Bullshit. Chemical weapons were used more against military targets than they were against civilians, from WW1 to Iran-Iraq War. And they were plenty effective in both cases. Heck, we now have unclassified CIA files where they openly admit that the use of poison gas by Saddam was responsible for many of his successes against Iran.

Depends what you mean by "choice". Of course nobody will choose poor if given a magical choice between being rich and being poor. But give them a choice of getting a minimum wage paying job, working long hours, giving up booze, drugs and cigarettes, living responsibly and saving small amounts of money on the side while looking for a course at a community college to improve their skills, studying at night while working during the day, then getting a better paying job and working hard at it. While you are right about mental issues being a major cause of homelessness, there are other issues involved and those include choices that they have made daily throughout their life, such as choosing an easy short term option (getting high) or hard (waking up early and going to a shitty job day after day).

Whats you strategy? 1) Kill them while they're young 2) If they somehow survive, give them more welfare 3) Increase taxes on productive people to finance the ever-increasing welfare state 4) Greece, here we come

Causes of poverty:

1. Dropping out of high school
2. Having children before the age of 21 or outside marriage
3. Using drugs or committing other crimes and spending time in jail
4. Failure to get a job (even unskilled minimum wage) and stick with it and work hard

If you do not do any of those four things (and it is not too much to ask) you have only 2% chance of living in poverty in the USA.

...Because traditional phone conversations are secure?

There are two types of sciences:

There is the theoretical side of science which is mostly publicly (or academically) funded. This is a lot of the stuff that makes you go "oh neat" but has little to no practical application in our lives.

Then there is the practical side of science, this is almost always privately funded through companies R&D teams, this is the stuff you use.

Until the theoretical side of science can really get the support of individuals, they're pretty much doomed to get cut first in any budget because their focus is almost exclusively on interesting, but not practical solutions.

Yes, of course. My point was that pretty much all C++ compilers out there have some language extensions of their own, so the problem has been with us for the long time - and people have generally learned how to deal with it.

Of late, the official Microsoft guidance on using C++ to write apps for its platforms (specifically, in the context of Win8 Metro apps) is to use standard C++ as much as possible, and only use language extensions when necessary to interface with the OS (e.g. C++/CX to call into WinRT), with a clear isolation boundary between portable code and platform-specific code.

There's no requirement to be a physicist other than practicing physics. To be called a Doctor, you need a doctorate, sure. But there's no such requirement for physicist like there's no degree requirement to be a manager or a programmer.

Webster defines it as: "a specialist in physics"
Oxford defines it as: "an expert in or student of physics."

So by those definitions, it could just be someone studying physics book or extremely learned in the field of physics.

This is why I don't see someone putting a ton of effort to get something on a large body like Mars. I could, however, see someone spending all kinds of money trying to lasso an asteroid made of rare/desirable ores.

You're close, but think bigger. Much bigger.

The global interests have decided that it's time for global change. They want the "Age of America" as a top superpower finished and over with. They want a major global power-shift.

The only way outside of natural disasters/pandemics that major and sudden global changes happen is through world war.

World War 3 is what is being staged here. Russia has already sent a fleet to the area. Both Russia and China have warned the US not to strike Syria. The US will be facing Russia, China, Iran, and much of the Middle East and others with an over-extended and exhausted US military. The US doesn't come out of that well.

The US Dollar is about to collapse. They've been running the printing presses at warp speed to maintain a rough status-quo while they make preparations. They see a war as not only the only way, but the preferred way, out of the somewhere-north-of ~$17T debt (that's admitted to), while simultaneously taking the US out of the top-global-superpower club and allowing martial law to be declared in the US and massive domestic political/societal changes made via the barrels of guns.

Hang on boys and girls.

Shit's about to get real after Obama strikes Syria.

I firmly believe it will be the "Archduke Ferdinand" moment that starts a world war and signals the end of the US as a top superpower, and the end of constitutional civil liberties as we've known them for the people in the US.

Strat

Some other people have tried to blow the whistle through proper channels in NSA. Didn't work out so well for them, and it was publicized back in the day. I assume that Snowden is no idiot and read up on that experience.

Simply put, if your "internal affairs agency" is compromised to the point where it's useless, and you know about it, the only meaningful course of action is to go public.

Not really. They claim that they have suspicions, but they refuse to release any information that would prove them. So far we have to basically trust their claims that their violations of our privacy are helpful in catching terrorists and preventing attacks.

The problem, I suspect, is that the people who wrote SELinux are a different group from the people who have actually had it set up the way they did, giving sysadmins effectively unlimited access without it being formally recognized in the permission system (which is probably what is actually reviewed by some security clearance committee somewhere).

It really reminded me of this short animation. Maybe they should show it on NSA orientation courses to explain how security (doesn't) work.

The logic is fairly obvious: when there is such a large gap between the leader and everyone else, why would you as a malware writer target anything by the leader? It doesn't make sense to target 20% of your exploits for iOS and 80% for Android, just because that's the corresponding market shares. You target all of your exploits in such a way as to maximize the total number of people hit by each. From that perspective, the only logical choice is to target Android for all of them.

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/C-Extensions.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/C_002b_002b-Extensions.html

Some of them are "draft standard", most aren't. E.g. computed goto, statements as expressions, conversion from member function pointers to regular ones, nested functions, various __attribute__ stuff etc.