Interestingly, I hated Donna the first time I watched it through. She was my least favorite companion. I think her brash voice and demeanor just grated on me. After my wife got into Doctor Who and we watched the Donna episodes again, she became my favorite companion. Her brains and the fact that she was always ready to put the Doctor in his place (and not fawn over him) was perfect. (I can't want to reach the Donna years yet again as I re-watch Doctor Who with my boys.)
I wouldn't believe the reported "top picks." Moffet has said that he purposefully leaked wrong names to keep us guessing. That means that none of those actors are likely the next Doctor.
Unless he was lying about leaking wrong names so that THAT would throw us off the trail. In which case it COULD be one of the top picks.
If by "his daughter", you mean Jenny, the "clone daughter" from "The Doctor's Daughter", then he wouldn't seek her out. Last he saw her, she died and didn't regenerate. Only after he left did her regeneration kick in (albeit without her changing forms) and she took off to explore the Universe. They could bring her back by having her contact the Doctor or run into him, but why would he seek out someone who he thinks died (and whose timeline doesn't allow for a visit without meeting his past self)?
Let's say this logic was true. Congress could create a law and add, as part of it, "challenging this law in the court system is illegal and carries an instant sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole to be handed out via a military court."
By the logic of Step #2, this law is Constitutional until SOCTUS says otherwise. Except that nobody can bring legal challenges to the law without getting "disappeared." Constitutional? Of course because everything Congress does is Constitutional by default and only SOCTUS says otherwise. As for voting them out, maybe Congress would pass a law declaring that they have lifetime terms (with the same "no challenging this" rider). Suddenly, they have lifetime terms and can't be taken to task by those pesky voters.
All of this is highly unlikely to happen, of course. Normally, the opposing party would stop them. Say what you will about the two parties being the same, at least they've gotten so used to the "you rule and then we rule" scenario that neither party seems willing to make a "ban the other party" power grab. If one party were to implode enough, though, giving the other party enough power and control of Congress and the Presidency, it could be possible. If that situation happened, I would hope that people in the government wouldn't just say "Well, it's Constitutional until SOCTUS says otherwise so I'll go by the law." I would hope that they'd challenge the situation and bring things back to the Constitution.
That might have been a laughable statement now because more memory (as well as faster processors and other advances) allowed for computing applications that we couldn't foresee at the time, but the limitation on displays isn't "what are we using it for" but "what can the human eye see." Perhaps we'll wind up implanting devices in our eyes to increase our eye's resolution limit (and somehow get around the fact that our brains might not be able to deal with ultra-HD reality), but short of that there's a hard limit on what the average person can see. Put a 600dpi tablet screen and a 1200dpi tablet screen in front of 100 people and 99 won't be able to see the difference.
Exactly. The government is viewing this as "Guy exposed classified programs to the world including our enemies. This helped our enemies and hurt us therefore he needs to be punished severely." This is true (up until "therefore..."), the mitigating factor of the program being extremely illegal is completely overlooked. In fact, worse than overlooked, it's being actively ignored and the rest of the story trumpeted over and over to give the impression that the "government version" of the story is the ONLY version of the story.
Can you get my Facebook chat logs, private messages, all of my HTTP traffic, web searches, files I upload or email, VPN traffic, VOIP traffic, Google Earth traffic, my usernames, buddy lists, etc? Because the NSA can, and does. Their training materials show how to query that data. Can you find an encrypted VPN, decrypt the traffic, and determine who is using the VPN? The NSA can. Can you get a list of all IP addresses that visit a website? The NSA can.
Is it bad that I began reading that to the tune of "The Candy Man Can"?
*sings* Who can find your Facebook chats? Private messages too? All of your e-mail and every search that you do? The NSA. The NSA can. The NSA can 'cause they look at everything to make the US stay safe! *stops singing*
Ok, someone with more time on their hands.... rewrite the whole song.
