streaming (or both). I expect a strong drop in the cable/satellite subscriber base in the first year after this happens, which will be devastating to their share prices because jacking up rates to make up for lost revenues and profits will just encourage more people to leave.
I do have a fair idea of what Morsi was doing, and yes, he was trying to consolidate power for the Muslim Brotherhood. But much like every other opposition party who decried all of the things the party long in power was doing, he learned that calling for change and actually changing are two very different things.
In trying to take control of the military, he set himself up for failure. I mentioned the fuel and food shortages, and there is also Egypt's significant debt that requires payment from reserves it doesn't have. Had Morsi tried to work with the military, they might have tried to work with him to keep the population under control. As it was, when he started talking about reducing subsidies and people started protesting that (on top of everything else), the military intervened only when they deemed it in their interest, like protecting Morsi when the security forces he did control proved inadequate.
The military doesn't care too much who is running the government as long as it doesn't interfere with their own investments and power, which also means not abrogating the peace treaty with Israel (war is bad for their investments). They'll work with anyone who is willing to leave them alone and doesn't cause too much discontent among the populace. But this removes a large fraction of the people who would run and hence makes almost anyone else not viable in an election. There has been some speculation that Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will run for president, but this risks the military getting involved directly and openly in politics, something that it has been loathe to do. If he wins, he risks being seen as a Mubarak-like dictator running the government while cozy with--or completely controlling--the military, especially if he starts doing things the people don't like (like reducing subsidies). If he loses, he risks tarnishing the generally positive view the population has of the military.
I agree that this will probably go back and forth. I think it may at some point end up in a situation like Turkey: a nominally secular state with an overwhelmingly Muslim majority where the secular character is protected by the military, which steps in whenever the secular aspect is threatened. There would still be members of Islamic--and even Islamist--parties elected and even reaching the most senior jobs in government, but always with the risk of being deposed if they push too hard toward a religious state.
There was little to no chance of Morsi becoming a dictator. The military ultimately has the power in Egypt and has for decades. That the ruler has been cozy with the military and therefore safe has been the general rule. Morsi was not only not cozy but aggressively tried to sideline the military which made him unpopular with both the military and the people.
It doesn't matter who runs Egypt in the next few years. They're going to be unpopular because Egypt's economy is in a shambles largely due to excessive subsidies. They export oil but import gasoline because they don't have sufficient refining capacity, making fuel subsidies extremely expensive to maintain. They don't grow near enough grain to feed the population and have to import it at international market prices while subsidizing it to an enormous degree.
The military wants to keep the power but doesn't want to be the public face of it. They also don't want anyone remotely friendly with the insurgents in the Sinai in power (effectively ruling out Salafist candidates), and know that most secularists stand zero chance of doing anything more than spoiling a vote. This leaves the Muslim Brotherhood and allied smaller parties, which isn't really possible right now because they're boycotting anything political.
But in the absence of an overthrow of the military establishment (everyone from captains up and even most of the junior officers), the military isn't going anywhere, nor do about half the people want them to. They're seen as the protectors of the state, such as it is.
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Fair enough. Apology accepted.
I will point out, though, that the majors are major because of proselytizing, and the minors are minors often because they do not. It's not that they're anachronisms (though the Druze and Zoroastrians certainly have long histories), but that their choice of interacting with the outside world necessarily limits their ability to become a major religion.
I'm not Jewish. I'm pointing out that your assertion that all religions "without exception" go for completely indoctrination when there are many that do not. Even your apology seems to be trying to hold your original view while barely admitting only a single caveat. The Druze and Zoroastrians are other examples of religions that do not actively seek to incorporate outsiders (and sometimes refuse to accept those that independently wish to join), and who will even often hide their religious affiliation from those they do not know. Other religions remain small not because they were or are oppressed, but simply because they don't feel the need to expand. Your absolutist view on religion is colored based on a few large ones and does not match the real world.
The content of contracts is legally regulated. You cannot, for example, sell yourself or your children into slavery. Any asset-entanglement contract such as you suggest would involve time with an attorney, possibly adding a not-inconsequential cost and adding to the potential burden to the courts down the line, as well as probably requiring a section of law to deal with such contracts when they are drawn up for terms of marriage, thus requiring the presence of marriage law anyway.
Further, rights accorded to spouses go far beyond simple asset sharing. There are hospital visitation rights, powers of attorney, and inheritance priorities, things that *can* be set by contract but are accorded a default status in marriage law based on traditions that go back centuries. While some of these powers were traditionally held by the males of the family (control over the wife, possessions going to eldest son, etc.), they've been balanced as females have been handed the same powers over time.
