Not disagreeing with you, but I was looking more towards situations in meatspace. Such as areas that are not accessible by roads. Which would be rural villages not in the US, or "wild" areas like Alaska or Northern Canada.

Frankly, I see this having more use for people "needing" to hike for long distances (10-20mi) under weight.

But lets hypothesize that you had a need to walk 10 miles in one direction and 10 miles back. Your calf muscles aren't weakening because they're being worked, but you expend about 7% less (metabolic) energy completing the 20 mile walk.

Good for you.

1) You do realize that the end of WW2 and the end of the Korean War was less than 10 years?
2) "PVA troops in Korea continued to suffer severe logistical problems throughout the war. In late April Peng Dehuai sent his deputy, Hong Xuezhi, to brief Zhou Enlai in Beijing. What Chinese soldiers feared, Hong said, was not the enemy, but that they had nothing to eat, no bullets to shoot, and no trucks to transport them to the rear when they were wounded."

That is not the definition of a "professional" army.

And even if they were better organized by 1979 (each soldier had a rifle, and the soldiers were all carried by truck), they really were's much more than an antiquated mass of farmers that hadn't fought an external war since Korea.

It was also a Vietnamese military victorious over a world superpower less than ten years ago. Vietnam was basically the equivalent of the US military in that region. Vietnam didn't have a lot of air power, but it had the best trained, veteran soldiers in the region. China, on the other hand, was still an antiquated mass of farmers that hadn't fought an external war since WW2. And they were trying to thrust a million men through a pass in a mountain range (which separates China from Vietnam).

The irony is that even though Vietnam thoroughly kicked the Chinese invader's ass, they still had to negotiate a peace with China, because China's loss was like losing a zit on its hide.

Your error is thinking the Ukraine conflict is between Putin & Ukraine. One does not negotiate with the house servants.

Beijing (not Peking) is full of amateur hour mistakes, particularly in its diplomacy. I laugh when Beijing whines "Why are my neighbors allying against me? It must be the machinations of the United States, not when I make diplomatic seizures of all the ocean territory up to their coasts".

Multi-billion? Wow, you think countries like Vietnam are stupid enough to sell themselves cheap.

OWS was an experimental event anyway. Whatever "they" decide to do in the future, it will be based on what they've learned from the OWS experience.

If you think Starship Troopers is one of the greatest works of science fiction, you have an extremely limited exposure to sci-fi literature. I don't think I could put it in the top 100 of sci-fi novels.

Well, you must be a full blooded American, because you are phenomenally stupid.

If no law enforcement body is compelled to prosecute a violator for convictable abrogations of law, then a directed verdict for "guilty" cannot be illegal (except in your delusional imagination). You've been watching too many pre-1960's movies. Hint, what HUAC and the FBI did wasn't legal either, in the American legal context. I didn't see either Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover go to prison either.

A politician's honesty has nothing to do with it. Its a lawyer's honesty. Its much like dealing with Lucifer, but they are scrupulously honest where enforceable legal stipulations make them so. If you can't believe in that standard in operational integrity, then your most rational reaction when being prosecuted for a criminal indictment would be to flee the country.

You could implement your own version of the SSL libraries that don't implement "weak" encryption protocols. When confronted by a client/server session that tried to default to the vulnerable mode, the client would get a "no failover" error message. The homebrew version would be no help in "forcing" a secure SSL session, and the browser/server would not be standards "compliant". Oh well. Oh, it would have to be a browser with available source code; hello firefox, goodbye safari.

Are you suggesting that Seal Team Six have magical powers that lets them operate inside the heart of Russian territory without the likelihood of being captured?

No its not. A plea bargain agreement is the defendant agreeing to plead guilty to certain crimes in exchange for a sentence agreed to by the prosecution. Sadly, its still possible for today's federal gov't to "disappear" a person into Guantanamo or a black site, and that is "effectively" a directed verdict.

US lawyers can form a legal agreement with the DOJ as to the form of legal prosecution which would be acceptable to both parties. My guess would be no Star Chambers, and a public federal criminal prosecution will all legal rights that a US defendant are afforded. The potential sticky point would be Snowden providing the prosecutors/DNI to the best of his knowledge, the information he did procure, to avoid a situation where sensitive information gets leaked in court, or federal prosecutors be given the ability to "close" trial sessions. And of course, the DOJ's willingness to cut their losses concerning Snowden; I doubt Snowden would agree to a twenty year prison sentence.