What a bunch of SJW horseshit. Makes me ignore the rest of your posts.

This hit home for me. I cannot get DSL, fiber or cable where I live outside of Austin in the Texas Hill Country. My home ISP is a T-Mobile hotspot. To ensure I don't go over my hotspot limit, it isn't uncommon for me to download CentOS, Ubuntu or Windows 10 ISOs over my unlimited cell phone plan and copy them over USB to my network. My running average on my cell is 25-27 Gigs of data a month. I have TV setup so I plug in cell to HDMI and then stream Amazon.

I was recently on a jury for a young black man with a volunteer defender. He was acquitted on the most serious charge - the lawyer was quite good, and just bored of defending DWI cases for a living. That's how the system is supposed to work. It's a pity that it doesn't usually, but that's human systems for you. The fact that he's black never mattered to the case (it might have to the cops choosing him to speak with in the first place, but it was definitely his choices that got him arrested).

If you want to claim that the system is biased against blacks over whites after people are arrested, you'll need some evidence for that. Every system gives at least a little advantage to rich people, of course, that's what rich means after all.

I have no issue with Assange being on this. His goal was ALWAYS about getting knowledge out there. Now, he may be a rapists, but that is a different issue.
However, I take issues with both Manning and Snowden.
Manning's goal was NOT to release information because he opposed what was going on. His reason was because he was mad at the US because he was gay and was about to be booted out. With that said, the information that he release was about some of our illegal doings. As such, he should not be punished for this, but, he is no hero.

Snowden is a whole other creature from these two. He worked on a number of NSA systems. He was aware of what was going on. Cool. I worked on some of these, BUT, it was all low-level stuff, not the high levels that he had. I was aware that it was POSSIBLE to do the things that we have done. When he spoke about the spying on Americans, I was actually good with that. NSA had congressional oversight that was removed by the GOP back in 2005. I was against that because I knew that they did that so that their friends could go to work and do much more than what they were allowed to. That is why Congressman Udall kept hinting at what was going on.
BUT, when he told how NSA spies on the outside world, he became a traitor. America set up NSA to spy on what other nations, terrorists and foreign elements do. We need to know what is going on out there. It is the same thing that ALL NATIONS DO. Yes, EVERY NATION HAS THIS GOING ON. Now, NSA has greater capabilities because we have top ppl in there. In addition, we have worked with many nations to not only spy for us, but also to give them the information. Everyone that we work with, which includes all of the west, KNOWS what we are up to. In addition, we, and UK, have tought others how to do this counting on sharing of information. That is why AQ has not been successful in attacking the west for over 10 years. France happened because all of these nations hold back from spying everywhere, and once terrorists became aware of how we do things, then they could evaded the net. All they had to do was simply avoid certain comm channels that went between nations. By doing that, the evaded the net.
France's attack success can be blamed partially on Snowden. He made it possible for those terrorists to evade the net. In fact, a big reason why so many are going from Europe to ISIS is because ISIS now knows how to avoid detection and instead focuses their recruiting efforts throughout europe and other locations in which they are not going to be interrupted.
How many of you have kids? Do you have a 15-16 y.o. in which the girls want to go marry a terrorists and 'fight for freedom'? Of course, when those girls marry, they are not just property, but ISIS killed a number of them, and their infant kids, so that they were not a burden when they moved from one location to another.
Of course, your boy was not murdered. Just put on the front line with little to no training and told to take on western trained troops. IOW, they were cannon fodder.

Sorry, but this is not what I would want for my kids. And sadly, Snowden makes it possible.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? No one has the right to compel these gentlemen to do anything, or take their land, just as they have no right to set the use of anyone else's land. If, however, this is public land (as seems likely), then the government gets to decide what to do with it.

I don't know what their beef is anyhow - build the damned thing on top of the volcano, and if the freaking volcano god doesn't like it, well, I'm sure He'll think of something.

Whoever has the bigger military owns the land (or gets to say who owns the land if they don't want it). That's the entirety of "international law". Land ownership is similar.

I'm sure you're right. Which god again? I know I don't believe in 9999 of them, but I sometimes forget what the one is that I don't disbelieve. If these religious whackjobs are elected leaders, and represent the will of the majority, then that's that - doesn't matter why they believe. But if they're some vocal minority trying to use the state as a weapon of their religion, that's clearly not religious freedom, is it?

