No, the NSA is monitoring social media and bloggers, in Russia they have progressed from just monitoring to repressing them. I'm in no way in favor of what the NSA is doing but there is a difference between watcing bloggers and telling bloggers they have to register if they get a hitcount over 3000 or suffer the consequences, whatever they may be.

It's a bit more than that, Israel helped China with air to air missiles (as in license production of the Python-3 which was a quantum leap for the PLAAF) and other guided weapons and is also alleged to have helped the Chinese develop sophisticated fighter and AWACS radars, had a hand in the design of some of the latest generation of Chinese fighters and sold them a whole bunch of other technology to do with miniaturized cooling units, Electro-optics, UAVs, and sophisticate sighting systems. A lot of this technology originated in the USA and was paid for by John Q Taxpayer.

It depends on how you look at it. Iron Dome costs something like 20-30.000 dollars per shot. One of those home built Quassam rockets Hamas uses costs 5-800 dollars per shot, the Grad rockets probably a bit more. It's the same economy as dropping PGMs that start at 15-20.000 per unit (the Hellfire missiles used by the RQ-9 drones cost $110.000 per unit) on five man Taleban guerrilla groups carrying a grand total of 3-4000 dollars worth of equipment (tops). It adds up pretty quickly. If Hamas hoses off enough Quassam rockets the costs start to pile up for Israel but Israel can pay the monetary cost, the political cost of the slaughter happening in Gaza at the moment is another matter and we haven't even talked about the side effects. I was Hamas, now that they can reach Ben Gurion airport, I'd start hosing those rockets off at Ben Gurion in the biggest volleys I could manage. The rockets as such don't do much damage but the cessation of international flights into Israel does, the fact that Iron Dome would probably start to falter under such a load would be damaging to the politicos who sank all that money into it and the fact that Airlines aren't willing to allow their aircraft to fly though a rain of rocket fire to land at Ben Gurion is doing massive economic and political damage. All you need is to saturate Iron Dome and achieve enough accuracy to ensure that a few of rockets reach the airfield perimeter at regular intervals. If you can do that you have effectively obliged anybody flying in and out of Israel to make a stop-over in Cyprus until other arrangements can be made. It would seem increasingly more sensible to just stop this stupid fighting, get over the idea of Greater Israel and make peace with the Palestinians, but that won't happen until Netanyahu and Liberman have conclusively proven that some problems cannot be solved by bombing them and pretty much the same goes for Hamas and their idiotic obsession with destroying Israel. Not that I think that is likely to happen, both sides have been radicalized beyond recovery by their own fanaticism and intransigence.

Nixon presided over the slaughter that was Vietnam which included the Phoenix program of targeted killings and torture of suspected communists. Phoenix prisoners were subjected to rape, gang rape and they were murdered using some pretty bestial methods that included starvation and pounding dowels through prisoners heads. So even if you factor in drone assassinations and the torture allegation against them neither Obama nor GWB Jr can hold a candle to Nixon.

If anything they'd look cooler with feathers. It also explains a whole lot, like how they were able to survive in the Arctic.

Nah, with all the T-Rexes looking like chickens it just won't be the same... although... just imagine the Kentucky fired drumsticks.

This means we'll have to redraw 200 years worth of artwork...

I don't use music streaming and similar services at all, just don't like them.
I don't use Netflix and similar movie streaming services at all. I'd like to but can't a lot of the time because of stupid regional restrictions.
I watch a fair amount of YouTube stuff (and appreciate the complete lack of stupid regional restrictions).
I listen to quite a bit of recorded radio programs offered by local radio stations over 3G/4G on my iPhone.

That amounts to about 20-30% of my media consumption.

Additionally all of my TV is streamed over a TCP/IP connection to a set-top box so if that counts as streaming then it's closer to 80-90% or so. Techincally any cable or wireless TV connection is streaming but I don't think that most people don't think of that as streaming.

Does this thing acutally work or is it as bugridden as the rest of the F-35? I sure would not want to be sitting in an F-35 when the rendering software has a buffering issue or just plain segfaults in the middle of a dogfight.

Dear internet user, would you like the Tory Party to think for you?
[ ] Yes.
[X] No.

