Here's a hint for you: IS operates in territory where they enjoy wide popular support. That means drones kill a lot of women and children in addition to "enemy combatants" which is a classification used to anyone killed who happens to have a pair of balls that already dropped. Especially children since due to high mortality and no social security, people are effectively forced to produce a lot of children to be able to survive their senior years in those regions.

And with drones having to stick around to see what happened, you get to see those shredded or burning children. Often while they're still alive and burning or bleeding to death. Something rational human mind that isn't completely psychopathic generally finds very hard to do because of emotion known as empathy, even when it happens to other men. Children are even worse. Either people crack and do become psychopaths devoid of empathy, or they get extremely stressed as their mind attempts to comprehend, justify and generally just try to process that they have killed a lot of people, often in an extremely gruesome way such as burning them alive or blowing them to pieces. All while they have to watch and document exactly what happens after the strike.

Essentially the only way to act like you suggest is to be a psychopath. Considering your arguments, it's quite likely you are one.

Drones can largely fly themselves. Automation is there. The reason why they need operators is decision making. I.e. unless you pre-program a full mission, which is very difficult you are better off with the organic brain capable of directing the machine through it. And making a call on who to follow with the camera or who to shoot at is something machines aren't going to really be able to for a while at least - as it would require comprehending the criteria why we as people choose to track and kill those other people.

Drone designers are most definitely working on the issue however, which is why there is a very significant discussion going on about who is responsible if a fully automated drone that can make decisions due to extremely complex algorithms allowing it to does make decisions that are incorrect.

Read and comprehend the post and relevant explanations. Your question has already been answered.

You seem to think we are a part of NATO, or that we are relying on NATO to defend us.

This argument is straight up idiotic. We are neutral, overwhelmingly anti-NATO in stance, and we maintain a huge reserve and universal conscription for all men, with army branches that specialize in both frontal warfare and guerrilla warfare. We specifically geared the entire military for fight against something like Soviet or NATO assault where we would get little to no outside help. Country is awash in weapons, most of which are buried in cashes.

We even have huge anti-nuclear bunkers designed specifically to withstand NATO tactical nukes in all major cities because NATO basically informed our leaders back in 1970s that in event of USSR attack, they would drop tactical nukes on our main cities to deny Soviets infrastructure and every large building is mandated to come with bomb shelter. They're used as storage facilities, saunas and so on during peace time. Hard to get all touchy feely about "nice NATO that wants to defend you" when you visit that huge tactical nuclear bomb shelter when you want to take a swim or get some skating time in the summer.

In case you want to make a suggestion that these are against Russian nukes, I would simply remind you that their second largest city is well within fallout range and their main cause for both wars with us so far has been security of that very city.

As a result, your suggestion that NATO base locations in Eastern Europe create security, rather than insecurity for us is quite absurd. To us, NATO approaching Russian borders is a huge cause for concern because it forces Russia to militarise its Western borders and Gulf of Finland, which destabilizes the region.

As for "stretch goals", may I remind you of degree of Russian military success in Finland before this day, and the fact that they have huge problems essentially on all borders except those in Middle Asia and on our border. Are you really here suggesting that they would want to destabilize their most stable borders and would be willing to invest massive amount of military force needed to actually do something meaningful to us instead of addressing the actually problematic parts of their borders?

Because if you genuinely believe them to be that stupid, why are you worried about them at all? They will lose everywhere shortly if they're that stupid, simply through investing their forces in all the wrong places and getting overrun elsewhere and will get cut to small, manageable pieces as per doctrine of certain think tanks back in the 1990s.

Except that you'd get taken to EHCR, and likely lose. This ruling was extremely narrow in scope and court went to great pains to emphasize this. Attempting to jury-rig it to fit broad scope censorship would fail for a number of reasons, many of which are listed in my post.

Indeed, this is straight up shock scaremongering. Original article itself in fact goes to state:

T J McIntyre, who is a lecturer in law and Chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, the lead organisation that won an important victory against EU data retention in the Court of Justice of the European Union last year, explained where things now stand. "Today's decision doesn't have any direct legal effect. It simply finds that Estonia's laws on site liability aren't incompatible with the ECHR. It doesn't directly require any change in national or EU law. Indirectly, however, it may be influential in further development of the law in a way which undermines freedom of expression. As a decision of the Grand Chamber of the ECHR it will be given weight by other courts and by legislative bodies."

Basis for decision:
The Grand Chamber emphasised a number of factors that led it to rule that Delfi was liable: the "extreme" nature of the comments which the court considered to amount to hate speech, the fact that they were published on a professionally-run and commercial news website, the insufficient measures taken by Delfi to weed out the comments in question and the low likelihood of a prosecution of the users who posted the comments, and the moderate sanction imposed on Delfi.

Basically the problem was the fact that the company was informed that comments were easily distinguished as illegal and refused to remove them. This does not mean a change to national legislation, or pre moderation or anything of the sorts. It simply means that if comments are easily distinguished as illegal, you can't just ignore the law and let them stay up. Court also notes that punishment is moderate and serves as a warning to follow the law hopefully without stifling free speech.

Overall, it looks like they did all they could on court's side to not make a decision against national hate speech laws without giving ammunition for broader call for censorship.

