That's the battle they have to win now.

Yesterday's (Monday's?) story about whether Grace Hopper could get hired in today's SV.

Oh, and to address your issue of people being arrested/harrassed for googling "pressure cooker", I assume you were referring to this. First, this appears to be an isolated incident, not some law-enforcement pandemic across the nation. Second, this was conducted by local police, not Feds, so again there's no nationwide conspiracy. Third, a subsequent look into the situation seems to indicate the issue was a former employer informing the police of bomb-related searches on a corporate PC associated with the couple, not some vast Google-search dragnet. Overall, the claimaint's Google search history seemed to be almost irrelevant to the reason they got a visit in the first place. The couple has also received significant pushback on their original story and has subsequently declined to do further interviews. If they had a solid civil liberties case I imagine they'd be lawyering up with the ACLU on their side, but they're shutting up and backing off instead.

If you'd read into more than just the surface of this incident you'd know all this. Instead, it looks more like a case of confirmation bias on your part.

The difference is that US citizens at least have a *basis* to complain about and demand redress for out of their government, whereas citizens of other nations have no such option at all. Is it difficult to get action even with such a basis? Sure. But that's better than having no basis at all.

So what? Why does that matter? The President is chosen by the electorate, not selected based on gender, color, religion, or sexual orientation. If a candidate has a suitable policy platform that's appealing to the electorate, all of those categories are irrelevant.

And anyway, there are numerous non-Christians in the House and the Senate. MInorities and females are well represented given their relative makeup of the population. Granted, they don't have the bully pulpit of the Presidency at their disposal, but they have considerable lawmaking power, something the Presidency itself lacks in many ways.

In this area you and I are in agreement, although I take a somewhat different angle on it: the government has no business being involved in marriage -- gay, straight, whatever -- at all. Civil unions should be the beginning and end of government involvement in this area. "Marriage" is and always has been a religious institution, and government has no business having anything to do with that.

As for the comparisons to the Ukraine, Hungary, Thailand, and Cyprus...you're really reaching there. Political, economic, and religious oppression is much more prevalent in these countries than in the US. You trade one slight (gay marriage) for a host of others. You must weigh things as a whole, and on that basis it's very difficult to find anyplace on the planet that is as free (economically, politically, relgiously) as the US. This is not meant to exonerate the government for its current sins. Far from it. I'm just pointing out that no matter where else you look, you have to give something up to live there. Whether or not that "something" is something *you* value versus something *I* value is debatable, but the whole "giving up" part is not.

On the scale of individual rights (which includes freedom of association and religion) I find it difficult ot believe any country anywhere in the world offers as much *on paper* as the US Constitution. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." You can't get more sweeping than that. At best, West European democracies can *equal* it but not exceed it. However, they do not. Every single one of them has, at the very least, laws abridging freedom of speech or freedom of the press in ways that actually matter, not just your "joke at the airport" example. And while free speech and press are definitely under assault in the US right now, as I stated earlier, the Constitution at least gives citizens the legal right to demand redress. Europeans have no such option.

Your other criteria -- "lack of racial issues, integration of society, acceptance of minorities of various sorts and other similar things" -- are societal issues not related in any way to the subject under debate. You cannot legislate someone into liking or accepting someone else. Indeed, the Constitution pretty much *prohibits* this in the first place as it would directly conflict with the right to liberty -- i.e. to have your own opinions and express them freely. You can prohibit the *law* from discriminating, but that's it. And that's as it should be. Anything else is tantamount to the government telling me how I'm supposed to think and feel, and that is about as far away from the 1st Amendment as you can possibly get.

Indeed it is. Far better so than any other such document on the planet. And if our government can be compelled to actually follow it, all the time, every time, we wouldn't even be having this debate. However, I still stand by my premise that it's far better to have a Constutition that the government occasionally flouts than to live in a country where the government doesn't even *have* anything to flout in the first place.