It might be easier, but how much thigh meat would the average grasshopper have? Even assuming you had 100% successful meat/shell separation every time (no shell bits getting in your meat and no meat clinging to the discarded shells), you'd need over a thousand crickets to make a pound of meat. Going by my last estimate of 0.055 oz of meat per cricket, getting just the thigh meat would probably get you something like a quarter of that. If not less. So we're talking 0.01375 oz of thigh meat per cricket. This is about 73 crickets for every ounce of meat.
Perhaps our simplified cricket-meat-extraction-robots would be able to process 10 crickets per second (probably a high estimate). This means it would take a cricket robot 7 seconds to make an ounce of cricket meat or nearly two minutes for a pound of cricket meat. Getting a group of robots could wind up producing more meat quicker, but it would get expensive quickly.
Cricket meat would still likely wind up costing more than an equivalent amount of beef, poultry, or pork. Given that more accepted meats are both widely available and (relatively) inexpensive, the "ewww" factor of insect meat is worse than a solution in search of a problem. It's a solution that nobody wants for a problem that doesn't exist. Even if you were to remove all meat products (including all seafood) from the supermarket shelves, I think most consumers would go vegetarian before they went insectivore.
Somehow I doubt that, even with robotic labor, you could get something useful out of insects. A quick Google search showed that an adult Morman Cricket (a large to pick an insect at random) is around 0.11 oz. Let's say that 50% of that is "meat" (this is probably being optimistic) and that a properly developed cricket robot can strip a cricket into cricket meat in half a second. This means each robot would be able to produce 0.11 oz of meat per second. It would take a robot about 2.5 minutes to produce a pound of meat. You could have many robots working at the same time, but you'd need a LOT of them to get to commercial scale. And while the crickets themselves would be cheap, the robots would be expensive.
I think lab grown meat (of the cow, chicken, pig variety) has more of a future than insect meat does.
I don't curse. Ever. (Yes, I know I'm a freak of nature.) However, even *I* see this as a horrible thing. Why if people curse it's their responsibility. I'm also the parent of young kids and the fact that people curse online is the least of my concerns when my kids go online. (Higher up on the list are people who would try to scam them or harm them in some way.)
Once Russia bans curse words, I predict a rise in "alternative" curse words. Instead of saying "the F word", they could say Frell. Instead of "the S word", they could say Scrap. Kind of like how the producers of MASH weren't allowed to use the word "virgin" in one episode so, in their next episode, they had someone say he was from the "Virgin Islands." People will rebel and find ways around the system. Then either the system will need to expand to include all possible words that could be used as curse words (pretty much the entire dictionary) or it will become so ineffective as to be useless for its intended purpose.
Except, as others have pointed out, you rarely take a lobster or crab and eat it whole - shell and digestive system as well as meat. With an insect, there's no way to remove the shell, extract the meat, and just eat that part. You pop the entire insect in your mouth including the shell, legs, and digestive system (including any waste products that the insect didn't "dispose" of). Even if you could extract the meat, each insect is so small that the time spent pulling out the meat wouldn't be worth the amount of meat obtained.
I'd be willing to bet on the future of meat being lab grown rather than bug-grown. (If it does indeed change significantly from the current system.)
I can only remember one time that I ate bugs and it was completely by accident. I had made a cup of hot chocolate from a powdered mix. I got to the bottom and there was chocolate sludge on the bottom (like there always seems to be). As I was eating it, I asked my mother if the chocolate was supposed to be moving. Mealworms had infested the hot chocolate. I believe it took me awhile to be able to drink hot chocolate again after that.
Back in high school, I'd bring beef tongue sandwiches for lunch. They were delicious but not very socially accepted. There were plenty of taunts from my more juvenile peers regarding consuming a cow's tongue.
We actually use one of those protein shakes for our youngest son. He's a picky eater and refuses to eat breakfast most days. Sending him to school on an empty stomach isn't an option so we buy chocolate protein shakes. He thinks he's just having "chocolate drink" for breakfast, but he's actually getting some protein and vitamins.
Personally, I wouldn't be able to take eating "meal sticks" or "meal shakes" all the time. I prefer real food. (When I'm watching my calories, I find creative ways to eat real food while not eating high fat/high calorie foods. Mostly via portion control and ingredient substitution.)
