Well, Snowden is clearly a pawn, but in some sense so is Putin. Why shouldn't Snowden play this game? His goal is to get some accountability for the US surveillance state and rein it in a bit. So he stirs the pot.

Right now the US and EU are struggling to find an approach they can agree on for dealing with Russia. Snowden brings up the NSA which is a sore subject with the EU, making it harder for the US to get them on-board. If the US ends up agreeing to more transparency or less surveillance in order to get the EU to back more sanctions against Russia, how is that a bad deal for anybody but Putin?

That is REALLY hard to pull off these days. There are only so many people with access to that kind of data, and the NSA/CIA/etc could do quite a bit to try to figure out who he was. If he remained in a country friendly to the US he could have been extradited.

I don't think he went to Russia because he's sympathetic to the Russians. He just knows they would do anything to embarrass the US so they'd be likely to harbor him. This just seems like mutual interest.

Well, it might be hypocrisy, but pretty much every nation both engages in espionage and outlaws it at the same time. That's how it has worked since as long as anybody can tell. Some nations admit that they do it, some don't, but they basically all do it anyway. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vatican engaged in espionage.

Do the cells not form a blastula? The article was a bit fuzzy on the details. If these form embryonic stem cells it just seems like a matter of degree to outright produce a whole embryo, which of course means the possibility of human cloning.

Well, I can't say that my SSD sustains much more read/write throughput than my 4-drive 2-copies-per-block RAID1ish btrfs. It certainly seeks faster. Maybe my SSD just isn't particularly fast.

Hardly. The office I work at has about 7k people working at, in a suburb 20 miles from the major city (which isn't NYC). It used to have over 10k - mostly with STEM majors. Sure, most of them wouldn't work at Google, but the point is that you can find people with advanced skills in suburbs. Quite a few are willing to drive a fair distance to get there as well, but with a LOT less hassle than a commute into a major city.

2,567 hours just to read the US Federal Tax law, which is 120% of a work year if your full time job was to read that Law. And just think of your joy when you find out next year laws are changed (not amended) and grows at a frightening rate. 26,300 pages in 1984, to 54,846 by 2003, to 67,204 in 2007, and 73,954 today. Reference.

We already have very advanced containment systems. There's nothing about them that would be unsuitable for oceanic use, aside from requiring a whole lot of floatation. The containment system at Fukushima wasn't even close to modern, yet it did a pretty good job anyhow. Hell, the system at Three Mile Island contained nearly all the radioactive material, and that was 35 years ago.

With even the Mark 1 containment building found at Fukushima (which was 40 years old; the same age as TMI), an incident like Chernobyl (which had *no* containment building) wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Compared to modern containment buildings though, Mark 1 isn't even *last* generation; it's outright obsolete.

Still, it's a reasonable proof-of-concept in many ways. Scaling it up and using a tethered platform instead of a mobile isn't a trivial engineering exercise, but we already know how to produce multi-GW nuclear plants. This gives us a good, safe place to put them. It also means they don't have to go sucking up precious river water for their heat exchangers and cooling towers; the ocean is as big a heat sink as we could hope for on Earth.

Spending 2 minutes reading Feinstein's Wiki page discounts any possible claim you have of "extraordinary". You could not possibly be claiming that everything I stated was dependent on Feinstein explicitly stating one sentence in one way, because that would be idiocy.

Here are One, two, three references, all of politicians calling for the death of Snowden (and one of those contains 6 references).

I can not find the exact quote from Feinstein either, but this is not uncommon nor does it make my statement wrong. Feinstein called Snowden a traitor, which has a punishment of the death penalty. If Feinstein was not a supporter of the death penalty I may cut some slack. Her Wiki page speaks for her very well.

Even assuming she did not state "kill him" directly, there is a very obvious indirect statement by her calling him a traitor (on numerous occasions).

There is no difference, sorry. Obama is not talked poorly about in US media. Anyone that talks negatively tends to be labelled a racist almost immediately.

In the last week the only things I have heard regarding President Obama in broadcast media are that he talked to Putin about the Ukraine, and that he's coming to town for a yet another fund raiser. I can not possibly watch all 3 major stations all the time (obviously) but do try and rotate stations. It's possible someone did question or talk poorly about him and I didn't watch during that time, but I have severe doubts.

Last I checked, Google is not broken. Start with Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, then see who's on the boards of every media company in the US. This is really not hard to figure out, if you care to look. If you don't care about the facts at least have the decency not to muddy the waters for people that do.

Are you falsely trying to claim that the only possible way to organize a message is by one person disseminating information? Perhaps you are trying to claim that "Don't talk about Gitmo in a negative way, or ignore Gitmo completely." could not possibly be directed, and the only way to direct a message is revoke individually? Either way, your false assumption is just that. False.

OO once had a calculator and mail program. Why not simply bring it back?

They supply steering wheels for the Model S.

I still don't understand why he went to Russia. Iceland is a much more liberal, democratic country and welcomes whistle-blowers. He would be fairly safe from the US there.