And if a large majority of Syrian citizens are against further arming Assad's regime? Whose problem does it become? If they ask or beg for the UN to impose a no-fly zone to counteract the Assad regime's airstrikes, whose problem does it become, these new(er) anti-aircraft missiles?

Was Rwanda and its internal affairs just a problem for Rwanda and Uganda? Was the breakup of Yugoslavia merely a problem for the Serbs, Croats and Muslims to duke it out?

Just curious at how far regimes can descend, before action is taken. Is it a utilitarian argument, where the balance of lives saved must outweigh the lives lost in escalating the rebellion or outright toppling the regime? Is it an argument for means justifying the ends, that there's a tipping point where offensive military action or aid is justified (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey already think so)? Does it change the equation if not stopping the Syrian conflict will inevitably draw Lebanon, Israel and probably Iran, Turkey and the United States into a wider and messier conflict? Would it change the equation if Assad had 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Istanbul?

The point of all these questions is foreign policy is difficult and nuanced. No two situations are alike, and although we'd like it to play out like a domestic law enforcement problem, it never does and it necessarily can't be. Leaders and nations following simple rules to a fault, such as "Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem" tend to make a fucked up mess of things, either through gross inaction or not-well thought out action, like George W. Bush.

Hey thanks, moron, for stalking me and my slashdot account information. If you didn't notice, my UID is slightly older than your ignorant ass, so you're about a decade too late with the premed cracks. And again, you're fucking retarded, because while the laws don't prevent people necessarily from making a weapon or two at home with materials and tooling that they can purchase, it does give legal pretext to 1) arrest these idiots (like you, I presume) who make these completely unjustifiable weapons without going through the due process of obtaining the proper credentials and 2) monitor the purchases of material (fertilizer, anyone?) to make these weapons and 3) prevent any scalability of businesses who peddle services in obtaining these weapons. You can't outlaw education and skills, but you can tell people, politely, to not turn their skills to violent purposes. And it shouldn't take a bomb going off to take away the said bomb in the first place...which in your fantasy world apparently everyone should be able to stockpile whatever weapons they want.

So, please, do the world a favor and blow yourself up with your favorite hobby. The gene pool thanks you in advance.

Are you fucking retarded? Do you own a 20 mm minigun? How about a room full of pressure cooker improvised explosives? Maybe a fertilizer bomb? There are clearly things that do not belong in the possession of the general public (other than properly licensed and checked entities) and it doesn't need to progress to pulling or pushing the trigger before saying "oops, he shouldn't have possession of that item!".

It doesn't need to proven that Manning personally handed a copy of the release to an al Qaeda agent to make him guilty. This charge should absolutely stick. Let's say John Doe is a disgruntled Armed Forces intel agent working in Afghanistan. He's sick of his job, and takes a huge stack of classified targeting mission profiles and drone photos and scatters them in the air in Kabul's marketplace out of protest. Agents of the Taliban or al Qaeda collect the papers and peruse it. Regardless of the timeliness or utility of the info, he's (unwittingly and stupidly) gone against explicit orders and policy and aided and abetted the enemy efforts. Trying to draw a ridiculous line of causality for "proof" between release and someone getting killed is not needed at that point.

Quit idolizing Manning. Just because Manning exposed some of the seedy underpinnings of international diplomacy doesn't make him a hero. No, there were no explicit war crimes that weren't already being exposed by the MSM (Abu Ghraib being the best example). I've read through the wiki leaks releases, and there is little to nothing within them that couldn't be found in the MSM or inferred through a basic knowledge of international affairs. He's a Kevin Mitnick of this decade.

$168,000 for a married couple would be lower-end upper middle class (or comfortable middle class for a higher living-cost area like a metropolis). Think about it. That's two lower-end salaries for a pair of educated professionals. You're not buying mansions at $168,000 a year; nor are you jet setting to Club Med on a whim.

Just because the current meme equates middle class with "just above drowning in debt and living paycheck to paycheck" does not make it true.

The Wealthy, the true upper class, have no need to work. Their income (for the most part) comes from interest and capital gains. They'd be using a different tax calculator anyways.

