It's a way for scammers to stretch their supplies of actual medicine ridiculously thin to make obnoxiously huge profits
Or not use any at all. Seriously, since Homeopathy means diluting a substance down to a level where it would be undetectable, how would you be able to tell the difference between two vials of homeopathic "medicine" where vial A was properly diluted and vial B was just plain water that never held any such substance?
Homeopathic "medicine" providers could just sell tiny bottles of water and there would be no way to show they were scamming their customers. (Beyond the fact that homeopathy doesn't work, I mean.)
I think the main problem happens when people (movie directors, studio execs, marketing, etc) decides that "gearing X towards kids" means "adding lots of bodily humor, inserting slapstick everywhere, and dumbing everything down." There have been a lot of very successful "kids" movies that don't pander to kids and are quite watchable by adults.
A recent one that comes to mind is Inside Out. Disney/Pixar could have easily made the imaginary friend character (Bing Bong) a Jar-Jar Binks-esque disaster. They could have inserted tons of scenes of the emotions slamming into things. They could have had Anger release gas every time he got furious. They did none of this. Instead, they made a movie that my 8 year old loved, my 11 year old loved, my wife loved, and I (pushing 40) loved. They didn't assume that Kid = Only Appreciates Crude/Low Brow Humor.
I'm not saying there isn't a place for crude humor. Sometimes it works just fine. However, shoehorning that stuff into a movie because "this will appeal to kids" is a recipe for disaster.
Spoiler Alert: That crashed Star Destroyer from the Star Wars trailer? It crashed on top of Jar-Jar. Many Imperials died to save us from the menace of Binks.
Not to mention that Chewbacca is portrayed in a positive light most times. Right down to his strength. You don't "let the Wookie win" because otherwise he'll throw a fit, trip over his legs, and end up on the floor. Pit Chewbacca against a few Stormtroopers and Chewy will come out ahead. Put Chewbacca on the problem and he'll work out how to fix it.
Contrast this with Jar-Jar whose main attributes seem to be "gets in the way", "gets into trouble that others need to get him out of", and "is generally helpless unless his clumsiness inadvertently results in his enemy's defeat." About the only way Jar-Jar would take out a group of Stormtroopers would be by repeatedly tripping into them until they were all knocked out. His only purpose to the plot seems to be to get in the way of and annoy the other characters.
And why didn't Lucas do what he did for aliens in the original trilogy: Either make them speak some alien language with subtitles, or give them some not-easily-identified accent? Jabba didn't speak like an Italian guy - he spoke in Huttese. Greedo spoke in his own tongue. Chewbacca had his growls that Han and C3P-O translated. Aliens that spoke English (Yoda, Ackbar, etc) did so without any obvious dialect. You didn't have Ackbar shouting "It's a trap!" with a French accent. Yoda didn't speak with a stereotypical Indian accent. The original Star Wars trilogy did alien-speak right, why couldn't the prequels? (Not saying that this would have fixed all of the prequels' problems. Their issues go far deeper than offensive alien accents. Still, it would have been one less thing to cringe at.)
That last group was the trade federation who were a bad Japanese stereotype.
Along similar lines, I saw Mr. Magoo was on Hulu and decided to introduce my boys to the wonderful antics of that nearly-blind and completely senile old man. I was a bit surprised when the first episode had a stereotypical Chinese servant of Magoo's. The guy had squinty eyes, giant buck teeth (that made Bugs Bunny's look normal) and pronounced "Boss" as "Bloss". My boys are young enough that the stereotyping went over their heads and they just enjoyed Magoo having a "day at the beach/amusement park" at a construction site.
After the show was over, I used the opportunity to point out the stereotype and explained that this type of thing was considered appropriate when the show was made, but wouldn't be anywhere close to appropriate nowadays. We can still enjoy the show as a reflection of the time period it was made in while rejecting the stereotypes it presents. In the case of the Star Wars prequel stereotypes, though, Lucas should have known better.
I am a parent and while it is important to get to the bottom of bad behavior to keep it from happening again, you also need to be firm in enforcing punishments for bad behavior. Kids will naturally test the boundaries. If your reaction to bad behavior is only "Now, why are you doing this? Let's have a friendly chat about it", then your kids will walk all over you. Have firm (but fair) consequences for their actions followed up with discussions about what they did, why it was wrong, and how they should act in similar situations in the future.
