I don't think it's legal for EU companies to export some data to the US anyway. Microsoft Liechtenstein might have to maintain its own servers in the EU that are not under the control of Microsoft US. If Microsoft US doesn't have control, Microsoft US can't be compelled to produce it. Of course, a EU court might require Microsoft Liechtenstein to hand over data.

Basically, every cloud service is controlled from somewhere on the planet that is under some country's jurisdiction, and that country can issue legal orders to get that data. This isn't just a US thing.

Huh? While you're in the US you do not have direct control over your Amsterdam bedroom. Microsoft US does have direct access to the emails. (Or it did, at least, and the courts aren't going to look kindly on a party that deliberately hides evidence.)

Essentially, yes, and Microsoft has a choice of complying or not doing business in that country. As a matter of practice, no country is going to do that. In this case, the US courts want specific email that Microsoft has chosen to store in Ireland for reasons of its own. This is not a general fishing expedition into Microsoft Ireland. This would be entirely unremarkable if the email was stored in the US, and the only reason it's interesting is that Microsoft is trying out a new excuse to avoid handing the email over. As the judge pointed out, this would make any sort of discovery or subpoena or search warrant useless against a multinational company.

In Harrison's "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers", the 747 was using a cheese-based drive for interplanetary and interstellar travel. None of this VASIMR nonsense.

Moreover, Fleischmann and Pons were getting energy out of what they were doing, so they did have experimental results. Some other people were confirming it as fusion, and were later exposed as people who had no clue how to use a neutron detector. Since then, I've been dubious about results like this (didn't stop me from trying to figure out how to put FTL neutrinos into Special Relativity, though).

Gehlen took over Foreign Armies East (German Army intelligence) and the Germans started getting better information. His predecessor was woefully incompetent.

Gehlen then spent years downplaying Soviet capabilities, so the Germans were constantly being surprised by the Soviets doing something Gehlen had said they didn't have the strength to do.

After this miserable track record of getting the German Army surprised time and again, he switched sides and convinced people he was actually competent.

Let's look at the diplomatic history. Stalin was against the Nazis at first. When they became threatening, he looked for allies, since he felt (correctly) that a fair chunk of Western opposition to Hitler was "Let's you and him fight". The negotiations with Britain and France were going nowhere, as neither of those countries really wanted the alliance all that much. Realizing this, he changed Foreign Ministers from Litvinov to Molotov and formed an alliance with Germany. He didn't think that alliance would last indefinitely, and so he started a "creeping up to war" strategy. Then, of course, he completely failed to expect the Germans to attack when they did, and the reorganization of the tank and mechanized forces was woefully incomplete.

The Communist Parties in other countries did suffer by this. Comintern ordered them to be anti-Nazi in the 1930s, pro-Nazi in the last part of August 1939, and anti-Nazi starting June 22, 1941, and a lot of Communists just left their parties as a result.

Not on the same scale. British concentration camps were very bad places, but much better than the Nazi concentration camps. The British, as a whole, had little regard for some of the lesser races, but they weren't determined to wipe them out in the millions. (Major die-offs in the British Empire were typically more lack of Imperial interest than hostility.)

The monsters often are real.

Germany started WWII in Europe by invading Poland. The Soviets joined in later, and in accordance with a treaty that they signed because Britain and France really weren't interested in a defensive treaty with the Soviet Union. The Ukraine is an interesting case: they at first welcomed the Germans as liberators, until Hitler pulled off the truly amazing feat of making Stalin look like the better choice. (Not for everybody: my next-door neighbor was apparently an officer in the Galician SS, and he's Ukrainian. I'm not going to second-guess his decisions.) Still, the Ukraine resisted the Soviet government for some time after the war ended.

However, the threat of Communism was used to keep the US people in line, and the propaganda painted it as far more dangerous than it really was. The US supported some despicable governments just because they were anti-Communist.

IIRC, Skylab was launched with pretty much all the consumables for the three missions, and no good way of replenishing them. It wasn't designed as a permanent space station. There was good reason for that: nobody knew how to build good living and working environments for zero-G. For example, panels and controls were designed for use from a sitting position, which turns out to be a difficult position in zero-G, and one area was designed without a coherent up and down, which was comfortable for only one astronaut of the nine.

We learned a whole lot from Skylab. Among other things, we learned how to design space stations for long-term occupancy and use.

As far as I can tell, Nazi Germany murdered innocent people at a considerably higher rate than the Soviet Union did, and being conquered by the Red Army wasn't as devastatingly bad as being conquered by the Wehrmacht. Overall, I have to rate the Nazis as worse.

Of course, there's still a lot of moral room between being horrifyingly evil (and the Soviet Communist Party certainly was) and the Nazi Party.

I was on a wargaming mailing list for a time with a Communist. We'd talk about various things, and eventually I realized he was as patriotic as I was. We both wanted what was best for the country. We had considerably different opinions on what would be best, and our opinions differed a lot more on how to get there, but the basic aim was the same.

One thing I learned at an Oracle user group meeting: what you or I might think a large database is actually pretty darn small by industry standards. We discussed one where the activity pretty well maxed out write capacity on their disk drives.

Customs and immigration agents are Federal employees, and airport upgrades are state and private level. I don't know if an airport can simply pay Customs to supply more agents.

In any case, having another station open would cost a whole lot more than $100. There isn't a 24/7 pool of available customs agents who can simply show up for $50/hour, two hours minimum, when there happens to be a lot of people coming through. To man a station 24/7/365 (shouldn't that be 24/7/52.14?) takes a minimum of five people working there.

And, yes, we tend to elect more colorful politicians. You missed Rudy Perpich and Jesse Ventura as governors (Jesse "The Governor" was actually pretty good), among others.

No. If money can buy permission, it means that whatever it is is less important than money to whoever's giving permission. This could be a case of an agent having different incentives than a principal.

I have no good reason to think there was bribery or corruption involved, but let's explore the economics if they were. Suppose the environment currently has an economic value of $50 million, based on how much people would pay to keep it more or less pristine. Suppose that the filming would do that much damage to the environment, and the advantage to Disney of filming there rather than somewhere less fragile is $20 million. In that case, were the permission to be given by a corruptible guy who doesn't care, Disney could pay a few million to that guy and do $50 million of damage for it.