Iran should feel free to. The US economy wouldnt even blink. In fact, Iran needs the US and other advanced manufacturing economies for the high strength materials needed for its missile and nuclear material enrichment programs.

And that was for Mario, as well as my and my kids' anticipation for the next Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Mario Party, and Metroid. We'll probably get a PS4 too, but the decision to buy a Wii U was a no-brainer. Those games are coming, and yes, they'll be worth a new console.

Yes, this surgery is creepy and dangerous.

However, when you veer off into talking about addiction in general, you start conflating two very different phenomena: dependency and addiction. Dependency is the fact that if you stop using the substance in question, you will experience adverse effects. Stop drinking caffeine after you've become dependent, and you'll experience headaches. Etc. Addiction is a primary neurological disorder stemming from the way the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are wired. Addiction is not necessarily tied to a specific substance; more than likely, if an addict experiments around, there are multiple behaviors and/or substances that can fill their craving just fine.

There's a very simple litmus test that can tell you when a person needs to stop. Substance abuse is separated from mere dependency by the continued use of said substance despite clear harm or impairment from its use. A cigarette smoker that is tied to an oxygen tank because of COPD. A cocaine abuser that has cardiomyopathy and heart failure. An drinker that continues to drink despite brain damage and liver failure. These are more extreme but easy to think of cases of abuse in which they should have stopped a long time ago or gotten treatment.

Well, everything, and I do mean everything, exists in a finite supply. What's more limiting than simply the number of idiots is 1) the amount of ready-to-spend cash held by idiots and 2) the attention span of idiots before they jump at the next make-money-with-no-effort scheme.

The authorities should be obeyed, in most general situations, unless they are asking you to do something unlawful. If you're an idiot that is refusing to leave a place of private business when the business owner's representative asks you to leave, and then calls the cops when you refuse to leave, everything else that happens after that is a simple preventable fact.

There is a way of handling the police or other law enforcement officials. Be polite. Be courteous. Follow simple directions, with the above limits. Have a plan to contact an attorney with full details, names, and badge numbers at the soonest available opportunity if the need arises.

You are not going to out-argue a police officer. You are not going to outfight a police officer. You are not going to kill more police officers than there are willing to kill you. Physical or verbal confrontations with a police officer are pointless; they will all end in the same result. The way to fight police injustices is through the courts and media, not through sparring of any kind.

Keep in mind: police officers in any individual incident, above all else, are trained to MAINTAIN CONTROL OF THE SITUATION, using any necessary means. If you're the idiot trying to take control of the situation away from the police officer (rightly or wrongly), guess who's going to end up next on the target list?

As 1984 and central Africa demonstrate, hunger as a tool of dissent control and food as a political weapon can be a very powerful thing. Even if North Korea was swimming in cash, I doubt its common citizens would be getting well fed any time soon.

There's nothing odd about Russia's position. Russia has always asserted its right to militarily dominate its own secessionist populations and its nearby sphere of influence. Agreeing that al-Assad shouldn't kill 40,000 of his own citizens in an attempt to restore order sets a bad precedent for Russia. It might come back to haunt them, say, the next time they decide to level Grozny block by block to bring Chechnya back in line.

It makes perfect sense. Passive-aggressives avoid visible and outright conflict or argument. Why would they want to have a conversation that could turn negative when they could simply shoot off a text or email?

This is +4 Insightful? I could buy plenty of movies with boobs showing at the supermarket. "R" rating includes pretty much everything except prolonged full frontal nudity and/or hardcore sex. In some cases, enough people get off that here in the United States wenominate it for an Oscar.

Heck, if boobage is all you're looking for, just turn on some cable TV. Don't act like you have to travel to the naughty side of town for that.

First: kidneys are vital organs. Just because the human body has a built-in redundancy does not make it any less necessary to live. Some people, depending on their preexisting health, won't be able to tolerate the removal of a kidney either without taking a significant hit to their kidney function.

Second: opening the marketplace for donor human organs to profit motives is a bad idea all around. But, if you can solve the human conditions of corruption, avarice and socioeconomic inequality than yes, it might be workable.

By the time a workable profiteering model for selling organs is adopted, we'll be growing MHC-matched replacement organs in the lab.