Go ahead, try to convince a homeopath that there's no memory of stuff that's no longer there!

C) Wants to pay with cash. This is common among children too young to have a bank account in their own names.
D) Is buying an item that's too heavy to ship affordably with UPS or USPS and already owns a truck to carry it home.

Snowden said he wrote emails that he can't produce despite taking almost two million documents. You can't explain that away since you are directly challenging him.

Ok, I'll stipulate that he claims he wrote them.

All this while intending to make the claim that he was a "whistle blower" on the US? And he forget the whistle he claims to have blown, repeatedly, while there? That doesn't wash.

I honestly and sincerely don't even see it as related. He may not even anticipated that someone would challenge. He was seeking to establish beyond credible doubt that the NSA was doing XYZ. That is "the story" he was looking to tell. That someone would try to argue that a big part of the story would be "hey, can you prove you tried to tell someone inside, first" possibly didn't even enter into his mind.

In the big picture, it doesn't even matter. What matters is what the NSA was doing, not how vigorously Snowden tried to change it from within first.

Regardless of how important this particular detail is to you, its at best a tangential detail to the main story.

Its just a small minded distraction to try and divert attention from the main story. Like obsessing over Julian Assange's significant personal flaws instead of focusing on the actual wiki leaks leaks.

Maybe because they don't exist?

That doesn't fly within this thread of the sub-argument.

You'd stipulated they DID exist and contained the NSA's response that they were legal. You can't now argue that maybe they didn't exist, at least not within this sub-thread.

Or they discuss classified programs that are still classified?

They could redact them. Even if they were just "walls of black ink", they would establish that they existed.

I expect that the NSA has done that in the proper forums for discussing classified matters: in meetings with the administration, in closed sessions of Congress, and before the courts in closed hearings.

You are contorting like an acrobat. You are arguing that "if they exist, the NSA is rightfully keeping them secret, therefore we should assume Snowden is lying about their existence, and that they don't exist". That's not even coherent.

Seems to me then, its perfectly reasonable to accept Snowden's claim they exist.

Which "general consensus" is that?

Lets see:
the 5 member Privacy and Civil liberties Oversight Board created by Congress ruled them illegal.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled them illegal.

United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled them illegal.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

http://www.wired.com/2013/12/b...

And even the NSA itself, has ADMITTED substantial wrongdoing.

http://thehill.com/policy/tech...

"The one on Slashdot?"

Yeah, sure, the one on slashdot too. ::eyeroll::

You missed my point. Ordering online is voting with your wallet. Your real problem is that people are voting with their wallets -- but they're voting the wrong way.

If they can grow it on Aluminum foil, perhaps they can grow it on an Aluminum block, with cooling passages.

As long as the manufacturing can scale and it does offer the advantages we assume, I would expect in in £300 cameras with 5 years, maybe even cheaper. Look at Gorilla Glass, once they found a market and could scale, now everyone uses it for smartphones.

So would you agree with Larry Niven's assertion that "sufficiently analyzed magic" becomes indistinguishable from science? If so, then the only difference between science fiction and fantasy is how in control of their magic the magicians are. By your definition, electricity used to be "magic" centuries ago when Luigi Galvani and friends were doing experiments in "animal magnetism", and inheritance was "magic" before Gregor Mendel's pea experiments, and Dungeons & Dragons magic is "science" in the "Tippyverse" stories where spells are "trapped" in push-button devices that people use daily and people commute from city to city through teleporters.

Bingo. What science fiction and fantasy have in common is exploration of how a particular counterfactual phenomenon affects relationship among sapient beings.

Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) had The Lord of the Rings in its "Science Fiction and Fantasy" section in late 1993. This was three and a half years before first publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

An author could always be his own publisher, hiring an editor and having books printed through a contract printer. Or he could sign a time-limited contract with a publisher and have copyrights revert to him after a decade. Or he could license the rights to a publisher throughout the industrialized Anglosphere (US, CA, GB, IE, AU, NZ, ZA) but retain rights in the rest of the world, as the Authors Guild suggests. Or an author could sign with Baen, a publisher that not only specializes in speculative fiction but also "gets it" with respect to e-books. Baen offers e-books with no digital restrictions management, releases many of its authors' older works as free samples in the Baen Free Library, and even offers paid early access to the public.

That I actually have done ;) On a 60-degree slope down into a deep canyon nonetheless! Also there's manmade objects and yes, *gasp* trees in some places ;) The country isn't totally treeless!

But yes, it's not exactly a very practical solution for Iceland. I'd really prefer something more designed for both roles, hanging and on the ground.

no -40 F rated sleeping bag from Walmart is gonna keep you comfortable even at +30 F, that rating is all just bullshit.

No problem there, I avoid Walmart for a great many reasons.

heads covered, and breathing through a small opening

Instead of a "narrow passage" I've found that throwing a light and thin breathable sheet over your face does a superb job of holding a small amount of heat and warming incoming air, without restricting breathing like anything any heavier. (a T-shirt works, in a pinch)

Somehow this headline smacks of "yellow" journalism. We always need to remind the west how shifty the majority population behaves.

Stop being so judgmental - it's not easy to replace the Russians overnight. Get with the program, commie/traitor...

Isn't it ... "odd" ... that Snowden could manage to steal 1.7 million documents, but apparently didn't manage to get copies of his own emails showing his alleged attempts to raise the issues through official channels?

a) Because when I suspect my employer of illegal wrong doing doing I always write an email? Oh, wait, no, we're trained that those sorts of inquiries are supposed to go through channels without permanent records for legal liability reasons. You can argue that that's a bad thing, but that's reality in a LOT of places.

b) While I'm sure he'd have been capable of snagging his email, maybe it simply didn't occur to him.

You don't think it could be because even if he did "raise the issue" of legality he was given the reasons why they were legal and chose to steal the documents anyway?

If your argument is that Snowden didn't keep and release them because they would contradict and harm his 'narrative', then why is the NSA not bending over backwards to get them out there?

The NSA should be happy to provide us with such a relevant record that details their dutiful adherence to the law, and how they conscientiously explained to Snowden why he was mistaken in raising concerns.

If you really beleive what you wrote, why do think the NSA is refusing to release them?

And if you really believe what what the NSA was doing was legal, how do you reconcile that with the general consensus that a great deal of what they were doing was not, in fact, legal.