I especially like it when someone wants their representatives to eliminate entitlements, but don't dare touch their medicare and social security.

Full disclosure: I probably qualify as "old", and perhaps "confused" too. (Though if both, the later may not be caused by the former.)

Scotty will have the power back just in time.

I do believe it flew a lot closer than that in 2015.

Looks like the whole FA is just an ad for a wannabe data processing company.

That's your government's way of creating jobs. But like most trade deals, it creates the jobs and increases the GDP in other countries, and drives the trade deficit way up.

Better yet, some tech-savvy entrepreneur could use the data to make a tour guide, so you could go see people kill each other in quaint places. Kind of like eco-tourism... nature red in tooth, claw, switchblade, and machinegun.

The idea that everyone needs to be able to write code is nonsense. This is just propaganda to support the "need" for more visas.

It's a CRISIS, I tell you! But fortunately we can spend the next 20 years importing labor for the jobs we can't export, while you fix the school system and kids work their way through it.

When you combine time cube theory with electric universe theory you get a cubic universe plus an electric clock. The cubic universe is flat (in the cosmological sense), so if the two underlying theories are correct then the universe diverges from flatness by the amount of one electric clock.

However, pedantically speaking, that's "plus one electric clock per universe". So in the case of a multiverse, the theorem only indicates the average. But with judicious application of the Central Limit Theorem, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and a line of reasoning left as an exercise for the reader, we can confidently conclude the universe is probably approximately flat, for definitions of "confidently", "conclude", "the universe", "is", "probably", "approximately", "flat", and "definitions" which remain to be derived from first principles.

Read more about it on my blog, Starts with a Bump on the Head, which, as you may have guessed from the title, is written in atrophic dactylic tetrameter, like all good cosmological monographs and comic books.

Your basic unit of flatness can't be zero or infinite, so Kansas will do just fine.

You just ruined the chance for people to say global warming is going to result in the moon crashing into the Earth, silly poster.

Nonsense. As every Solarian knows global warming is due to the sun bestowing it's benevolent, fiery appendage upon us.

I never understand why people consider it news when someone takes a position that is 100% predictable given who they are.

perl is a write-only language. It's *supposed* to be incomprehensible gibberish.

Nope, wrote it myself, asshole. But thanks!

...and your comment represents the absolutely fundamental misunderstanding that pervades this discussion.

The truth no one wants to hear:

The distinction is no longer the technology or the place, but the person(s) using a capability: the target. In a free society based on the rule of law, it is not the technological capability to do a thing, but the law, that is paramount.

Gone are the days where the US targeted foreign communications on distant shores, or cracked codes used only by our enemies. No one would have questioned the legitimacy of the US and its allies breaking the German or Japanese codes or exploiting enemy communications equipment during WWII. The difference today is that US adversaries -- from terrorists to nation-states -- use many of the same systems, services, networks, operating systems, devices, software, hardware, cloud services, encryption standards, and so on, as Americans and much of the rest of the world. They use iPhones, Windows, Dell servers, Android tablets, Cisco routers, Netgear wireless access points, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail, and so on.

US adversaries now often use the very same technologies we use. The fact that Americans or others also use them does not suddenly or magically mean that no element of the US Intelligence Community should ever target them. When a terrorist in Somalia is using Hotmail or an iPhone instead of a walkie-talkie, that cannot mean we pack our bags and go home. That means that, within clear and specific legal authorities and duly authorized statutory missions of the Intelligence Community, we aggressively pursue any and all possible avenues, within the law, that allow us to intercept and exploit the communications of foreign intelligence targets.

If they are using hand couriers, we target them. If they are using walkie-talkies, we target them. If they are using their own custom methods for protecting their communications, we target them. If they are using HF radios, VSATs, satellite phones, or smoke signals, we target them. If they are using Gmail, Windows, OS X, Facebook, iPhone, Android, SSL, web forums running on Amazon Web Services, etc., we target them -- within clear and specific legal frameworks that govern the way our intelligence agencies operate, including with regard to US Persons.

That doesn't mean it's always perfect; that doesn't mean things are not up for debate; that doesn't mean everyone will agree with every possible legal interpretation; that doesn't mean that some may not fundamentally disagree with the US approach to, e.g., counterterrorism. But the intelligence agencies do not make the rules, and while they may inform issues, they do not define national policy or priorities.

Without the authorities granted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), the United States cannot target non-US Persons who are foreign intelligence targets if their communications enters, traverses, or otherwise touches the United States, a system within the United States, or, arguably, a system or network operated by a US corporation (i.e., a US Person) anywhere in the world. FAA in particular is almost exclusively focused on non-US Persons outside the US, who now exist in the same global web of digital communications as innocent Americans.

Without FAA, the very same Constitutional protections and warrant requirements reserved for US Persons would extend to foreign nations and foreign terrorists simply by using US networks and services â" whether intentionally or not. Without FAA, an individualized warrant would be required to collect on a foreign intelligence target using, say, Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo!, or even exclusively foreign providers if their communications happens to enter the United States, as 70% of international internet traffic does. If you do not think there is a problem with this, there might be an even greater and more basic misunderstanding about how foreign SIGINT and cyber activities fundamentally must work.

If you believe NSA should not have these capabilities, what you are saying is that you do not believe the United States should be able to target foreign intelligence targets outside the United States who, by coincidence or by design, ever utilize or enter US systems and services. If you believe the solution is an individualized warrant every time the US wishes to target a foreign adversary using Gmail, then you are advocating the protection of foreign adversaries with the very same legal protections reserved for US citizens -- while turning foreign SIGINT, which is not and never has been subject to those restrictions, on its head.

These are the facts and realities of the situation. Any government capability is imperfect, and any government capability can be abused. But the United States is the only nation on earth which has jammed intelligence capabilities into as sophisticated and extensive a legal framework as we have. When the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress, multiple executive agencies under two diametrically opposite Presidential administrations, armies of lawyers within offices of general counsel and and inspectors general, and federal judges on the very court whose only purpose is to protect the rights of Americans under the law and the Constitution in the context of foreign intelligence collection are all in agreement, then you have the judgment of every mechanism of our free civil society.

Or we could just keep laying our intelligence sources, methods, techniques, and capabilities bare to our enemies.

âMany forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1947

"The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged â" all that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favourable issue.â â" George Washington, our nation's first spymaster, in a letter to Colonel Elias Dayton, 26 July 1777

s/kept/put/

In 1953 they had a democratically elected, very westernized government. The US and UK staged a coup when that government wasn't generous enough with "our" oil.

Worked out about as well as all our other efforts to tell the rest of the world how to run their countries.