Your post does not contradict mine.

Getting from Hong Kong to Ecuador (or wherever he was going) without flying over any US or allied territory requires strange routes - just go to a flight booking flight and notice that the returned results mostly involve changes in the USA.

Taking such a route was wise - look at how US allies forced down the presidential jet of a LatAm leader just to search for Snowden.

But I'm really not sure why you're arguing with me about this. What happened to Snowden is a matter of public record, it's not something that's up for debate. He got stuck in Russia because the USA revoked his passport and he then wasn't allowed to board his onward flight. But once it became clear that no plane was safe, not even those with diplomatic immunity, if it flew over any US allied territory, he would have been an idiot to leave anyway because that would have been a direct flight into a lifetime of solitary confinement.

Fox News is the last place anyone would turn to learn about abuses of power by the government, especially with anything related to national security. It is however VERY effective at making it look like there's real accountability and competition in governance, by turning everything into a personal popularity contest between two men who are little more than figureheads.

Congratulations. Your post wins the "who can represent the worst stereotypes about Americans" prize for this thread.

Let's recap. Snowden revealed gross abuses and illegality in your government. Doing this results in the same sort of punishments as it does in many other countries with overly authoritarian leadership: lifetime in jail, as you request. So to do the big reveal you admit is something you "really needed", he had to run. His first choice was Hong Kong, but when it appeared the Chinese might hand him over or keep him jailed for years in diplomatic limbo he decided to go to Latin America, probably Ecuador. He was en-route there when the US Govt revoked his passport, leaving him stranded in Russia which happened to be on the way.

Your post and general mentality have multiple failures, but don't worry, they are correctable.

1. An absurdly strong "us vs them" complex.
2. A garbled and factually incorrect belief about events in very recent history.
3. A desire to see someone who did something "really needed" severely punished because he did it for "the wrong reasons", you of course don't elaborate on what those wrong reasons were. He has stated his reasons many times: he saw illegal behaviour and knew it had led to dangerous territory and serious abuses. He did not do it for personal fame or fortune, as evidenced by the fact that he is now broke and vanished from the scene almost entirely for months after he got let out of the Russian airport. Pretty hard to argue he had the wrong reasons.
4. Finally, a strong quasi-religious belief that the USA is better than Russia, despite the fact that they are both remarkably aggressive and corrupt societies, run by oligarchies, in which democracy is barely functional and anyone who challenges the status quo has to run away lest they end up with a life sentence from a kangaroo court. In addition, the populations of both countries are easily manipulated by telling them how glorious and special they are. There are far more similarities than you dare imagine.

There's a simple fix for your predicament - never use the word "traitor" ever again. It describes a state of fevered flag-waving tribalism which allows your own government to blind you and switch off your critical thinking. The people in power are not better than you or anyone else, they are just ..... the people in power. Your country is not better than other countries, it's just .... the place where you were born. Your rulers deserve no loyalty, no special breaks. They are corrupt and untrustworthy to the core, they need to be watched constantly lest they abuse the powers they were temporarily granted for some purpose or another. You cannot be a traitor to such people, the concept simply has no meaning.

Once you get into this mentality, your recollection of historical events will probably improve.

He didn't choose Moscow. He chose Latin America and got stuck in Russia when the USA revoked his passport. It's the US governments fault he's now in Russia and yet they try and paint him as a traitor who ran to the Russians - yet more US hypocrisy and propaganda.

You wont be arrested for insulting or protesting Obama. You wont be arrested for reporting on his failings; there are huge websites dedicated to it.

Of course you will. The Obama administration has prosecuted journalists and leakers at a far higher rate than before. How is one supposed to report on his failings, if the act of revealing them triggers immediate accusations of being a traitor and guaranteed prosecution? The US based papers who reported the Snowden leaks took big risks to do so, and of course their source is now in exile ...

These propaganda sessions for Putin are pre-staged so Snowden has allowed himself to be used as a "propaganda tool". Considering how freedoms are curtailed in Russia, it seriously deminishes Snowden's reputation.

No it doesn't.

Snowden asked a simple and direct question, as is the norm at Putin's Q&A sessions (he does them with press corps too). Putin gave a simple and direct answer. Whether you believe the answer is a lie or not, it's a question that anyone could have asked and got the same response.

Also, do you actually know these sessions are entirely pre-staged? Can you give a cite for that? Putin had to ask for help with a translation of Snowden's question, why would he make himself look linguistically weak like that if it was all pre-staged and he already knew the question was coming? Far better for him to look fluent.

Maybe I was unclear - we have an engineering team of about 15 people, 5 of whom work at standing desks. It's not required.

Are you kidding?

What's going on in places like Yemen and Afghanistan where lots of people are heavily armed is exactly the reason widespread gun ownership in the USA makes no sense. You can't beat modern governments by having lots of people own light weapons, it's a stupid idea. If one lone gunman decides the Feds have overstepped and takes them on, he ends up shot or committing suicide and being described as mentally ill (was he? hard to tell now he's dead). If a group of people try to build a conspiracy to attack government installations the NSA will find them and they'll be prosecuted for terrorism or simply vanished before they even make the first move.