Coincidentally, I read an article today about The Tax Foundation calculating how much real money someone would have if you gave them $100 based on the national average. In other words, 100 "National Average Dollars" would buy you $111.61 worth of stuff in Ohio, but only $86.73 worth of stuff in New York (where I live).
Using this, someone with a $100,000 salary in California would be making 112,296 "National Average Dollars" which would buy you 128,197 worth of stuff in South Dakota. To put it another way, to earn $100K someone in South Dakota would need to earn $87,596 "National Average Dollars" - or $24,700 less "National Average Dollars" than someone in California would need to earn.
Of course, these state figures can be misleading. While it is certainly more expensive to live in a comparably sized town in New York than South Dakota, it is less expensive to live in Upstate New York than it is to live on Long Island or New York City.
Altering a marketing strategy is different than a politician who changes his views because "that's what the polls say." Such a politician can't be trusted because he'll change everything he stands for just to stay in power. It's staying in power that he cares about, not doing what's best for the people he represents.
A politician who sees a poll change, examines the issue closely, and because of his examination finds new information that changes his opinion is different. That's fine. I will grant you, however, that it can be hard to tell the difference between a politician who uses a poll as an indicator that he needs to re-examine an issue and a politician who uses a poll as the only piece of data he needs.
My wife has had this happen to her too. Someone used her e-mail address when signing up for their Comcast account and Comcast kept e-mailing my wife with account updates. (We're not in a Comcast area.) She called and they essentially said there was nothing they could do since she wasn't the account holder. They needed the account holder's permission to change the e-mail that was going to my wife. The same account holder who put in my wife's e-mail address in the first place. (I believe they eventually contacted the person and sorted the issue out, but she still gets the occasional e-mail when the person again puts my wife's e-mail address into a system.)
All this being said, I wouldn't say that "has the wrong e-mail address in the system" is Identity Theft. You're getting pestered with e-mails, sure, but they aren't impacting your credit report, charging you for the other person's service, or anything else. As a victim of Identity theft myself (my name/SSN/DOB/address were used to open a credit card in my name), it takes a lot more than "put your e-mail address in the system" to qualify.
There is definitely some "new parent no sleep superpower" that develops when you have a baby that screams to be fed/changed/just because every 2 hours*.
I would take "the night shift" and let my wife sleep. (Besides, if my wife tried rocking them to sleep, my kids would smell milk and decide it's feeding time. With me, no milk smell = time for sleep.) As my kids got older and slept through the night, we got more sleep. My oldest would wake up at 6am sharp every morning no matter what. School, vacation, weekend, he would wake us up at 6am to ask if it was ok to go to the living room and play. Now, he still does this, but at least knows enough not to wake us just to tell us he's leaving his bed now.
* For non-parents, it's not every 2 hours. That would be too regular. It's more like an hour, then 20 minutes, then three hours (during which you're too worried that something is wrong to actually sleep), then 5 minutes, then 30 minutes, etc. You get your sleep in whatever tiny chunks you can.
Sleep helps the body, but its primary benefit is for the mind. If you think of the mind as a computer, sleep is when it performs all of the needed maintenance tasks that it can't do when you're awake to keep the computer operating at peak efficiency. If you don't sleep enough, you can get by for awhile, but your brain will become more and more muddled until you can just barely function. Removing the genetic need for sleep wouldn't be a simple procedure and would likely have some very ugly consequences.
You can go on line and find video of damn near any one of them claiming to fully support an idea and then in a different campaign claiming that same idea will be the end of civilization as we know it and (s)he would never support such a thing.
And this is one reason why I love The Daily Show. While the regular media will just play the latest clip of the politician saying "X will destroy America!!!", The Daily Show will then play the "I fully support X" clip. Yes, they do it for laughs, but they are informative laughs.
To clarify, I have no problem with politicians changing their minds. I WANT politicians' views to change if new information is brought to them. What seems to be a great idea one day may seem horrible when new information comes in and vice versa. However, I don't want politicians changing their minds simply because poll numbers show that now Y% of people think that X is bad.
Actually, I misspoke a bit. I believe the person was filing a complaint and readying a potential civil suit. When the police in the harasser's area were contacted, they went to her house, told her just who was filing the suit, and then left. So the harasser spun it (in her mind and online) that the police believed that god talked to her and kept up her behavior. Meanwhile, the court system fizzled out the case. Has this harasser been the type of person to travel to bother someone in person, the woman she was targeting could have been in danger from the police officer's actions.
