Here's a video of the actual thing, not just an animation.

It's how the Internet works. To quote directly from the experts: A target's phone call, e-mail or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path.

Physical distance is not as important as congestion on the routes. So it might very well be that your data takes a much longer path that what you'd think, simply because it uses the fastest way, not the shortest.

Angela Merkel's approach is pretty idiotic, and it cannot fix the problems. First of all, most emails are routed through the US either because the sender or the recipient has an American email provider (Germans love Gmail, too). Secondly, even if that is not the case, can you be sure that the NSA doesn't spy on traffic in Frankfurt? It wouldn't surprise me.

Only true end-to-end encryption can be a solution. The government in Germany is currently pushing for DE-Mail, which relies on transport encryption only. So that means that your email provider can still snoop and so can the German government, which is probably the reason why they designed it like that in the first place. End-to-end encryption would have been possible, especially since the German government is spending much money rolling out their own PKI, with keys for every citizen right on their new national ID card.

There's a presentation about DE-Mail from last December's Chaos Communication Congress, it's worth watching (video also has an audio track with English translations).

Compare it to any violation of rights you wish. The GP's assertion that corporate profits trump rights is pants on head crazy.

Well, the money is flowing along that highway. Hope you are willing to financially wither for your unrealistic and unsustainable ideals.

You could have said the same thing about slavery, child labor, anything OSHA regulates, etc. What's good for corporations is not the same as what's good for people.

We would have LOVED to support the standard and commit code back, but the restrictions on our own code were unsustainable

In other words, your project could not be viable without oppressing your users. Sounds like good riddance.

While theoretically GPL could subsume BSD code produced from the collaboration

Yeah, ask Theo DeRaadt about that.

Today's anti-missile systems will be useful for many years to come.

Are today's anti-missile systems useful? Or are they just meant for posturing? I remember during the first Gulf War that not a single PATRIOT missile shot down a SCUD. Is there anything better today?

Slashdot has long been in decline anyway. They are taking the risk of driving everyone away, in the hopes of attracting a new audience. It won't work, but I can see how it is at least a rational attempt to recover some of their sunk costs.

if you think they're ticketing for something they *know* isn't a crime

Whether they know it or not is irrelevant. Every person falsely accused deserves compensation. If charges are dropped, dismissed, or you are acquitted, you deserve 100% of any costs you incurred because of the accusation.

This ruling won't stop cops from ticketing you, forcing you to leave work to appear in court, and paying the court costs after the ticket is dismissed. Cops can and do write invalid tickets simply to be dicks, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Our justice system needs to ensure that the victim of a false accusation of a crime is made whole again.

So, hook the nuclear power plant up to batteries, a flywheel, or pump some water uphill for hydroelectric when needed. Or shit, just provision for maximum capacity and release waste heat when it's not all needed. This is not a serious practical objection to nuclear power.

Creationists, in my experience, would be happy to be corrected on actual, observable, testable science

In my experience, creationists believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Try correcting them about what the fossil record actually shows, you won't get anywhere.

an atheist believes there is no God, so any option that leads to a God conclusion must be false

Not true at all. I've never met an atheist with an active belief in the absence of gods. Not even Richard Dawkins goes so far. What atheists do is withhold belief until there is evidence, and no evidence exists for the existence of any god or gods.