the US, China, and India (the latter two aren't even going to start their work until after 2020 anyway)
Actually, China has gotten very serious about the issue and is on track to be well ahead of its commitments by 2020. In January China announced that it is investing $360B in domestic low- or no-carbon power generation (wind, solar, hydro and nuclear), to be installed by 2020. China has already cut its consumption of coal sharply, and is on track to keep cutting it further. China is also investing heavily (about $1T over the next few years) in green energy production around the world. Much of that money counts as a donation to third world countries under the terms of the Paris Accord, but China is going to end up owning much of the energy infrastructure in Africa and elsewhere, which means it's going to end up with huge influence and economic power in those regions just as they start to modernize... and start buying lots of Chinese-made goods.
China has recognized that not only is Global Warming a problem to be solved, it's also a tremendous opportunity to create an economic empire and obtain concomitant political influence throughout the emerging markets of the world. While the US dithers and disengages, China is going to step up and establish a new Chinese-led world order to replace the one that America created after WWII.
Calling Republicans a "basket of deplorables" or whatever it was just drove people to vote Republican when they might not have voted at all.
What was especially funny/sad about that particular case was that Clinton was trying to say that many Republicans aren't "deplorables"; she was drawing a distinction between the minority of racists and xenophobes and the decent people who make up the majority of the party, and describing her strategy to go after the votes of the latter. Of course, the way it was reported and taken led the majority of non-deplorable Republicans to believe that she was calling them deplorable, thereby driving them firmly into Trump's camp.
Back in the mid-90s, the "VP" of engineering (given that he supervised a team of two programmers the "VP" title was more than a little ridiculous -- of course I was the more "senior" of the two programmers, and my title was "Director of Engineering") of the startup I was working for told me he had a great idea for incredibly-efficient video compression, which would make full streaming video practical over dialup. When I asked for details, he told me the key was to find an optimal representation of the video stream, then send that. Since that statement was somewhere between blindingly obvious and utterly stupid, I pushed some more. His answer, delivered in hushed tones, after looking over his shoulder to check the empty room for spies, was:
"Here, do a thought experiment: Imagine a whole room full of transputers, all cranking away to find that one minimal representation of a frame of a movie. Now imagine a building full of them... can you imagine how optimalist the result would be?"
I laughed out loud, couldn't help it, which pissed him off so much that a few minutes later when the other programmer came in and greeted the "VP" with "Good morning, sunshine", he threw his very expensive headphones at him. He missed, so they shattered against the wall. Then the VP went running to one of the co-founders to complain about being disrespected by the staff. Nothing came of it.
That was far from the weirdest thing that happened at that place. My few months there ended abruptly one day when I arrived at work to find 20-foot flames shooting out of my office window. We're pretty sure that one of the co-founders torched the place to cover his theft of the ridiculously-expensive servers he'd purchased with the other co-founder's money, but nothing was ever proven.
"Call it a 'matter', not an investigation", hardly rises to the level of obstruction. I'm not saying it was right -- I don't think the White House should try to spin FBI investigations -- but if you equate that to ordering (however phrased) that an investigation be halted, you have no interest in truth or accuracy. Lynch never asked that the Clinton investigation be shut down, just that Comey use a different name for it. That's not remotely similar to what Trump did.
* Technically, I'm not even supposed to discuss that.
Says who? I held a TS clearance for years, and no one ever suggested that I shouldn't mention it.
But after the FBI conducted standard background checks and interviewed my neighbor the drunk, everyone in town knows.
If you actually held a clearance, you should know that "everyone knows" is not a reason to share information that actually is supposed to be kept secret. Were it true that you should not tell anyone that you held a clearance, the fact that the town already knows wouldn't justify telling anyone in town, much less posting it on/.
However, you're safe, because the fact that you once held a clearance (along with millions of others), is not a secret.
he said there was no hope of observing it directly.
But we just observed it directly. Depending, of course, on your definition of "directly". If you define it to mean "with the unaided human eye", then he was right. If you allow the eye to be augmented, then you have to specify what forms of augmentation are to be permitted, and where you draw the line is totally arbitrary.
It is interesting you bring up adaptive optics and image post processing. How would I know the observed displacements are real observation, not some software glitch in adaptive optics or post processing?
The same way you know the image from the Hubble is accurate, after the processing applied to its imagery. Calibration and great care.
Workhorse W-15, I am looking at you. Please transform yourself into a 4x4 station wagon.
