Out of interest, what political groups is 60-minutes known to gain political traction with when it airs stuff like this?

Forgive if I'm being naive and out of touch, it's a long way to America from here, but I was under the impression that Fox News was the outlet of choice for Tea Party supporters and activists - they already seem to be out protesting against the NSA's surveillance, so maybe they realized it wasn't worth the shot at convincing them otherwise?

In some ways the NSA are their own worst enemy in this situation. Snowden leaked huge quantities of documents directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that broadly incriminates the NSA of a host of crimes they were supposedly able to self-regulate against. The problem they have now is one of credibility - they have no channel through which to put out their version of the story that will allow it to carry the same credibility as Snowden's leak.

I work in the media sector and myself and know that no self-respecting spin doctor could get this so badly wrong as it seems on the surface - there was a target demographic of supreme importance that they hit square in the face for some reason. Not that I can go looking for them from the other side of the pond...

Not having access to 60-minutes in the UK, it would seem the main thrust of the NSA's argument is that the system has checks and balances for exactly this sort of situation, and that Snowden should have notified the right people about his findings rather than go public. What it doesn't seem to mention is that these very same people should already have known about this - everyone whose responsibility it was to either refrain from these actions or say "No" when someone else asked if they were allowed had already said "Yes" so I think removing the system's responsibility for self-regulation by public release in that context is exactly the right thing to do.

By trying to paint Snowden's actions as irresponsible by failing to follow the preapproved script for this sort of violation, they are also trying to cover the arses of the self-regulators by claiming ignorance of the matter on their behalf. It's simultaneously a smear-attack on Snowden and an attempt to save the faces of the people he's made like utter f***wits. The logic-fail in this case is that they can't cover up what we already know from their own documents happened, so the ignorance play only makes the self-regulation argument even weaker as, prior to Snowden's releases, it had already comprehensively failed to protect those in it's charge over a long period of time.

While most people replying to this seem to have gone the way of the Thinkpad T-series, I went with a 15" Edge. They are significantly cheaper than the T and are obviously not as durable, but the keyboard is excellent and I'm very impressed with the engineering on this thing. Removing a single panel from the bottom exposes the RAM, HDD and the Mini-PCI slots. The keyboard is easy to remove and, although it's not got the Ultrabay system, I picked up an aftermarket caddy and swapped the optical drive with the HDD (SATA2 port) and put an SSD in the free bay (SATA3 port). The battery is easy to replace and the screen has a matte finish to it - I'll never buy another laptop without that last part.

On the downside, the screen resolution is not great at 1366x768 and the battery life is mediocre at best - 3-4 hours of light use or 1 hour if I really push the AMD A6-3420 APU hard. Speaking of which, while I may have sprung for the quad-core option at build time, I wish I hadn't - the reduced overall clock rate of a single core when running a single threaded process doesn't hit the speed the dual-core would have managed, even with it's turbo boosting features working flat out.

So, although I have misgivings about this thing, there is one massively important thing that just wipes the floor with almost every other option I looked at - price. It was around a third of the price of other options I considered (Thinkpad T-series and Macbook Pro included) so the fact it's survived two and a half years before the rising threshold of my processor requirements has started to outpace it is highly impressive.

If I'm understanding this correctly, the music labels are now resorting to re-educating future generations in a futile attempt to protect their obsolete business models. Their meddling with the legal system, constant redefinition of copyright terms and heavy-handed persecution of those they see as "offenders" have, as predicted by everyone except them, done nothing to prevent people doing what human beings have loved to do with audible culture for millennia - sharing it. These idiots probably see this as a good idea. What next? Selectively assigning breeding privileges to the population based on an exam paper sponsored by the Corporate Overloads of America to ensure your opinions conform to our scientifically proven CorrectThink(TM)?

Good to see the playground my-console-is-better-than-your-console war is still going, I remember watching the SNES and Megadrive owners fighting it out when I was in junior school.

Now get off my lawn!

Yup, just like it's always mentioned in any news story about him that Assange is evading extradition on rape charges.

Grats. Which constituency are you standing in? I'm gonna collect dog turds from the park, put them in paper bags with your leaflets and set them on fire on your voter's doorsteps. You know, just as a standard welcome-you-in thing. You're welcome. ;)

The Trident missile program

Politicians spend too much time in Prime Minister's Question throwing mud at each other across the table. They've got so caught up in the internal bullsh*t of parliamentary debate they don't realise how far from reality those arguments are removed. Just recently Cameron and Milliband were claiming they both had figures showing waiting times in hospital A&E's were simultaneously long-term records for longest and shortest at the same time. The quality of the debate was so poor I almost expected to come back half an hour later to find them both standing on the table nose to nose screaming "Duck Theathon!", "Wabbit Season!" at each other.

We expect there to be parliamentary debate and the parties to contradict and keep each other in check, but at some point you need a third party to pipe up and say "you can't possibly both be right, so let's figure out how to resolve this." Unfortunately, this third party is currently in cahoots with the Conservatives.

Yeah, it's funny, I haven't had any trouble at all accessing any of my favourite porn sites, including those that house somewhat questionable "vintage" Hentai that's probably in contravention of the indecent publications act (or whatever it's called) that came in a few years ago, yet I have to go through a proxy to get The Pirate Bay... ...Did I just share too much? I had a point though, right? Right?

Don't look at me like *that*!

Once you get the hang of reading between the lines, this is actually quite an honest admission. It goes something like this:

"Whaddya mean you're not going to let us get away with it?!"

We can either look at it from a moral perspective or from a selfish survival perspective. I prefer the latter - reduction of biodiversity in the ecosphere reduces humanity's long term continuation chances.

In Soviet Russia, jellyfish piss on you!