Between this, net neutrality and the 1 trillion year copyright extensions, we will need to pay for everything, including the privilege of seeing adds and being locked into walled gardens. Nice future we are heading towards, if you are in the top 1%
Exactly. This is more about converting all those OTA analogue FM listeners enjoying free bandwidth to a metered-bandwidth model and monetizing what was once free, and then selling off the radio band for even more cash for government to waste.
I stopped watching (and owning) TV in the US when OTA TV went digital and I haven't looked back. I have classic movies on DVD, make my own music being a musician, listen occasionally to FM analogue music radio and AM talk radio on my trusty '70s Lafayette stereo receiver, and read books. Many books. Dead-tree books. The most recent movie I can remember watching (dragged to a theater with friends) was the Star Wars movie with that horrid "Jar-Jar Binks" character. I don't own a cellphone and nothing I own has Bluetooth or WiFi capabilities.
Increased fuel economy is better "performance" and you can get modern smaller more economical engine cars going faster than older larger engine cars. Modern cars are also a lot better at protecting the passenger than older cars ever were.
Yes, but at ever-higher cost. Why would a working-poor driver get rid of their current working car to spend tens of thousands for a new ultra-efficient car?
And I'm sorry, but IMO I'd be far more likely to survive a collision with a dump-truck in a '75 Eldorado than a 2018 Focus or Malibu,, or even a Tesla. Airbags, crumple-zones, etc can only mitigate so much energy/damage.
Hillary comes across as someone who can put together coherent sentences,
So could John Gotti and Bernie Madoff.
Hillary Clinton is as corrupt as they come. There's been a trail of murdered individuals in her and Bill's wake. That's not even touching on the scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative and all the very questionable hijinks surrounding them.
The cause is that the GOP party politicians don't give a fuck about this country, they only give a fuck about themselves being in power.... and they're willing to lie with every breath to make that happen. Their base is so willing to be lied to just so they can remain living in their fantasy land bullshit, that they go along with the bullshit no matter how damaging it is to this country. Then there are worthless fucks like you who are more than willing to destroy this entire country just so you can act like a petulant little teen instead of an adult.
The problem is complete fucking stupidity, and an abject hatred of the US, on the part of blindly ignorant conservative 1/3 of the electorate. And again, i agree... grab-them-by-the-pussy Trump, the whiny little worthless bitch, is a perfect representation of people like you. It used to be conservatives cared about this country.... but that ended in the 90's, fueled by their down-on-their-knees worship of Reagan's myth that they created.
Your sig really gets to the point... you don't know shit about anything, but you want your worthless, ignorant opinion to be considered right... no matter how fucking stupid it is.
So I take it you won't be RSVPing for the reelection gala? LOL!
You're so soaked in blind hatred all anyone can do is laugh at you and shake their head in pity. Seek professional psychiatric help, STAT.
CAFE standard as passed by Congress [wikipedia.org] set CAFE to 35 MPG by 2020; President Obama used an executive action to raise it to 41+ MPG. Well, it's been rolled-back to the passed law.
The 41.5 mpg standard would have meant that ICE cars would increase in price dramatically while plunging in performance metrics, and also in crash survivability as structure is sacrificed for reductions in vehicle weight to increase mpg.
As a result, people would keep their old ICE cars with lower mpg and higher emissions on the road far longer, defeating much of the reasons for higher CAFE standards that have been touted.
I guess some here would rather see people keeping their old lower-mileage,higher-emission cars on the road rather than settle for 35mpg.
Trump is more a symptom of the problem than he is the problem itself; he is the manifestation of the problem. The real problem is the people who voted for him in the first place and the people who backed him as a candidate. None of this however excuses his behavior or lets him off the hook for not being suitable to be POTUS.
It's true that Trump's election is a symptom, but the cause is public frustration with "establishment" Republicans and Democrats, both. People are fed up. They elected Trump as a giant "fuck YOU!" to BOTH the Democrat AND Republican "establishment".
And, if Trump is still an effective thorn in the sides of both (R) & (D) in 2020, guess who's going to be throwing a reelection gala?
Police and FBI support. DEA and High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area policing. State task forces and city, state police. Their hardware and software has to work. A cellphone thats too hard to decrypt and track all around the USA is a cell phone that should not be approved.
Exactly.
The government loves them some "third-party doctrine". It means that not only does it make it trivial for government to implement mass surveillance/tracking, it also means all these corporations can cash in on your privacy as well, and so can bad actors.