So what part of "land owners or majority in a democracy" was unclear to you? People are free to believe in whatever invisible sky grandfather makes them happy, and do with their own land according to those beliefs. But trying to block construction on someone else's land, or on public land if you're not the majority, is the opposite of religious freedom - it's using the state as an instrument of religion.

That strikes me as just fine.

Maybe it would be reasonable to ask them to add a small section as a memorial to those who fought and died to free France and perhaps those people could be honored by future research done in their name, since such a research station only exists built by the French because of it.

So sure, go ahead... dedicate the building to the allied soldiers, it would be a nice tribute.

What a great way to slap the face of the Nazi's by building our future on top of their evil. You could use it as a learning opportunity for all future students. You could put a memorial to the whole thing right in the center of the common grounds of the university. Millions of students over the years would have direct contact with it and be forced to see it on a regular basis, rather than once in a lifetime on a field trip during high school.

That's fine, all of Earth is one big nature preserve... Perhaps 25% of all the profit from the mining could be used to double the size of the preserve and establish a fund to return the land to better condition when they are done.

You could, but it would be pointless, there is perfectly good land half a mile over that works as well, and no one is asking to do that.

Yep, and it stores a WHOLE 39 MW... that is nice, but it is noise in the grand scheme of things.

That hill is also taller than anything within 500 miles of where I live.

A "few meters"? Really? It is 128 meters higher... That isn't a "few meters", that is a lot!

That is 300 meters difference in height. As I said, there is a LOT of elevation changes in Germany. I'd have to travel a thousand miles to find a hill that high here.

So for 155 million euros, power is provided for 1600 homes...

That is a TERRIBLE investment...

There are about 5 MILLION homes in the Dallas, TX area...

This is all a nice idea, but you really are off by 3 orders of magnitude in what would be required to provide such power storage for a large number of people.

More religious whackjobs blocking progress. If they own the land, or represent the majority in a democracy, so be it; otherwise a does of "separation of church and state" would be welcome here. No one should get a free pass on being a religious whackjob simply because they aren't a Christian whackjob.

In Texas, we're slowly shutting down coal and it is largely being replaced by natural gas. That being said, we're the largest state for wind power in the US, so we're doing a decent amount of that too.

Wind is much cheaper than solar, but of course it kills a lot of birds, so go figure. No free lunch. :(

Not quite that simple. I have 5 people who live in my home, that uses far more energy than a single person in a small flat would. Also, my ceilings are more than 20 feet tall in the main rooms, that makes my heating/cooling bills much higher than yours (unless you also have two story rooms). My family room, living room, dining room, front entrance, and hallway are all two stories. In addition, it is open concept, so the upstairs kids playroom is open to the house below as is the upstairs hallway, so keeping warm air down low and cold air up high is nearly impossible, forcing additional heating a cooling that a more closed house would not require.

Now you could argue that is bad design, but my point is simply that sqm alone or how many kitchens a home has doesn't indicate the power bill.

Or you could be wrong and it is much higher. :)

Far more American's likely have fully AC homes than Europeans, for example. We have more food at lower prices, we have more cars, we have more gadgets...

I suppose it depends on what you consider to be a higher standard of living. If it is "who has the most stuff", then Americans win by a landslide.

Equally? Probably not, but it's damn common for both men and women. Everyone has different tastes in what arouses, of course, but Fifty Shades of Grey is no more targeted towards men than Twilight or a Harlequin romance or Sex in the City was.

This Victorian attitude that centers on the idea that women don't like sex just needs to die. Teenage humans are fans of pornography sites. Different strokes for different folks, of course. When a man and a woman both get drunk enough to lower their standards enough to actually get laid, this is not "rape culture", dammit, because men and women both are interested in sex. It's not "lie back and think of Britain" for fuck's sake.

Only from TFS did I learn where this image came from: having first seen it in an age where 16-bit (and even 8-bit) color palettes were the norm, I just assumed it was chosen for the purple feather, the details of feather and hatband and hair (which emphasize compression artifacts) and the human face, which we're very good at seeing distortions in. It just seemed like a challenging photo to compress in the days when jpg was too heavyweight for most PCs.

Still seems like a perfectly reasonable test image.

Yes, you do... your reading comprehension is terrible.

Go back and reread what I wrote, you really, really misunderstood like all of it...