"spazzies"? Really? You know, before the car accident that screwed me up, I was perfectly normal. Now that they've done surgery to correct the issue, I'm perfectly normal, with a little extra titanium hardware. We're all one car accident away from having the same issues. That is, unless you never leave your mother's basement.

No, congress.
And they would know and never lie to us. Would they?

Oh, I agree with you.
I worked on aspects of the US PAT act. As such, I became aware of some of capabilities (snowden released more than I knew, but has missed other things; thank god). NSA having them is not a fear to me, BUT, I always thought that they needed a LOT OF OVERSIGHT. Sadly, once the act went through, the GOP pretty much removed CONgressional oversight of the NSA. That was their way of disavowing responsibility for their actions. But, I have no doubt that many terrorists actions were caught. In fact, I suspect that this is one of those, though others claim that it is not likely.

BUT, the idea that ANY of this equipment could be turned over to police, FBI, DEA, etc is just TERRIFYING. Oddly, a number of the GOP have called for just that, which I can not image a worst situation. We would have a true police state (which in many aspects, I think that we can argue that we already are in one).

As to the Dutch sitation, if that data is limited to say another intelligence group and not a local police group, it makes good sense. After all, the goal of groups like NSA and GCHQ is not to go after local citizens, but to find others from outside of the nation that are threats to their nations.

Those states were gerrymandered by the GOP. Impossible to vote out the GOP until the courts shoot that down (and yes, it meandering in the courts, though it is possible that it is only about federal).

Ya.. There are are a bunch of whiny bitches here. :) The same ones who complain about kids, or the fact that I bypassed the lines in the courtesy wheelchair, because I couldn't walk through an airport.

Thanks. I am so delighted it got fixed. It only took about 1.5 years and a half dozen "expert" doctors to find one who knew what he was doing. I had sympathy for people who couldn't get around before. Now I have a *lot* more.

Only if you're lucky. Well, I think SW does that. No other airlines I fly do. I don't really care about kids. My ears have never really tolerated flying much, so I have to use the pressure relieving earplugs. Wearing noise cancelling headphones over them, I can barely tell the engines are running, much less screaming children. :)

Wow, that's interesting, I would have described myself as a radical technologist. I think left and right politics have consistently failed to deliver the important structural changes our society needs to adapt and prosper. We devalue science and engineering and try to over-over simplify things when it's just not appropriate.

Instead of good quality debate we get low quality politicians driven by funding from corporate sources, and they want what they pay for. In reality I think that the alternative energy sources like wind, solar and geo-thermal are appropriate sources of technological development for the next 100 years while we get nuclear power engineered properly for the next 1000-5000 years. But that's close to impossible now because the debates about all of these things has become so polarized that people have forgotten things like compromise, wisdom, truth and fact.

And the science of anthropogenic global warming was reported right here at /. before it was trendy to talk about it. The debate was considerable different too, considering the merits of the science as opposed to how convincing the lobby groups are.

And alternative energy will mean an explosion of activity in IT to deploy control systems to manage energy. The cruel irony is countries like America and Australia are so abundantly rich with wind and solar resources that the future is practically begging us to lead the way, yet we choose to dig our heals in and forget that we used to do difficult things and solve hard problems.

You call me a conservative, but what does that mean any more? What does a liberal mean anymore? I like capitalism because when an idea is bad or has had it's turn, it collapses and something new takes over. Well the music industry is one of many examples that show us all that the vested interests CAN halt change, so what we have isn't capitalism at all, it's corporatism.

New ideas and thinking don't stand a chance against that sort of money.

No, you really want them to board first.

For the last year, up until last month, I was barely able to walk. I still had to fly for work. I boarded flights with the kids and anyone else that needed help.

The parent doesn't just stow their stuff and sit down. They stow the kids bags, get the kids to sit down, shut up, buckles on, no you can't go to the bathroom, blah, blah, blah.

For me, it took me about 4x as long just to get down the airway. A guy barely walking down the ramp with passengers walking normal speed definitely held up the flow, no matter how much room I tried to leave. I still got held up by the parents with kids, and I didn't care. I'd just sit on the nearest armrest until they were done.

You don't want me, or the parents with kids slowing you down. People are assholes enough boarding planes.

If you wait for them to board last, now you'll have parents trying to stow bags in the last few spots (if there are any), trying to get the kids in their seats at the same time, and having the kid(s) climbing over other passengers.

For me, barely able to walk, if I had to take the window seat, that would mean everyone in the other seat(s) would have to move. Walking on a cane, I wasn't able to just squeeze by anyone, especially if there were no good seats available. It was still hard just to get *to* the window seat.

And before any of you complain, since surgery I can walk fine. The cane is retired at least for another 30 years.

I watched Krauss on Q&A and WOW, what a great scientist he is. I thought to myself, this is one of the reasons people look up to America, because they have all these great thinkers that we can learn from.

Unfortunately Australia sometimes takes the lead in being backwards thinking and it's no secret here that many of our accomplished leaders in creating solar energy are now in America. Now it seems American politician are looking to Australia for methods to embed the status quo. This looks a lot like the Australian government scrapping the independent Climate Commission (made up of scientists), but legislating to avoid, what happened here, a relaunched Commission funded by the public as citizens instead of as taxpayers,.

And like a dying animal the status quo tries to kill the future. This is not a generational issue because some of the older generation know what the issues are and trying to make things better to minimize the consequences and costs the younger generations that will experience. However, the people controlling energy and its future, now, will be dead by the time the effects are here, so for them why wouldn't they have all the benefits of cheap power when they will never experience the downside of it.

They struggle for 50's thinking to be relevant in the 21st century, but have compunction imposing it and since the science is so convincing the only thing left to do is muzzle the scientists. It's madness.

"How many wars have been waged or led by democracies in the past 200 years? Quite nearly all of them. "

Or none of them. The ones democracies participated in, were started by dictatorships invading their neighbors. But even if you add up all the dead in all the wars of the last 200 years- you're still at only a fraction of the 56 million that we've lost to abortion in America alone since 1973.

"How many wars have been waged by actual socialist countries - not just ones who were playing with words - in the past 200 years? Almost none of them."

By playing with words, do you mean the ones who have actually claimed to be socialist? Plus, of course, socialism and democracy does have a rather strong overlap.

"Hell just the number of people that our democracy has killed in war in the past 15 years is likely larger than the total number killed by all the military actions of all actual socialist states in the past 200 years."

Hmm, larger than the 15 million Stalin killed outright? Not in war. But abortions, yes.

Your average modern war kills a few hundred thousand tops.

This may help: http://cathleenfalsani.com/obama-on-faith-the-exclusive-interview/

"Democracy has a body count many orders of magnitude higher than socialism."

Only if you take abortion into account.

Which is really not all that bad.
I would rather NSA, who has no powers, spy on me, than FBI, or even worse, the local police.
Taking it further, I have less issues with say GCHQ spying on me. Why? Because not only do they not have any powers, but, they have no INTEREST in me, unless I am up to something that will be seriously detrimental to UK, or other western nations.

Dutch citizens? I doubt it. BUT, Dutch government is probably ignored by the US government.

NSA to spy. Of course, I doubt that Germany KNEW that we were listening in on their gov officials, to which they absolutely should be mad. But, I suspect that NSA is still allowed to spy all over Europe. I would not be surprised though, if we have a few new treaties.