No Facebook accounts for me, but my wife is on Facebook. She keeps her Facebook account with her real name separate from her blog pseudonym.
Of course, you can see why I don't mention her by name. The last thing I want is for her to know my real name (I use a pseudonym online) and try to harass me that way. Not that I think she'd do any actual damage, but she'd be very annoying. (Sort of how a bunch of houseflies in your house won't hurt you but will REALLY annoy you for awhile.)
I actually don't wish anything bad for her. I just hope she gets the help she needs as quickly as possible. Then she can be better and the people she's been harassing can get some peace.
From that article: "Twitter is just another arena. The normal rules don’t apply. You can say things you would NEVER say in real life. That’s social media. And if you don’t like the rules, well, get off Twitter."
I'd beg to differ. I've been using Twitter for 5 years now and I'll admit that I say many things on Twitter that I wouldn't say face-to-face, but that's primarily because I feel more comfortable socializing via computer. That being said, I have a very simple rule for what I say on Twitter:
Imagine you are in a room standing on a stage in front of your boss, co-workers, parents, assorted family, friends, spouse, and kids*. Would you STILL say what you are about to say? If the answer is no for ANY reason (e.g. "My boss would fire me" or "My parents would freak"), then don't say it.
What you say on Social Media isn't private. What you send via e-mail isn't private. Text messages aren't private. (As Anthony Weiner found out.) They are, at best, "public" messages that just haven't been shared with someone else yet.
Saying "I'm going to rape you for your beliefs" is not allowed because "the normal rules don't apply." The rules of being a human being apply, it's just easier to be a jerk to a screen name and small avatar photo belonging to someone who-knows-where than it is to be a jerk to someone standing right next to you. And threatening a person with bodily harm is going beyond being a jerk and veering down the criminal harassment path. Anyone who thinks they can harass people online and get away with it because "it's on the Internet" is sorely mistaken.
* Depending on the age of your kids and the topic, you might be able to leave the kids out of the theoretical room.
I've been the subject of abuse online and offline. Some abuse can be shrugged off. If someone replies to my comment telling me that I'm an idiot and all of my viewpoints are garbage, I'll care about it for about one nanosecond. That's all Some Random Commenter I Don't Know deserves.
On the flip side, there are some people who will start to repeatedly harass you online over and over. I had one woman who would harass me on Twitter and on my blog. Then she harassed my wife as well. She has a history of harassing people (sometimes for months, sometimes for years) and is clearly mentally ill (she thinks she's a prophet of God and that I'm really someone else who is secretly in love with her... or something like that - her tales get twisted in such a fashion only she can understand them). She has contacted people's employers, "contacted" multiple police departments to report people (where "contacting" means sending an e-mail often accusing the people of pedophilia with no evidence) and even the hospital where one person's boyfriend was being treated for cancer. (Claiming that he was faking having cancer for insurance money... like the doctors wouldn't figure that out.) Thankfully, she seems to have moved on from me at the moment but at any moment she could decide that I'm someone she has to "report" again. She gets banned from Twitter only to reappear with another account hours later. (I think she's up to 300 by now... I've lost track.)
I and others have contacted the police, but she's in Canada and I'm in the US so nothing gets done. She did harass someone in Canada prompting Canadian police to visit her and a lawsuit to start, but that all fell through. (Partly when the police told her exactly WHO reported her... yeah, that's smart!) Thankfully, she's not violent or prone to travel to her targets, but who knows if that will change?
In short, you have the right to express your thoughts and people have the right to ignore said thoughts. However, when those thoughts get increasingly harassing, they get harder to ignore. Being told that you'll be raped or killed because you support Cause X is NOT free speech and never has been. That's harassment and should result in charges. If the only way you can express yourself in opposition to Cause X is telling supporters that you'll rape and/or kill them, then you need to seriously re-examine your debate skills before you say/post anything else.
I use Instagram but have been leery about it ever since the Facebook takeover. I've been working out a system to take any Wordpress install and turn it into an Instagram-esque system. With luck, I work out something that not only will let me replace Instagram with a system that I'm 100% in control of, but that will let others use it as well.
