From parent following statements are valid:

The adversaries of Israel are not above using a nuclear bomb to get what they want

The adversaries of Israel are not above using a nuclear bomb to get a tiny strip of land

The adversaries of Israel are not above using a nuclear bomb to get the whole western world

I don't know exactly who is considered "adversaries of Israel" I do know there are some dozen countries who don't recognize Israeli passports and more than half will either throw you in jail or not let you in if you so much as have an Israeli stamp on your passport. At least one such country already has nukes.

While I'm sure there really are people or groups of people who would actually Nuke x if they could for reason y this represents a tiny subset of "adversaries of Israel" .. the same statement probably holds true for just about every country in the world making it rather worthless.

Hmm, is it just me or does Pyongyang sound like the name of a Russian speaking city to me...

Absolutely.

Israel is actively occupying Palestine and stealing the Palestinian's land.

Look at the racism that occurs against Hispanics in the US due to them taking some crappy jobs. Is it a surprise that a nation that's been constantly losing it's land to self-identified Zionists for over 100 years is going to end up really antisemitic? Having Palestinians spontaneously turn into a nation of Ghandis isn't a realistic prerequisite for peace in the middle east.

Which strip of land? Israel or the West Bank? I agree that Iran has said some worrying things and Israel seems a nice place to live filled with generally pleasant people. But they are without a doubt the aggressors in the current conflict and having nukes is one of the factors that has emboldened them to adopt such an extreme strategy. Now their enemies having nukes is a really scary proposition because Israel has adopted an extremely aggravating position predicated on the idea that their enemies are powerless to harm them.

The construction of this statement is priceless if not vague, inaccurate and worthless. The intersection of adversaries of Israel and lunatics particularly is quite laughable.

But I don't think the competition of the official prize with the black market is relevant at all.

Right now a big proportion of exploits come from security researchers, partially because they're looking for exploits, but also because they do have a strong incentive to find and report vulnerabilities. I don't think a cash prize is going to change their calculation much.

The place a prize could make a difference is in ordinary developers. I suspect a lot of bugs are partially discovered multiple times before they're officially reported. Some developer is working with the software, notices some weird behaviour, but doesn't follow up because they lack the incentive. A cash prize increases the incentive and potentially turns some of those dev hunches into new bug reports.

The way the black market comes into play is the devs are competing against the black market. If the bug discovery rate goes up the price of zero-day exploits goes down (since they're shorter lasting) as does the incentive to discover them (since good devs are competing for the same bugs). So you can significantly impact the black hat market without approaching the black hat rate.

This is foolish when you apply a patch to an open source project it essentially becomes public knowledge to anyone who is paying attention at that point. The more you do this the more eyes on patches. This only yields ignorance and suppresses urgency.

Only telling a select few (normally by subscription to very expensive security services) gives giant media an advantage it is not clear to me they have a right to or in any way deserve.

Finally as much money locked up in black/gray hat activities we don't need to be enriching anyone for contributing to an industry of an elite few none of us have any reason to trust.

Behavior of crowd at recent BlackHat toward Mr. Alexander made crystal clear to me kids have all grown up and money runs the show now. The more money the more "ethics" bend towards production of additional money.

A lot of the comments comes from long established accounts that have commented on many other topics which doesn't really seem feasible for an astroturf network (unless they were 3rd party groups that get contracted by different entities). But moreso there's a lot of them who do engage in back and forths for quite a while, that's simply something that doesn't make sense for an astroturf because there's no point in a one-on-one with someone you clearly can't convince.

Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.

But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.

If I wanted to describe how you would start WWIII I think this passage would be a good start. Remember Europe actually knows what a real war looks like, even if you could keep it conventional a military confrontation with Russia is going to result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths. Add nukes to the equation and you really want to get hesitant about calling Russia's bluffs.

Personally my vote is for UN peacekeeping troops in Eastern Ukraine, ideally made up of troops from anywhere except the US (and ideally Europe). It puts a neutral party with a good reputation in the crosshairs, it makes a military invasion by Russia extremely costly, but it doesn't embarrass Putin by being overly pro-West and in the worst case of an invasion it won't escalate into a major war.

I don't think China and Russia being worse is a valid defence for the US. But I do think it's a valid point of criticism for Snowden. It is a bit hypocritical to criticize the US's surveillance activities, and then flee to the only two major powers that are demonstrably worse.

That being said I think he did have understandable motives, he wanted to go to somewhere that wouldn't extradite him to the US. That means a country that is a) not particularly friendly with the US, and b) powerful enough to resist US pressure, that pretty much means China and Russia. As the Evo Morales grounding incident demonstrates Europe was not an option. Maybe Ecuador was but they may not have been big enough and he still had to get there.

It's still unfortunate that he's in Russia, I think the Ukraine incident has revealed that Putin is a bit crazier than anyone anticipated and Snowden's position more tenuous. The Russians may have been threatening to send him back to the US as a concession to ease the sanctions unless he starts cooperating in their propaganda.

Ah the good ole days before the IRS collected and data mined all our credit card transactions.

I'm privileged to be part of that 1% elite who believes all of their time estimates are wrong and laughably absurd while making them.

I don't think the "use of technology" causes these problems. Rather it is the failure of children to play much with physical objects, as all previous generations have done, and in extreme cases, failure to learn social interaction. That doesn't mean we have to eliminate computers from children's lives, it means children need more parenting and human contact.

I think you are feeling very confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

You actually live in something *better* than a direct democracy.

A direct democracy enjoys no constitutional guarantees of rights. It's strictly majority rule.