The problem is getting any police/legal work done across country borders. As it stands, she was tweeting claims that I kill babies so I contacted Twitter and they refused to do anything about it. Apparently, saying that someone is a baby killer isn't grounds for account suspension.
Agreed. This wasn't one unwanted call resulting in a $229,500 judgment. It was a series of calls with the woman telling them to stop calling and that the person they were trying to reach wasn't at that number. They even kept calling after the lawsuit was filed. In short, Time Warner Cable has some seriously mucked up telemarketing practices and didn't care enough to clean them up. Maybe this judgement will jump start some discussions in the company to fix this.
Something similar to this almost happened to me. There's a woman online who has been harassing people. She found my blog where I post under a pseudonym. (I'm not posting the pseudonym or the woman's name here lest she link my pseudonym with my real name.) She claims to be a prophet from god and "god" tells her all sorts of awful things people have done. She then goes and alerts the police/family members/companies those people work with/etc. about those bad things.
One of her primary targets is a teacher in New Zealand. She alerted his university to the "fact" (as told to her by god) that he was a pedophile. Luckily, he had already warned his superiors about her and they shrugged off her reporting. Unfortunately, she then used Facebook to track down his relatives so she could tell all of them.
When she targeted me, she decided that I and "New Zealand Teacher" were the same person because we both liked photography. (Because NOBODY else online likes taking photos, apparently.) I ignored her the best I could but she threatened to alert every company I was working with about my "crimes." Thankfully, there was no actual damage to me beyond some stressful months as I endured her attacks on me and my wife. She couldn't track down my employer due to my pseudonym. Eventually, she moved on to other targets, but still comes back to us every so often.
She has harassed others and had other companies break off ties due to her claims. This is more a bad mark on those companies believing $RANDOM_INTERNET_PERSON who claims "god told me they did this bad thing", but unfortunately all it takes is one overly cautious company shying away from any potential controversy (no matter how ridiculous) to cost someone money.
BTW, I did try filing reports, but the police don't seem able to do anything due to her being in another country. The one time she harassed someone in her country (costing that person some business), a lawsuit was filed and the police went to her and TOLD her just who had filed the lawsuit. Way to give the stalker personal information. (The lawsuit got tied up in the courts, never went anywhere, but now she had this woman's contact information.)
Were I required to specify my real name and address on my domain names, this woman would know just where I live and could make my life a living hell.
That last scene was horrible on many levels. Here you have Padme - a strong female character - who suddenly decides that she's going to die if she can't have her man. And does. Completely disregarding that she has two babies on the way that need her. Nope. Her man's gone to the Dark Side so it's time for her to die. Every time I think of that scene, I want to rip Jar-Jar's tongue from his mouth and use it to whip Lucas. (Bonus: Without his tongue, perhaps Jar-Jar won't be able to speak.)
I'm really hoping Disney will put out a series of Star Wars movies that tie together the way the Marvel movies do - that is, they stand on their own (for the most part) but also weave together into a vast universe that builds upon itself. If they do it right, we could enter a golden age for Star Wars fans. Maybe it will finally scrub THE FILMS THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED from our memories.
Suppose the winds change direction, those in charge offer Snowden a deal, and he accepts it. The problem here is that the winds could change again and Snowden could find himself in the US and suddenly a wanted man again. There's also the possibility that he is officially pardoned of any wrongdoing, but unofficially his life is made a living hell - if not simply ended.
I even wonder what the status of any deal would be over the course of an administration change. Let's say Obama and AG Lynch do a 180 and decide to grant Snowden a deal: Return to the US, sit in on some Oval office and congressional meetings regarding everything that took place, and no charges will be filed. For the sake of argument, let's say Snowden accepts the deal and returns to the US. Now, the 2016 elections take place and new President takes office. How bound would this new President (and his AG) be by the previous President and AG's deal? Could the new President and AG decide "deal's off" and haul Snowden in under a charge of treason? Or would they have to trump up some charge to do this? (Not a big deal for them, I'm sure. It would likely rank as "minor annoyance" versus just saying "the deal is null and void.")
And yet, it's still better than pretty much any reality show on TV. Not saying much, I know, but I'd rather watch Battlebots (poorly put together or not) than Survivor: Yet Another Location.