Nitpic: It does not mean they have no interest in enforcing the law, it means that the government realises that the law is un enforceable however much they'd like to enforce it. In future you will get four warnings and then, by the sound of it, you can pirate download all you want as far as the govt. is concerned. They'll probably still be going after large scale distributors and facilitators. This also means that UK courts will in future be choked beyond capacity with civil suits against copyright infringers. So this is a (kind of) victory for the pirate 'community', it is a victory for the public at large because of the precedents cutting off internet connections etc. would have set but bad news for anybody who needs the legal system for other kinds of lawsuits.

Yes I can see what they mean, the only measure of honesty is frequency of thieving and cheating, not magnitude. Under communism everybody cheats all of the time but most people who do the bulk of the thieving are petty thieves whereas under capitalism you have an elite made up of corporate executives, elected representatives and bankers that has been given a license by society to handle most of the thieving and cheating. Capitalists steal less often but when theft happens they rob everybody else blind. Epiphany! I'm beginning to see the mortgage crisis in a whole new shining light of capitalist honesty and moral superiority over communism.... uughhhhhh..... what a bunch of bullshit. Try as I might I have always failed to see how capitalism is any less rotten than communism and that is not likely to change. The only reason I prefer capitalism is that it is somewhat less oppressive but I don't think of it as being in any way vastly morally superior to communism although I realize that many capitalist fanboys are terribly offended by this point of view.

Yes it is sad how people always have to die before lessons are learned. I always figured the Flight 007 was a similar case, after seeing documentaries about both incidents I see them in a similar light. In both the case of F007 and the Vincennes case it sounded like there were pretty obvious common sense procedure they could have done to avoid the situation. In the case of F007 that would have included flying in front of the guy, nobody fails to notice a Su-15 hovering in front of their windshield, and in both cases calling the airliner on air traffic frequencies might have been a good idea. Having heard an interview with that Soviet pilot it sounded like nobody ever bothered to tell him or his colleagues what procedure to follow when they have get the attention of an airliner pilot, in the arctic darkness, with a bunch of nervous brass-hats yelling at them over a radio link any more than any body bothered to drill the SAM operators on the Vincennes how to exhaust all possible options on contacting an airliner. I don't doubt such procedures were implemented on the double and triple afterwards by the Soviets (and a whole string of other air forces to be sure) and they included intercepting pilots doing a thorough eyes on inspection and providing a description of the target aircraft to GCOs, always intercepting in teams and both fitting all interceptors with tracer ammo on at least one of their guns at all times and making the interceptor fly in front of the target to make sure they are seen. It sure still sucks that nobody thought of training scenarios like that right off the bat.

They misidentified Flight 655 as an Iranian F-14 operating out of Bandar Abbas, a known F-14 base but also a civilian airport. That may seem strange to us in Europe or the USA where miltary and civilian operations are conducted from separate facilities but in many parts of the world it is not by any means uncommon for a couple of jet fighters packing bombs and missiles to be launching out of the military half of an airport and an airliner taking off of from the civilian half a minute or two later. The military systems I am familiar with today are data fused with air traffic control systems so civilian aircraft are automatically flagged for the military controllers and they have access to flight plans and other such data but I'm not sure to what extent the military had access to civilian flight control data back in 1988. I'm guessing very little especially on a destroyer off the coast of Iran. The Vincennes tired to contact Flight 655 on civilian and military emergency frequencies but not air traffic control frequencies which is strange since that was their best bet to get the attentinon of a civilian aircraft. Don't SAM crews get trained for this kind of an eventuality? You'd think they'd get suckered into shooting down an airliner during a few of their simulator sessions in military school just to make double and triple sure the identification procedure for civilian aircraft sticks in their minds like the aftermath of a good hard kick in the nuts.

That's true, I wish I could count the advertisements I have seen specifying not just three or four certifications but also down to a dozen or more APIs that you must have top notch experience with in order to qualify. It's as if they are looking for a mental clone of some guy who left for a better paid job somewhere else and actually expect to find him/her. In some cases it's near impossible even to convince people that if you can handle web development in PHP you can handle web development in Perl. I'm not sure if this is really down to the tech companies or just the utter, utter, utter stupidity of HR personnel and headhunting agencies and their complete unfamiliarity with the industry they are recruiting personnel for. The last time I applied for a job at a headhunting agency they actually wanted me to write down a list of every API I had ever worked with and rate my skill level in it from on a scale of 1-10. I quickly realized that this list would be several pages long and a complete waste of time so I just told them I wasn't interested and found a job on my own. I can just imagine some HR person telling an aircraft mechanic to create an itemized list of every one of the thousands of component on an modern jet liner and rating his skill at reparing each one on a scale of 1-10.