The right side? What a bunch of horseshit. The summary quotes Kerry as saying

And we believe these principles can positively help us to distinguish the legitimate practices of states governed by the rule of law from the legitimate practices of states that actually use surveillance to repress their people. And while I expect you to hold the United States to the standards that I've outlined, I also hope that you won't let the world forget the places where those who hold their government to standards go to jail rather than win prizes.

Which I'm might be a typo ("the legitimate practices of states that actually use surveillance to repress their people") but would be unsurprised to find out he actually said that, Freudian slip and all that.

What really infuriates me is the hypocrisy and the lies. Who is "win[ning] prizes" for holding the US government to standards? Snowden had to flee his country to seek asylum in RUSSIA for crying out loud.

The whole thing stinks and they (Kerry, Obama) have the gall to lie to our faces that they are going to do something about it.

I'm so angry I could spit.

The summary has one detail wrong.

Yes, developers who do pay a yearly fee have been able to download betas of OS X. Additionally, users identified by various means were invited by Apple to be a beta testers and those invited testers paid nothing to be download, test, and evaluate OS X betas.

I know this because I have been one of those invited testers since 2008.

Seriously? Lay critical crucial infrastructure through North Korea to South Korea?

There's no way Pyongyang would manipulate those rails and pipes in a fit of political pique that seems to happen, oh, once every eight months. Absolutely now way.

I get the same kind of car every time I rent (Toyota Prius because of low emissions), so the controls are pretty much where I expect them.

However, I know my case is somewhat unusual given there are dozens of Zipcar locations within a 1-mile radius of where I live. This means I can bike to my Zipcar rental, lower the back seats, and put my bike in. Because I have lots of places to find a Zipcar, I can almost always find one of a particular make.

• John Fledgling
• John Ya Ya
• John Parrot
• John Bigboote (BIG-BOO-TAY! TAY! TAY!)
• John Nolan
• John O'Connor
• John Mud Head
• John Smallberries
• John Many Jars
• John Littlejohn
• John Starbird
• John Lee
• John Whorfin
• etc.

WTH. Mods on crack.

You said pretty much the same thing I said, except you made a mistake when you said "the trigger is in fact 'nothing'. " The "trigger" is often a sugar pill or some regimen believed not to have a therapeutic effect. Again, as you and I have both said, that is not nothing,

Nothing would be no exposure, either to a placebo or a substance/regimen suspected to have a therapeutic effect.

You're equating "placebo" with "nothing". A "placebo" is not the same as "nothing". Placebos may activate psychological (or other) mechanisms to achieve their better-than-nothing results but, by definition, they are not nothing.

I think you're ignoring the obvious. Or maybe you're actually saying something of value and I can't parse. Maybe you're trolling.

So, telecoms charge to build and run infrastructure that transports packet traffic.

Internal distinctions a company makes about where to invest revenue and resources to build and run that infrastructure do not change the fact that building and maintaining that infrastructure is the same phenomenological process that moves data across the Internet's networks.

All the bureaucratic details of what a telecom must do to keep the infrastructure running doesn't change this fact.

As a former faculty of American Literature at at a research university, I can assure you that you have no idea what academic feminism is.

Critical theory, race studies, religious studies, psychoanalysis, film theory, subject spectator theory, semiotics, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and more are all well-understood by and -represented among the scholars and intellectuals who are recognized as feminists. Academic feminists analyze and consider the signs, systems of meaning, legal histories, social histories, cultural artifacts, popular culture, etc. etc, etc. insofar as they affect women and the people to whom women are connected, which would be every human being who has ever lived.

Feminism is multiple, not singular, and the best way to describe what drives feminists is the desire to see women—and the people and collectives to which those women are connected and by which they are constituted—to be empowered and autonomous rather than (as has historically been and, in many contexts, currently is the case) disenfranchised and subjugated.

Seriously, do yourself a favor and understand that movements that promote human welfare are good for everyone. People threatened by feminism don't understand feminism. Feminism is about making things better, flawed as some of its approaches may be.

Here's something old-school style that demonstrates some "academic" feminism from 1991: Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manfiesto". That's some old-school cultural anthropological feminism for you that is super awesome, fun, literate, and though-provoking.

Try it and see. Some of these people are smart and amazing. You might be surprised.

(As a straight male professor, it agonized me when young intelligent women would come to my survey on critical theory and proudly announce during our feminist section that "I am not a feminist." I am grateful to have had the opportunity to change some of these young persons' minds.)

Come on. Are you even trying to make a coherent argument?

In the case of the Internet, paying for the "construction and maintenance" of infrastructure is the same thing as paying to have the bits go back and forth across the networks that make up the Internet.

Or are you seriously saying telecomms are charging to "move" ones and zeroes separately from the infrastructure and energy through which those ones and zeroes "move"?

I really don't like when companies turn my app from a standalone product to one requiring a subscription to access new features. BranchFire did it with "PDF Annotate" and Abvio has done it with "Cyclemeter".

Part of the reason I purchased "PDF Annotate" and "Cyclemeter" ($25 and $5, respectively) is they didn't phone home or require a subscription that was looking for an excuse to go belly up.

My guess is once new user growth slows, the companies consider monetizing their current user base (aka "seeking rent"). So, in the next upgrade they introduce subscription services.

I'm sorry, but I'm not interested. At all.

Users should have the ability to roll back any upgrade, including OS upgrades.

Your advice is a good one for subjects of a possible exposé or smear campaign, however, out of hand dismissing journalists as people without integrity is not in the best interests of an informed public and (probably) in many cases unwarranted.

When I was a university professor, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked for an interview about what it's like to be single and a new faculty (ha!). I agreed to an interview and, on several occasions, said that I wanted to say a few things "off the record" about the behavior of colleagues and the spouses of colleagues (ahem). Some of what I said off the record was juicy and I told my interviewer those things to contextualize my "on the record" remarks.

The article was published, my female colleague who was written up got a couple of marriage proposals, and everything attributed to me was on the up and up.

I know not all journalists adhere to a code of ethics, but I believe that many do. Clamming up when a story needs to get out may protect you, but one needn't be suspicious form the get go.

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• You can visit this link to see if your device/browser is affected.

Can anyone in 2014, with a straight face, write that the Americas and Australia were places where "humans had not been before"?

Such statements don't withstand the scrutiny of someone with even gradeschool historical knowledge, yet here we are having to chew on a +4 comment that forgot humans were in these places well before Europeans got it into their minds to begin displacing indigenous peoples.

Imagine a colonization trip to Mars that discovered humans who had been living on Mars since before recorded history. These indigenous "Martian" humans then sheltered and fed those of us who traveled from Earth, receiving as thanks a colonist-driven campaign to kill them and appropriate their resources AND THEN two to three hundred years later the colonizers "recalled" how exceptionally difficult it was to colonize Mars, a place where no humans had been before.

While the likelihood of finding indigenous humans on other planets is unlikely, one day our descendants may encounter extraterrestrial indigenous life forms and, with thinking like the kind exhibited in your post, would destroy those life forms, appropriate the liberated resources, and write a history that enshrined themselves as resourceful adventurers struggling to survive in a harsh "unlivable" environment.

I just want to know how many first steps they can take, it seems I am always hearing about this first step or that first step

Actually you're misremembering what's alway been the first step. It's just that before taking a second step, one must go halfway and take the first step. But before taking that first step, one must go halfway and take half a step. But before taking that half a step, one must go halfway and take a quarter step. . .

tl;dr: it's halfsies all the way down.