It is often repeated that embassies are foreign territory. This is a mistake, and they are not.

By the concession of the host country embassies and consulates are under a foreign jurisdiction under international law. They are within the host territory, and their diplomatical status is given and can be taken away at will (though it is not very polite to go around revoking embassies).

They may be treated as foreign territory under the US legal domestic regime (like federal buildings are treated as having their own jurisdiction), but they are surely not a foreign dot in the map. So I imagine the Constitution should take precedence over whatever other domestic policy pretending embassies are not US soil for spying purposes. Though I guess spying on foreigners would be okay anywhere anyway.

Why would it be temporary? Didn't you get the memo about all of Europe going soft?

The UK is not only a member of EU and permanently on the UNSC, but also a member of NATO. I'm hard pressed to create a scenario where it has to defend something, anything, on it own.

It just needs enough military capabilities to maintain a culture of pride in the armed forces and to keep the US complaints of burden sharing at bay.

The purpose of the British submarine nuclear deterrence is a mystery to me.

This has been said repeatedly elsewhere, but as everyone with any international law background knows, there is no such thing as diplomatic asylum anywhere, except as a local custom in South America. And not all of South America either.

There is no -law- in international law. It is entirely based on consent by each State. Even signed and ratified treaties are still open to interpretation sometimes. Sovereign governments do pretty much whatever they can get away with politically. The highest 'authority' of international law would be the ICJ, because everyone likes to pretend the UN Charter is important. Well, almost everyone. The US doesn't feel like recognising the authority of the ICJ is beneficial, so it doesn't, and then its not bound by it. Simple as that.

It's the same with the UK and Ecuador. The UK does not recognise asylum rights to free passage wherever. Assange is not a political refugee anywhere relevant to European courts. He has a pending arrest warrant. Whatever Ecuador says about their understanding of international law is completely irrelevant. Very simple too.

Except humans, they are a big existential threat to humanity.

And yet I don't see we going genocidal on each other. Oh, wait. It all makes sense now.

As is, SSL has no enforcement whatsoever, of course its exploited and abused, that's my point.

As for passports, they are faked, yes, but not all the time. In whatever country, you're totally and utterly screwed if caught with a fake passport. The real world isn't spy movies you know?

Governments aren't about trust, they are about compliance. You can be unhappy and distrustful all you want, but if you aren't posting from jail, odds are that you wouldn't fake SSL certificates just as you don't fake passports.

It doesn't need to be perfect, after all, just better than the meaningless system we have now.

Oh, I see. Induction is solved because we can show, based on empirical evidence, that our empirical evidence is correct. Great.

The more charitable way to describe that is "bootstraping". People in the know sometimes shorten it to BS ;) But only when they don't want to say its circular reasoning.

Nah, that first post can't be the coolest.

Entropy says that if it really was the coolest, it would also be the last.

See, deducing across universes is easy.

Is this novel, or complex, in any way? Aren't aspects and business intelligence covered in the first half of CS courses?

Why is 'call backs' in quotes? They probably are just callbacks, nothing arcane behind it.

I guess venture capital and headlines really are all about the buzzwords.

I knew it! Hollywood couldn't write 4 lines without fucking one up.

To be fair, the others aren't capitalized correctly either. So they only got 'Hollywood' right, and it must be because that's copyrighted.

Alright, it's definitely authentic.

Actually, that's a bit of a misinterpretation of knowledge. And religion.

Assuming knowledge is a justified/rational/reliable/whatever true belief, there can be still religious knowledge. Now, most scientists wouldn't consider "mystical revelations" as a valid source of knowledge, being irrational/unreliable/whatever, but there's a lot of difference between a random belief and a supernatural-based belief, and religious scholars have made this distinction for centuries. There are lots of other non-empirical knowledge sources after all, math, logic, introspection, and so on, and faith could just be one of them.

What you're describing is a kind of relativism so extreme I don't think it has serious proponents. Not educated, anyway.

I'm not defending paranoia, but if I were planting a cache in a crowded place, and receiving suspicious looks, and was still determined to put it there... what would be the problem of chatting up someone nearby (like a vendor that sticks around), showing how it works, asking where he thinks would be a good spot (just to engage, no need to actually listen :).

At worst it would be someone uninterested, but capable of clearing this kind of misunderstanding before panic mode. At best its someone that thinks its cool and joins in afterwards.

Seriously, I'm not a "people person" at all but this is just common sense.