- civil rights movement did one (1) of 2 things that was correct, it insisted that government must treat everybody equally and it must.

It did one more thing, which was absolutely illegal, unconstitutional and most importantly immoral, it destroyed rights of individuals to private property and association when it caused businesses to be regulated that way.

- that's not what I said. A right is everything that you can do without government abusing you. USA founders said exactly that, some where more insistent than others that the Constitution is the exact literal enumeration of powers allocated to the government, the powers that allow government to step over the rights of an individual under specific conditions. Government is violence by definition, that is all it is and for the governed to accept the government they have to see good reason for it and the way the USA Founders saw it, government had to have very specific powers given to it to deal with cases where people would be denied their rights.

A person in jail is a person, whose right to freedom is denied by government oppression, that oppression has to be enumerated as one of the powers allocated to the government. Government has to prove that it can oppress the right of that individual to freedom.

A person murdered by another person or a person hurt somehow by a company (which is really just another person or a group of people) is an individual situation, where criminal code may apply in order to establish guilt or innocence and to hand out oppression of rights again to those, who basically broke the criminal code rules.

So you can see that rights are related to individual or business and government, while criminal code is related to dealing between individuals or companies.

Government officials can break the law as well of-course, then it also has to be punished according to the criminal code, but government as a system cannot be punished by any criminal code, there is nobody personally to punish, so because government is a system it has to adhere to rules defined in the Constitution, rules as to how the government can oppress/abuse individuals, who have all the rights until the government can use its authority to deny that right.

A 40 kt headwind is 50% of the speed of an 80 kt airship, but only 10% of the speed of a 400 kt airliner. That's the difference between taking twice as long to arrive at your destination, or only an extra 1/10th of the time.

Just start a fusion power plant! It should produce plenty of helium! Fusion power is only 20 years away . . .

This might be interesting for use in the Andes and Himalayas, where much of the terrain is too high for helicopters to operate reliably and too rough for long airstrips.

The right means exactly that: government cannot oppress you and abuse you (and murdering you is a form of oppression and abuse), there is no concept of a 'right' between 2 individuals or businesses and there cannot be, because out of 2 individuals or businesses none of them have any legal authority to dictate to another and/or to use any form of violence. We have to have rights when we are dealing with a government, because government has legal authority to use violence (unfortunately), so to counterbalance that legal authority to violence we have to have rules that prevent governments from just using that violence however they like.

As to violence between 2 individuals or companies, that has nothing to do with rights, that has to do with criminal law as it is understood within that locality. You could have a completely private criminal justice system and still deal with violence that way. People did give up their right to deal with criminal code to governments in most cases, but because the governments are (supposed to be) bound by the rules that are established as individual rights, governments also cannot just pretend to deal with criminal cases without abiding by those rules.

These are completely different issues, a right is about an individual or a company (which I also see as an individual) dealing with the violent government authority and criminal code is about individual and private matters, where individuals are interested in preventing crime committed by other individuals.

You are simply deluded. You know what was NSA called before it was widely know it exists. No Such Agency. Shining a light on it will only drive the real efforts into more secrecy. Once NSA is exposed a new secret agency we won't know about will be created. I would not be surprised if the efforts were already underway.

YOU CANNOT PREVENT THIS! The state has too much power, too little to fear. You can only mitigate the worst excesses of abuse of power, which I described above. Once you force the government into accepting the above described abuses as price of getting the information it thinks it needs, there is no way back.

The Eastern Europe behind its Iron Curtain had a hope of the West breaking through and helping them overthrow the government and clean the house, but you have NO ONE. There is nobody more powerful than the US government. There is no hope for you to get any sort of external help once the repression starts. NONE. So you better not speed it up. It has already started in Guantanamo it will spread, but fighting NSA will make it spread even faster.

There is slight chance of this country collapsing economically before it can defeat Russia and China, but that would be a very small hope to look forward to. Most likely Russia will fall soon and China soon after and that will solve any economic issues US might have had, since all of the world resources will be available for the taking.

You should work for NSA, because the alternative to NSA is worse. Totalitarian governments like USSR, East Germany or North Korea will do anything to have a total information control of their population in order to ensure stability. We have a well established history that if they cannot get this information technologically, they will lie, cheat, extort, kidnap, bully or worse, just to get to this information. USA now falls into this category and they will do anything to have full domestic surveillance. If you don't help them achieve this goal technologically, it will have enormous human cost. The alternative of not getting this information is not acceptable to them so they will get it and you can only help to affect how they get it and how many people and lives are harmed in the process.

