If you want a bit more background on defending and prosecuting political prisoners, I would suggest to read this article from Harvard Law:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Those links are also very interesting read:

http://www.pjvoice.com/v52/520...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Here are several links that are public knowledge. I know some cases personally, which I don't want to mention because I don't want to get associated with them publicly. There is more than 200 names in these lists:

http://www.thejerichomovement....
http://www.voxfux.com/features...
https://denverabc.wordpress.co...
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-...

I am not even including any of the whistleblowers or the Guantanamo prisoners in this list. But both of those categories are political prisoners.

I know how the story goes. I name people, then you say that is exception, so I name 3 more, you say that means nothing, it is still rare, so I name more and you say that well, Russia is still worse. There is always going to be some argument with you that will make it seem like everything is just fine. I don't care. If you are a troll, it won't stop you from trolling, if you are really a concerned citizen, you can do your own research and you will trust that more than you'd trust me here anyway.

I could have predicted it from mile away, anytime the arguments start to be hard for the spooks, they Godwin the discussion. :)

Yes, that has been the US mantra. You have a freedom of speech. But the thing is, you don't. Post of slashdot does not matter at all and where the speech matters, there it is viciously prosecuted. And if you did nothing wrong, well, everybody did something wrong. But even if you did not, who will question the authorities when they said they found a HDD full of child porn on your computer? Or that they find out you were enabling payment system for drug dealers? You will get railroaded and it won't even look political. That is how US operates. It leaves people to speak their mind because it does not matter. They can shout themselves to death. They just need to nab the few leaders of any of such effort, jail them on drug charges and are done with it. Or would you want to say that you mean to do some action beyond the words? No. You won't.

All it takes when the discussion heats up is sending couple trolls like you, who will start to peddle the freedom of speech argument and people will think: "Well, its not so bad when they let me say all those bad things about them." They just need a reason to justify for themselves why they do nothing about it. And you are conveniently supplying it.

Free Press, Human Rights, Rule of Law. Those are nice phrases. You say Russia has problem with those but compared to whom? I don't see free press in US, I don't see human rights observed, I don't see rule of law. So when you want to criticize someone meaningfully, you have to have a basis for comparison.

Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Stephen Jim-Woo Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Bradley Manning, Shamai Leibowitz, Lawrence Franklin

But the main travesty is the 2.2 million imprisoned americans, that is 5 times more per capita than China and even more by 0.5 million in absolute numbers. Those are from over half political prisoners before the law under which they were imprisoned exists for none other than political reasons, since these so called crimes have no actual victims.

You can talk with gays, blacks and immigrants about the human rights violations, you can talk with inmates about the rule of law. You can talk with Rupert Murdoch about the free press. If the same entity buys both press and the government, neither one can be considered free or for the people.

So I only defend Putin because of the hypocrisy implied in your statements. The implicit right you give yourself to criticize others countries for things your own does in abundance. I got no reason to like him personally, but I simply hate what you are doing. You are trying to attack others to put yourself in position where you can claim you are better, but you are not.

You keep ascribing motives to other people based on your assumptions and you think that by repeating it over and over ad nauseam you are going to suddenly become right. That is nothing but empty propaganda and I've heard way too much of it during the last years.

Again, you make a statement like: "Putin's actions to date in many areas have shown him look after himself first" where you don't support it by any evidence and the statement itself is patently untrue and then you make further assumptions based on that. One would almost think you have a vested interest in spreading some sort of propaganda on this site.

If something, everyone, who was actually affected by Putin's action in his country, or nearly everyone (85-90%) actually thinks that Putin has acted in the interest of the country first and they fully support his actions during the last 15 years. Putin in regards to Snowden has followed both Russian and International law to deal with this situation. He is not a tyrant, there are laws in the country that govern what can be done and those were followed. The fact that you fail to grasp even this much says that you are either intentionally lying to promote some point or that you don't understand the situation enough to even make a point.

It does not matter what I do believe and that is precisely the point I was making. We can only judge by actions taken. The fact that you continue argue your assumptions means you've failed to grasp the point.

This subscribes to a cynical one sided view of the world. In regards to Snowden, we only have assumptions on Putin's behavior toward him, while we do have evidence on Obama's behavior towards him. What you do here, is condemn someone based on assumptions, in order to try to protect or justify actions of someone else, who's already done harm. As for the second set of assumptions, we've had a reverse case like that which you advocate with a country similar to Germany, the UK. So there is actual evidence that this is not a preferred scenario for the concerned party.

I wish, Sir, you stopped living in a fantasy world of conclusions reached based on assumptions and joined us in evidence based reality.

Probably because the images are data and databases do data manipulation and normalization in correct design. We usually offload CPU heavy data transformations or impossible to do data transformations into application layer, but that is a break in the design forced on you by constraints. If I said that database converts all integers into INT4 on insert, or all strings into sanitized strings or all XML into JSON format, you would not say a word. Converting images is the same thing.

It is. We all here have 15 years of experience with Microsoft as the Devil and this makes it hard to ever trust them again. Because we did trust them and trust them again and again and again and every single freaking time, they've done something so horrible to break this trust that our very souls have felt like burning in hell.

What do you mean FREE country?

Actually, that is the problem. You can only get let's say ABC, TBS, HBO and FOX. And only some of the shows. If the show is from NBC it will be on Hulu and thats ads only or if the networks don't select the show from their catalog, well it is not there. They decide. Their content right? Well I don't like to be forced into a platform to watch my content. I don't like to be said, this show is only on Amazon Prime and that is not on Apple TV so you gotta go and get another gizmo to watch this. I'd like the networks to decided whether or not they make their content available and what is the price. Then let all the delivery services compete based on their various models. They can present the content to me and the price + whatever delivery fee they charge and let me decide if I pay it or not. Maybe I will like Comcast's Xfinity, maybe I will like Apple TV. Who knows? But I don't like the content to be tied to a particular delivery mechanism. That is something that should be illegal at the very least in case of monopolies like Comcast, etc.

To rent a car from Hertz with camera in it, one has to BE bananas.

I got used to the fact that people like you will say absolutely anything that suits them in an argument, regardless of the veracity or the ability to actually source their claims.