It becomes a problem when they are incompetent, and get caught spying on allies. You ought to have a problem with that, because it's costing the USA money and credibility. Sure, in national terms, maybe it's fine to be a prick; it can work to your advantage. Being outed as a prick, however, has repercussions - one of which is the subject of this article. (If it's actually the reason, and not hyperbole. But even if it isn't the reason here, it is/will be in other instances - plenty of them.)

None of that changes the fact that the WMDs were are hollow pretext for a war that GW Bush had decided was going to happen LONG before 9/11. The sexed-up dossiers etc were all fig leaves for an invasion that was happening no matter what anyone thought, specifically the electorate in some alleged democracies (UK/USA).

If they're right, the message just needs to be 'Snowden bad, us good'. Making sense is a nice, unessential extra.

I suspect the cause-effect could easily have been the other way around. e.g. find us the 'intelligence' we need to justify the invasion. I recall, around the time of the inspections (to find WMDs), a white house 'source' quoted as saying "We're not going to take 'yes' for an answer."

The only perspective that matters... *right*? ;) Seriously though, the front of that site seems to think Jihadism is 'left'.

Water under 100km of ice is a problem for life, because you want to have some cycling of materials from the surface down to the ocean. In 'Unmasking Europa' Richard Greenberg makes a very compelling (in my opinion) case that the icy crust is much thinner than this, as can particularly be seen in melt-through features such as the Connemara Chaos. This, combined with the likelihood that Europa's environment has been stable for billions of years, makes me think it by far the most likely body in the solar system to have life, and indeed even multicellular life. I'm perfectly willing to bet on it but I guess I'd be waiting a loooong time...

Though with or without these plumes, it would still seem sensible to try to collect some of the icy material sharing Europa's orbit, as this ought to have been ejected from impacts (or perhaps these plumes) - a lot easier to find little (dead of course) critters there than trying to melt through 10km or more of ice.

Richard Hoagland..! I wondered if you posted on Slashdot. ;)

Being unable to distinguish between jocularity and serious is also fairly stupid, though of course you're excused if you have a social deficit of some kind. You're calling this guy stupid, but he's ripping the piss outta you.

See when he said his computer destructs based on GPS location? That was a joke. He wasn't being serious. It's unfortunate that needs to be explained, because it is obvious as fuck.

It's proximity to the event horizon that shows strong relativistic effects akin to being accelerated close to c (rather than proximity to the centre in and of itself). Black hole event horizons are not 'made' of anything in particular, they're just a region of space, so I expect we could observe black holes merging without any difficulties. Objects thrown in will appear to slow down and stop on the event horizon before gradually disappearing.

World created in six days. Want another?

That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. There is a claim, 'the biblical flood happened'. The onus is not on a skeptic to prove that it did not happen.

You went off at the deep end, strongly suggesting that parent's post had about as much semantic meaning as a gong being banged, merely because he contracted 'a lot' to 'alot' which you didn't like. The parties quip was justified I think. No-one cares. And no, people copying other's syntactical mistakes doesn't mean what they say is akin to a mynah bird copying every noise it hears.

Anti-bacterial soap and antibiotics are different. One of 'em kills humans too unless it's kept on the outside.

I save in a credit union and am "white". Also there's lots of community centres here but not very many 'ethnic' people. In other words, what you say can be safely disregarded. Phew.