I assume you are being deliberately obtuse, because there is a pretty big war in Afghanistan going on. Most of NATO was there, sorry you missed it.

Is this amateur hour?

Yeah, he'll get in line behind the thousands of others who kill during war.

I don't know if your thesis is right, because I'm betting that a substantial number of people who took the survey don't even know that Snowden is in Russia. That is my problem with surveys like this. I would love to know why informed people support or don't support him - I'm not so interested in what ignorant people think.

I was referring to this study. The largest source of news for Millennials is Facebook. That might seem like "the news" to someone without epic stupidity flowing through their veins, but some of us are so full of epic stupidity that we still think of Facebook as a place to get biased, self-reinforcing information from your little circle of "friends".

Honestly, I think it is because Millennials don't know who he is. They really don't, as a cohort, pay much attention to the news. I'd love it if these surveys also tested knowledge about basic facts on an issue, and not just opinions.

So...don't trust anyone over 30?

10%

I think you underestimate the strength of those tunnels, but that is kind of a tangent.

I agree that it would be easy to disrupt the economics that underpin society. Look at all of those unguarded electrical poles. Most highways could be completely clogged with just 3 or 4 coordinated drivers simply parking and walking away. The fact that we have so few people actively engaged in such behavior tells you just how rare the motivation to carry out such things is - or how ineffective it is to simply piss people off rather than to terrorize them.

Yes, and he killed more than 2 people :)

I've never put my mind to it (nor do I intend to), but it seems like some well-timed damage to a rail on a curve would cause some problems for even the best-designed train.

I can't even imagine how much explosive you would need to damage the tunnels from INSIDE a train. Maybe if you could get some incendiary device on a diesel train, but diesels don't run into NYC. Actually that isn't quite true - NJ Transit runs some dual-mode trains now. Still seems like a long shot.

Right, so one of those was an on-board bombing which killed a whopping 2 people. That is exactly my point: you could kill 2 people without smuggling something on board. You brought the TGV into the discussion, and I'm not very familiar with the system. I'm sure a determined terrorist could find a way to kill more than 2 people, but I could just be ignorant. Certainly it would not be hard in the US with typical commuter rail, Amtrak, or subways.

Go to the Craigslist rideshare section. Yes, they are indistinguishable.

Yes, there was a major breakthrough in 2006 that has powered the "deep learning" revolution that has given us things like instant voice recognition on your smartphone and machines that beat humans at Jeopardy. Basically, someone got neural nets to work, and work right, and potentially together. I imagine that each time I hear about some new task that an AI has been trained to do, that we have produced another tiny part of the brain that will one day become "THE" AI.

This is why now is the time for discussion of AI ethics (really, nine years ago was the right time, or even earlier).

That's like waiting for your face to get wet before worrying about the tsunami.

AIs working off of neural nets approximately equal to the size of insect brains have shown themselves capable of primate level object recognition, and are able to give millions of people optimized driving directions simultaneously. An AI that can form a "basic thought" is already a god. Or a demon.