Glad I don't own a cellphone. Not planning on getting one until this privacy/security stuff is fixed to at least a somewhat reasonable level, which likely means I'll never own a cellphone.
What needs to happen to force change is to use this to publish tracking data for top federal officials and politicians. After some high-ups in the FBI, DHS, etc and Congress get their undies aired in public things may change.
In order to be fair, wouldn't it be necessary to take into account all the unfairness that took place during the last couple of centuries, and give an edge to the groups who were treated unfairly?
Why just 2 centuries?
Why not 5 centuries? Or 10 centuries? Why only America? Were there no racial injustices in the world until America was colonized?
What about Irish slaves in the pre-civil-war US? There were more Irish slaves than Africans by the time the Civil War occurred. Hell, Irish slaves were cheaper! Don't they get consideration for their slavery?
*You're* being racist in only wanting certain races you care about included.
But the biggest reason I've dropped out is that my primary account is connected to my real name, and during a big "social media" push by my employer (encouraging everybody to follow the company from their personal account) my direct manager decided to "follow" me about a year ago; He uses his twitter account to post all about his personal political beliefs, and now I'm reluctant to even "like" anything the least bit divergent from the left-wing party line.
Delete your twitter account. If your boss asks, just make up some vague reason to do with personal taste in social media. No employer can force an employee to join and/or participate in some third-party social media site if that was not part of the original job description and requirements for hiring.
If he/they try to force you anyways, that's your cue that "it's time for you to leave" like Cain leaving the monastery after snatching the pebble from the master's hand.
Hopefully you won't be forced to move a huge brazier of hot coals with your bare forearms to reach the door. Those dragon-shaped scars *are* kinda cool, though.:)
If the US government forces me to be spied on then whenever possible I'll choose to be spied on by the US's enemies over allowing the US to do so.
Bitter much? So bitter that you would trust a power-crazed murdering dictator over a country that at least makes an attempt to provide some freedoms. At least the USA has a chance to change and improve. Russia will always be under the thumb of Putin and his cronies.
Both governments are murderers of innocents and oppressors of their respective populations.
The US just has better PR and people like you that lap it up.
Maybe if US tech companies lose enough business to foreign outfits because of the lack of trust they might pool enough resources to convince the US gov to back off on their police-state tendencies.
The kiddie porn plant allows them to take him down for something other than his line of work. This is crucial because it allows him to be prosecuted without exposing methods of the CIA to the discovery process of the public courts.
Thank you, I came here to say essentially the same thing. The last thing a US TLA wants are judges and lawyers poking around their activities, not only for "national security" reasons but also because they do a lot of blatantly illegal and unconstitutional shit, much of it to those same lawyers and judges (parallel construction?).
The US no longer has a legitimate government. It's run by coalitions of rich and powerful oligarchs that play political power games much the same as in Russia. All the rest is window-dressing and kabuki theater for the bread-&-circuses masses.
...If the US government forces me to be spied on then whenever possible I'll choose to be spied on by the US's enemies over allowing the US to do so.
Tossing your privacy to the wolf instead of the wolf in sheeps clothing. The old kamikaze approach. That'll teach 'em.
Russia/Putin have zero interest in me and have no ability to toss me into PMITA prison unlike the US government who is and has for decades violated many if not most civil rights enshrined in the US Constitution.
If the US government doesn't want people running Russian software maybe they should stop trying to out-Russia Russia.
Eugene Kaspersky still lives in Moscow and he's still an ex-KGB agent. These two facts alone make look Kaspersky highly untrustworthy considering that the Kremlin is waging e-war with the rest of the world.
No, even if true Kaspersky A/V is still the far more trustworthy choice as I'd trust Putin over the US government as far as their interest in and ability to screw with me as an individual.
You have to understand that any A/V made by companies in "Five Eyes" nations or their allies is intentionally and deliberately broken out of the box. Kaspersky A/V will happily identify/remove US/Western LEA/TLA spyware, etc. That's really what this is about.
If the US government forces me to be spied on then whenever possible I'll choose to be spied on by the US's enemies over allowing the US to do so.
If they don't screw it up with ghost patents, this could be in every vehicle, phone and IOT dohickey. Making the net more open.
One other possible hurdle to overcome is the possible push-back from government/LEAs/TLAs as this would make slurping up and cross-indexing every domestic US message and email much harder for them. Just look at how they've come out against strong & secure data encryption, they won't like this either. It might even go so far as forcing them to get individual warrants based on probable cause, and that's unacceptable to modern US law enforcement and domestic spy agencies. No doubt they'll roll out the standard "terrists!", "drug dealers!", and "pedophiles!" memes to attempt to derail or compromise such an initiative.