Slashdot Mirror
Or not use any at all. Seriously, since Homeopathy means diluting a substance down to a level where it would be undetectable, how would you be able to tell the difference between two vials of homeopathic "medicine" where vial A was properly diluted and vial B was just plain water that never held any such substance?
Homeopathic "medicine" providers could just sell tiny bottles of water and there would be no way to show they were scamming their customers. (Beyond the fact that homeopathy doesn't work, I mean.)
I think the main problem happens when people (movie directors, studio execs, marketing, etc) decides that "gearing X towards kids" means "adding lots of bodily humor, inserting slapstick everywhere, and dumbing everything down." There have been a lot of very successful "kids" movies that don't pander to kids and are quite watchable by adults.
A recent one that comes to mind is Inside Out. Disney/Pixar could have easily made the imaginary friend character (Bing Bong) a Jar-Jar Binks-esque disaster. They could have inserted tons of scenes of the emotions slamming into things. They could have had Anger release gas every time he got furious. They did none of this. Instead, they made a movie that my 8 year old loved, my 11 year old loved, my wife loved, and I (pushing 40) loved. They didn't assume that Kid = Only Appreciates Crude/Low Brow Humor.
I'm not saying there isn't a place for crude humor. Sometimes it works just fine. However, shoehorning that stuff into a movie because "this will appeal to kids" is a recipe for disaster.
Spoiler Alert: That crashed Star Destroyer from the Star Wars trailer? It crashed on top of Jar-Jar. Many Imperials died to save us from the menace of Binks.
But without Joan Rivers, who would play the female C3PO?
Not to mention that Chewbacca is portrayed in a positive light most times. Right down to his strength. You don't "let the Wookie win" because otherwise he'll throw a fit, trip over his legs, and end up on the floor. Pit Chewbacca against a few Stormtroopers and Chewy will come out ahead. Put Chewbacca on the problem and he'll work out how to fix it.
Contrast this with Jar-Jar whose main attributes seem to be "gets in the way", "gets into trouble that others need to get him out of", and "is generally helpless unless his clumsiness inadvertently results in his enemy's defeat." About the only way Jar-Jar would take out a group of Stormtroopers would be by repeatedly tripping into them until they were all knocked out. His only purpose to the plot seems to be to get in the way of and annoy the other characters.
And why didn't Lucas do what he did for aliens in the original trilogy: Either make them speak some alien language with subtitles, or give them some not-easily-identified accent? Jabba didn't speak like an Italian guy - he spoke in Huttese. Greedo spoke in his own tongue. Chewbacca had his growls that Han and C3P-O translated. Aliens that spoke English (Yoda, Ackbar, etc) did so without any obvious dialect. You didn't have Ackbar shouting "It's a trap!" with a French accent. Yoda didn't speak with a stereotypical Indian accent. The original Star Wars trilogy did alien-speak right, why couldn't the prequels? (Not saying that this would have fixed all of the prequels' problems. Their issues go far deeper than offensive alien accents. Still, it would have been one less thing to cringe at.)
That last group was the trade federation who were a bad Japanese stereotype.
Along similar lines, I saw Mr. Magoo was on Hulu and decided to introduce my boys to the wonderful antics of that nearly-blind and completely senile old man. I was a bit surprised when the first episode had a stereotypical Chinese servant of Magoo's. The guy had squinty eyes, giant buck teeth (that made Bugs Bunny's look normal) and pronounced "Boss" as "Bloss". My boys are young enough that the stereotyping went over their heads and they just enjoyed Magoo having a "day at the beach/amusement park" at a construction site.
After the show was over, I used the opportunity to point out the stereotype and explained that this type of thing was considered appropriate when the show was made, but wouldn't be anywhere close to appropriate nowadays. We can still enjoy the show as a reflection of the time period it was made in while rejecting the stereotypes it presents. In the case of the Star Wars prequel stereotypes, though, Lucas should have known better.
I am a parent and while it is important to get to the bottom of bad behavior to keep it from happening again, you also need to be firm in enforcing punishments for bad behavior. Kids will naturally test the boundaries. If your reaction to bad behavior is only "Now, why are you doing this? Let's have a friendly chat about it", then your kids will walk all over you. Have firm (but fair) consequences for their actions followed up with discussions about what they did, why it was wrong, and how they should act in similar situations in the future.
