To be accorded full POW status you also have to reveal your name and rank, and obviously identify yourself as an enemy partisan. If you respond "al-Qaeda, what's that?" you really have no rights under the Geneva conventions. We can decide you're an enemy clandestine operator - which means as far as the Geneva conventions are concerned we could execute you on the spot.

Most buyers of the big suite packages are without doubt businesses where people use the tools for work. And from a business perspective a one-time purchase is an investment which in the U.S. is paid for with taxed money (at a 40-50% rate depending on state), and then depreciated over a number of years as determined by the IRS. A monthly recurring fee however is an expense. It's the same reason airlines sell their plane engines to financing groups, which then lease them back to the airline - a pure paper arrangement to reduce profit and taxation. (Paying interest at 10-15% is cheaper than paying corporate taxes at almost 40%; then try to recover value from the fixed-schedule depreciation.) For the same reason, leasing software is cheaper than buying it; Adobe understands this and wants a cut.

Eh. A math tag would have allowed me to type math in my response to you right here, in postings to facebook, email, or anywhere HTML is used. Requiring a site to source scripts guarantees it'll never be more than peripheral and utterly irrelevant.

At least the tools of the fifth column are kept busy with an imaginary problem...

The discussion is about mass, not weight. Weighing something is a very indirect way to determine mass; but regardless, it's about mass, not weight. If it were about weighing schemes a term other than mass would have been used.

Depending on where you live, exposing yourself to even the risk of being prosecuted and convicted of negligently discharging a firearm is a really poor idea. In CA a misdemeanor conviction will result in a fine of up $1000, up to 12 months in county jail, and a ten year ban on gun ownership. A felony conviction is a strike on your criminal record (resulting in a doubling of your sentence should you do something similarly foolish again), up to a $10000 fine, up to 3 years in a state correctional institution, a permanent revocation of your second amendment right to bear arms, and your registration as a convicted felon.

Basically, if someone flies a drone over your property you reach for the phone and call 911. Not your gun.

I fly lots of RC aircraft, both heli and fixed-wing, and can tell you it's not easy to find a decent flying field. You can't fly above 400 ft, out of visual sight (not that you'd want to without a first-person-view link), over people's property, over roads and highways (including waterways, marinas, etc), or anywhere it's banned. And you'd be amazed how just about every piddly town has an ordinance prohibiting all forms of unmanned model aircraft. This is why it's so hard to find anywhere to fly. Unless you live out in the NV desert the issue of private surveillance drones just doesn't exist. And if you do live in the middle of nowhere you might have a fair amount of acreage to keep tabs on, in which case having one is justifiable. Basically, the whole thing is a complete non-issue for private users. It's really only government and some limited commercial uses, like law enforcement, coast guard/search and rescue, high-acreage businesses like farming and ski areas etc, BLM/Forest Dept, and such where regulation is relevant. The reality is that flying model aircraft today's is almost (though not quite) as difficult as finding someplace to go shoot guns. Private small drones don't really require any additional regulation.

It's not illegal for a service provider to read email they've stored for you. The only thing preventing them is internal policy - a google employee found reading email would likely be fired. But there's no criminal act there. By comparison, a postal worker who opens letters and reads them will go to prison. A telco worker who taps your phone likewise. Email isn't considered more private then you make it, so doesn't have legal protections.

No it's not; this isn't tritium (T2O) being discussed, but normal water contaminated with Sr90. ALPS is supposed to separate the Sr. The remaining water has a modestly low level of tritium. Releasing tritium is no big deal; it may slightly harm seafood or maybe even kill it, but it will dilute quickly and is of no harm to humans who eat seafood. Sr90 on the other hand is a metal and while it's easily broken up into dust and carried around by currents it's heavier than water so collects in hot spots on the sea floor.

This is what they say. Then they put Apple on desks and in bags, and buy iPhones, not because it's lower cost but because it's viewed like a perk (like free lunches, snacks, or an on-site gym, etc) - and it's relatively cheap compared to payroll costs in general. What they say is largely irrelevant because they don't know what they want, and in the absence of wanting something else a purchaser will say they need lower cost. When a purchaser says they're cost sensitive it really says they don't know what they need and aren't in the business of brainstorming. This doesn't mean there's no opportunity for innovation outside of cost-performance. Sun benefited from its stackable pizza boxes; people greatly preferred having a stack of those in a corner to the other common alternatives at the time, even though they cost more. They also ran SunOS. Sun wasn't popular with purchasing departments either, but they had no choice because if they bought Pentium PCs or IBM AIX based machines their technical staff would go work someplace else. Sparc was only briefly, if every, best bang for buck in terms of performance. The problem with Sun was their product innovation completely stopped and all they did was tweak the underlying technology. Oracle is just as bad if not worse. This means they have their market locked in, but it's an ever shrinking market that can't be grown.

