I use HDMI from my tablet to TVs in hotel rooms when traveling.

That would be the pro football fans.

Seriously, there are any number of other, smaller, leagues, and it would be easy to start more, but the fans keep flocking to the NFL. Why? Well, this is a case of a sort of natural monopoly. If there are multiple competing pro football leagues, then none of them can lay claim to having all of the best athletes, coaches, etc., so there is no real football championship. So the fans are always going to pick one league to be "the" league, and everything else will more or less disappear.

It's not the FCC's rule, its the NFL's rule. The NFL is exercising its rights as a copyright holder to prevent games from airing locally unless the stadium is sold out. The NFL believes this encourages local fans to attend, boosting revenues, and argues that if fans can watch it on free TV rather than going to the stadium, many of them will, so the NFL will be forced to pull the games from free TV and move them exclusively to cable, probably pay-per-view, to make up the lost revenues.

I have no position on whether the NFL is right, but this is them exercising their rights as a business to sell their produce in the way they choose (well, they're using the government granted and enforced copyright in order to control their product, which muddies that argument quite a bit).

That comes and goes. Google constantly fights it. Google makes changes which remove that crud, then the virtual companies figure out how to work around the changes. Rinse, repeat. The smaller search engines don't have as much trouble because there's not as much effort put into figuring out how to work around their protections.

Late 1970's tech vs 1960's SAM.

Sure, though somewhere on the net I've read a better technical explanation of how the modification was performed and how he Dani kept his equipment running despite intense NATO HARM coverage (basically he observed flight corridors, used short pulses of radar when he knew craft were along those corridors, and kept the main radar on the launcher off until the last second only using remote antennas that were positioned far enough from the launcher that a missile strike would not take out the crew or SAM)

The F117 that was lost in the Balkans NATO mission in 1999 was shot down by an S-125 modified to use longer wavelenths than the RAM paint on the aircraft would absorb. The issue has been known since then and it's very likely that the F22 and F35 low observability design characteristics have taken this into account as much as physics and material science will allow.

Yes, they were. And the reason they weren't is because those newer-generation reactors were never built. We had the first gen reactors built in the early 50s that were horrible, and the second generation (like Fukishima) in the 60s and early 70s which were much better than the first-gen, but still had some potentially nasty failure modes and required active management to be safe. And that's where we stopped. The third and fourth-gen reactors were never built. So, yes, we hear about all these new generations of designs which were supposed to be cleaner, cheaper and safer, and they would have been... if we built them.

Is it really? Industrial-scale link farming requires thousands of sites. At $50 each, that's going to start chewing into your profit margins.

You're using hyperbole to make a point, I get that, but the pedant in me insists on responding to your literal statement: No, ROT-13 doesn't look a lot like AES256, even at a glance they look very different. ROT-13, or even more sophisticated fixed substitution ciphers, are trivial to recognize and break, in real time, with only the most cursory knowledge of the structure of the plaintext.

Google gets to decide what's relevant in the rankings on their site, but not what's relevant for other search engines. If they do a bad job of picking good ranking criteria, it gives other engines an opportunity to provide better service. This is a somewhat coarse mechanism for demanding more relevant criteria, I suppose, but you'd better believe that Google takes it very seriously. They have a lot of other signals that help them decide whether users are well-served by the top-ranked hits, and if something like preferring HTTPS damages that, it'll almost certainly lose.

I'll give you my answers to your questions. These answers are based on little to no real data, mostly just reasoning about how Snowden's flight most likely went down, and a (reasonable, I think) assumption that he's a fairly ordinary guy, not a brilliant and nefarious planner. I also doubt that he extracted much, if any, data prior to his big grab-and-run, because it would have been too risky. So I don't think he had much time to do things between getting the dump and hightailing it.

None. This would have required more planning, and probably more time, than is evident. Any place he might have tried to drop data in the cloud would be too risky because the NSA's tendrils are too widespread. Physical dead drops are more feasible, but they'd have to be in the US, and probably not too far from Snowden's normal stomping grounds. They'd also have to be fairly easy to locate (since he'd have to provide instructions, which he'd have to be able to remember accurately), but also well-hidden enough not to be found accidentally. That's not impossible, but it's harder than it appears, as anyone who's tried to place geocaches knows.

Of course, he could have done something like left the supposed additional, unrevealed data, or the location of the data, with an attorney or other trustworthy person. But again, the NSA has long arms, and has undoubtedly pulled out all the stops to trace his steps before he ran.

Nope, I think taking time to drop data between grabbing the dump, delivering it to the news agencies and running would have been too risky and require too much planning, so I doubt he did it.

Very little that's useful. I doubt it's all that difficult for them to gather information about NSA policies, and the really valuable stuff was all turned over to the Guardian and has been published anyway.

I doubt Snowden knows much about that. He was a SharePoint admin, remember, not an operational guy. The data he collected may contain quite a bit on that, but I strongly suspect he doesn't have that data. I certainly wouldn't have kept it on my when I took off... much safer to deliver it all to a news agency and travel without it.

Nothing, unless the Russians are stupid, which they're not. Nothing that we've learned about the NSA's surveillance methods were at all surprising. The only surprising things were (a) the scope, (b) the fact that they weren't being careful about targeting US citizens and (c) that they were actively working to undermine security systems, in direct violation of one of their two missions. If you had asked the computer security community "Hypothetically, supposing the NSA decided to take the gloves off, ignore the law and ignore their responsibility to ensure the strength of US security technology in both public and private sectors, what would they do?", the answer you'd have gotten would have been a pretty accurate description of what they've been doing. The "what" and "how" are quite obvious.

Oh, and while I'm at it:

I don't think they could use it as leverage to get more information, because I don't think he has any more information. As for influence, well, I suppose, but what would they be influencing him to do? Just giving him a place to live accomplishes a significant goal for them, that of poking the US in the eye. I suppose they could try to convince him to strengthen their PR play, by taking Russian citizenship and denouncing the US, but I don't think they'd get anything out of that. The old USSR would have done that, and been thrilled about it, but the USSR was playing an ideological game, trying to convince the world (and themselves) that communism was superior to capitalism as an economic and social structure. Putin's Russia doesn't have that motive.

I don't know about the accuracy of your SCOTUS result-picking algorithm, but you and mwvdlee have a good algorithm to get modded up on slashdot: Just express deep cynicism about the system. Doesn't have to be true in the slightest.

FWIW, I watch SCOTUS pretty closely, and I'd say their bad decisions are fairly rare. I'm unhappy with the outcome in a larger minority of cases, but it's not very common that upon reading the opinions and dissents that I find myself ultimately in disagreement with their conclusions. And in most cases I think they not only make the right legal call, but the right call for the citizenry (though that isn't, and shouldn't be, their primary focus).

Of course, you and I may well disagree about some of the decisions.

That's a rather bold assertion. Care to support it?