I'd prefer it stay a pickup truck... but they should move the REX from the chassis to the truck bed. Make it so I can jack the REX up and drive the truck out from underneath it, so that when I don't need to cart an ICE around with me (which is most of the time), I can leave it home. When installed the REX should mount forward, against the cab where truck boxes often sit. Also, the electric-only range should be increased to about 150 miles, though the current 80 miles is adequate for most purposes.
. Next time you fill your tank note how long it takes to fill and how many gallons were pumped. Now figure out how many watts that gasoline pump just transferred. Do some tinkering with that math and compute how many amps that would be with a typical household electrical service voltage.
This is a pointless exercise, because it assumes that electric vehicles are charged in the same way that gasoline-powered vehicles are fueled. mark-t's issue will be addressed by fixing his core problem, charging infrastructure at home or wherever his car is parked for long periods of time (at work, at stores, etc.), rather than super-fast charging. The only time fast charging is even relevant (given EVs with a few hundred miles of range) is on road trips, and even there as long as the car can be recharged in a half hour or so, you're good. People need time for food, bathroom breaks, etc.
Also, even if very fast charging were required, there's no reason to demand that the grid be able to supply it that quickly. Buffer the energy in a large battery so the grid only needs to be able to keep up with the average draw, not peak. Large batteries are expensive today, but prices on new battery capacity are dropping fast, and in a few years we're going to have a large supply of used EV batteries coming onto the market. When your car battery has lost a third or half of its capacity, it no longer makes sense to use it in the car because it means you're hauling a lot of dead weight. The same concern doesn't exist for fixed locations, so EV batteries will be repurposed for load-smoothing.
I don't need to scream out at the world I have an electric car, I want something that looks nice, drives well and I can smile smugly to myself when I pass the pumps.
How about a Volt? It's pretty understated, it works well, is emissions free for the first 38 miles each day and you don't ever have to worry about getting stranded by a depleted battery.
The Volt is okay. I dislike the idea of carrying around an extra motor, though. All that complexity and weight, for something that you really would prefer never to use.
But disproof by counterexample is always possible. Einstein said we wouldn't be able to observe this, and since we've observed it we've have disproven that claim. Not knocking on Einstein; obviously he had no basis for theorizing the sort of observational capabilities we have now -- and even then he threw in a weasel word, "unlikely", to qualify it.
The apparent angular displacement due to such micro lensing turned out to be so small, he said, "such a small displacement is unlikely to be observed". He is right, even after this observation, no terrestrial telescope can hope to observe this.
Well, he would be right if he'd said it can't be observed from a terrestrial telescope, but made no such restriction. I would also not be so ready to claim that no terrestrial observation could ever be made. Adaptive optics, image post-processing and telescope arrays all offer opportunities for increasing the resolving power of ground-based scopes. I'm sure there are other clever techniques that could be applied.
I wish I'd read "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II" by Douglas Blackmon many years ago. Of course, it was only published in 2009, so that wasn't really possible, but still. The book has some flaws -- I wish it included a little more data, rather than focusing primarily on anecdotal evidence -- and I don't agree with all of Blackmon's conclusions, but I found it incredibly eye-opening. I had absolutely no idea that blacks were so heavily and so hypocritically oppressed in the post-reconstruction era. I mean, I knew about Jim Crow and "separate but equal", etc., but it went so far beyond that, to outright slavery and worse, torture and murder of a degree that wasn't seen during real, open slavery. This book has done more than anything to help me understand the perspective of modern black Americans, especially in the deep south. Not that the same crap is still going on, but you don't live through generations of that without becoming deeply skeptical of the establishment.
Highly recommended. Especially if you often find yourself baffled, confused or outraged by events like Ferguson, etc.
I am definitely hopeful. I'd love to buy an electric car now. However, I live in a condo, and board and owners are not interested in installing any charging points in our parking. So, no luck in any foreseeable future.
Give it a few years. Charging stations in the parking area will become an important competitive point for apartment and condo complexes, just as parking spots and swimming pools are now.
Some people cry "treason" when an authorized representative of the US government tells another government intel about a common enemy
Trump's sharing of intel with the Russian diplomats was in no way treasonous. Not only is the president the ultimate classification authority, able to classify or declassify anything he likes, for any reason at all, the constitution defines treason as giving aid and comfort to an enemy. Given that Russia is not our enemy (arguably, we don't even have any enemies at the moment), it's flatly impossible for any US citizen to be guilty of treason for any information they give to the Russians. Which isn't to say they can't be guilty of a crime (e.g. espionage), just that it's not treason.