AFAIK, partly from the simulated Mars in X-Plane, you can add more blades to any given prop.This helps reduce the supersonic tip issue with longer blades, which is especially true with a low density atmosphere. Consider the development of fighter aircraft props from two blades, up to five in 1945, and counter rotating, for six, and paddle blades.
One of the features that most late-war (ww2) fighters (and many others as well) also had were variable-pitch propellers. Helicopters rely on varying the main rotor pitch to control vertical lift and horizontal motion/thrust when the main rotor is tilted by the main rotor control stick, and a variable-pitch tail rotor to control yaw.
I doubt that any drone the size of a softball that is capable of doing anything useful would have the spare room or mass available for a pitch-controlled rotor system, however. Almost certainly it's an independent variable-RPM motors powering independently-gimbaled, fixed-pitch rotor type, for minimum mass/size.
The biggest motivator to get nukes is to avoid being invaded.
But Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons for defense. They are not seeking them as a deterrent.
They seek them for offense, to take out Israel and the US, their "Little Satan" and "Big Satan" and fulfill the 12th Imam prophecy by bathing the world in blood and fire.
When dealing with Iran, one must realize Iran's leadership are not rational actors, they are radical religious-fanatic nutjobs. One must understand that in their minds, a "win" involves most everyone including themselves dying.
"Gosh, Congressman! It seems your wife's sister is engaged to a guy whose brother is linked to terror groups!
1. You watch WAY too many movies. Can you cite even one single example of this sort of extortion actually happening in the last 40 years, by federal law enforcement, against a sitting congressman? Or anything even close to that? 2. Do you really think that a federal bureaucrat has so much of a PERSONAL commitment to getting backdoors, that they are willing to risk spending decades in prison for political extortion? 3. You are talking about Hollywood fantasy levels of corruption and extortion to prevent the passage of this bill. It is even more ridiculous to suppose that this type of extortion would work against tech billionaires like Tim, Larry, and Sergey, after the bill became law, which is what we were talking about.
Tell that to the people Hoover blackmailed while he headed the FBI, tell it to all those serving prison sentences because of "parallel construction" using illegally obtained data.
Twenty years ago you could claim that US TLAs capturing and storing data in bulk on US citizens in the domestic US was crazy-talk, but then Snowden proved that and more.
If you don't think they use the data they gather against key government officials and bureaucrats you're either a fool or playing political games.
Iran is a minor military power that may be controlled by fanatic madmen. We can stomp Iran any time it becomes really necessary, and their reach is limited.
Well, that "minor military power" (Iran has a relatively large standing military btw) just launched a major missile attack against Israel from Syria using Iranian Kudzforce troops there in Syria.
They'll have nukes very soon and they *will* launch them if they think a strike has a chance at success. The Saudis are now working on a nuclear weapon and others are or will be to counter Iran. A nuclear ME is a tinderbox waiting for the slightest spark. Better to take out Iran now and remove the largest motivator for ME nations to go nuclear.
The NSA has no leverage whatsoever to "blackmail" or "extort". Do you have any idea what the NSA is or what they do? They don't carry guns. They can't arrest or detain. They are a bunch of nerds with computers and stuff. They collect and analyze data.
"Gosh, Congressman! It seems your wife's sister is engaged to a guy whose brother is linked to terror groups! It sure would be bad if this came out right before election night, huh? It also appears your daughter in college has committed serious copyright violations for all those TV shows, movies, and somgs she's pirated...why, there's millions of dollars in fines and serious felony charges possible here! Let's hope some anonymous tipster doesn't alert authorities! Let's rethink this "backdoor prohibition" thing, hmm?"
"Data" is as good as a gun in destroying a person, especially one in public office. It just doesn't directly kill them physically.
Bullshit. What prophecy? How will dying in a nuclear firestorm fulfill it?
You should be able to cite some specific dogma to support this claim.
Apparently you can't read as I posted that it was the 12th Imam prophecy which you can Google for yourself that says the world must be bathed in blood and fire and only then will the 12th Imam return and those believers who die helping will spend eternity in heaven.
Slashdot Mirror
Between this, net neutrality and the 1 trillion year copyright extensions, we will need to pay for everything, including the privilege of seeing adds and being locked into walled gardens. Nice future we are heading towards, if you are in the top 1%
Exactly. This is more about converting all those OTA analogue FM listeners enjoying free bandwidth to a metered-bandwidth model and monetizing what was once free, and then selling off the radio band for even more cash for government to waste.