Imagine if you get word that your spouse was suddenly hospitalized and you race there, only to be prohibited from entering the room until you can produce your notarized contract that says you're allowed by your spouse to go in, something which you cannot find despite tearing apart your domicile while hoping you'll be there when your spouse awakens, and your original attorney is no longer available. Later, your spouse is on life support, effectively brain-dead, and you know your spouse wouldn't want to continue living like that *but you never got that legally attached to the contract*. You have to wait for the body to finally give out, days, weeks, or months later, and in the meantime, hospital bills are stacking up that you may have to pay, adding to the emotional burden. And then after your spouse dies, whatever possessions are left over go to...who? You can't find your contract, thereby having no way of proving asset entanglement.
For decades, the Supreme Court has required that the state show a compelling interest when it places limits on marriage. This came about most significantly in the anti-miscegenation cases of the 1940s through 1960s, culminating in Loving v. Virginia, and numerous others where the courts have placed limits on how the state can limit marriage, but it has never gone so far as to say that the state has no interest in the marriage of people within its jurisdiction.
Indeed, it has said the opposite, that the state does have a compelling interest in marriage, that marriage is one of the very foundations of our society in that it encourages the procreation of offspring necessary to perpetuate the society, and that the state may take reasonable steps to thus encourage marriage or, in relatively rare cases, to block marriage, such as when untreated diseases are present that may be spread to an unwitting partner. However, it has also placed significant limits on the state's powers over marriage, recognizing, among other things, that marriage need not lead to procreation to be valid.
The state does have an interest in providing a default framework for something that is so ingrained in our society that judges spend entire careers overseeing cases involving it. That framework, though it should exist, should be the minimum required to allow the institution to exist without unduly burdening those partaking in it.
There's not much going on in the way of Jewish proselytizing, and most Jews, including senior members of the more restrictive sects, don't want it to happen at all.
I've had a new phone see the battery drained completely because I forgot to put it in airplane mode and left it in my pack. It would get warm (much warmer than when in airplane mode), which I have always presumed was because the radio power was cranked up to max while it tried to find a usable tower.
I agree with you on needing some common sense, but the rules didn't allow for it, and the flight crew has little choice but to enforce the rules. It's one thing if they have some plausible deniability like being able to claim they didn't see the one passenger, but allowing everyone to use their devices will inevitably get out and the FAA would look into it, probably fining the airline and thereby getting the crew in trouble.
Keeping people from getting up is a different story. Pilots don't always get that warning of when they'll be able and expected to move. In that situation, an aircraft ahead of them might decide to return to the gate to refuel or disembark passengers. In that case, the entire line will move up, and the pilot gets only as much notice as the number of visible aircraft ahead that might be moving (which in heavy rain may only be a few planes). He's not going to call back to the cabin to make sure everyone is sitting down before releasing the brakes and spooling the engine.
It's not a Boolean AND, it's distributive, as in 'the installation of an amateur station must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft and the operation of an amateur station must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft.' Whether it's physically installed to the aircraft or not, you need the pilot-in-command's permission to operate it, something that you're certainly not going to get on a commercial aircraft.
I've been in IT for coming about 18 years, working with end-users to one degree or another the entire time, and I've never met anyone who didn't understand that the apps they used under Citrix, RDP, or VNC were running remotely and just being drawn locally. They may have been frustrated that they couldn't access local resources (this can be good or bad), but few if any of them thought the programs were installed locally.
It should be dead simple for most people to use a remote desktop capability without much thought on how to set it up because most people are not interested in anything other than the apps appearing on their screen. Microsoft has refined this well enough that it's used in enterprise environments large and small with enough auto-configuration that it will adapt to the local capabilities but can be overridden by a power user if so desired. Anyone who wants to see Microsoft's dominance at least challenged should accept that this is the way it needs to be.
I understand that X does its job well. But there are those who believe that the system in place does not do it well enough. Wayland's devs are in that group and are trying to address it. What concerns me is the group of people who refuse to accept that it should be done any other way and actively try to shoot down alternatives, even before they've had any real chance to use it. That contradicts the foundation of the open source community.
I agree that we have an existing solution, but to claim that there's no reason to replace it is to claim that no one can come up with something better. I agree that it's well-supported, that it can perform well, and that VNC is a hack. But I'm not sure that it's true that it's well-understood, especially given that people are far more likely to handle remote desktops with VNC than with X, even in environments where people largely use Linux instead of Windows. That prevalence of VNC over X suggests to me a serious gap in understanding of the community at large.
This leads me to think that while X is still a good solution, it may not be the best solution, and that's why I'm watching Wayland with curiosity.
