Thanks! I don't have a 2-nic machine handy though without swapping cards.

Yeah mine has a camera and mic. But I have duct tape, so that's all right.

Plus if companies do get caught on this kind of thing, they tend to be hardly punished (by regulators nor consumers). So there's almost no reason for them to play fair.

Having said that, not connecting it at all is not an option for me, that would break netflix. If only we could configure our own hosts file on our tv, or something.

Maybe APK can lead the way.

I recently got my first Smart TV (I had an almost 20yr old Philips that just would not die, and in the end it never did).

It's a Samsung and I made a point of not accepting the privacy policy. So far I have noticed nothing that does not work, which made me wonder if Samsung actually bothers to check whether or not the policy was accepted.

How would I know if they were selling my viewing habits anyway?

Decriminalisation of drugs would also go some way toward slightly less insane levels of incarceration? Having 5% of the population the US account for 25% of the world's prisoners. That is just batshit unhinged.

Wait, a seven-foot rise is not a reasonable prediction but our being beings of translucent energy in 400 years is? Allrighty then.

Most likely, there will be no significant change to speak of. Maybe some cosmetic tweaks. Certainly new promises which will be broken on day one. Almost definitely a populace who will continue to fail to demand real change.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

TFS and TFA are both ridiculously vague.

How exactly does this work, in terms of jurisdiction? Is this a case for the ICC? WTO?

Or is it now (officially) the position of USJ that its jurisdiction covers the whole planet?

Worked wonders for Scientology, that.

Or Unthinkable in which, after Samuel L Jackson tortures a guy for the whole film it turns out he didn't go far enough. Having slashed the detainees wife's throat before his eyes, they stopped short at doing same to his kids. Moral of the story, torture works but only as long as you're willing to go all the way. Sickening.

Well yeah, that's obviously a possibility. Although Greenwald seems to maintain a more or less positive relationship with Snowden, which is markedly different from the wikileaks film (which I didn't care for, though I still think Benedict Cumberbatch did pretty well) where Assange basically hated the script even before the movie was out.

Actually I was in disagreement with your assertion that Pax Americana was somehow not a kind of empire in how it operates in the world the last couple decades, I didn't mention all out war.

But you're not wrong in that, since the end if the Cold War, there have been fewer "nation-vs-nation" wars, as you put it (which were not really that, even during the Cold War, but mostly proxy wars between both superpowers). "Standing armies" does not mean what it used to, before there was a single superpower.

But notice that military spending has not diminished as one might have expected, rather it has risen since the early 90s. It is as much as the rest of the planet combined, to the extent that their budgets are accountable at all, that is. Find a world map of US military installations. The reason that actual, explicit coercion is rare is simply that lesser nations can't afford to let it come that far. That makes the coercion more efficient, yes, but not less "empire" like.

That doesn't make the present situation peaceful in any meaningful way though, for great numbers of people. That there were no formal war declarations and massive infantry battles doesn't actually make the history of, say, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, all that much less bloody. That is what imperial enforcement looks like, not Waterloo.

What is this peace you speak of? Imperialism is far from over, the current situation is hardly different from the Spanish, British, or even the Ronan empires in any interesting way. It always amounts to wielding an overwhelming asymmetry in military might to maintain a steady flow of wealth from the rest if the world to the homeland.

The amazing thing is that so few there seem to have any idea what kind of dick they are being as a nation, or to what extent their comfort (often even a luxury that ought to be embarrassing, frankly) is underwritten by misery and poverty in lesser places.

Actually, John Conway and Simon Kochen at IAS have a really interesting argument about free will. Lecture videos here.

Well they have serious problems with even
0. The assumptions on which their model is based.

FTFS: