The "But my lawyers sucked!" argument very rarely works. If it did work, then a significant amount of defendants would deliberately get bad lawyers, roll the dice, and if they lose ask for a retrial. Even trying this trick by representing yourself as your own lawyer doesn't work. People tried that in the past and then when they lost, they argued that they had incompetence representation, namely themselves. I'm sure that his next set of lawyers will indeed argue that his defense was incompetent, but the odds of a court agreeing are pretty low. That kind of argument really only works when you can prove criminal misconduct or incompetence to the extreme, not just merely being dumb. You're allowed to have bad lawyers in the USA and yes, you often lose when that happens. His lawyers knew that they couldn't run the standard "He didn't do it so you have to prove it" argument so they gambled that maybe sympathy would work. It sounds stupid, but honestly, I don't see how it's worse than defiantly arguing "It was somebody else", especially in sentencing. All it takes is one juror to give him credit for admitting to it in the penalty phase and he can escape the death penalty. Well, I actually don't know the federal rule but most US states have an "all or nothing" rule in the death penalty where one dissenter can stop it.

I can't say this without sounding like an old man, so you kids stay off my lawn. There.

One of the problems I see with younger IT people, like presumably the poster who asked about this, is that there are always the following assumptions.
1) Everybody older than me is an idiot.
2) I've had some kind of genius insight that nobody before has had, because, well, see #1.

Perl is just horrifically bad? Then let's invent Python which is just so much better in every way possible. Oh wait. Python sucks bad, so let's invent Ruby. There's probably something out there now that will replace Ruby because Ruby just sucks too. The people like the original poster never ask these kinds of questions:
1) Has this been tried before and failed for a really good reason? Really good reasons might include it being really difficult to do this, being able to do it but not well, being able to do it well but nobody wants to use it, etc.
2) If there's been no big push in the past to get this done, is there really some kind of true demand for this?

I don't go around insulting people who start topics here, but this does seem rather pointless.

I agree that this sounds reasonable, but I am afraid the reality is that once countries start changing their laws to do this, it won't be enough. If country A says "OK, we'll change the law to get 17%" then country B offers 15% and then later country C offere 12% and so on, businesses will continue to complain about the declining tax rates as still being "excessive" until they reach zero. I can't rule out that some enterprising country might find a way to make a tax rate of 0% work for them if it's done in exchange for the company bringing so many jobs at specified rates there. I just don't believe that cutting the tax rates is really going to solve anything. Here in the USA there may actually be some companies that want the tax code to stay the same. I've read it claimed that Liberty Media prides itself on never paying any US income tax and even has an accounting office dedicated to zeroing out their tax bill every year.

Correct. Hurt Locker cost $15 million to make and almost nobody in the USA watched it when it was in theaters. It barely made $15 million in US box office, so depending on what was spent for advertising and such, it either lost money or was barely profitable when counting foreign receipts (I don't know what it made in foreign box office receipts). This is why those 2 films are singled out. Rather than admit that the films either sucked or nobody was interested in the subjects even if the films were good, Hollywood is trying to sue its way into profitability there.

My experience is that Netflix has a lot more videos with captions than Amazon Prime. Last year I had a girlfriend who spoke English as a second language. Her English was pretty good, but not fluent. She wanted to improve, so sometimes we would stream movies and I would turn on the captions or subtitles (whichever is the right term) if available as she said it helped her. There were several times when both Amazon and Netflix had a movie and only Netflix has the captions. It got so common that basically we only used Amazon in cases where Netflix simply didn't have it available for streaming. I'm sure there are some movies or shows where Amazon has captions and Netflix didn't, but I think that those are exceptions.

I know that it's popular to believe that China just wants to stop Bitcoin because it can't control it and while that may be part of the reasoning behind their actions, there are possibly other reasons as well. My last 2 girlfriends were Chinese and I mean "born and raised in China". In China as the stock market is fairly new thing and the general population doesn't understand it very well, there are a lot of misconceptions about how it works. I had issues with money with both of them, although slightly different issues with each. The 2nd one had this belief I couldn't ever correct that everybody can get rich by simply buying the correct stocks and she didn't understand why I wasn't a millionaire or how it was even possible to not make tons of money on every stock available. The first one didn't understand anything about the stock market so that wasn't specifically an issue, but what ended up being an issue was a huge disconnect between her lifestyle expectations and the reality of my salary should we get married. She dumped me and went looking for someone with a lot more in the bank. The reason I bring this up is that my experience is that people in China just assume they can get rich without doing any kind of work to reach that goal. Just buy the right stocks and you'll be rich. If it was that easy, believe me, everybody would be doing that. Or "Why aren't you saving 100% of your salary?" from the first one. I think some of this may be that the government is trying to protect its citizens from themselves so they don't have to deal with massive Bitcoin ripoffs and scams that will inevitably result from an uneducated public buying them thinking that in a year or two they're all going to be rich.

I really couldn't disagree more. If Russia or China nuked anybody, there would be a lot of world wide anger, but any actual acts against them? Ha ha ha ha ha. Even the USA's BFF the UK really could not possibly be more of China's bitch on a constant basis.

Here's how I see the nuclear powers.
Bad actors: Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea.
Good actors: USA, France, UK, Israel.
I doubt that any of the "good actors" would ever use a nuclear device first. Putin may be just trying to make everybody else think he's unbalanced or he may actually be crazy enough to possibly use a nuke first. I'm not happy with either possibility. India probably wouldn't use a nuke first, but Pakistan may be crazy or irrational enough to do so. North Korea is definitely irrational enough to do so. I doubt that China's civilian government would use a nuke as a first choice, but I fear that the Communist Party may not have as great a control over the PLA as they'd like to think and if the PLA has the ability to launch strikes without the CCP giving the order, there just might be generals crazy enough to do it because they don't believe anybody has the guts to make them pay for it. No amount of public pressure can make the 'bad actors" I listed back off and if anybody honestly thinks the USA, France and the UK are the greatest threats to the world, then you're delusional to a point that nobody can bring you back from.

I have to admit to being surprised at how many posts suggest that contacting your Congresscritter will actually work. Those days are long gone for several reasons.
1) The Supreme Court ruling that basically allows virtually limitless campaign contributions means that reps and senators no longer have to depend on the public for financing, meaning that they can do whatever they want and if Big Money likes it, they'll get re-election money. I don't see this as anything Big Money cares about.
2) There's a possibility that the majority of Americans may actually be in favor of the Patriot Act. I know that it's common for American Slashdotters to believer that the entire nation agrees with them politically, but I believe that in fact the majority of Americans are not troubled at all by the things that drive American Slashdotters mad.
3) Voters have proven for decades that they don't pay attention to issues at all, they have short memories, and they merely vote on party lines every time. Incumbents have little incentive to listen to the voters when they can literally do anything short of breaking the law and handily get re-elected. And polls have laughingly shown that year after year the US electorate wants to "throw everybody out, except my representative/senator" and they fail to grasp that when the entire country insists that their rep/senator isn't the problem but yours is, nothing will ever change.

I have to ask - Is the linked article on techworm a fake? It's the first link in the parent post. The quality of English there is just a little bit off. It's not quite natural sounding. It's like something someone would say when writing as a second language when their skills are very good, but not fluent. The article reads a bit like an email spam as a result.

Thank you as I had no idea at all what this was. I think somewhere Dennis Miller is reading this and saying "Even by my standards that's obscure."

To a certain extent you have a point, but I wouldn't say you're completely correct with that statement. I believe that the most correct statement I ever read on the subject was where a linguist said that it's up to the speakers of a language to determine what is a dialect and what is a separate language. German and Dutch are regarded as separate languages by their speakers yet the degree of mutual intelligibility is extremely high. Spanish and Portuguese are probably roughly 90% the same but the speakers regard them as separate languages. Galician is even closer to Portuguese than Spanish and while it probably really should be a dialect of Portuguese, nobody gets upset that everybody thinks it's a separate language. Speakers of English from the UK or USA wouldn't regard Jamaican English as anything but a dialect. China's official policy is that there is one Chinese language and Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, Hakka, Min and others are simply dialects of I guess some theoretical single ancestor language, yet some of these "dialects" are as close to each other as English is to Polish. As far as the Romanian/Moldovan thing goes, you need to remember that the USSR stole Moldova during WWII and kept it and it was in their interest to promote the idea that Moldovans were culturally and linguistically distinct from Romanians. Romania never allowed Soviet troops to be stationed there and operated a relatively independent foreign policy during the Ceausescu era. The last thing the USSR wanted was large numbers of Moldovans seeking to rejoin Romania, hence they overpromoted the idea that Moldovan was a completely separate language. This idea is starting to fade in today's world and I would think that a majority of people in Moldova outside of Transnistria would easily admit that they speak Romanian, not some wildly different "Moldovan" language.

You're quite right, but there's even more to the story that might be of interest to the readers here.

The Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, died in 1967 and some time later, I think in late 1968 or very early 1969, the group decided to hire a new manager. The Rolling Stone recommended Allen Klein. John Lennon met him and convinced Ringo Starr and George Harrison to agree to let him become the group's manager. Paul McCartney had been arguing for his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, to manage the group and refused to sign the contract with Klein, although the other signatures were enough to make him the manager anyway. Apparently John, George and Ringo believed that Eastman would favor Paul's interests over the rest of the group, so that was why they rejected him. In 1971, Paul sued to dissolve the group so he could get out from under Klein's control. John, George and Ringo all eventually turned on Klein as did the Rolling Stones. Paul became quite rich under Lee Eastman, so you can judge for yourself just how "bad" he would have been to have managed the group.

Klein's relationship with George unraveled first following some mismanagement of funds from the Concert for Bangladesh. The "My Sweet Lord" plagarsm case went through the court for decades. Yes, decades. Litigation began in 1971 and finally ended in 1998. To stick it to George, because Klein was nothing if not vindictive, eventually he bought the publishing company that had successfully sued George in the plagiarism case. In 1981, the original amount of damages assessed were reduced to George because of Klein's duplicity in being George's manager at the start of the legal case and then switching sides to being on the side seeking compensation. In the end George just bought the publishing company from Klein to help bring the situation to a close.

My first job after college was as a computer programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't like to name. I'm glad I did the job at the time and just as glad that I left for private industry 20+ years ago. The reality of government service is that big shots do whatever they want whether it makes sense or not and whether it's legal or not because the people under them who realize "Hey. That's NOT allowed!" don't have the authority to make them do what they are supposed to do and the people above them who do have the authority have bigger fish to fry. So nobody tells them "John Doe isn't following the rules on email" or whatever. Plus, people in the military and government are amazingly vindictive and if you complain about a superior doing something wrong/illegal, the person who is likely to pay for it is you, not them. So I totally understand how Hillary came up with this stupid idea to use her own email server and everybody below her was too scared to complain about it and Obama had bigger issues like Ben Laden to worry about than what server Hillary was using for email.

When I worked for the US military, we had a general who ran our base and he single handedly kept an ancient Vax system alive for his email. I had a job that got me into contact at times with fairly senior civilian managers and they used to complain about how they loved a new Unix based email system that the base had setup but the general refused to use it. He insisted on using an old Vax that at the time couldn't easily be integrated into the newer system for some kind of technical problem that had to be overcome, so the top military and civilian managers had to have an email account on the Vax just to see if the general sent them email, but everything they sent amongst themselves that didn't need to go to him went through the new system. The general finally had to retire and once he left, his successor didn't care anything about the old Vax email system, so it finally got shut down. So I've personally seen it where some big shot in the government just does whatever the heck they want to when it comes to email. I've wondered how much it cost in manpower and other costs to keep one old email system alive because one general refused to use anything else.

There's been some speculation that somebody's military might have a really good idea about where the plane went and they aren't sharing it deliberately because it's in their strategic interest to not let other nations know that they have this capability. But ledow does have some rock solid arguments for why nobody may have noticed the flight at all and it may be that nobody paid enough attention to be able to help investigators know where it went. At this point either nobody knows anything or those who do know are deliberately not sharing, so it amounts to the same thing.

Snowden isn't going to come to the USA willingly to face trial. This is all a ruse. His Russian handlers may just be messing with the US or it may be said to get some publicity. If Snowden really wanted to face justice, he wouldn't have done what he did. His handler is quite right that if Snowden leaves Russia he may end up extradited to the USA. Snowden is going to stay as a permanent "guest" of the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russian Republic as long as Putin is in charge and possibly longer. Wait for it - in the end Snowden or his handlers will say that he couldn't get the guarantees he needed about a fair trial, so he won't be coming. Even if he really wanted to leave and face US justice with no pre-conditions, I don't think Putin and his former KGB boys would let Snowden leave.