Wow.

It's a massive interruption of society with the deaths of millions to billions of people. Why do you presume there'll be useful scrap metal or functional parts to salvage? It's not a civilization on/off switch. After the dust settles, after people somehow survive, how much do you think will be left over from the fall, however it might happen? Stores would be looted, anyone who maintained order is going to vigorously defend it. It's very unlikely you're just going to scrounging up usable metals, fuels and tools to smelt them with, etc.

If something would make your life easier, then the first assumption is that almost everyone else already figured that out and was looting it during whatever calamity was in the midst of happening. Can you even go near the cities? Ground zero for people who will be resource deprived well beyond their local ability to support themselves?

This presumes you have access to magnets. That's...not a given, since you need iron working. Iron working is actually hard to bootstrap - it's why the bronze age preceded it.

Dyssentry usually isn't fatal. Usually.

I'd worry more about getting rid of those then the value of X-prize things.

Bingo. There's a lot of people who are willing to declare the unpaid volunteers don't know what they're doing...but have absolutely no patience to try and contribute or agitate for change from within. Which really makes me wonder whether they'd have the wherewithall to run a new project, or you know, do anything at all.

Code that gets written gets run.

In every single one of those cases, the people involved were notionally involved with groups which planned active hostilities against the US government. Notionally. I am not speaking to the specific validity of those claims.

They weren't accused of general espionage. And in one of them, they were collateral damage in an attack which was targeted at someone else. Which, in a program of systemic strikes, is likely to happen.

They weren't accused of espionage. And they weren't now free and clear of being plotting against the US government or its citizens. Snowden's position is rather different - no one's beating the drum for "he's planning to attack the US".

But, since you clearly want to wear your outrage on your sleeve since again, you omitted rather important aspects of your own links, I'm done here.

Moreover, physics is built on this very principle - gauge symmetry requires that any system of units and measurement should experience a gauge forces which would smooth it out to be equivalent to any other system of units and measurement.

Seems plausible you could construct a very very obtuse system which would assume the Earth is a stationary point.

Of course it would also work for any other planet.

It's comments like this that remind me that all the people who think they're so much smarter then everyone else, are exactly as pliable as the "masses" they think they're smarter than.

If you want to simply outrage theatre yourself, the internet has plenty of echo chambers to choose from. Otherwise you might want to engage with what's actually said, because in case you hadn't noticed, your "side" isn't really in charge of much of anything at the moment.

In every single case you just cited, the allegations are "bearing arms against the united states" and all the grey area that involves (except the last one, which was collateral damage and not targeted). I mean you don't mention that 9 other people were killed in the same strike.

Setting aside everything about those cases that is a grey area, the central issue was still "may be bearing arms, or conspiring to bear arms, against the United States".

Snowden hasn't done that. He's committed a bunch of espionage, but he's also well out of the way of areas which have active hostilities in them. People forget Yemen is hardly a particularly peaceful place at the best of times.

This is a lot of words without actually explaining why one problem (display latency) is not a suitable proxy for the thing you call the actual problem (perceptive latency).

They're obviously related, but one of these we can measure directly, the other we cannot. Ergo, we get our proxy suitably low until we find a point where the trade-offs are acceptable.

The malice quote though is essentially a re-statement of Occam's razor.

It's most pertinent when people are proposing a conspiracy theory involving dozens to hundreds of informed actors moving in unison, then just the happenstance alignment of failure at any given moment.

The thing is, in politics, you're not actually multiplying logical entities without necessity: often, malice and incompetence is simply determining whether a single actor knowingly acted, or accidentally acted. And worse, because it's frequently all opinion and rhetoric, malice oftentimes just involves the will to later take advantage of the results of incompetence - which again, might just be one person saying one thing, and not another.

It makes you an idiot because you think anyone who disagrees with you on contentious issues is.

You're not willing to think they might have a valid opinion if it even slightly differs from yours in tone or content. Which is why you're going to be constantly confused as to why all the "idiots" are always in charge. Which would be my other pro-tip: if everyone seems like an idiot, then actually just you are.

At the very least, presuming even that your opinions are correct - the fact you assume everyone who is against you is weak of mind will lead to you being constantly politically outmanoeuvred because you will consistently underestimate your opponents.

Why would they kill him?

Seriously. The number of "oh this person will be totally 'disappeared'" statements that never come to pass is ridiculous.

The reality here is no one cares what Edward Snowden does. He's a PR pain-in-the-ass and little else. He may have claimed to have "gotten everything" but the only things which would actually justify killing him would be if he had intel on ongoing operations and could actually put people's lives directly in danger - but every intelligence agency treats that type of information as a whole extra level of different to just "China is doing this". And even then - it's easier to cancel operations then it is to try and kill someone, since unless you get them right away, you still have to assume all your operations are compromised.

Governments just don't act like conspiracy theorists think they do, but Edward Snowden has the problematic future ahead of him of getting to live his days out not being trusted to work IT in Russia.