I stopped watching (and owning) TV in the US when OTA TV went digital and I haven't looked back. I have classic movies on DVD, make my own music being a musician, listen occasionally to FM analogue music radio and AM talk radio on my trusty '70s Lafayette stereo receiver, and read books. Many books. Dead-tree books. The most recent movie I can remember watching (dragged to a theater with friends) was the Star Wars movie with that horrid "Jar-Jar Binks" character. I don't own a cellphone and nothing I own has Bluetooth or WiFi capabilities.
Strat
Increased fuel economy is better "performance" and you can get modern smaller more economical engine cars going faster than older larger engine cars. Modern cars are also a lot better at protecting the passenger than older cars ever were.
Yes, but at ever-higher cost. Why would a working-poor driver get rid of their current working car to spend tens of thousands for a new ultra-efficient car?
And I'm sorry, but IMO I'd be far more likely to survive a collision with a dump-truck in a '75 Eldorado than a 2018 Focus or Malibu,, or even a Tesla. Airbags, crumple-zones, etc can only mitigate so much energy/damage.
Strat
Hillary comes across as someone who can put together coherent sentences,
So could John Gotti and Bernie Madoff.
Hillary Clinton is as corrupt as they come. There's been a trail of murdered individuals in her and Bill's wake. That's not even touching on the scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative and all the very questionable hijinks surrounding them.
Strat
The cause is that the GOP party politicians don't give a fuck about this country, they only give a fuck about themselves being in power.... and they're willing to lie with every breath to make that happen. Their base is so willing to be lied to just so they can remain living in their fantasy land bullshit, that they go along with the bullshit no matter how damaging it is to this country. Then there are worthless fucks like you who are more than willing to destroy this entire country just so you can act like a petulant little teen instead of an adult.
The problem is complete fucking stupidity, and an abject hatred of the US, on the part of blindly ignorant conservative 1/3 of the electorate. And again, i agree... grab-them-by-the-pussy Trump, the whiny little worthless bitch, is a perfect representation of people like you. It used to be conservatives cared about this country.... but that ended in the 90's, fueled by their down-on-their-knees worship of Reagan's myth that they created.
Your sig really gets to the point... you don't know shit about anything, but you want your worthless, ignorant opinion to be considered right... no matter how fucking stupid it is.
So I take it you won't be RSVPing for the reelection gala? LOL!
You're so soaked in blind hatred all anyone can do is laugh at you and shake their head in pity. Seek professional psychiatric help, STAT.
Strat
CAFE standard as passed by Congress [wikipedia.org] set CAFE to 35 MPG by 2020; President Obama used an executive action to raise it to 41+ MPG. Well, it's been rolled-back to the passed law.
The 41.5 mpg standard would have meant that ICE cars would increase in price dramatically while plunging in performance metrics, and also in crash survivability as structure is sacrificed for reductions in vehicle weight to increase mpg.
As a result, people would keep their old ICE cars with lower mpg and higher emissions on the road far longer, defeating much of the reasons for higher CAFE standards that have been touted.
I guess some here would rather see people keeping their old lower-mileage,higher-emission cars on the road rather than settle for 35mpg.
Strat
Trump is more a symptom of the problem than he is the problem itself; he is the manifestation of the problem. The real problem is the people who voted for him in the first place and the people who backed him as a candidate. None of this however excuses his behavior or lets him off the hook for not being suitable to be POTUS.
It's true that Trump's election is a symptom, but the cause is public frustration with "establishment" Republicans and Democrats, both. People are fed up. They elected Trump as a giant "fuck YOU!" to BOTH the Democrat AND Republican "establishment".
And, if Trump is still an effective thorn in the sides of both (R) & (D) in 2020, guess who's going to be throwing a reelection gala?
Strat
Police and FBI support. DEA and High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area policing. State task forces and city, state police.
Their hardware and software has to work.
A cellphone thats too hard to decrypt and track all around the USA is a cell phone that should not be approved.
Exactly.
The government loves them some "third-party doctrine". It means that not only does it make it trivial for government to implement mass surveillance/tracking, it also means all these corporations can cash in on your privacy as well, and so can bad actors.
Glad I don't own a cellphone. Not planning on getting one until this privacy/security stuff is fixed to at least a somewhat reasonable level, which likely means I'll never own a cellphone.
What needs to happen to force change is to use this to publish tracking data for top federal officials and politicians. After some high-ups in the FBI, DHS, etc and Congress get their undies aired in public things may change.