Snowden is neither accused nor convicted of any crime. Yet the US seems to be about to threat to sanction any country that harbors him.
And some people wonder why Snowden doesn't just come back to the US and prove that he's innocent of any crime. With that many people in positions of power gunning for him - to the point of essentially declaring economic war on any country he's in - there's ZERO chance he'll get a fair trial. If he returns to the US, he'll be locked up for a couple of months (to punish him for running) before having a speedy "trial" conducted in which he'll quickly be convicted of being a horrible traitor. Then, he'll either get the death penalty or will be locked up in some horrible detention facility for the rest of his life with no contact with the outside world.
Then when (and in the unlikely case of IF) people ask why you didn't do what you were supposed to do, you can cheerfully say that you were too busy keeping the US safe.
I'd go one step further: If/When people ask you why you didn't so what you were supposed to do, point out how you were keeping the US safe and then insinuate that any further questioning of you proves that they don't care about keeping America safe. In fact, maybe THEY are terrorists/socialists/communists too. Maybe THEY are enemies of America and need to be locked up. They don't want that, do they? No? Then they'd better keep their mouths shut and let you do what you want to do.
I had this argument with my father this past weekend. He's a staunch Republican (of the "watches Hannity, O'Reilly and Fox News" variety). I'm more liberal with some libertarian leanings. He seemed fine with the NSA activities saying that it'd catch criminals and what could be wrong with that. I pointed out that letting police just arrest and jail anyone they wanted without trial would put more criminals behind bars also. (After all, how many criminals get off on technicalities or due to having a better lawyer than the prosecution?) Also, what if the police were allowed to place cameras inside everyone's houses (including in our bedrooms). Imagine how many crooks could be caught with this program!
Of course, all those things would be highly illegal and HUGE invasions of our rights to due process and privacy. We shouldn't give the police additional powers just because "they can catch more criminals." At least not unless said powers come with sufficient oversight and accountability. Had this NSA program had appropriate oversight and accountability, it might not be such a big issue mostly because they wouldn't have been allowed to just capture information on everyone and then weed through it.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, I hated Donna the first time I watched it through. She was my least favorite companion. I think her brash voice and demeanor just grated on me. After my wife got into Doctor Who and we watched the Donna episodes again, she became my favorite companion. Her brains and the fact that she was always ready to put the Doctor in his place (and not fawn over him) was perfect. (I can't want to reach the Donna years yet again as I re-watch Doctor Who with my boys.)
I wouldn't believe the reported "top picks." Moffet has said that he purposefully leaked wrong names to keep us guessing. That means that none of those actors are likely the next Doctor.
Unless he was lying about leaking wrong names so that THAT would throw us off the trail. In which case it COULD be one of the top picks.
Curse you, Moffet. Now I can't wait until Sunday!
If by "his daughter", you mean Jenny, the "clone daughter" from "The Doctor's Daughter", then he wouldn't seek her out. Last he saw her, she died and didn't regenerate. Only after he left did her regeneration kick in (albeit without her changing forms) and she took off to explore the Universe. They could bring her back by having her contact the Doctor or run into him, but why would he seek out someone who he thinks died (and whose timeline doesn't allow for a visit without meeting his past self)?
Let's say this logic was true. Congress could create a law and add, as part of it, "challenging this law in the court system is illegal and carries an instant sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole to be handed out via a military court."
By the logic of Step #2, this law is Constitutional until SOCTUS says otherwise. Except that nobody can bring legal challenges to the law without getting "disappeared." Constitutional? Of course because everything Congress does is Constitutional by default and only SOCTUS says otherwise. As for voting them out, maybe Congress would pass a law declaring that they have lifetime terms (with the same "no challenging this" rider). Suddenly, they have lifetime terms and can't be taken to task by those pesky voters.
All of this is highly unlikely to happen, of course. Normally, the opposing party would stop them. Say what you will about the two parties being the same, at least they've gotten so used to the "you rule and then we rule" scenario that neither party seems willing to make a "ban the other party" power grab. If one party were to implode enough, though, giving the other party enough power and control of Congress and the Presidency, it could be possible. If that situation happened, I would hope that people in the government wouldn't just say "Well, it's Constitutional until SOCTUS says otherwise so I'll go by the law." I would hope that they'd challenge the situation and bring things back to the Constitution.