No, Trump's comments weren't treasonous, or indeed anything other than perfectly and completely legal. They were just stupid. Not because it was stupid to share intel with Russia, but because the way Trump did it was both ineffective and damaging to US interests. It was ineffective because verbal delivery creates lots of opportunity for error in relaying the information, especially when one or both sides are represented by people who are not intelligence professionals. It was damaging because it put sources and methods needlessly at risk and, worse, put an ally's sources and methods at risk, without the permission of the ally in question.
The right way to do it would have been for Trump to direct his National Security Advisor to have a brief prepared. US intelligence officials would have created a thorough and carefully-vetted document that precisely described what was and wasn't known, what was inferred and why, and what level of confidence should be placed on each part of the information. They would also have sanitized it as necessary to prevent any unnecessary revelation of sources and methods. If sources and methods disclosure were required, they'd have carefully limited the degree of damage to exactly that required, and if it were necessary to disclose the ally who provided the information, they'd have vetted the disclosure with the ally, or at least have made sure that the decisionmaker who decided to throw the ally under the bus did it in full cognizance of the potential damage. For example, they'd have made sure that he understood that merely not mentioning Israel by name would not prevent it from being clear that Israel provided the information.
Even if if Trump were a brilliant and insightful man, rather than the puerile idiot that he is, he simply doesn't have the experience or training to know how to deliver such a brief effectively and safely. A competent, or even non-moronic, individual would have realized the limits of his own expertise in the course of his regular intelligence briefings, and would have deferred the job to the experts. Well, assuming he actually paid attention to the briefings for more than to see how many times his own name occurred in the single-page summary that his subordinates have realized is the limit of his attention span.
Yes, precisely; they don't mind saying they're in favour of an "equal draft" because they know it's unlikely to be used, and they know that in the case that any government were thinking about using it they could just protest it in it's entirety.
The above sentence is almost true... but terribly misleading and false because of that.
It's false because it claims that feminists would only support equality because they won't be drafted, and implies that they would only protest the draft if they might be drafted. Neither of those things are true. What is true is (a) they support equality in all things (including the draft), (b) many of them oppose the draft. There's no basis for implying any causal connection between those, any more than there is for implying that they would protest the draft because the oppose anti-abortion laws. Many of the same people who oppose the draft are also pro-choice, but not because one thing really has anything to do with the other; both just arise from a common philosophical basis (well, actually more of a common cultural basis).
I agree in principle. However, there are plenty of legal venues for doing exactly this.
Yes, there are. And it's abundantly clear that they do not work, at all. Read about Thomas Drake and John Crane. Trying to use the legal venues just gets you silenced, fired and prosecuted... to absolutely no beneficial result. The only way to actually bring abuses to light is by breaking the law, and then either doing the prison time for it or, as Snowden did, fleeing the country.
How can someone work for the NSA and NOT be aware that they track everything? If I was an NSA leaker, I certainly wouldn't be e-mailing my leaks from my work computer/e-mail account. I'd set up a throwaway account (and even then would be looking over my shoulder every second).
Really, Snowden's approach is the only smart one. The odds of being able to leak without being caught are close to zero, so if you're going to leak, you should (a) go big -- get lots of data -- and (b) get out, to a country that won't hand you back.
Were the draft to actually be instituted, and applied to women, I suspect you would hear these brave justice warriors singing a much different tune.
I suspect you're completely wrong, in fact I'm quite sure of it. "Vocal feminists" may not often be the same sort of women who voluntarily join the military, but they absolutely are the sort of women who would despise any woman who tried to use her gender to avoid being drafted. Many of them would probably argue against the draft, but they'd argue against it for both men and women.
In any case, the draft is irrelevant. Not only haven't we used it in 40 years (since before you were even born, most likely), it's very unlikely we'll ever use it again. Conscription isn't compatible with the needs of a high-tech military.
Slashdot Mirror
the US, China, and India (the latter two aren't even going to start their work until after 2020 anyway)
Actually, China has gotten very serious about the issue and is on track to be well ahead of its commitments by 2020. In January China announced that it is investing $360B in domestic low- or no-carbon power generation (wind, solar, hydro and nuclear), to be installed by 2020. China has already cut its consumption of coal sharply, and is on track to keep cutting it further. China is also investing heavily (about $1T over the next few years) in green energy production around the world. Much of that money counts as a donation to third world countries under the terms of the Paris Accord, but China is going to end up owning much of the energy infrastructure in Africa and elsewhere, which means it's going to end up with huge influence and economic power in those regions just as they start to modernize... and start buying lots of Chinese-made goods.