Strat
In order to be fair, wouldn't it be necessary to take into account all the unfairness that took place during the last couple of centuries, and give an edge to the groups who were treated unfairly?
Why just 2 centuries?
Why not 5 centuries? Or 10 centuries? Why only America? Were there no racial injustices in the world until America was colonized?
What about Irish slaves in the pre-civil-war US? There were more Irish slaves than Africans by the time the Civil War occurred. Hell, Irish slaves were cheaper! Don't they get consideration for their slavery?
*You're* being racist in only wanting certain races you care about included.
Strat
Liberalism/"progressivism"/socialism can only end in totaltarian behavior, it is part and parcel and the end game of any socialist activity.
Been saying this for a long time.
It's even my /. sig.
"Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce."
Google/FB/twatter/et al provide the surveillance state, the Feds provide the police state.
Fascism refined for the information age. It's an authoritarian's wet-dream.
Strat
Don't you let her sit in a chair, or anything? Patriarchist! :D
Strat
But the biggest reason I've dropped out is that my primary account is connected to my real name, and during a big "social media" push by my employer (encouraging everybody to follow the company from their personal account) my direct manager decided to "follow" me about a year ago; He uses his twitter account to post all about his personal political beliefs, and now I'm reluctant to even "like" anything the least bit divergent from the left-wing party line.
Delete your twitter account. If your boss asks, just make up some vague reason to do with personal taste in social media. No employer can force an employee to join and/or participate in some third-party social media site if that was not part of the original job description and requirements for hiring.
If he/they try to force you anyways, that's your cue that "it's time for you to leave" like Cain leaving the monastery after snatching the pebble from the master's hand.
Hopefully you won't be forced to move a huge brazier of hot coals with your bare forearms to reach the door. Those dragon-shaped scars *are* kinda cool, though. :)
Strat
Sounds like a violation of the 4th amendment, just with extra steps.
"It's illegal and unconstitutional for me to do as a LEO so I'll just pay someone else to do it for me!"
"You'll go far in US politics, Son!"
Strat
If the US government forces me to be spied on then whenever possible I'll choose to be spied on by the US's enemies over allowing the US to do so.
Bitter much? So bitter that you would trust a power-crazed murdering dictator over a country that at least makes an attempt to provide some freedoms. At least the USA has a chance to change and improve. Russia will always be under the thumb of Putin and his cronies.
Both governments are murderers of innocents and oppressors of their respective populations.
The US just has better PR and people like you that lap it up.
Maybe if US tech companies lose enough business to foreign outfits because of the lack of trust they might pool enough resources to convince the US gov to back off on their police-state tendencies.
Strat
The kiddie porn plant allows them to take him down for something other than his line of work. This is crucial because it allows him to be prosecuted without exposing methods of the CIA to the discovery process of the public courts.
Thank you, I came here to say essentially the same thing. The last thing a US TLA wants are judges and lawyers poking around their activities, not only for "national security" reasons but also because they do a lot of blatantly illegal and unconstitutional shit, much of it to those same lawyers and judges (parallel construction?).
The US no longer has a legitimate government. It's run by coalitions of rich and powerful oligarchs that play political power games much the same as in Russia. All the rest is window-dressing and kabuki theater for the bread-&-circuses masses.
Strat
Russia/Putin have zero interest in me and have no ability to toss me into PMITA prison unlike the US government who is and has for decades violated many if not most civil rights enshrined in the US Constitution.
If the US government doesn't want people running Russian software maybe they should stop trying to out-Russia Russia.
Strat
Eugene Kaspersky still lives in Moscow and he's still an ex-KGB agent. These two facts alone make look Kaspersky highly untrustworthy considering that the Kremlin is waging e-war with the rest of the world.
No, even if true Kaspersky A/V is still the far more trustworthy choice as I'd trust Putin over the US government as far as their interest in and ability to screw with me as an individual.
You have to understand that any A/V made by companies in "Five Eyes" nations or their allies is intentionally and deliberately broken out of the box. Kaspersky A/V will happily identify/remove US/Western LEA/TLA spyware, etc. That's really what this is about.
If the US government forces me to be spied on then whenever possible I'll choose to be spied on by the US's enemies over allowing the US to do so.
Strat
If they don't screw it up with ghost patents, this could be in every vehicle, phone and IOT dohickey. Making the net more open.
