Actually, the Supreme court has already ruled that this is, in fact, legal.

Because the average rural Afghan doesn't even have a radio. You tell the village elders what you're doing, you don't bother putting it on TV. The stuff on the Internet and TV are for us, not the people that the Taliban want to rule.

And while our control links to our UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are encrypted, the video feeds are NOT. And we *know* that the bad guys are tapping into the video feeds when we have UAVs overhead. Which just goes to show that contractors can do some silly things.

Not sure I like the idea of having ALL of our UAVs and various robots using a single OS. Because unless it's VERY secure, I can forsee a time when the bad guys hack the OS and our drones/UAVs/robots/etc are used by them against us...

I've been a Verizon customer for a couple of years, but got fed up with the prices they charged while I was deployed and not even using the service, merely to keep my phone number for when I got home.

I'm tired of it, and tired of being locked into contracts and paying for data. I want freedom! So here's what I did:

1. - I purchased two unlocked Galaxy Nexus penta-band GSM phones for $400 each
2. - I purchased StraightTalk unlimited prepaid plans for each phone for $45.

Yes, I paid an early-termination fee. But by my calculation, even with paying the full cost of the phone, I come out even in six months. And I no longer have to worry about the tyranny of a contract. I'm free to go to any MVNO.

Actually, that's incorrect. We (I'm a Signal Officer in the Army National Guard that just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan) have several communications systems that use civilian satellites.

So your statement would more correctly read: The military has plenty of money to rent time on civilian satellites.

To head off the inevitable "it's not secure!", we use NSA-provided end-to-end encryption for all of our tactical communications, especially those going over civilian networks. Including satellites.

I just got back from a deployment to Afghanistan, and I can tell you that sometimes the only way to get to sleep is by watching something that will get your mind off of what's really going on. My favorite was light comedies and sitcoms.

I didn't know about this guy. We got most of our movies over there from local vendors who would sell pirated copies (that's legal in Afghanistan). The MPAA is getting the Customs Service and DoD to crack down, though. We used to be able to buy whatever we wanted from the locals and bring them home. Then when I came home from Iraq in 2008, we were allowed to bring one copy of each movie/TV show, and that was fine as well. This time when we were coming home we were told that we could only bring one item, period. Which was fine, again, because now we're ripping the movies to our hard-drives, anyway. I wonder how long it'll be until the MPAA gets the Customs Service to look at all of the content of our laptop hard drives on re-deploying back to the U.S....

If you were lucky enough to be stationed at Bagram Air Field, then you had a PX where you could by legit movies for full price, but for most of us stuck out at various FOBs scattered across the country, the local guy was all we had. Hopefully the Pentagon Pukes don't listen to the MPAA and take that away from us, or we'll be in a world of hurt over there. This deployment sucked pretty bad. Not sure what'll happen if the next one is even worse due to those greedy MoFo's in the MPAA...

Yeah, President Obama will say "Hey! I'm running for re-election, how do I get some of that dough?"

Um...isn't California broke?

Something that you're overlooking: The insurgents are actively attempting to get us to accidentally kill civilians. We *know* that this is a Tactic/Technique/Procedure (TTP) that they're using. They hide behind civilians, or wear civilian clothing and shoot at us, then hide the weapons when we return fire. They are actively attempting to make it look like we're killing civilians for their Information Operations (IO) campaign. Of course, the liberals don't deal with reality, they prefer the "American soldiers are killing babies!" headlines. Sorry, it's just frustrating for those of us over here when the Main Stream Media actively ignores the reality of what is going on over here, in favor of "higher truth".

I'd have much more confidence in "climate scientists" if everybody claiming the title made their data transparently available. Not just to those who agree with their stance, but everybody. Hiding your data means that you don't have a scientific agenda, but a political one.