China has recognized that not only is Global Warming a problem to be solved, it's also a tremendous opportunity to create an economic empire and obtain concomitant political influence throughout the emerging markets of the world. While the US dithers and disengages, China is going to step up and establish a new Chinese-led world order to replace the one that America created after WWII.
Calling Republicans a "basket of deplorables" or whatever it was just drove people to vote Republican when they might not have voted at all.
What was especially funny/sad about that particular case was that Clinton was trying to say that many Republicans aren't "deplorables"; she was drawing a distinction between the minority of racists and xenophobes and the decent people who make up the majority of the party, and describing her strategy to go after the votes of the latter. Of course, the way it was reported and taken led the majority of non-deplorable Republicans to believe that she was calling them deplorable, thereby driving them firmly into Trump's camp.
Still, water doesplay a key role in anthropogenic climate change models.
More than one role. Water vapor also condenses into clouds, which increase albedo and reduce insolation.
No, no similarity at all, to any rational, non-partisan analysis.
Back in the mid-90s, the "VP" of engineering (given that he supervised a team of two programmers the "VP" title was more than a little ridiculous -- of course I was the more "senior" of the two programmers, and my title was "Director of Engineering") of the startup I was working for told me he had a great idea for incredibly-efficient video compression, which would make full streaming video practical over dialup. When I asked for details, he told me the key was to find an optimal representation of the video stream, then send that. Since that statement was somewhere between blindingly obvious and utterly stupid, I pushed some more. His answer, delivered in hushed tones, after looking over his shoulder to check the empty room for spies, was:
"Here, do a thought experiment: Imagine a whole room full of transputers, all cranking away to find that one minimal representation of a frame of a movie. Now imagine a building full of them... can you imagine how optimalist the result would be?"
I laughed out loud, couldn't help it, which pissed him off so much that a few minutes later when the other programmer came in and greeted the "VP" with "Good morning, sunshine", he threw his very expensive headphones at him. He missed, so they shattered against the wall. Then the VP went running to one of the co-founders to complain about being disrespected by the staff. Nothing came of it.
That was far from the weirdest thing that happened at that place. My few months there ended abruptly one day when I arrived at work to find 20-foot flames shooting out of my office window. We're pretty sure that one of the co-founders torched the place to cover his theft of the ridiculously-expensive servers he'd purchased with the other co-founder's money, but nothing was ever proven.
Says who?
My employer.
I suppose that's where the error comes from, then.
Yes, but who am I?
Also not remote a justification for revealing information that is supposed to be secret.
You mean the part where he confirmed that the Obama DOJ(Lynch) directly interfered with the investigation into Hillary? Yep, much lying, much obstructing.
"Call it a 'matter', not an investigation", hardly rises to the level of obstruction. I'm not saying it was right -- I don't think the White House should try to spin FBI investigations -- but if you equate that to ordering (however phrased) that an investigation be halted, you have no interest in truth or accuracy. Lynch never asked that the Clinton investigation be shut down, just that Comey use a different name for it. That's not remotely similar to what Trump did.
I had a security clearance*
* Technically, I'm not even supposed to discuss that.
Says who? I held a TS clearance for years, and no one ever suggested that I shouldn't mention it.
But after the FBI conducted standard background checks and interviewed my neighbor the drunk, everyone in town knows.
If you actually held a clearance, you should know that "everyone knows" is not a reason to share information that actually is supposed to be kept secret. Were it true that you should not tell anyone that you held a clearance, the fact that the town already knows wouldn't justify telling anyone in town, much less posting it on /.
However, you're safe, because the fact that you once held a clearance (along with millions of others), is not a secret.
he said there was no hope of observing it directly.
But we just observed it directly. Depending, of course, on your definition of "directly". If you define it to mean "with the unaided human eye", then he was right. If you allow the eye to be augmented, then you have to specify what forms of augmentation are to be permitted, and where you draw the line is totally arbitrary.
But I thought in a few years 95% of travel will be self-driving cars. Some city dwelling autist neckbeards said so!
I'm sure there will be a variety. But, yeah, car ownership in urban, and even sub-urban, areas is going to drop rapidly.
It is interesting you bring up adaptive optics and image post processing. How would I know the observed displacements are real observation, not some software glitch in adaptive optics or post processing?
The same way you know the image from the Hubble is accurate, after the processing applied to its imagery. Calibration and great care.
Workhorse W-15, I am looking at you. Please transform yourself into a 4x4 station wagon.
