Women make safer choices. That's better if safety and stability are higher priorities. Men make riskier choices that come with greater potential rewards; some obtain the rewards and some fall flat on their faces. Neither choice is "better" without looking at what matters to the person making that choice.

Freedom of speech exists to protect the most disgusting, offensive, disturbing, and unpopular speech. It does not exist to protect speech that is not objectionable, as such speech does not need protection in the first place. Production of video constitutes a form of speech; content is irrelevant. The concept of "obscenity" does not exist in the First Amendment and its existence anywhere in the body of statutory and case law as an excuse to penalize people for unpopular speech runs strongly against the entire purpose of the First Amendment.

Or someone who is aware that that audience exists and is fairly large. I'm not part of it but I don't have to be to know it's size is significant.

I saw video last week of one defector sending largish bundles of "The Interview" DVDs over the DMZ with large plastic bags filled with helium.

Do you not remember people comparing Bush to a chimpanzee?

I remember that well. It was extremely insulting -- to chimpanzees. Chimps are highly intelligent creatures.

The monkey thing is only racist if a white person calls a black person a "monkey".

However, this incident has North Korea comparing Obama to a monkey, so it can't be racist. Many people here in the US believe it's impossible for non-white people to be racist.

Don't worry, it won't. The very LAST thing an enemy in your asymmetric war would want is you to stop using them. They cost insane amounts of money to keep them flying. Every hour that thing is in the air is running for your enemy.

Again, the asymmetric war is not about killing Americans. It is about making them spend more money on its military than it can. Interestingly enough, exactly the same strategy the US employed against Russia in the cold war.

And we know how that ended.

As I explained above, the tests don't show whether the student is learning. The tests show whether the student understood the underlying system. I can honestly say that I don't have any clue about bookkeeping despite allegedly learning it for 5 years and passing with a B average.

Tests have a fundamental flaw that they are testing whether you can work as a sponge. Soak up any and all crap and reproduce it at request, without the need to retain anything of it for any longer period of time.

Well, the US (unlike the Reich) pretty much has to go high-tech with its army, simply because high losses would quickly mean that support for any kind of war would decline sharply. Not really a problem for a dictatorship, but certainly one in a democracy. So what the US strives for is a high-tech army that reduces the risk of losing personnel and instead favors spending money. Which would be a great thing if it was done with the main goal of protecting soldier lives rather than keeping home front war support up. But not the point right now.

So in general it's not a bad idea to use better technology instead of more manpower. The problem arises when your enemy can do the opposite with impunity as we see in asymmetric warfare. The US need a huge infrastructure and logistics apparatus to keep its military going, the overhead is incredible. It boggles the mind to ponder just what is necessary to get the average US soldier in the field supplied. With this in mind it can be successful to actually wage war against such a huge military machine, simply by spending a tiny fraction of its expenses and hence weighing it down under its own weight. If putting a gun in the hands of some fanatics is all you have to do to "force" the US to field aircraft carriers and deploy field HQs in some godforsaken corner of the planet (which both needs incredibly complicated logistics and tons of resources to keep running), you can get the international warfare equivalent of a reflected DDoS running: Invest minimal resources that forces your target to waste more resources than they can afford.

There have been a lot of follow-ons to that too. People complain that kids sit their butts in front of video games and grow fat, but forget the reason. It's not that 'kids these days' are born lazy. It's that now that neighborhoods do not generally have a number of adults home at any given time, kids are strictly forbidden to go outside after school. They are under strict orders to lock themselves inside but no 'rough housing' (meaning running around engaged in physical activities).

Gee, I wonder why they don't exercise? What ever could be getting them in the habit of chatting online when they could walk two doors down and talk face to face?

If we as a nation want kids to value physical activity and going outside, we better fix the screwed up work/life balance until there are responsible adults at home again.

Don't underestimate the F-35 with a US pilot. The airframe may or may not be competitive against the opposition but I suspect the training will be.

It's the combination that counts. It's why I'm not terribly concerned by the UK selling our top arms to other countries: we'll just be so much better at actually using them.

How is he stereotyping anyone besides the general populace? He never claimed that average American users were any more tech-savvy. The idea that average phone users in any country are going to be savvy enough to use technical means to bypass these roadblocks is just silly.

Good universities teach you how to learn. It's a skill that isn't necessarily obvious, and isn't inherent to people that can become utterly awesome at other things if they know how to learn how to improve.

Anyway, your overall premise is clearly and demonstrably flawed. Great sports coaches are seldom as good as the people they coach, but they still help them get better.

I don't need to be able to intuitively apply knowledge and experience to know that piece of knowledge and experience in applying it are important, and I can share that wisdom with someone capable of intuitively grasping the concepts and applying them.

I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do. I do continually train myself and learn new things - and one key way of doing that is to listen to people that I can learn from. They already have the answers, and one thing I have learned is not to waste my time on solved problems.

Oddly, I probably largely can. Very few (if any) countries on the planet would refuse me residency.

Many of them would require me to have a job in an in-demand field first, but that's not a massive problem.

Many wouldn't. I could just sell everything and go live there. Buy a mansion, with what my current house is worth - not because it's worth a lot, but because it's only not worth a lot locally.