I didn't say killing. I said murder. There's a difference.

Publishing documents may or may not be legal. Espionage is always illegal. See the difference?

"As long as it would be inconvenient to prosecute anybody else, they will kill the messenger if they can get a hold of him."

Well, to be fair, the act of being the messenger is what makes espionage illegal.

You are already guaranteed a right to a fair trial. It's not something that the AG can "add to" or deny. Compare a trial in the US to a trial in, say, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the territories controlled by ISIS/ISIL. Even some of the most egregious examples of non-impartial trials in the US seem fair in comparison to treatment of suspected anti-government persons in those states.

The problem is that Snowden's version of "Fair" and the general standard of "Fair" in the US are still probably fairly widely separated. He would probably like whistleblower status for everything, ignoring the parts of classified documents he released which were sensitive but not necessary to indicate the underlying problems he wanted to expose. He would probably like the damage he did to the US relationship with its allies to be inadmissible, along with the potential tactical advantage gained by other states as a result of the massive, unfiltered release of classified US intelligence documents.

I think he should really spend his effort working on his Russian and praying that Putin never grown tired of him.

What part of "releasing classified documents" doesn't he understand? It's pretty obvious he violated US law. Fair and impartial won't change that outcome.

You may argue that the law is bad, or that the purpose of his actions was noble. That same may be said of killing [insert bad guy]. It doesn't make the murder legal, it may only lessen the sentence. I'm not sure when facing the death penalty, that life without parole in a federal penitentiary is going to be that much more appealing if your goal is to live out your life in the United States without constantly being under the thumb of the government.

Must be after 4.4.2, because I have access to AppOps on my device. Still, it would be a shame to lose this if I move to v5.

Wait...TWO icons in one? How the fuck are users going to parse that? A picture and a gear - does that mean it automatically opens the file? A picture and a hamburger? A picture and a small bird? A document and two lines with a dot between them?

Users will screw things up no matter how you do it because there is no common language for executable, text file, picture, slide, pdf, rich text, etc. And with the propensity for UI designers to change the look of icons just to be "new and hip" with every other OS release (ex: settings icons), the users will never "catch up" before accidentally "executing" what they think is a picture file.

Segregated emails annoying? Are you kidding me? I go out of my way to keep personal and business emails separate, to the point of having a stock"bounce" email I send to people who accidentally send to the wrong email address. Same with phone numbers - one personal, one business.

She's either lazy or evil. Given it's Hillary, I'm going to split the difference and call it both. Too lazy to have two emails, just evil enough to know that if she says something awful she can at least delete it from her end. (I mean, every email goes somewhere so it's not like you can delete all of the copies yourself.)

As a (mostly) Democrat, I sincerely hope she doesn't run for President. While I think she has been vilified by the right beyond her actual failings, I'm not a fan of her in general. More importantly, I might get stuck voting for her as a result of some nutjob who makes it through the GOP primaries. Either that or I'll have to write in Bill 'n' Opus.

This is the part of the entire streaming service payout values which artists appear to entirely ignore. Many of my singer/songwriter friends complain about the value of a stream relative to a permanent digital download or CD track cost (50:1 to 400:1 depending on the service and the analysis) as if a "listen" is someone enjoying the track as their primary activity. I suspect it often is neither.

When we talk about things being like 1984, we don't literally mean 1984.

"...could be engineered to show one number to the naked eye and another to an infared sensitive camera?"

Yeah, because intentionally falsifying your license information instead of just selectively obscuring it is so much less illegal.

Payments are paid to the rights holders. Artists get what is in their contract unless they own the rights.

It's one reason the artists are so up in arms - they're getting shit because they have shit contracts. Well, that and they're just the performer. They think they should get all the money. But that would be like paying an architect $1,000,000 for your house and paying the builder and subcontractors nothing. It doesn't work that way.

Look on the bright side. In 100 years, you'll be able to listen to Jumpin Jack Flash for free, assuming they don't extend copyrights again.

That's what the artists are not considering. In the best of cases, the entire production team: artists, writers, producers, promoters, will never average more than about $0.55-0.60 per track for a CD or permanent digital download. Pandora pays the cost of a permanent individual license, valuable for the life of the author plus 70 years by copyright law, after just 320 listens. Spotify in less than 90 listens. I'm finding it hard to see the economic case that an ephemeral transmission for 3 minutes is worth more than 1/90th-1/320th of the value of a permanent download good for 100 or more years with no limits on the number of times it can be played.

BUT radio plays that song to millions of devices simultaneously, whereas P & S play to a single device. If it's listens we're worried about (and that is what this is about), it would take Pandora 5.7 years for a million people to consecutively listen to that 3 minute Lady Gaga, but radio can distribute the same amount of listens in just 3 minutes.

Performers get zero payments for songs played on the radio (http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2014/08/didnt-know-radio-royalties/). The authors of the songs (music and lyrics) do get paid. The payments to the rights holders (authors) of the music get paid from radio at a rate which is somewhere around $0.0003 per listener (give or take about 300% - source: http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/...).

In contrast, a permanent digital download and a CD (which can be played as many times as you like) have the same one time rate of $0.096 per track. This is set by law and is called a mechanical right.

So lets see what kind of relative value we have to a CD or PDD:

One radio listener, one listen = $0.0003, iow a permanent right "breaks even" at 320 listens

For Pandora and Spotify, they have to pay the entire chain - producers, artists, authors, promoters, etc.
If we scale the total fees using an album model, with a typical album costing $9.99 and having 12 tracks, of which 30% goes to the retailer, the value of a "track" is $0.583, or about 6x the amount paid for the author on that track. (you can argue the specifics, but if you're buying tens of millions of CDs worth of songs, you'd better get pricing that it *at least* this good)

So at that 58.3c/permanent track...
One pandora listener, one listen = $0.0014, break even is at 416 listens
One spotify listener, one listen = $0.007, break even us at 83 listens.
Radio has to play that track for 1920 listens to match the total compensation paid by the two streamers.

What does online streaming look like now? Pandora is slightly below Radio in their compensation per track to everyone they pay. You might contend that Pandora "finds" new artists better due to their model instead of radio playing whatever they're given to promote, and therefore provides slightly more value. Spotify, OTOH, lets you choose just what you want - you can play Brittney Spears all day, over and over - and therefore it's more like buying a track. And if you were to hit 83 plays on a track, you'd have been better off just buying the track. 83 plays seems like a lot, but that's over an entire lifetime - actually lifetime plus 70 years in copyright.