But all of this information comes from the same government that executed him. Its very likely he was involved, but did his involvement rise to the level of a capital crime? Is there even a death sentence for conspiracy to commit murder?

"al-Aulaqi declared himself an enemy combatant and a member of a group which we are at war with"

Did he? How do you know?

That IS a major turning point. There is a huge difference between occasionally killing people in secret and declaring that the government has the right to kill citizens without a trial. Secret killings need to be limited in number or they can't be kept secret. Once execution without trials is in the open, what limits the numbers?

If you are in a state of war with a country, within some limits it is expected that you can kill people in that country. Where things get complicated is when you are in an ill defined state of hostility against a non-state organization like Al Qaeda. What are the rules on declaring someone to be part of that organization and there for a military target? While this question applies to any possible targets, it is especially troublesome when the target is an american citizen. The government cannot execute an american citizen without a trial. Can it declare an american citizen to be a member of a foreign military and then execute them? This would seem to completely bypass the constitutional right to a fair trial.

In a standard state-war it is fairly simple: If they are in an enemy country it is OK to kill them in the same way that it was OK to kill anyone else in that country. An american arrested for treason in the US on the other hand would get a trial. In a conventional state war you don't bomb countries that are not enemy states.

The level of activity to be considered a target for execution is also a tricky question. It is clearly OK to return fire if fired upon. When his actions are less direct it becomes more difficult.

At the root of all this is that the concept of "war" has changed and laws have not kept up with 21st century wars.

The technology development would be really valuable if you believe in a future for human presence in space (which I do, but which I admit is an almost religious belief). The actual asteroid capture on the other hand seems like a difficult but not particularly interesting stunt. 10M isn't really an asteroid, its a rock. Rocks that size hit the earth regularly.

Personally I'd rather see the solar-electric propulsion developed for large probes, especially an Europa lander / rover, and maybe a Titan lander or boat. The manned launch capability is fine if we are working toward a Mars mission (which I hope we are).

Manned space isn't about science and never was. Neither are the pyramids, the Olympics, National parks, fireworks displays, Christmas, Karaoke, or a huge variety of other things we spend tons of money doing. These things, like manned space flight, are more of a goal, rather than a means.

Shouldn't this be a case of criminal collusion? At the very least it seems punitive damages are appropriate, and those could far exceed the nominal damage done.

A number of labs like SLAC have a salvage department that collects old, but sometimes still functional equipment. If you are associated with an educational institution you might be able to get some of this stuff for free. It will be old but probably fine for some types or student experiments .

The difference between talking about something and doing it is the difference between amusing talk and a crime. We've also talked about putting bitcoin miners in all the high power FPGAs we use for real time feedback. The thing is that we DIDN'T.

As far as the penalty - this is like any other theft of materials. There must be applicable laws.

I think he was able to leave China because they didn't want him. They presumably had already extracted whatever information they could (if there was any). At that point he was just a liability. They didn't want to "cooperate" with the US, but at the same time didn't see any advantage in creating an incident. They had not reason not to let him go.

Russia presumably did want him in the hopes (true or not) that he had useful intelligence information with him. They probably decided that he made a useful political playing chip as well.

The US bungled this really badly. By to aggressively trying to retrieve Snowdon they made it clear that his allegations were largely true and attracted a huge amount of media attention. Something along the lines of "A low level NSA employee has defected to Russia. We can't comment on whether or not he had any sensitive information. He had been showing signs or stress recently. We are negotiating with the Russians for his return", followed by the traditional "no comment" on any of the issues Snowdon raised would probably have worked a lot better.

Of course even better would to not have had the NSA act in a way that if caught would do substantial damage to US interests .

Its not just cars - the F35 fighter plane has touch screen controls!

If you think manipulating a touch screen on a bumpy road is bad, imagine trying to do it while making 6-G turns in a fighter. In turbulence I sometimes have trouble hanging onto physical knobs on my 50 year old Beechcraft.

At SLAC we have installed real physical knobs to control the accelerator and they work. Operators can look at displays and have the tactile feedback of moving a control. It speeds up machine tuning.

Touch screens are a way to save money, but in most cases do not improve the user interface.

(Damn kids,, don't know how to design a UI like they did in my day....and the music they listen to.....grumble).

Is it a race between a Corvette and a Taurus, or is it a comparison of two different designs of battleships? I don't think the problem with the F35 is that it is a bad plane, but that it may not be a good weapon for 21st century wars.

  It might be a great weapon if China decides to invade Taiwan with thousand of troop ships, but that doesn't seem likely. Far more likely that China would use a combination of economic pressure, support of internal rebellions, cyber warfare, and possibly drones if they wanted control of Taiwan. Iraq has shown that while a technological advanced country can easily defeat the armed forces of a less advanced, less powerful country, the real difficulty is to actually extract any sort of lasting value from that victory.

Improved weapons would not have improve the US position in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or the Ukraine. War is different in the 21st century.

Its not really an "asteroid", its a rock and not a very big one. We are talking about moving something the size of your living room, not a dinosaur-killer certainly not Ceres. . We have lots of fragments from meteors already.

Its OK, but it seems like a lot of work to move the entire rock here rather than just collect interesting samples and bring them back.

As the article said, it doesn't seem to really develop much interesting technology.

There is some Pt in asteroids, but no where near enough to pay for this type of effort.

IF (current poster is not an idiot)
AND
(current post appears to support a stupid idea),
THEN
(post is SNARK).

So what they really need is a stupidity detector - which might be a great invention except that it would be on all of the time.

Wish I had mod points, I think this is the key:

I recently switched to Win 8, and the problem is not so much that it is worse that win7 but that it is different . I know how to do everything I want in win7, now I need to learn new ways to do the same things. Since I still need win 7 at work, I need to remember the old ones as well. This takes time and slows down my work. In return for that time I get.....well pretty much nothing. I haven't found any way in which the win8 interface is better than win7, its just different.

For the folks that say I should "learn new things" - I'm happy to learn new INTERESTING things, but figuring out where in various menus and "charms" Microsoft has hidden functionality is just not interesting, it is a pure waste of time.

Oh, and win 8 is really ugly with no aero - feels like windowing from 10 years ago. Doesn't hurt productivity, but it is UGLY.

Google (along with the NSA, CIA, FBI, Chinese Government and a hoard of others) all know everything I do. Why are the ads I see so badly targeted? I spend lots of money online and in the real world, and I can't remember the last time saw an ad for something I actually wanted. When ads are targeted they are always late - ads for hotels in cities I've just left, ads for new computers or cars just after I've bought one.