They have definitely attempted to tackle it at a technical level. Part of installing Blizzard games is giving consent for it to look for cheating programs. Support for macro keys such as found on Logitech keyboards has been broken numerous times (and I think is broken right now) as they allow a keyboard macro to perform exactly one action that would be performed as a player clicking a button. It can be a keypress combination (such as Alt-Shift-4 or whatever you have it mapped to), but especially for combat, they don't want that one keypress doing a string of actions, especially not timed.
They've also been going after bots since well before their peak player count. I've seen news of lawsuits going back for at least six or seven years.
WoW is certainly in decline (if they could upgrade the entire game's graphics to be like Pandaria, it might draw a few people in or back, but the cost probably exceeds the potential income) and they need something to take over, but these enforcement actions aren't new by any means.
If they detect it, they can disable or delete the account using it. That doesn't completely stop its use, but it does mean that a lot of effort has been for naught for that player.
I'm not sure what part of California would have homes without furnaces. Every part of California I've lived in or visited has the capability of daytime peaks of around 50F and nighttime lows in the mid-30s, and that's in the warmer parts. Deserts often reach freezing temps during the winter, and the hills and mountains can get pretty chilly, too. Even San Diego can get some winter temps low enough to justify a house heater of some sort.
It depends on the treaty involved, but generally one cannot be extradited for an act which is not a crime in the hosting country. As you mention, someone in the US (even a German citizen) who posts something pro-Nazi is protected from extradition to Germany because the First Amendment applies to anyone in the US. A US citizen who goes to Europe and has sex with a 17-year-old has broken US federal law, but not necessarily the laws in some countries in Europe, and so might not get extradited to the US.
Extradition law gets complex, though. Even where there is overlapping criminal law, there can be subtleties in the laws broken, whether there would be enough evidence if the crime occurred in the hosting country, etc.
These often require one to get involved in the very corruption that people decry within the US, only on a much more local scale. Many people in these areas must bribe their garbagemen to get regular service--when there are such services. Other than that, getting a government clerk to respond to a form within weeks or months often requires a bribe, getting the police to ignore you for something petty requires a bribe (and bribing them too low may result in much worse charges).
There are countries where someone can live quietly off the grid for a long time. I'm told that Belize is one of these countries. But for a modern technogeek, it gets much more difficult.
I think that's about how long it took Captain Terrell to commit suicide between the length of the phaser firing and his body disintegrating.
You can't win by moving to another country. As much as Germany got up in arms about the NSA spying on it, German intelligence agencies have also been found to be skirting their own laws regarding monitoring people. If you want to move you have to find a country that is:
* Not part of UKUSA (knocking out United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK)
* Not part of NATO (knocking from the list Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey)
* Not extremely friendly to or reliant on US intelligence assets (removing Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, and much of South America)
* Not part of the former Soviet Union (even Ukraine is working closely with Moscow these days)
* Not making a public point of monitoring its residents (China, India, and others)
* Still reasonably democratic and not horribly corrupt (seriously, US corruption has nothing on most of the world)
The list gets very small at this point. You have Finland and Sweden, but they're not trivial places to move to weather-wise unless you've lived in, say, Alaska or Maine, and Sweden may have been working with the NSA and/or monitoring its residents. Switzerland is also a possibility. But these require some very significant personal choices, involve massive lifestyle changes, and may not be possible as even the short list of nations that do fit the bill don't make immigration easy.
The bank account in Las Vegas means that he was paying for (and perhaps profiting from) the servers. That provides US jurisdiction no matter where the data was being stored. The same thing happens around the world: if part of an action happens within a given country and it's illegal in that country, jurisdiction applies. They may have to work through extradition, but in this case, France may also look to get a piece of him, especially if he's not convicted in the US. France may then go through extradition to get him into their courts for storing child porn on French soil.
If there's a court order behind this, it's less problematic in my mind. Not all court orders are publicized even by normal courts; search warrants aren't provided to the targets to challenge before execution precisely so they can't hide or destroy evidence.
The problem I have with this operation is that it was conducted on servers located in France, which means that either French law enforcement was also involved (very possible) or the FBI is hacking servers across international boundaries. That puts at risk any agents involved as they could be tried under French law for such trespass, though given that it was to deal with child pornography, the political result is that it probably wouldn't result in much more than a warning.
Not all fleets keep their vehicles in the same spot. Rental car fleets are dispersed throughout the country. When new registrations come up, the cars have to be tracked down and pulled from service for the amount of time it takes for the registration sticker to be delivered. That's lost revenue, and since many fleets have tens of thousands of cars, it's a potential loss of millions of dollars.
The article mentioned one possible practical use: fleet vehicles. As it stands, either tags have to be manually applied or plates changed out, and even done every so many years, this can become a management hassle for larger fleets. Electronic plates would, depending on their durability, remove this requirement. Many fleet vehicles are already tracked via data networks, so the privacy issues aren't as strong as for a personal vehicle and the ability to display a message indicating theft could be useful. Then, of course, there could also be ads for the fleet owner on it, but I think that's pushing into tacky territory.