The second amendment is obsolete and should just be deleted entirely. The USA is quite clearly not Switzerland, which has a notable absence of mass shootings. A heavily armed population has not stopped the US Govt sliding more and more towards full-blown authoritarianism, nor is it going to. So there are no benefits to this rule. Other countries that got serious about gun control have seen positive results over the long term (eg UK and Australia)

I do development and I work a standing desk (and for a couple of years did a walking desk when I worked at home). I'm actually vastly more comfortable not just at work now but in the rest of my life since switching:

- issues I had with sciatica went away
- I am in better shape/have more endurance & energy
- I sleep better
- I used to feel like shit if I went on a 10 hour coding binge (sluggish and exhausted) but now I just feel pretty much normal

It's only uncomfortable at first, but once you figure out good shoes to wear, good anti-fatigue mats to use and good posture it's much MUCH more comfortable (at least in my experience) and makes your non-work life better as well.

At my office we have 5 people in our engineering team (some IT, some developers) who use standing desks and a few more who are considering making the switch. The oldest stander is me (42) so it's not just something 20-somethings can do.

I completely understand your points, but let me offer a few things:

Shit like this happens to people every single day. Often vastly worse; I volunteered with an organization that sought clemency for people who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned (and in the US that means being subjected to some truly horrific shit). Yet, by and large, despite being completely fucked over by the system and having had years - sometimes decades - of their lives taken away, despite being tortured by beatings, rapes, solitary confinement, these people didn't lose their shit and go on a killing spree. They kept their shit together. My point here is that people get fucked over and there are ways of dealing with it, and sometimes things get handled and sometimes they don't, and you need to move along and get past it.

But, as you say, that takes perspective. Which gets me to my next point: The kid himself may not have perspective, but his parents sure as hell should. Or some other adult. Someone should have sat him down and explained that he was right, the people in power were assholes, and that while he probably is plenty pissed about how it all went down, in the grand scheme of things it's just a run in with assholes, and he's better than that. It is the job of parents not just to teach kids how to not be assholes, but how to deal with the fact that assholes exist and they will try to fuck up your life.

I definitely agree that dealing with bullying needs to be handled better not just because it's the right thing, but because it's an immediate safety issue and letting it keep going perpetuates a culture that accepts it. The problem is that school administrators are short sighted in this country (actually, pretty much everyone involved in public education in this country is extremely short sighted), and they want to maintain control with a minimum amount of hassle.

When I switched from working in an office to working from home for a couple of years, I went to a standing desk and then to a treadmill/walking desk.

Took me about 3 days to get used to standing all the time - as in, able to do it without feeling too much pain in my feet at the end of the day.

The walking desk took about a week to get used to, at first I could only read emails etc. while walking, but after I got used to things I was able to do 4MPH indefinitely while doing basic stuff, and about 2.5MPH while doing stuff that required a bit more precision with a mouse etc. Put it at a 5% incline and it's not a bad workout. My best day was 20 miles.

I wound up losing some weight - 10 lbs. - which wasn't strictly necessary but wasn't a bad thing. My productivity took a hit at the beginning but got back to normal after the first couple of weeks. My energy level went up dramatically after the first month and my general sense of well-being was much improved. Even better, issues I was having with sciatica went away and I would sleep much better.

At my current job I am at a standing desk all day and while it's not nearly as active as my walking desk, it's still working for me.

Some research suggests that it isn't that much better for you (or at all better for you) than a sitting desk, but my personal experience defies that; I'd recommend trying it for a month - commit to it - and see how it works for you.

Though both are hedging as you say, I think both desperately want the other to overwhelmingly succeed. MS on ARM is not competitive due to a complete lack of support for legacy x86 applications and an otherwise uninspired design, so MS wants the world to run on x86 where they have home court advantage. Similarly, while Intel still has mostly better offerings, they cannot extract the desired margins out of such a highly competitive market like ARM where people will go without the very latest semiconductor process and gobs of performance. They want a software ecosystem that demands x86, which only Microsoft really has.

So yes, each has some 'worst case' contingency intended to keep them in the market. Those contingencies are both such long shots and will forever reduce margins even if they are 'successful'. That's why Intel has double downed on engineering with MS about platform sleep states and such without giving Android nearly as much attention (basically just token attention).

Microsoft and Intel should be best friends. They are each others main hope for relevance. Intel competing against the horde of ARM vendors on even ground is not going to end well for Intel's margins no matter how much share they hypothetically get. In much the same way that MS is nothing without the momentum of decades of x86-only applications, Intel isn't much without MS applications. Well, Intel's products are a bit respectable in their own right, but the primary driver of their large margin is the x86 ecosystem where MS is ubiquitous.

Intel may be hedging their bets to try to assure they aren't completely left behind in an Android-centric world, but I wager they are strongly hoping for MS to provide a software platform experience on x86 that is too compelling to overlook. I will say that even the 'best' Android apps I deal with are pretty crappy ( having to mysteriously be killed because it hangs, sometimes needing their persistent storage wiped because it has no idea how to work back to working state from whatever state it stored persistently). Even chrome randomly decides 'I'm just going to stop being able to render certain pages altogether'. It's bizarre, since on Windows and Linux desktops I don't see nearly as much wonkiness from many of the exact same application vendors doing about as equivalent a product as can be imagined. For a given price, I'd honestly prefer an x86 tablet so long as secureboot can be disabled to run platforms I have a great deal of familiarity with.