Imagine instead that you have a rack where you can add and remove boards as you see fit. Need 4 more CPUs each with 16-64 execution units, insert a board. Need another 64GB memory? Insert a board. Need a pile of ethernet ports perhaps with a builtin soft configurable switch, add a board. Or FC-AL, or anything else. And, more interestingly, want to remove a board? Push the stop button on it and the kernel begins releasing all resources on it used - unconfigure interfaces, power down CPUs, or deallocate (possibly page out) memory. When it's safe to remove a light comes on and you pull it out. A power supply might take up four slots; need redundancy? Put in 2 and set the mode to active slave. Or stick in a video board and run it like a big fat desktop. Such a system might cost more than the equivalent x86 servers, perform less, give less bang for buck, but it would have reasonable incremental expansion costs and flexibility. It would find an immediate customer base in academia and technical markets - the pizza box of the 2010s.

In the case of the Sparc T5 they're once again just going after cost. Nothing wrong with that, but more telling is there's no product innovation going on.

...and there was no one else left to lift a finger.

Twitter would have made no difference. I was opposed to the Iraq war exactly because waving dossiers without sharing any useful fact or showing hard proof sounded like total BS. Yet in the anti-war demonstrations and anti-war rhetoric it was all about "no war for oil". The reason the war happened was because it was unopposed, which was because the retard knee-jerk left had hijacked the opposition. The Saddam Hussein regime sold us all the oil we wanted, especially if we were to lift the sanctions, so the whole leftist narrative was as much BS as Powell's dossier. I couldn't even tell if these people even cared if there was a misguided war or not, or if anyone died, as long as they could win a few political points. That's why the war happened - because of the left's intellectual inbreeding and inability to make a coherent argument against it. Twitter wouldn't have helped with that, because they'd still be tweeting about war-for-oil narratives which most people would just roll their eyes and facepalm at.

Supporting the Shah has nothing to do with it. Tyrants always play up past grievances to epic proportions. If we hadn't supported the Shah they'd simple use something else. Or make something up; it doesn't terribly matter how factual it is, since once they start talking war over it and build an army to overrun their neighbors it starts being taken seriously. And if it's something they invented they can steer public opinion. What's exceptional in the Iraq war is that a dictator got a taste of their own medicine for a change, and instead of trying counter fiction and warmongering with a rational response we replaced their fictitious narrative with our own.

Well, let's keep in mind that the purpose of the ICC is to prosecute war criminals in states that won't prosecute themselves. The same legislative body that passes the Service Members Protection Act also has laws in place for the prosecution of U.S. war criminals. And it oversees the military judicial system, which prosecutes the same. If you hand evidence to a military prosecutor that some general ordered the genocide of a village, or instituted a policy of persecution, or otherwise ordered crimes to be committed - they WILL be investigated, and if there is a case there WILL be prosecution. In fact if there's any organization on this planet that's anal about obeying rules it's the U.S. federal government. NO part of the federal government tolerates criminal activity. There's just no debate; you'd be handed off to the FBI immediately. The same applies to the U.S. armed forces, there's just no tolerance for attacking or abusing civilians. There's no culture of doing that. It's not an organization built for that purpose, to set that into system, organized to that end. It decides exactly what it can do, then sticks to it. An officer would have an extremely hard time getting away with any crap, so when it happens it tends to be individuals or small units that lose it. Which do get prosecuted, making an obvious example to anyone else who ever considered the same, and their superiors get investigated to make sure they weren't involved in it. Their email, text messages, random witnesses who might have overheard orders or discussions, etc - it all gets collected. As a result, it's not possible to claim no as of yet uncovered systematic war crimes never happened in some conspiracy at some point, but it's really very remote. A state and a military ruled by law doesn't need the ICC. The only people who would be indicted would be by political finger pointing ("oh yeah, Obama himself must been involved!!! Amerikkka baaahd!!!").

Note the "citation needed" in that Wikipedia quote. NATO's position was that if adopted it becomes law, and first use would become an criminal act. But the USSR was never hampered by this since it wasn't ruled by law, and could just change its mind and strike first. Hence, the agreement would in practice have different implications for the two parties. NFU is irrelevant today and never amounted to more than a propaganda play.