That might have been a laughable statement now because more memory (as well as faster processors and other advances) allowed for computing applications that we couldn't foresee at the time, but the limitation on displays isn't "what are we using it for" but "what can the human eye see." Perhaps we'll wind up implanting devices in our eyes to increase our eye's resolution limit (and somehow get around the fact that our brains might not be able to deal with ultra-HD reality), but short of that there's a hard limit on what the average person can see. Put a 600dpi tablet screen and a 1200dpi tablet screen in front of 100 people and 99 won't be able to see the difference.
Exactly. The government is viewing this as "Guy exposed classified programs to the world including our enemies. This helped our enemies and hurt us therefore he needs to be punished severely." This is true (up until "therefore..."), the mitigating factor of the program being extremely illegal is completely overlooked. In fact, worse than overlooked, it's being actively ignored and the rest of the story trumpeted over and over to give the impression that the "government version" of the story is the ONLY version of the story.
Is it bad that I began reading that to the tune of "The Candy Man Can"?
*sings*
Who can find your Facebook chats? Private messages too? All of your e-mail and every search that you do? The NSA. The NSA can. The NSA can 'cause they look at everything to make the US stay safe!
*stops singing*
Ok, someone with more time on their hands.... rewrite the whole song.
It might be easier, but how much thigh meat would the average grasshopper have? Even assuming you had 100% successful meat/shell separation every time (no shell bits getting in your meat and no meat clinging to the discarded shells), you'd need over a thousand crickets to make a pound of meat. Going by my last estimate of 0.055 oz of meat per cricket, getting just the thigh meat would probably get you something like a quarter of that. If not less. So we're talking 0.01375 oz of thigh meat per cricket. This is about 73 crickets for every ounce of meat.
Perhaps our simplified cricket-meat-extraction-robots would be able to process 10 crickets per second (probably a high estimate). This means it would take a cricket robot 7 seconds to make an ounce of cricket meat or nearly two minutes for a pound of cricket meat. Getting a group of robots could wind up producing more meat quicker, but it would get expensive quickly.
Cricket meat would still likely wind up costing more than an equivalent amount of beef, poultry, or pork. Given that more accepted meats are both widely available and (relatively) inexpensive, the "ewww" factor of insect meat is worse than a solution in search of a problem. It's a solution that nobody wants for a problem that doesn't exist. Even if you were to remove all meat products (including all seafood) from the supermarket shelves, I think most consumers would go vegetarian before they went insectivore.
D'oh, I started to edit my post and then got distracted. (Squirrel! I mean, cricket!)
"an adult Morman Cricket (a large to pick an insect at random)"
should have read
"an adult Morman Cricket (to pick a large insect at random)"
Somehow I doubt that, even with robotic labor, you could get something useful out of insects. A quick Google search showed that an adult Morman Cricket (a large to pick an insect at random) is around 0.11 oz. Let's say that 50% of that is "meat" (this is probably being optimistic) and that a properly developed cricket robot can strip a cricket into cricket meat in half a second. This means each robot would be able to produce 0.11 oz of meat per second. It would take a robot about 2.5 minutes to produce a pound of meat. You could have many robots working at the same time, but you'd need a LOT of them to get to commercial scale. And while the crickets themselves would be cheap, the robots would be expensive.
I think lab grown meat (of the cow, chicken, pig variety) has more of a future than insect meat does.
I don't curse. Ever. (Yes, I know I'm a freak of nature.) However, even *I* see this as a horrible thing. Why if people curse it's their responsibility. I'm also the parent of young kids and the fact that people curse online is the least of my concerns when my kids go online. (Higher up on the list are people who would try to scam them or harm them in some way.)
