This is just a mountain made out of a molehill by leftists who are fans of the government of Cuba and don't like when Western governments try to undermine it. I have news for them: doing things like this is the intelligence agencies' *job*. They're supposed to spy; that's why they're called spy agencies, and Cuba couldn't be a more deserving target.

If Cuba doesn't do such things itself, it's only because of lack of budget in these post-Soviet days, not lcak of scruples. (Remember when Cuba used to send "advisors" to Africa?)

(Would I like it if Cuba did that here? No, of course not. But I wouldn't like it if Cuba dropped bombs on us either, yet I'm not foolish enough to say that it's immoral to drop bombs on another country.)

Perhaps nerds see Wil Wheaton as an example of someone acting in a socially awkward manner. Playing the role of a universally hated character is pretty much as socially awkward as you can possibly be when you're someone in the national media, after all.

Reeasing things in dribs and drabs has benefits, though. It probably keeps the public's interest more than releasing the whole thing as a lump; even if public interest is down because of exhaustion, it's probably not as far down as it would be if nothing had been released in a year.

The other reason is that it makes it harder for the government to lie. If you release a document, the government can't lie and deny it because they don't know that maybe tomorrow you'll release a document that could expose the lie. If you release the whole thing in a lump, they could just carefully tailor the lie to match the existing releases.

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to supercede State or local health regulations." I wonder what the state regulations are.

"All parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue" isn't legally binding on anyone who might later decide to sue the company. At best it might make lawsuits harder depending on what the exact liability rules are. Furthermore, even if they win the lawsuit, fighting one will cost money and bad publicity, especially when the newspapers can use the spin "it's from a plant that was condemned for salmonella poisoning, how irresponsible can this megacorp be?"

If they give away the peanut butter, they stand to lose quite a bit with nothing to gain except a little good publicity (said good publicity going down the toilet if anyone actually sues).

In this context, arbitrarily modding down a post and then being modded up to +5 insightful becomes insightful in the process, because it's a demonstration of how easy it is to abuse a reputation system, and the article is about--wait--reputation systems.

In short: Whoosh.

Of course movie studios don't want their own DVD sales being undermined, but they already allow Netflix to "compete" with the studios own DVD sales by offering physical DVDs for rent, so why wouldn't they allow them to offer virtual DVDs for rent in exactly the same way?

Bennett is apparently clueless enough not to have heard of first-sale.

Studios don't "allow" Netflix to compete by offering physical DVDs for rent. The law allows Netflix to do that and the studios cannot legally stop them (that's how first sale works). The law does not allow Netflix to offer "virtual DVDs".

I remember when Bennett first came here as a teenager. He seemed relatively clued-in for a teenager. Unfortunately, as he got older, his clue level didn't go up and is below par for an adult.

The interviewer who is worth working for is the one willing to give him a job in which he can earn money to eat and pay rent.

He has 12 years of experience. He just needs the degree to get past bureaucrats who toss his resume in the garbage because they automatically toss out the resume of everyone without a degree. For him, a degree *is* just a line item on a resume.

Doesn't even looking at this source code create a minefield for open source developers? If you look at the source code, Microsoft can scrutinize all your open-source contributions claiming that since you read Microsoft's source code, you can't suddenly forget everything you learned, so all your contributions to open-source software are tainted by your knowledge. It will be impossible to prove otherwise. This may mean that if you look at Microsoft's source code, you are barred for life from working on the Linux kernel or anything even remotely related to operating systems. It could even affect your ability to get a job.

Notice how he snuck "nationalism" in there?

If nothing else, this is an excellent example of how the race and gender warriors aren't going to stop at race and gender. Suddenly nationalism becomes equivalent to wanting to keep black people as slaves and women in the kitchen. What next, will they complain about capitalism in games?

Characters who are physically disabled don't appear in games because the kind of things that characters do in games tend to involve a lot of physical activity. How's someone who can't walk going to be jumping over obstacles? How's someone who can't see going to be shooting things?

And your idea about dark skin is particularly ridiculous.

1) "Dark skin" is exactly worded, because if you were to say "non-white" it would be obvious that games made in Japan have Japanese characters, who are non-white.
2) At any rate, Japan has few black people and you would not expect to see any in Japanese games except as a percentage of the Westerner-type characters, who in turn are only a small portion of all the characters.
3) Street Fighter II contains a black character, an Indian character, and several non-Japanese Asians and it comes from 1991. I suppose "recently" means "within 23 years"?
4) A lot of games, especially games from before "recently", have characters who are not human and so can't be black. Exactly what race is Sonic the Hedgehog or the ship from Defender? A lot more games have characters drawn with such few pixels that you have no way to tell what race they are unless you say "that pixel has a brightness of under 50 so it's dark enough that the character is probably black".

Oh, and Constantine is based on a comic. Gabriel is white in the comic.

It doesn't really matter _why_ there was a problem.

It does if you're playing the sexism card and the problem is real but not sexism.

Why would people file complaints of actual police misconduct when there's no camera available, but suddenly stop filing those complaints when the camera was there (even if the footage was "lost")?

Some reports are real and some are fake. Cameras reduce the number of fake reports, but they don't reduce the number of real reports (since the police will "lose" the recording in a real incident). The end result is that the total number of reports of police misconduct goes down, but actual police misconduct doesn't go down.

Even Ellsberg went to congress.

Ellsberg is on record saying that Snowden did the right thing.