I'd prefer it stay a pickup truck... but they should move the REX from the chassis to the truck bed. Make it so I can jack the REX up and drive the truck out from underneath it, so that when I don't need to cart an ICE around with me (which is most of the time), I can leave it home. When installed the REX should mount forward, against the cab where truck boxes often sit. Also, the electric-only range should be increased to about 150 miles, though the current 80 miles is adequate for most purposes.
A lot of people I know, soon including myself, will code in C++ for food and a restroom. That's the reality of stupid america.
Well, there's your problem: C++. You need to get with the times. Learn Rust.
. Next time you fill your tank note how long it takes to fill and how many gallons were pumped. Now figure out how many watts that gasoline pump just transferred. Do some tinkering with that math and compute how many amps that would be with a typical household electrical service voltage.
This is a pointless exercise, because it assumes that electric vehicles are charged in the same way that gasoline-powered vehicles are fueled. mark-t's issue will be addressed by fixing his core problem, charging infrastructure at home or wherever his car is parked for long periods of time (at work, at stores, etc.), rather than super-fast charging. The only time fast charging is even relevant (given EVs with a few hundred miles of range) is on road trips, and even there as long as the car can be recharged in a half hour or so, you're good. People need time for food, bathroom breaks, etc.
Also, even if very fast charging were required, there's no reason to demand that the grid be able to supply it that quickly. Buffer the energy in a large battery so the grid only needs to be able to keep up with the average draw, not peak. Large batteries are expensive today, but prices on new battery capacity are dropping fast, and in a few years we're going to have a large supply of used EV batteries coming onto the market. When your car battery has lost a third or half of its capacity, it no longer makes sense to use it in the car because it means you're hauling a lot of dead weight. The same concern doesn't exist for fixed locations, so EV batteries will be repurposed for load-smoothing.
I don't need to scream out at the world I have an electric car, I want something that looks nice, drives well and I can smile smugly to myself when I pass the pumps.
How about a Volt? It's pretty understated, it works well, is emissions free for the first 38 miles each day and you don't ever have to worry about getting stranded by a depleted battery.
The Volt is okay. I dislike the idea of carrying around an extra motor, though. All that complexity and weight, for something that you really would prefer never to use.
Proofs are possible only in mathematics.
But disproof by counterexample is always possible. Einstein said we wouldn't be able to observe this, and since we've observed it we've have disproven that claim. Not knocking on Einstein; obviously he had no basis for theorizing the sort of observational capabilities we have now -- and even then he threw in a weasel word, "unlikely", to qualify it.
The apparent angular displacement due to such micro lensing turned out to be so small, he said, "such a small displacement is unlikely to be observed". He is right, even after this observation, no terrestrial telescope can hope to observe this.
Well, he would be right if he'd said it can't be observed from a terrestrial telescope, but made no such restriction. I would also not be so ready to claim that no terrestrial observation could ever be made. Adaptive optics, image post-processing and telescope arrays all offer opportunities for increasing the resolving power of ground-based scopes. I'm sure there are other clever techniques that could be applied.
I wish I'd read "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II" by Douglas Blackmon many years ago. Of course, it was only published in 2009, so that wasn't really possible, but still. The book has some flaws -- I wish it included a little more data, rather than focusing primarily on anecdotal evidence -- and I don't agree with all of Blackmon's conclusions, but I found it incredibly eye-opening. I had absolutely no idea that blacks were so heavily and so hypocritically oppressed in the post-reconstruction era. I mean, I knew about Jim Crow and "separate but equal", etc., but it went so far beyond that, to outright slavery and worse, torture and murder of a degree that wasn't seen during real, open slavery. This book has done more than anything to help me understand the perspective of modern black Americans, especially in the deep south. Not that the same crap is still going on, but you don't live through generations of that without becoming deeply skeptical of the establishment.
Highly recommended. Especially if you often find yourself baffled, confused or outraged by events like Ferguson, etc.
I am definitely hopeful. I'd love to buy an electric car now. However, I live in a condo, and board and owners are not interested in installing any charging points in our parking. So, no luck in any foreseeable future.
Give it a few years. Charging stations in the parking area will become an important competitive point for apartment and condo complexes, just as parking spots and swimming pools are now.
