Kindly point us to your magical gaming laptop that handles graphics and games "better than most gaming desktops". Quite a few of us are looking for such a machine, and sadly it does not exist yet.

This gets more warped. It would likely be illlegal to produce certain data on EU citizens like this according to EU privacy directive. Company would be forced to choose to either follow US law or EU law, as these would be at odds with one another.

I can see policy like this bringing current globalization trend to a screeching halt as companies would split to have daughter companies incorporated and operating only in certain countries to shield them against this kind of abuse.

Dear NSA PR agent. You are behind the times. Snowden already released the files debunking your current lies. The current line is that "yes, we conduct dragnet surveillance, we just don't look at it", and "yes, it resulted in oppression of innocents on occasions, but that has been rare and couldn't be helped and we don't really want to talk about it".

Yes.

Here's one example of several average, innocent Europeans severely affected by extraordinary rendition. CIA "woops grabbed the wrong guy".
There are several examples of this.

http://www.france24.com/en/201...

And holy crap, "he could actually fight the decision after they broke into his home with heavy assault weapons, and so on, and almost got him extradited post haste". Clearly a sign of benevolent US not threatening citizens of other countries.

Hey dumbass. It may be normal for insane person like you that police can smash its way into your home with assault weapons, beat you up, smash your place and break your business. It's not normal around here however. We are not anywhere near as deep into the police state insanity that US is, and it would be really nice if you stopped imagining that "just because we do it to our own people, we're entitled to do it to everyone else as well".

The answer to that question requires you to define which specific traits you're asking for. If you're referring to "dragnet surveillance", that would probably be between 2000 and 2010 (time when most of the programs revealed by Snowden started to function). If it's about militarization of police and police having a right to break into your house and shoot you dead at any given moment just based on assumption and be indemnified by the law from responsibility as long as they had "a reason to believe there was a crime committed", that would be around 2005-2012 (police militarization and associated legislation). If you have another criteria, you can present it and people more knowledgeable than myself can probably provide you with an answer.

There are several well known cases where people were forcibly extradited or are under a significant threat and pressure to be extradited to US for things that are legal in their country of residence, but illegal in US.

Kim Dotcom comes to mind of the more recent and noted cases, as well as a couple of others.

Then there's the extraordinary rendition program.

Again you act under assumption that this is a purely US project.

Take a look at who is actually footing the bill. The list quite a long one.

You forget that this is not a US, but international project, with several foreign countries financing the development. "Woo, you're paying to create american jobs" is not an argument that is going to sound good in Australia for example.

P.S. F-22 is highly likely going to be better for close air support than F-35. That in spite of having no such capability. Because there is no way for F-35 to have any close air support capability due to its extreme fragility, high minimum air speed and complete lack of ability to loiter.

Project to add attack functionality to F-22 fleet existed, and would have been (and likely still is) far cheaper and more productive than creating a new fighter. That will now apparently cost almost as much as F-22 on top of it. Rafale, Eurofighter and Gripen are viable options as well.

As for "you will never get funding", that is a US POLITICAL choice. The fact remains that CHOICE exists. It's that politicians choose not to exercise that choice for political reasons in one NATO country. Considering that F-35 program has a lot of donors from the countries that are not US, and that without those the project would likely be scrapped as costs would jump further, this is pretty much purely a political problem. Not even a choice, but an actual problem, because many countries paid for F-35 without tenders.

And eventually, it seems that people who made those decisions will be called to answer why, at which point it's fairly likely that we'll have massive corruption trials and jail time for politicians, as well as collapse of the project.

Marines and UK need replacement for Harrier. That means STOVL or full VTOL. At the moment, the only aircraft that meets the requirements is the Harrier and the barely flying version of F-35B as well as Soviet Yak-38 which is no longer in service and cancelled Yak-141 which is the aircraft from which Lockheed Martin licensed the STOVL system from.

Can you please keep your micropolitical bullshit to yourself? This is an adult discussion about real issues.

Again, the "F-35 is the only game in town" clame is a bold faced lie. NATO countries currently operate the following 4.5/5th gen fighter/attack aircraft:
F-22
Rafale
Eurofighter
Gripen

We are spoiled for choice. This is definitely not about that.

In a fight with "real adversary" by your definition, F-35 is the single worst choice of all aircraft, barring downgrade to F-4 or similar, due to its extreme cost. Ignoring the MAD aspect of the issue, if you're facing a massed assault of decent air superiority aircraft in a shitty fighter that has barely any missiles and only frontal stealth, you're dead.

Current fleet at least has a chance because there's enough of air superiority aircraft that have decent to good performance.

And again, you appear to be ignoring the fact that F-35 is a terrible attack aircraft even if we pretend for a moment that Lockheed Martin isn't advertising it as a fighter. Attack aircraft's primary role requires it to have decent operational range and payload. F-35 has neither without external hard points.

And no offence, but in modern world, enemy will know you're coming. Political conflicts that result in massive conflagration between two major states are affairs that take months to appear. And once that happens, spy satellites AWACS aircraft and strategic search radars kick in. Stealth provides little protection from those, you will be spotted. It will only provide protection from fire control radars which cannot get a proper lock due to sensory deprivation, and considering the questionable stealth that F-35 has in the first place and the fact that Russians operate MiG-31s which will be locking on it from above rather than below, F-35 is still pretty much the worst choice.

Why not? US is currently Russia, largely due to complete halt of develpment and massive brain drain after the fall of Soviet Union. That suggests that US has at least ten to fifteen years of head start. If you go into details, Russians probably still lead on aerodynamics and engines or are about even due to two decades of lost development. US has a massive lead in its traditional advantages of logistics, production and avionics.

US most definitely has the time to develop something else. That argument is quite ridiculous.

The main argument here is cancellation of F-35 program because of structural failures of the program mentioned above, and usage of F-35 development to create three separate aircraft for each branch (carrier based fighter/bomber, airforce strike focused fighter bomber and marines STOVL strike focused fighter/bomber).

This would also solve the problem with Lockheed Martin becoming an effective monopoly for future fighter production in US as tenders could be given to separate companies.