Your post is a tribute to misunderstanding (or trolling?) and bad moderation. There are detrimental effects from Snowden's leaks. I don't know how you think I said there wasn't.* It is entirely logical that they are spending money to repair the damage caused Snowden's leaks. The mess was caused by Snowden, and you are paying for the clean up. The US will be vulnerable for years or decades to come.

* Well, maybe I do know how you managed to achieve such a "misunderstanding" based on your sig: Fanboy .... Ron Paul.

The only reason that they have the money to spend is because they made a case to Congress, demonstrated the damage, and had their appropriation increased to recover from the damage. They don't get to spend whatever money they want to "just because."

The "many benefits" you see are only the places you look in your narrow view. You aren't looking anywhere near the national security landscape, only the "security landscape" comprised of internet programmers and activists. You avert your eyes from the real damage and see what you choose to. Your view is uninformed and stunted.

The militia laws reflect potential military requirements not social engineering goals. So yes, there are reasons for it, good ones. You could get a hint about some of that if you search your memory for the number of female infantry regiments in the service of Russia or Ukraine at present. I'm pretty sure the number will be close to zero.

By the way, that reply you made to me about Castro not being a communist at the beginning is essentially irrelevant. Castro apparently spoke out against capitalism and for collectivization while in school. After school he used his legal training to defend communists. He also took part in revolutionary activities overseas years before he did in Cuba. This was all before Batista returned to power, and before he met up with Guevara. He may not have been a communist by membership, but the handwriting was on the wall.

It is pretty unlikely that women would be excluded from 2nd Amendment rights since the trend has been broadening the rights and clarifying that it is an individual right.

The militia clause isn't equal because the demands of the military aren't equal. That has been tested in court and upheld many times.

And there is a good solution for storage, but the allies of the fossil fuel industry have combined with the anti nuclear folks to block Yucca mountain from opening. Bury the nuclear waste deep in the earth, because that is where it came from in the first place.

It is very sad for the thousands of people that lost their homes because of radiation around Fukushima. But compare that evacuation to the effects of the earthquake and tsunami itself, which claimed the lives of 15,885 people and injured 6,148 with 2623 people still missing, the response to the radiation leak is just one after effect of the tsunami, but it hasn't caused any deaths.

As for "Such a fire will render the U.S "virtually" uninhabitable.".... a hundred nuclear weapons were detonated on the US mainland as part of above ground nuclear weapons tests. While I think that was incredibly stupid and irresponsible and there have certainly been health effects and increased cancer deaths in the decades afterwards, the radiation leaks at nuclear power plants pale in comparison to the radiation released by those above ground tests and as far as I can tell the US is still inhabitable.

Nice straw man.

-Defusing bad moderation since 1999.

Ummm, if you bothered more than a cursory glance at my thing you'd notice I AM advocating open solutions. Monowall is FreeBSD, with some mods and a nice WebUI stuck on it for configuration. EdgeOS, that runs on the ERL, is a fork of Vayetta, which is a fork/mod of Debian.

Both are open solutions but both are under active development and support by a team. Hence I'm a pretty big fan. Monowall was last updated in January, and they still support their legacy version for old hardware like WRAP systems, and their new version for more powerful systems. EdgeOS was updated in March, and they have an alpha for the next version going you can opt in to.

On the other hand the OSS firmwares are half-abandoned it seems. When I Google for Tomato I get a page that talks about it as a WRT54G firmware and looks like it hasn't seen updates in 5-8 years. Further down there's a "Tomato USB" mod on it that was updated in 2010 and still runs on 2.6.

This sort of thing does not engender trust in long term viability or freedom from bugs/exploits.

Also there's the issue that some of us have high speed needs. My Internet connection is 150/20mbps. So I need something that can support that. Triple stream N is pretty much the minimum (dual stream N maybe can in ideal cases) and AC is a better choice. Also the "router" part of the router needs to be able to keep up with that kind of speed, even when I've set up my firewall rules and such.

Finally you seem to confuse reliability with swappability. Sure, you can have a whole host of cheapass old routers and if one dies, put in a new one. However it is hard to do when you need more powerful, and thus expensive, hardware but also that isn't reliable, that is just having extras. I'd rather just have something that has less issues, that works for years on end with no problems, and not have to mess with it. That's what you get with something like a monowall box.

Also like I said, one component may need replacing before others. My Edgerouter Lite will last me a long time, unless it breaks, since it can handle around gigabit speeds with the setup I have (I've tested it). However if I get much faster Internet, I'll need a new cable modem, since mine is only 8x4 stream, and to go much above where I'm at you usually want 16 streams down. Likewise if my WAP is likely to get replaced sooner than the ERL, but probably not as soon as the cable modem.

I can have latest tech where I want it, older tech where I don't and it is all good. Also in my experience setups like that are extremely reliable.

Maybe this is why the hypocrite Democrats aren't legalizing cannabis-- they're hoping the illegal growers will drive adoption of green energy to hide their energy usage.

-Defusing bad moderation since 1999.

What really should have happened is that all his Monsanto-using neighbors should have gotten in trouble for allowing their seeds to escape. Since they were the ones who were parties to the agreement with Monsanto, they were the ones who broke that agreement.

Of course, Monsanto suing its own customers would be bad for business, so it went after the innocent third-party instead...

Maybe this is why the hypocrite Democrats aren't legalizing cannabis-- they're hoping the illegal growers will drive adoption of green energy to hide their energy usage.

Nice straw man.

Well, then it's about time the UK starts allowing their citizens to arm themselves, stop being monitored in public, and paying for stupid TV licenses. While we're at it, the French need to work longer hours and wear deodorant, and the Germans need to have the sticks up their asses surgically removed.

Comfy?

Appeal to popularity, right? I'm pretty sure the USA is quite leftist compared to the entire Middle East and much of Africa, regardless. So by "The Rest of the World", what an elitist like you means is, "Western Europe".

Not only is the smell of cat pee the least of my concerns, but if some guy was burning trash and stinking up the neighborhood, I'd have reason to complain. Likewise, if his cannabis smoke is wafting around my house. I guess he'll have to run the A/C while he's tokin'.

If you think that the US hasn't been a close ally of the UK then you are either uninformed or misinformed, or perhaps simply wrongheaded. Do you realize that the US and UK cooperated on some of the programs that were leaked? Do you realize that Snowden was leaking GCQH material?

Snowden could have gone to Congress, or in UK terms to Parliament. Surely you can imagine that it would be preferable in a disagreement over defense plans that it would be better for the country if the dissident goes to Parliament instead of stealing millions of documents of whatever sort he can get his hands on and flees to China to publish them under questionable circumstances?

Even if you assume he wasn't a spy, the problem isn't that he didn't have a chance to do the right thing, but that he made an anti-democratic decision against public policy.

Your grateful that he damaged the security of your country, the UK? Sad.