How much money is made on illicit alcohol in the US?

Actually, the bigger question is that, if the "pirates" are making so much fucking money on this second-rate content (compressed, poorly packaged, difficult to find, and onerous to collect), how is it that the content creator, which have the ability to make acquisition super-easy are not able to see a dime from their work?

The simple answer is that the entire landscape for distribution has changed, and the laws are still written as if it were pre-internet.

True, but apparently, we have not honored our part either. We told Gorby that we would NOT be going after old warsaw pact nations, but we have.

LOL; Right now, Large businesses and foreign gov. are buying America's gov. That is true. BUT, TRUE fascism is where the gov. controls businesses. By far, the best example of that is NOT the west, but China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and somewhat socialist nations in Europe.

BUT, America got businesses to go along with this by offering up contracts (Verizon, ATT and Qwest very much got contracts for allowing a lot more ).

But declaring America as a whole to be fascists is a joke. I will say that the republican party fits the very definition, but they do not control everything.

First, Femi was part of the fascist party. He left Italy to escape the anti-jew laws that was used against his assistants, and was looking at his wife and kids.
Secondly, everything that he had done up to that time, had been in the open. Germany had not even started work on nukes until late in 39, and they used Femi's work just as much as the American's did.

There is ZERO similarities here. After all, did America pass laws that prosecuted either Snowden or his family? Nope.

Hmmm.
Einstein was doing nothing with Germany's military projects before he came to the US, nor did he seek to steal any state secrets to bring here. Yes, Einstein was declared a traitor by Germany, but only later on, and not for spying and stealing.

Snowden has openly stated to others that he stole these documents. He has said exactly how he did it. And multiple other witnesses who were part of this are backing up his story ("I gave my credentials to snowden", etc).

Sorry, but in any nation in the world, Snowden would be a traitor, while Einstein would only be a traitor by those that say that all ex-pats with value are traitors (like china still does, and USSR used to do).

While it is irrelevant, Germany did want to.

Actually, his running to China and Russia is not an issue. We have provided safe haven for others from other nations without them telling us all their secrets.
The problem is that Snowden is a hero by speaking about the spying on Americans, but then he is a traitor for speaking of what we LEGITIMATELY do with spying on other nations.
Now, he has destroyed a lot of our capabilities to know what terrrorists, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing. In fact, I would not be the least bit surprised if all of this outing of our capabilities is what is leading to Putin to go after Ukraine ( that and the fact that there is enough oil to provide Ukraine and the rest of Europe independence from Russia).

At this time if were to come back to the west, I say pin a medal on his chest and then allow 20 ppl to shoot him in the head.

Look, that area is contentious and has LOADS of satellites flying overhead. IOW, loads of pix were taken. It should be easy enough to subtract the KNOWN flights from those sats. and see what remains.
BUT, nobody is coming forth with that.

Seems to me that they should be finding plenty of mamoth in greenland and north america. Perhaps we are not looking as much as we should.

Sometime ago, an accountant ran around screaming that oil is created by the earth. Now, here the possibility of heat and pressure with Carbon and water. Makes you wonder.

As a consumer listening to songs I find only a small percentage of work of any single artist strikes that perfect mix that makes me want to put a song on a "favorites" playlist. As you look back at your library of songs, is there a group that you think really are just meh and how many do you still really, really enjoy performing? As a followup - if the songs you perform the most get stale for you as a performer do you look to your catalog to keep things fresh or do you prefer to write new material?

I was going to post that the range would be teh suck, and disqualify a tesla, but a stretch version with 2-3x the batteries, and high-performance regenerative breaking might actually make it a better choice. Yes, it takes a shitload of energy to get the 10 ton vehicle moving, but this is mostly an in town car - lots of stop and go. You get a percentage of that kinetic energy back every time you brake. Even with an enhanced fuel tank of 30+ gallons, the Caddy probably doesn't have even a 200 mile range in town (best guess is that it gets 8mpg in the best scenario, on Diesel). An electric vehicle would be more limited by aerodynamics and heat losses, so it might actually be range-competitive except at highway cruising speeds.

Now, there still may be a scenario (extended evacuation distance) which the batteries just couldn't handle, but for normal to moderately-extreme conditions a battery pack car very well could out-perform the ICE version.

And if you really, really, really needed to get the stuff quickly you can "upgrade" to a commercial, highspeed account (100Mbps uncapped is ~$200/mo) and upload everything quickly or - in the case of a failure - download it all back faster than they can write it to a HDD and mail it to you.

Damn straight. I'll remind myself that phones and tablets were never mean to watch movies or listen to music or share vacation photos or pull up a reference document when I'm on a job site. That's the kind of stuff I really should be carrying around a full laptop for.