If you can be bothered to look at the demographics, why not also consider the fact that the correlation between education and intelligence is probably significantly less than that between education and social status (pre education).

Mark E. Smith said: "If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall." Beat that, "Autumn"!

Unless you're in Albania, Bulgaria or Macedonia ;)

Not at all! If your ancestry includes members of species that actually have races it's definitely worth mentioning.

Even though I've been using SI all my life and studied physics, I don't think I've ever seen Tg used, even though it would be the logical unit. Unfortunately, the base unit for mass in SI is kilogram. In this case, you'd probably write 9.9 * 10^9kg, to avoid double prefixes. To make things even more confusing, the "tonne" is an accepted non-standard unit within SI, and in many countries it's usually spelled "ton".

The article states that it would take nine metric tons of material to shield a single torus. The table in the original paper says 9.9 Mt. That's megatons, not metric tons. Slight difference...

Congratulations! You won the "What does a Swedish cow with smokers' cough say?" competition. Your signed copy of "Bovine Bronchitis in the Baltics" is in the mail.

Pigs cheek is still considered a delicacy. I have eaten it at several great restaurants, including two with Michelin stars.

NASCAR?

I think we agree on most points, and I definitely agree that "neither politicians nor the public seem to care enough to make this a high profile issue." In the scope of the article, though, don't you think that some of the "holier-than-thou fuss about the NSA" might be a reaction to holier-than-thou statements like "the US government ... in its role as the 'caretaker' of the internet?"

I agree that other countries are doing the same thing. I don't think the main differences are the ones you listed, though.(1)NSA certainly have more resources than their counterparts in other countries, but I wouldn't automatically equal that to being "better at it". (2) People outside the US are making a fuss. The main difference from my POV is that most other democracies don't tout their spying as being "caretekers of the Internet" or "a bulwark against international terrorism". The spy and cheat and keep very quiet about it. When they get caught with their hands in someone else's cookie jar they do some low profile damage control and get back to business as usual.

... but they seem to hate me. In front of or behind the camera doesn't seem to matter. The results are usually disturbing, unintentionally funny, or both.