Once Russia bans curse words, I predict a rise in "alternative" curse words. Instead of saying "the F word", they could say Frell. Instead of "the S word", they could say Scrap. Kind of like how the producers of MASH weren't allowed to use the word "virgin" in one episode so, in their next episode, they had someone say he was from the "Virgin Islands." People will rebel and find ways around the system. Then either the system will need to expand to include all possible words that could be used as curse words (pretty much the entire dictionary) or it will become so ineffective as to be useless for its intended purpose.
Except, as others have pointed out, you rarely take a lobster or crab and eat it whole - shell and digestive system as well as meat. With an insect, there's no way to remove the shell, extract the meat, and just eat that part. You pop the entire insect in your mouth including the shell, legs, and digestive system (including any waste products that the insect didn't "dispose" of). Even if you could extract the meat, each insect is so small that the time spent pulling out the meat wouldn't be worth the amount of meat obtained.
I'd be willing to bet on the future of meat being lab grown rather than bug-grown. (If it does indeed change significantly from the current system.)
I can only remember one time that I ate bugs and it was completely by accident. I had made a cup of hot chocolate from a powdered mix. I got to the bottom and there was chocolate sludge on the bottom (like there always seems to be). As I was eating it, I asked my mother if the chocolate was supposed to be moving. Mealworms had infested the hot chocolate. I believe it took me awhile to be able to drink hot chocolate again after that.
Back in high school, I'd bring beef tongue sandwiches for lunch. They were delicious but not very socially accepted. There were plenty of taunts from my more juvenile peers regarding consuming a cow's tongue.
We actually use one of those protein shakes for our youngest son. He's a picky eater and refuses to eat breakfast most days. Sending him to school on an empty stomach isn't an option so we buy chocolate protein shakes. He thinks he's just having "chocolate drink" for breakfast, but he's actually getting some protein and vitamins.
Personally, I wouldn't be able to take eating "meal sticks" or "meal shakes" all the time. I prefer real food. (When I'm watching my calories, I find creative ways to eat real food while not eating high fat/high calorie foods. Mostly via portion control and ingredient substitution.)
No Facebook accounts for me, but my wife is on Facebook. She keeps her Facebook account with her real name separate from her blog pseudonym.
Of course, you can see why I don't mention her by name. The last thing I want is for her to know my real name (I use a pseudonym online) and try to harass me that way. Not that I think she'd do any actual damage, but she'd be very annoying. (Sort of how a bunch of houseflies in your house won't hurt you but will REALLY annoy you for awhile.)
I actually don't wish anything bad for her. I just hope she gets the help she needs as quickly as possible. Then she can be better and the people she's been harassing can get some peace.
"Across the whole of the earth, I often wonder which dominates: good or evil?"
My personal belief? Good dominates but evil is louder.
From that article: "Twitter is just another arena. The normal rules don’t apply. You can say things you would NEVER say in real life. That’s social media. And if you don’t like the rules, well, get off Twitter."
I'd beg to differ. I've been using Twitter for 5 years now and I'll admit that I say many things on Twitter that I wouldn't say face-to-face, but that's primarily because I feel more comfortable socializing via computer. That being said, I have a very simple rule for what I say on Twitter:
Imagine you are in a room standing on a stage in front of your boss, co-workers, parents, assorted family, friends, spouse, and kids*. Would you STILL say what you are about to say? If the answer is no for ANY reason (e.g. "My boss would fire me" or "My parents would freak"), then don't say it.
What you say on Social Media isn't private. What you send via e-mail isn't private. Text messages aren't private. (As Anthony Weiner found out.) They are, at best, "public" messages that just haven't been shared with someone else yet.
Saying "I'm going to rape you for your beliefs" is not allowed because "the normal rules don't apply." The rules of being a human being apply, it's just easier to be a jerk to a screen name and small avatar photo belonging to someone who-knows-where than it is to be a jerk to someone standing right next to you. And threatening a person with bodily harm is going beyond being a jerk and veering down the criminal harassment path. Anyone who thinks they can harass people online and get away with it because "it's on the Internet" is sorely mistaken.
* Depending on the age of your kids and the topic, you might be able to leave the kids out of the theoretical room.
