He claims to be a retired FSB colonel, not GRU.

That's a good point, if you look at the previous routes of the plane you'll see that it is usually much more to the south, even above Crimea: http://de.flightaware.com/live...
But today it looks different: http://de.flightaware.com/live... Much more to the north.

I am confused: here is the route of that flight: http://de.flightaware.com/live...
But if you look for older dates, you'll see that the route is much more to the south, almost above Crimea (about 300-350 km deviation depending on the date you choose), e.g. http://de.flightaware.com/live...

Are such deviations normal or could the flight be directed that far to the north by ground control? (Not an expert, just curious).

The US is a bit behind the trend IMO, probably due to the lower electricity prices: I pay about $0.30 per kilowatt (Germany). Two years ago I have calculated that an LED lightbulb will pay for itself *within* the mandatory two years warranty. Now the prices has fallen even further, I can buy a very bright LED (as bright as 75W conventional bulb) for less than $13 at amazon. If you replace a 60W bulb with it you return the full price in 2 years even if the bulb is on about 2,5 hours per day.

As prices fell, I have replaced more and more bulbs with LEDs. Actually, I bought better and brighter ones and the older LED bulbs went to less used places. Now my household is 100% LED-lighted and that alone has cut my electricity usage about 30% although I've started to use TV and console more and got a portable A/C for the bedroom. I've even replaced the smaller bulbs in the desk lamps so I won't have to worry about my niece burning her fingers.

In Germany there are plenty of LED bulbs sold even at retail's. Online you get better prices though. One problem is the light temperature: many are too white (6000K) or too yellow (2700K). You have to look for the middle ground. A few may emit a quiet buzz, but that about sums up all the problems.

>America went in to stop some serious badness happening
Oh yes, those imaginary WMDs would do some real damage. Thank God the US was there to save the day.

You may want to consider OSMAnd -- openstreetmap for android. It has support for offline navigation and you can pre-download entire countries. Offline wikipedia is a nice touch as well: major tourist attractions are mentioned there so you have a handy offline travel guide. Very useful abroad where I usually don't have data roaming.

Yeah, the upsides of such a tie are obvious, but the real question might be: why is this option so dominant in the US as compared, for example, to Europe?

Hence the summary should read "Why is the US so backwards?". To which the answer is: "because people pay more this way".

Two-year contracts become less and less popular In Germany. There are people, of course, who want a new phone every two years and are ready to basically lease the hardware, but the prepaid options are getting more and more lucrative with an added bonus of being able to cancel the service at will.

If you want you can buy a dumbphone for 20 euros, get a prepaid card for free (some vendors even offer initial bonus) and give it a go.

Same with smartphones, I got my Nexus 4 directly from google and use prepaid with it. There is a vendor now who offers advertisement-paid mobile flatrate: you have to agree to receive an advertisement a day via SMS and the speed is cut to EDGE-level after the first 100Mb, but for me it is an ideal offer as I seldom call or send an SMS but use online messaging from time to time.

Gosh, just paraphrase it to "Can God do something he can't undo?" and call it a day.

Please... I lived it. But the situation is a bit different here: radio free Europe, Voice of America, BBC etc. were mass media, they claimed higher ground and freedom from government censorship, but they still had owners, countries of origin and so on.

Social networks are controlled differently, the agents there pose as common people, changing and influencing the opinion of those who read but doesn't post (i.e. the majority of users). Often post from social networks are used in the western media to form an opinion about the situation in a country. And information is a very powerful weapon, see Iraq. And the best thing about it: zero credibility. Remember Amina Arraf? The Syrian lesbian blogger who was arrested by the government. Real name: Tom MacMaster, US citizen. For quite some time Arraf was a widely cited symbol of the Syrian rebellion against tyranny. The facts from the Syrian government that such person does not exist were ignored by the media. And that was the doing of a single person. Now imagine the organization behind it, say, NED. Zero credibility, free to invent facts and even a discovery of a hoax will not reverse the already formed opinion: a brief admission at worst: the media don't like admitting own mistakes.

Reminds me of a map about the Maidan tweets here: http://www.ibtimes.com/ukraine...

One may wonder, how many of those UK and US tweets were from Ukrainians living in these countries (US has a rather large Ukrainian diaspora, the UK doesn't) and how many were associated with intelligence agencies. Interesting are the blips on the map from Bahrain at the crucial moments.

Why? Because there may be no "angry common people overthrowing a corrupt tyranny and dying for freedom", merely "people misled by foreign provocateurs into destabilizing their own country"?

The real question is, to what extent was the US involved in other countries? Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine? Different counties, same scenario. Social media play a major role at the beginning and during each uprising.

Which also raises the question whether blocking social media is an act of censorship or an attempt to neutralize foreign involvement in internal affairs.

China's program is in heavy development, still with 2 flight in 2 years it is still not there yet IMO (Russia has launched 9 missions in the last two years). Would not be enough to keep the ISS manned.

As said, the resources were burned quickly, while many German machines managed to work throughout the war.
Keep in mind that the bulk of Lend Lease shipments happened after 1943, the Western Front opened 1944, well after Stalingrad and Kursk. The USSR was already winning back then, it was all about who gets the control over Western Europe.