One other possible hurdle to overcome is the possible push-back from government/LEAs/TLAs as this would make slurping up and cross-indexing every domestic US message and email much harder for them. Just look at how they've come out against strong & secure data encryption, they won't like this either. It might even go so far as forcing them to get individual warrants based on probable cause, and that's unacceptable to modern US law enforcement and domestic spy agencies. No doubt they'll roll out the standard "terrists!", "drug dealers!", and "pedophiles!" memes to attempt to derail or compromise such an initiative.
In Soviet Amerika, you protect the 4th Amendment.
Strat
He only has skills at running cons. But those aren't the skills we need as a president.
Wrong. Those are *precisely* the best skills to have when dealing with nations like NK, Iran, Russia, China, etc.
Those are invaluable skills to have as a President engaged in foreign diplomacy.
Diplomacy: The art of saying "nice doggie!" while reaching for a stick.
Strat
AFAIK, partly from the simulated Mars in X-Plane, you can add more blades to any given prop.This helps reduce the supersonic tip issue with longer blades, which is especially true with a low density atmosphere. Consider the development of fighter aircraft props from two blades, up to five in 1945, and counter rotating, for six, and paddle blades.
One of the features that most late-war (ww2) fighters (and many others as well) also had were variable-pitch propellers. Helicopters rely on varying the main rotor pitch to control vertical lift and horizontal motion/thrust when the main rotor is tilted by the main rotor control stick, and a variable-pitch tail rotor to control yaw.
I doubt that any drone the size of a softball that is capable of doing anything useful would have the spare room or mass available for a pitch-controlled rotor system, however. Almost certainly it's an independent variable-RPM motors powering independently-gimbaled, fixed-pitch rotor type, for minimum mass/size.
Strat
The biggest motivator to get nukes is to avoid being invaded.
But Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons for defense. They are not seeking them as a deterrent.
They seek them for offense, to take out Israel and the US, their "Little Satan" and "Big Satan" and fulfill the 12th Imam prophecy by bathing the world in blood and fire.
When dealing with Iran, one must realize Iran's leadership are not rational actors, they are radical religious-fanatic nutjobs. One must understand that in their minds, a "win" involves most everyone including themselves dying.
Strat
Tell that to the people Hoover blackmailed while he headed the FBI, tell it to all those serving prison sentences because of "parallel construction" using illegally obtained data.
Twenty years ago you could claim that US TLAs capturing and storing data in bulk on US citizens in the domestic US was crazy-talk, but then Snowden proved that and more.
If you don't think they use the data they gather against key government officials and bureaucrats you're either a fool or playing political games.
Strat
Iran is a minor military power that may be controlled by fanatic madmen. We can stomp Iran any time it becomes really necessary, and their reach is limited.
Well, that "minor military power" (Iran has a relatively large standing military btw) just launched a major missile attack against Israel from Syria using Iranian Kudzforce troops there in Syria.
They'll have nukes very soon and they *will* launch them if they think a strike has a chance at success. The Saudis are now working on a nuclear weapon and others are or will be to counter Iran. A nuclear ME is a tinderbox waiting for the slightest spark. Better to take out Iran now and remove the largest motivator for ME nations to go nuclear.
Strat
The NSA has no leverage whatsoever to "blackmail" or "extort". Do you have any idea what the NSA is or what they do? They don't carry guns. They can't arrest or detain. They are a bunch of nerds with computers and stuff. They collect and analyze data.
"Gosh, Congressman! It seems your wife's sister is engaged to a guy whose brother is linked to terror groups! It sure would be bad if this came out right before election night, huh? It also appears your daughter in college has committed serious copyright violations for all those TV shows, movies, and somgs she's pirated...why, there's millions of dollars in fines and serious felony charges possible here! Let's hope some anonymous tipster doesn't alert authorities! Let's rethink this "backdoor prohibition" thing, hmm?"
"Data" is as good as a gun in destroying a person, especially one in public office. It just doesn't directly kill them physically.
Strat
Bullshit. What prophecy? How will dying in a nuclear firestorm fulfill it?
You should be able to cite some specific dogma to support this claim.
Apparently you can't read as I posted that it was the 12th Imam prophecy which you can Google for yourself that says the world must be bathed in blood and fire and only then will the 12th Imam return and those believers who die helping will spend eternity in heaven.
Strat
Yeah, back when isps blocked netflix and bittorrent :/ Guess you forgot about that.
Yes, and they didn't stop until NN came along and...oh, wait...they stopped without any NN regs.
All the horror stories trotted out by NN proponents have a fatal flaw.
All those bad things were stopped before NN was passed, and were halted by the markets and the courts without needing NN.
Strat