Considering the recent treatment Polish gastarbeiters got, or the fact that we have long standing conflict with them that had to be sorted out on governmental level about their waste issues in Gulf of Finland, I'm extremely confused where you got that idea.

Finland has a long standing history of neutrality, similar to Switzerland. We have no fight with Russians, and Russians are desperate enough to get us on their good side that they are willing to sell us cheap technology just to keep us neutral. Last news is that Rosatom is making an extremely good offer on third Loviisa reactor if we don't get any closer to joining NATO. We also recently opened new electric interconnects which allow us to sell surplus electricity to Russia. We have zero gas-related problems with Russia as we don't have any third party causing problems in between us, and we had no security issues on our border either. It's literally the calmest and most secure border they have, and they very much appreciate it.

As a point to make, when they recently opened a base to secure Murmansk and Arctic Ocean near our borders, region on the other side of the border invited personnel of the new base and their families to visit. That is how afraid of Russian military folks that have to live right next to Russian bases are here in Finland. Good business, calm border.

Suggesting that we are somehow pro-NATO in this conflict beyond the mandatory participation in EU sanctions is absurd. If anything, the current Polish line is considered damaging to regional security here in Finland - something our foreign minister of outgoing government made no qualms about voicing every once in a while. Not beneficial and certainly nothing to be supportive of.

As for the rest, I don't think you quite understand the problem. On one hand, you don't want to put your mission critical bases into politically unstable states. Poland still has serious stability issues, as we have seen with their conservative religious right wingers suddenly getting electable again on the platform of fear of Europe.
On the other hand there are issues of infrastructure. Poland is far less developed than Germany is. And moving bases is expensive, but getting new infrastructure that can support them installed is far more expensive. That is why current plans are to move to Northern Italy, rather than Poland according to leaks.

I'm not talking about current security situation in Eastern Europe, and as a Finn, I find your attempt to pretend we're allied with hysterical extremely right wing Poland distasteful at best. Pretty much the only ones we can see ourselves allied with and are in actual talks with on the topic is Sweden. We're not in NATO, not feeling threatened by Russia and mostly worried about the fact that worsening security situation is going to squeeze our finances even further.

Germany on the other hand houses the single most important part of US assets in Europe. They are home to intelligence nerve centres of most military and spying activities. Those are directly related to current spying situation. Then there's the recent scandal with satellite controls of US killer drones in Middle East, and in fact there has been an active discussion in Germany that it should act to investigate, as many activities revealed are either illegal or clearly attempting to circumvent German legislation. Attempt was strong enough for US to start making plans for alternative facilities in Italy. But building secure high end connections, radomes and so on in sufficient numbers takes a lot of time. So right now, they apparently managed to put a lid on the discussion through arguing that US breaking laws in Germany is not as important as Germany's relationship with US.

Which may be partially correct in the current security situation, but most certainly does remind Germans that ones acting most aggressively against their state come from the other side of Atlantic, nor from the East.

And that stuff is cumulating right now. Even Ukrainian poison pill given to Europe is starting to not be poisonous enough to make public overlook all the problems coming from other side of Atlantic. And that is not good for cohesion among the states that go under the umbrella of "Western states".

Which at the time of real issue, that of the fact that US is diminishing as world hegemon is very dangerous for all parties involved.

And then you use that as leverage to force NSA to give relevant people up. It really isn't hard on state level. US does this kind of "soft blackmail" all the time, as do other large states. Freeze key assets in "investigation" and require extensive cooperation from target state to expedite unfreezing.

It's not that I don't agree with your assessment for most part. I am just pointing out that if there was a political will to get to the bottom of this, Germany does have legal means to do so. I.e. the part of your argument of it "being too hard to do under current legal framework" being not true. Means are there, and they are genuinely not that hard if there is a will.

In this case, it just appears that there was no will. They didn't even really want to open the investigation in the first place after revelations came to light and it required the media uprising to get the ball going. So it indeed is not terribly surprising that when any kind of significant action was required to obtain a stronger case, this was used as an excuse to drop the case instead.

The problem being that Germany is one of the key nerve hubs of most of electronic spying activity in Europe and Middle East as many of the recent leaks have shown.

While relevant people may or may not be there, they could search the relevant hardware which is in fact on their soil.

That was in fact the specific reason why they ended the investigation. They found strong circumstantial evidence, but because of lack of cooperation from NSA, they could not get any direct evidence. So the case was closed, as NSA was unlikely to change its stance.

Considering the BND scandal, it's pretty likely that no political pressure was put on NSA to compromise. They were simply going to sweep this under the rug.

The bias is actually very visible in the article with the Freudian slip of "send Russians money" instead of "paying Russians for services rendered" which is the actual case.

It's pretty rare for fanboy crowd to slip that badly though. Usually it's at least masked as a more reasonable argument.

Wait, are you here suggesting that you can use one foot to brace your body against a car to prevent injury?

Do you at all comprehend the forces involved? Your entire musculature in this kind of situation is utterly miniscule and irrelevant.

I stand corrected.

This card has 400GB/sec throughput on memory. Not that far away, and that's just the first model limited to 4 stacks.

No idea where that imaginary goal of yours came from though. They always marked this as around 100TB/stack. And of course like all such memory, it's going to run in parallel, so the more stacks on die, the more bandwidth.