Coincidentally, I read an article today about The Tax Foundation calculating how much real money someone would have if you gave them $100 based on the national average. In other words, 100 "National Average Dollars" would buy you $111.61 worth of stuff in Ohio, but only $86.73 worth of stuff in New York (where I live).
Using this, someone with a $100,000 salary in California would be making 112,296 "National Average Dollars" which would buy you 128,197 worth of stuff in South Dakota. To put it another way, to earn $100K someone in South Dakota would need to earn $87,596 "National Average Dollars" - or $24,700 less "National Average Dollars" than someone in California would need to earn.
Of course, these state figures can be misleading. While it is certainly more expensive to live in a comparably sized town in New York than South Dakota, it is less expensive to live in Upstate New York than it is to live on Long Island or New York City.
Altering a marketing strategy is different than a politician who changes his views because "that's what the polls say." Such a politician can't be trusted because he'll change everything he stands for just to stay in power. It's staying in power that he cares about, not doing what's best for the people he represents.
A politician who sees a poll change, examines the issue closely, and because of his examination finds new information that changes his opinion is different. That's fine. I will grant you, however, that it can be hard to tell the difference between a politician who uses a poll as an indicator that he needs to re-examine an issue and a politician who uses a poll as the only piece of data he needs.
My wife has had this happen to her too. Someone used her e-mail address when signing up for their Comcast account and Comcast kept e-mailing my wife with account updates. (We're not in a Comcast area.) She called and they essentially said there was nothing they could do since she wasn't the account holder. They needed the account holder's permission to change the e-mail that was going to my wife. The same account holder who put in my wife's e-mail address in the first place. (I believe they eventually contacted the person and sorted the issue out, but she still gets the occasional e-mail when the person again puts my wife's e-mail address into a system.)
All this being said, I wouldn't say that "has the wrong e-mail address in the system" is Identity Theft. You're getting pestered with e-mails, sure, but they aren't impacting your credit report, charging you for the other person's service, or anything else. As a victim of Identity theft myself (my name/SSN/DOB/address were used to open a credit card in my name), it takes a lot more than "put your e-mail address in the system" to qualify.
There is definitely some "new parent no sleep superpower" that develops when you have a baby that screams to be fed/changed/just because every 2 hours*.
I would take "the night shift" and let my wife sleep. (Besides, if my wife tried rocking them to sleep, my kids would smell milk and decide it's feeding time. With me, no milk smell = time for sleep.) As my kids got older and slept through the night, we got more sleep. My oldest would wake up at 6am sharp every morning no matter what. School, vacation, weekend, he would wake us up at 6am to ask if it was ok to go to the living room and play. Now, he still does this, but at least knows enough not to wake us just to tell us he's leaving his bed now.
* For non-parents, it's not every 2 hours. That would be too regular. It's more like an hour, then 20 minutes, then three hours (during which you're too worried that something is wrong to actually sleep), then 5 minutes, then 30 minutes, etc. You get your sleep in whatever tiny chunks you can.
Sleep helps the body, but its primary benefit is for the mind. If you think of the mind as a computer, sleep is when it performs all of the needed maintenance tasks that it can't do when you're awake to keep the computer operating at peak efficiency. If you don't sleep enough, you can get by for awhile, but your brain will become more and more muddled until you can just barely function. Removing the genetic need for sleep wouldn't be a simple procedure and would likely have some very ugly consequences.
And this is one reason why I love The Daily Show. While the regular media will just play the latest clip of the politician saying "X will destroy America!!!", The Daily Show will then play the "I fully support X" clip. Yes, they do it for laughs, but they are informative laughs.
To clarify, I have no problem with politicians changing their minds. I WANT politicians' views to change if new information is brought to them. What seems to be a great idea one day may seem horrible when new information comes in and vice versa. However, I don't want politicians changing their minds simply because poll numbers show that now Y% of people think that X is bad.
Actually, I misspoke a bit. I believe the person was filing a complaint and readying a potential civil suit. When the police in the harasser's area were contacted, they went to her house, told her just who was filing the suit, and then left. So the harasser spun it (in her mind and online) that the police believed that god talked to her and kept up her behavior. Meanwhile, the court system fizzled out the case. Has this harasser been the type of person to travel to bother someone in person, the woman she was targeting could have been in danger from the police officer's actions.