I don't see this catching on, though, at least not for a while yet. The technical hurdles are just too high, and California has a history of not being able to implement their computer projects on time or budget. It will be a novelty for the trial period and then quietly go away when not enough people sign up for it.
I read somewhere that the overall cost of chemical weapons and conventional weapons per casualty work out to be the same. Chemical weapons on a per-round basis may be more effective (when used to the greatest tactical advantage, and a wind shift can affect that quickly), but the resource costs (additional training, transportation, storage, and protective costs) associated with chemical weapons neutralizes the advantage overall. That military foes will almost certainly already be trained and equipped to deal with a chemical attack further reduces their effectiveness.
Their only effective use remains as a terror weapon, or at best an area denial weapon on retreat to slow the enemy (it's much harder to move as quickly when you're wearing a mask and possibly other gear).
According to Forbes, subscriber fees averaged a little more than $5 per subscriber in 2012. I think the ability to charge four times that would be far more than what they get from the cable company.
I think the biggest player that keeps people locked into subscription TV is ESPN, and they know it. Everything else can be found via acceptable delays whether it's Netflix/Hulu/whatever, DVD release, or even torrents. But most fans still strongly prefer to watch sports live.
Most people I know who still subscribe would gladly ditch cable/satellite if they could stream ESPN even if it cost $20/month, which is far more than ESPN gets from the cable companies and would allow them to offer features they can't run through non-interactive media. The number of people who have cut the cord (or know how to) hasn't reached critical mass yet, but once it does, ESPN is either going to be able to start dictating higher fees from cable companies or will take a shot at streaming (or both). I expect a strong drop in the cable/satellite subscriber base in the first year after this happens, which will be devastating to their share prices because jacking up rates to make up for lost revenues and profits will just encourage more people to leave.
I do have a fair idea of what Morsi was doing, and yes, he was trying to consolidate power for the Muslim Brotherhood. But much like every other opposition party who decried all of the things the party long in power was doing, he learned that calling for change and actually changing are two very different things.
In trying to take control of the military, he set himself up for failure. I mentioned the fuel and food shortages, and there is also Egypt's significant debt that requires payment from reserves it doesn't have. Had Morsi tried to work with the military, they might have tried to work with him to keep the population under control. As it was, when he started talking about reducing subsidies and people started protesting that (on top of everything else), the military intervened only when they deemed it in their interest, like protecting Morsi when the security forces he did control proved inadequate.
The military doesn't care too much who is running the government as long as it doesn't interfere with their own investments and power, which also means not abrogating the peace treaty with Israel (war is bad for their investments). They'll work with anyone who is willing to leave them alone and doesn't cause too much discontent among the populace. But this removes a large fraction of the people who would run and hence makes almost anyone else not viable in an election. There has been some speculation that Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will run for president, but this risks the military getting involved directly and openly in politics, something that it has been loathe to do. If he wins, he risks being seen as a Mubarak-like dictator running the government while cozy with--or completely controlling--the military, especially if he starts doing things the people don't like (like reducing subsidies). If he loses, he risks tarnishing the generally positive view the population has of the military.
I agree that this will probably go back and forth. I think it may at some point end up in a situation like Turkey: a nominally secular state with an overwhelmingly Muslim majority where the secular character is protected by the military, which steps in whenever the secular aspect is threatened. There would still be members of Islamic--and even Islamist--parties elected and even reaching the most senior jobs in government, but always with the risk of being deposed if they push too hard toward a religious state.
There was little to no chance of Morsi becoming a dictator. The military ultimately has the power in Egypt and has for decades. That the ruler has been cozy with the military and therefore safe has been the general rule. Morsi was not only not cozy but aggressively tried to sideline the military which made him unpopular with both the military and the people.
It doesn't matter who runs Egypt in the next few years. They're going to be unpopular because Egypt's economy is in a shambles largely due to excessive subsidies. They export oil but import gasoline because they don't have sufficient refining capacity, making fuel subsidies extremely expensive to maintain. They don't grow near enough grain to feed the population and have to import it at international market prices while subsidizing it to an enormous degree.
The military wants to keep the power but doesn't want to be the public face of it. They also don't want anyone remotely friendly with the insurgents in the Sinai in power (effectively ruling out Salafist candidates), and know that most secularists stand zero chance of doing anything more than spoiling a vote. This leaves the Muslim Brotherhood and allied smaller parties, which isn't really possible right now because they're boycotting anything political.
But in the absence of an overthrow of the military establishment (everyone from captains up and even most of the junior officers), the military isn't going anywhere, nor do about half the people want them to. They're seen as the protectors of the state, such as it is.