If you want to avoid the Gulags, the political prisoners, children not getting in universities because sins of their parents, neighbors spying on each other, informers and snitches everywhere, home searches, not being able to trust anyone, being afraid what your kids say in school that gets back to you, feeling helpless and afraid to report crime to police in fear they would instead investigate you. If you want to avoid all those things, you just have to go and help the NSA to get the information electronically, because the alternative is just too awful.

Sears makes a lot of money off its contractor "referrals". My dad was a remodeler for many years. He got a couple of jobs through Sears during a slow spell and was kind of pleased. Then he ran into a friend at the lumber yard who had lost his business and was working for someone else. He explained that Sears gave him plenty of business and life was good. Eventually he was working exclusively for Sears, and didn't have time for any of his outside customers.

Then Sears started to squeeze him. They started taking more and more of his profits, to the point where the only way that he could even break even was to do rushed, slipshod work and pay peanuts for unqualified employees. Finally he decided it wasn't worth the trouble and closed up shop, going to work for a former competitor.

My dad never worked for Sears again.

Actually the entire idea of these special entitlements that destroy individual rights TO DISCRIMINATE is a power grab by the insane government that is out of control.

Individual people discriminate every day. As a potential employee you can choose to work for a one legged Brazilian tranny and there is nothing any of the other potential employers can do to stop this obvious bigotry and discrimination by you against their businesses, NOR should there be anything they could do to force you to work for them. That's EXACTLY the same thing.

PRECISELY the same thing, since you working for a company is exactly like a company doing work for other people. When you buy a product you are buying work done by a company for you. A company is people standing behind it (corporations are in fact people, not as in 'Google is a living person', it is not. It is as in Google is owned by people, that's the people corporations are). A person that owns/runs a company has his or her right to discriminate and the Constitution of the USA is there to protect that right.

A right is a protection against government oppression and abuse, nothing else.

A government telling somebody that just because they are employing somebody they now lost a right is abuse and oppression and a power grab and unconstitutional and illegal and immoral.

Should people discriminate against each other based on sex, gender, age, race, colour? We know that some will and some do. If a business does so, it will face consequences whatever they are in the market. As to a belief that just because a business exists somewhere you automatically get an entitlement to their service - that is hubris and destruction of the people running that business as individuals and it cannot stand.

Of-course you are absolutely 100% correct, which was my first comment on this topic before the one you replied to. But my first comment appears to be extremely unpopular here.

In case of thie flight, it would have helped if the captain had a code that would have opened the door regardless of it being locked from the inside. But then the copilot might have just killed him first, before diving the plane to the ground.

We are all pretty good at fighting yesterday's battles. This happened in Europe, but in the USA there was time people could fly with only a ticket and not any ID, they could bring their guns with them too. Now you cannot have a gun, the cockpits are locked with farely strong doors because everybody is scared of terrorists, they didn't even have an axe on board, just a crowbar. Apparently the captain tried breaking the door with a crowbar, I wonder if he tried breaking the wall beside the door. Flying is completely fucked up, TSA harasses you and then you don't know if a psychotic pilot will kill you anyway.

How about TRYING FREEDOM for a change? Bring your ticket, allow people to take their guns with them and keep axes on board while removing insane cockpit doors?

Sure, everything can still go wrong, at least you are not just a sardin in a can, hoping not to be eaten this time around.

In Russia it is a small government based operation involving couple hundred people. In US it is a wide scale, industrial operation, otherwise referred to as mainstream media and involves hundreds of thousands of people. In Russia the product is comments under articles, in US the product are the articles themselves. I don't think that we, in the US, are exactly qualified to complain about what the Russians are doing.

Just as one example, look at articles from 2008 to 2013 about Russia in the US mainstream media. It reads like hit job. There is not a single article published without a mention of some perceived problem in Russia, be it with Putin himself, so called human rights violations, free speech violations or corruption. Not a single article that would not spend at least several paragraphs on bad mouthing Russia.

And even if you say, those are justified, compare it to articles from 2008 to 2013 on Saudi Arabia, which has much worse record in every single regard. You will see the stark difference.

From my experience the Russians are not exactly inventive country in the regard of international politics or even that good at it. I would not call them as "leading the pack" in almost any regard. Which leads me to believe that if the Russians are doing it now, the Brits and Americans had been doing it already 50 years ago.