The problem is getting any police/legal work done across country borders. As it stands, she was tweeting claims that I kill babies so I contacted Twitter and they refused to do anything about it. Apparently, saying that someone is a baby killer isn't grounds for account suspension.
Agreed. This wasn't one unwanted call resulting in a $229,500 judgment. It was a series of calls with the woman telling them to stop calling and that the person they were trying to reach wasn't at that number. They even kept calling after the lawsuit was filed. In short, Time Warner Cable has some seriously mucked up telemarketing practices and didn't care enough to clean them up. Maybe this judgement will jump start some discussions in the company to fix this.
Corporations are people the same way pigs are animals in Animal Farm.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Something similar to this almost happened to me. There's a woman online who has been harassing people. She found my blog where I post under a pseudonym. (I'm not posting the pseudonym or the woman's name here lest she link my pseudonym with my real name.) She claims to be a prophet from god and "god" tells her all sorts of awful things people have done. She then goes and alerts the police/family members/companies those people work with/etc. about those bad things.
One of her primary targets is a teacher in New Zealand. She alerted his university to the "fact" (as told to her by god) that he was a pedophile. Luckily, he had already warned his superiors about her and they shrugged off her reporting. Unfortunately, she then used Facebook to track down his relatives so she could tell all of them.
When she targeted me, she decided that I and "New Zealand Teacher" were the same person because we both liked photography. (Because NOBODY else online likes taking photos, apparently.) I ignored her the best I could but she threatened to alert every company I was working with about my "crimes." Thankfully, there was no actual damage to me beyond some stressful months as I endured her attacks on me and my wife. She couldn't track down my employer due to my pseudonym. Eventually, she moved on to other targets, but still comes back to us every so often.
She has harassed others and had other companies break off ties due to her claims. This is more a bad mark on those companies believing $RANDOM_INTERNET_PERSON who claims "god told me they did this bad thing", but unfortunately all it takes is one overly cautious company shying away from any potential controversy (no matter how ridiculous) to cost someone money.
BTW, I did try filing reports, but the police don't seem able to do anything due to her being in another country. The one time she harassed someone in her country (costing that person some business), a lawsuit was filed and the police went to her and TOLD her just who had filed the lawsuit. Way to give the stalker personal information. (The lawsuit got tied up in the courts, never went anywhere, but now she had this woman's contact information.)
Were I required to specify my real name and address on my domain names, this woman would know just where I live and could make my life a living hell.
That last scene was horrible on many levels. Here you have Padme - a strong female character - who suddenly decides that she's going to die if she can't have her man. And does. Completely disregarding that she has two babies on the way that need her. Nope. Her man's gone to the Dark Side so it's time for her to die. Every time I think of that scene, I want to rip Jar-Jar's tongue from his mouth and use it to whip Lucas. (Bonus: Without his tongue, perhaps Jar-Jar won't be able to speak.)
I'm really hoping Disney will put out a series of Star Wars movies that tie together the way the Marvel movies do - that is, they stand on their own (for the most part) but also weave together into a vast universe that builds upon itself. If they do it right, we could enter a golden age for Star Wars fans. Maybe it will finally scrub THE FILMS THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED from our memories.
You just need to use a time machine to work three times during the same day. WORST. TARDIS. TRIP. EVER!
Suppose the winds change direction, those in charge offer Snowden a deal, and he accepts it. The problem here is that the winds could change again and Snowden could find himself in the US and suddenly a wanted man again. There's also the possibility that he is officially pardoned of any wrongdoing, but unofficially his life is made a living hell - if not simply ended.
I even wonder what the status of any deal would be over the course of an administration change. Let's say Obama and AG Lynch do a 180 and decide to grant Snowden a deal: Return to the US, sit in on some Oval office and congressional meetings regarding everything that took place, and no charges will be filed. For the sake of argument, let's say Snowden accepts the deal and returns to the US. Now, the 2016 elections take place and new President takes office. How bound would this new President (and his AG) be by the previous President and AG's deal? Could the new President and AG decide "deal's off" and haul Snowden in under a charge of treason? Or would they have to trump up some charge to do this? (Not a big deal for them, I'm sure. It would likely rank as "minor annoyance" versus just saying "the deal is null and void.")
And yet, it's still better than pretty much any reality show on TV. Not saying much, I know, but I'd rather watch Battlebots (poorly put together or not) than Survivor: Yet Another Location.