Some people cry "treason" when an authorized representative of the US government tells another government intel about a common enemy
Trump's sharing of intel with the Russian diplomats was in no way treasonous. Not only is the president the ultimate classification authority, able to classify or declassify anything he likes, for any reason at all, the constitution defines treason as giving aid and comfort to an enemy. Given that Russia is not our enemy (arguably, we don't even have any enemies at the moment), it's flatly impossible for any US citizen to be guilty of treason for any information they give to the Russians. Which isn't to say they can't be guilty of a crime (e.g. espionage), just that it's not treason.
No, Trump's comments weren't treasonous, or indeed anything other than perfectly and completely legal. They were just stupid. Not because it was stupid to share intel with Russia, but because the way Trump did it was both ineffective and damaging to US interests. It was ineffective because verbal delivery creates lots of opportunity for error in relaying the information, especially when one or both sides are represented by people who are not intelligence professionals. It was damaging because it put sources and methods needlessly at risk and, worse, put an ally's sources and methods at risk, without the permission of the ally in question.
The right way to do it would have been for Trump to direct his National Security Advisor to have a brief prepared. US intelligence officials would have created a thorough and carefully-vetted document that precisely described what was and wasn't known, what was inferred and why, and what level of confidence should be placed on each part of the information. They would also have sanitized it as necessary to prevent any unnecessary revelation of sources and methods. If sources and methods disclosure were required, they'd have carefully limited the degree of damage to exactly that required, and if it were necessary to disclose the ally who provided the information, they'd have vetted the disclosure with the ally, or at least have made sure that the decisionmaker who decided to throw the ally under the bus did it in full cognizance of the potential damage. For example, they'd have made sure that he understood that merely not mentioning Israel by name would not prevent it from being clear that Israel provided the information.
Even if if Trump were a brilliant and insightful man, rather than the puerile idiot that he is, he simply doesn't have the experience or training to know how to deliver such a brief effectively and safely. A competent, or even non-moronic, individual would have realized the limits of his own expertise in the course of his regular intelligence briefings, and would have deferred the job to the experts. Well, assuming he actually paid attention to the briefings for more than to see how many times his own name occurred in the single-page summary that his subordinates have realized is the limit of his attention span.
Sorry. I discount your comment based on the link you provided. Got a more reputable news source than Fox "News"? I don't read propaganda.
This is the sort of news you'd expect Fox News to suppress. The fact that it's from Fox makes it more believable, not less.
Yes, precisely; they don't mind saying they're in favour of an "equal draft" because they know it's unlikely to be used, and they know that in the case that any government were thinking about using it they could just protest it in it's entirety.
The above sentence is almost true... but terribly misleading and false because of that.
It's false because it claims that feminists would only support equality because they won't be drafted, and implies that they would only protest the draft if they might be drafted. Neither of those things are true. What is true is (a) they support equality in all things (including the draft), (b) many of them oppose the draft. There's no basis for implying any causal connection between those, any more than there is for implying that they would protest the draft because the oppose anti-abortion laws. Many of the same people who oppose the draft are also pro-choice, but not because one thing really has anything to do with the other; both just arise from a common philosophical basis (well, actually more of a common cultural basis).
I agree in principle. However, there are plenty of legal venues for doing exactly this.
Yes, there are. And it's abundantly clear that they do not work, at all. Read about Thomas Drake and John Crane. Trying to use the legal venues just gets you silenced, fired and prosecuted... to absolutely no beneficial result. The only way to actually bring abuses to light is by breaking the law, and then either doing the prison time for it or, as Snowden did, fleeing the country.
Diversity hire. Someone with her background definitely should not have received a Top Secret clearance.
What in her background indicated that she shouldn't get a TS clearance?
How can someone work for the NSA and NOT be aware that they track everything? If I was an NSA leaker, I certainly wouldn't be e-mailing my leaks from my work computer/e-mail account. I'd set up a throwaway account (and even then would be looking over my shoulder every second).
Really, Snowden's approach is the only smart one. The odds of being able to leak without being caught are close to zero, so if you're going to leak, you should (a) go big -- get lots of data -- and (b) get out, to a country that won't hand you back.
Were the draft to actually be instituted, and applied to women, I suspect you would hear these brave justice warriors singing a much different tune.
I suspect you're completely wrong, in fact I'm quite sure of it. "Vocal feminists" may not often be the same sort of women who voluntarily join the military, but they absolutely are the sort of women who would despise any woman who tried to use her gender to avoid being drafted. Many of them would probably argue against the draft, but they'd argue against it for both men and women.
In any case, the draft is irrelevant. Not only haven't we used it in 40 years (since before you were even born, most likely), it's very unlikely we'll ever use it again. Conscription isn't compatible with the needs of a high-tech military.