I've been the subject of abuse online and offline. Some abuse can be shrugged off. If someone replies to my comment telling me that I'm an idiot and all of my viewpoints are garbage, I'll care about it for about one nanosecond. That's all Some Random Commenter I Don't Know deserves.
On the flip side, there are some people who will start to repeatedly harass you online over and over. I had one woman who would harass me on Twitter and on my blog. Then she harassed my wife as well. She has a history of harassing people (sometimes for months, sometimes for years) and is clearly mentally ill (she thinks she's a prophet of God and that I'm really someone else who is secretly in love with her... or something like that - her tales get twisted in such a fashion only she can understand them). She has contacted people's employers, "contacted" multiple police departments to report people (where "contacting" means sending an e-mail often accusing the people of pedophilia with no evidence) and even the hospital where one person's boyfriend was being treated for cancer. (Claiming that he was faking having cancer for insurance money... like the doctors wouldn't figure that out.) Thankfully, she seems to have moved on from me at the moment but at any moment she could decide that I'm someone she has to "report" again. She gets banned from Twitter only to reappear with another account hours later. (I think she's up to 300 by now... I've lost track.)
I and others have contacted the police, but she's in Canada and I'm in the US so nothing gets done. She did harass someone in Canada prompting Canadian police to visit her and a lawsuit to start, but that all fell through. (Partly when the police told her exactly WHO reported her... yeah, that's smart!) Thankfully, she's not violent or prone to travel to her targets, but who knows if that will change?
In short, you have the right to express your thoughts and people have the right to ignore said thoughts. However, when those thoughts get increasingly harassing, they get harder to ignore. Being told that you'll be raped or killed because you support Cause X is NOT free speech and never has been. That's harassment and should result in charges. If the only way you can express yourself in opposition to Cause X is telling supporters that you'll rape and/or kill them, then you need to seriously re-examine your debate skills before you say/post anything else.
Did the summary forget to mention that the inventor of the Slingatron hails from Elbonia?
I use Instagram but have been leery about it ever since the Facebook takeover. I've been working out a system to take any Wordpress install and turn it into an Instagram-esque system. With luck, I work out something that not only will let me replace Instagram with a system that I'm 100% in control of, but that will let others use it as well.
And some people wonder why Snowden doesn't just come back to the US and prove that he's innocent of any crime. With that many people in positions of power gunning for him - to the point of essentially declaring economic war on any country he's in - there's ZERO chance he'll get a fair trial. If he returns to the US, he'll be locked up for a couple of months (to punish him for running) before having a speedy "trial" conducted in which he'll quickly be convicted of being a horrible traitor. Then, he'll either get the death penalty or will be locked up in some horrible detention facility for the rest of his life with no contact with the outside world.
At this point, I'd even settle for a "pick two" scenario. Accountable and honest. Accountable and transparent. Honest and transparent.
I'd go one step further: If/When people ask you why you didn't so what you were supposed to do, point out how you were keeping the US safe and then insinuate that any further questioning of you proves that they don't care about keeping America safe. In fact, maybe THEY are terrorists/socialists/communists too. Maybe THEY are enemies of America and need to be locked up. They don't want that, do they? No? Then they'd better keep their mouths shut and let you do what you want to do.
I had this argument with my father this past weekend. He's a staunch Republican (of the "watches Hannity, O'Reilly and Fox News" variety). I'm more liberal with some libertarian leanings. He seemed fine with the NSA activities saying that it'd catch criminals and what could be wrong with that. I pointed out that letting police just arrest and jail anyone they wanted without trial would put more criminals behind bars also. (After all, how many criminals get off on technicalities or due to having a better lawyer than the prosecution?) Also, what if the police were allowed to place cameras inside everyone's houses (including in our bedrooms). Imagine how many crooks could be caught with this program!
Of course, all those things would be highly illegal and HUGE invasions of our rights to due process and privacy. We shouldn't give the police additional powers just because "they can catch more criminals." At least not unless said powers come with sufficient oversight and accountability. Had this NSA program had appropriate oversight and accountability, it might not be such a big issue mostly because they wouldn't have been allowed to just capture information on everyone and then weed through it.