Note this index shows the US lacking in "economic freedom." I didn't dig into what the index defines that as, but a fairly typical definition would probably be the lack of onerous regulations that hamper entrepreneurship. As we slide in a direction where the government regulates more and more of everything around us (healthcare anyone?) I can see why we'd fall down in this index.

I used to think I would go to Australia or New Zealand if I wanted roughly equivalent freedom and needed to leave the US. However, since then, the Aussie's have become pussies and banned firearms, and New Zealand cooperated in the illegal raid and seizure of Kim Dotcom.

There really is nowhere left to go, so I'm making my stand here in the US.

Did you even *think* about your comment before you posted it? "Most European countries"? Most of them still have royal families where it's a crime to speak out against them or disrespect them. Great Britain still has a national church. France won't let you work overtime. Germany will imprison you if you have a swastika. All of them have hate-speech laws. And if you think you're free, try purchasing a firearm for personal defense use. And let's not even get started on the onerous, extensive, labyrinthine, and politically-connected maze of economic regulations that come along with being a member of the EU. Yeah, that's got freedom written all over it.

Mind posting your source then?

Funny, I don't recall anyone ever being arrested for googling "pressure cooker." Perhaps you could cite a source. As for joking at the airport, I can tell all the "chicken that crossed the road" and "my wife is so fat" jokes I want without ever getting arrested. If, however, I tell a "joke" that starts with "I have a bomb and I want to kill people with it" then that gets attention real fast -- as it should. It's the equivalent of shouting "fire!' in a crowded theater, and as such your example is a poor one. Got anything any better?

Diversity has not a damned thing to do with imprisonment rates, and I challenge you to find a study from a respected, neutral organization that states otherwise.

Then please name these bastions of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom to keep and bear arms, and rights to life, liberty, and property. You obviously know more on this than I do, so please educate me. I, for one, know of nowhere on the planet that puts these guarantees in writing with as much breadth as the U.S. Constitution. Sure, our government is currently flouting said document, but other nations don't even *have* such a document to begin with.

Did you include all the prisoners in the state-run labor camps of China and Russia when you came up with these numbers? You know, those camps they officially deny the existence of and don't record or publish the numbers on? And that's just the first item that sticks out as not being particularly intelligent. Picking apart your other claims would be in exercise in futility since you clearly don't care to dig down past "USA = bad, everybody else = GOOD!"

I agree the US sucks in these areas, especially given the revelations of the current administration. That said, you can't go anywhere else in the world without dealing with the *official* loss of some freedom of some kind (freedom of speech and freedom of religion being the most common losses, albeit not the only ones). I see Iceland, Switzerland, and Antarctica listed as alternatives. Iceland has hate-speech laws so you can forget about freedom of speech. Switzerland makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust (not that I deny it, but if I did, I should have the freedom to do so without fear of punishment, otherwise speech is not free).

Antarctica is not a sovereign nation, so technically you would be pretty free there in the sense of anarchy being free...except that by international treaty there can be no permanent residents. It's also completely inhospitable to humans so you wouldn't be able to live there long without having to depend on resources sent from some other sovereign nation, thus making you indirectly a subject of their whims.

And precisely where are you going to go? Name me another country that has less restrictions on free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, right to property, and so forth. Everywhere you look there are governments that have it written right in their version of the Constitution that they can detain you, take your stuff, monitor everything you do or say...the list goes on and on.

You can say "I'm gonna move somewhere where they can't spy on me and arrest me for saying unpopular thing about the government" but I challenge you to find anyplace on the planet where that's guaranteed anymore. The US was the last bastion of this. If it's fallen, you're SOL.

That may end up being a bad habit for her: http://ehtrust.org/keep-that-cell-phone-out-of-your-bra/

Or it may mean nothing at all: http://www.cbcf.org/central/AboutBreastCancerMain/AboutBreastCancer/Pages/Facts-and-Myths.aspx

Exactly. As to the "large" address space - it's large if the random-number generator is actually random and has been seeded with a unique value. We've seen lots of bugs and exploits show up because those two conditions were not met.