They were all planning to die, and they had no reason to care about the impact on other Saudis, so it makes perfect sense they would take the simple safe option and carry their own ID.

Note, if the NK regime was demonstrably reasonable --- let's say, anywhere between China's government and South Korea's --- it would make a lot of sense to drawn down the US presence. So there is no impasse here.

The US is not occupying South Korea. South Korea has its own democratically elected government running the country.

A subset of South Koreans don't like the presence of US bases. But with the constant, explicitly stated threats from North Korea, as a nation they'd be suicidal to push US forces out.

Too many people have already died. China's support for North Korea is about their worst sin at the moment.

Atheists certainly can behave morally, ethically, and decently, and most do. The problem is, in most cases they do so in defiance of their professed epistemology.

Thanks for being honest about the implications of your position in that last sentence.

The fact that religion, politics, and anything else people care about can be abused to build a power base does not mean those things are in themselves bad. Nor does it mean we should abolish them and become apathetic drudges. Even if the latter was desirable and worked, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma where the first defector conquers the world. So much for freedom.

Please, no, not more squandering of funds on meaningless manned missions driven not by science or long-term goals but by absurd "human spirit" PR to get more funding for more meaningless missions.

We need a self-sustaining human presence off this planet, but all paths to get there require robotic mining and construction outside the Earth's gravity well, and that is what we need to be investing in.

I thought standards were there to implement not argue with

This sentiment is very wrong. It's easy to generate a standard that is no good, and the W3C is often not good at keeping out bogus standards. If we followed this sentiment browsers would burn resources implementing all kinds of useless things like XHTML2, XSL-FO, etc etc etc. "Browsers implement it" is an important and completely reasonable test of validity for any spec, alongside "Web developers use it".

The pace of innovation and automation is only going to speed up, but people's ability to retrain isn't going to speed up much. At some point, maybe not far away, we'll be eliminating classes of jobs faster than people can train for new ones. What happens if, by the time you've learned to do a new job well, it's likely to be obsolete? And then at some point we'll reach the situation where most people simply aren't capable of doing any useful job as well as a machine no matter how much they train.

It's ironic that both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing people believe the fallacy that people are endlessly reprogrammable labour units. Extreme right-wingers believe it because they want to believe people who aren't successful are lazy. Extreme left-wingers believe in a mythical world where every person is a special soul who can achieve anything if they're just given the right assistance.

It works in Firefox for me. The start button remains grayed out for some reason, but you can click on it.

Nor are reports of intelligence agencies weakening encryption systems anything new -- concerns about NSA influence over the Data Encryption Standard (DES), reach back about four decades.

While this is true, it's a dumb example to bring up, since it turned out those concerns were misplaced. The serious concerns were that the NSA's choice of S-box values had somehow introduced a backdoor, but since the early 1990s we've known that the NSA's S-box values actualy *strengthened* DES against differential cryptanalysis (an attack which was not publicly known at the time).

I think you're confusing VP8 with VP9.

The moment they receive a National Security Letter, the backdoor is added and pushed out in a regular software update. Or, on the server side, they add a tap anywhere they touch plaintext. Or they hand over keys.

Every US corporation is an arm of the NSA, except for those that follow Lavabit and choose to shut down rather than cooperate.

Your third paragraph is quite wrong. Well, maybe some Christians believe that people wouldn't know murder is bad apart from the Bible, but traditionally Christianity teaches otherwise, via the concept of "general revelation". It's clear in the New Testament (e.g. Romans 2:15).

In the fourth and fifth paragraphs I think you vastly overplay your hand. I'm a Christian and was in the USA for 10 years and never met anyone like that, even though I did meet a good number of "creationists".

Oh please, not that again.
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