Tanks are more vulnerable to infantry than most people realize. Sure, you're never going to win a 1-on-1 fight in open country, but in a shelled-out urban landscape, a guy with two sticks of dynamite and a greased-up sock can make a tank throw a track, and another guy with a can of gasoline and a lighter can make things pretty unpleasant for the occupants of the now-immobile steel-and-ceramic crematorium.

"You are pretty quick to blame without all the facts of the situation."

I've noticed that when cops get caught red-handed committing violent felonies against defenceless civilians, some people say we're quick to blame the cops, even though there's a pile of evidence of police wrongdoing. Then, without a shred of evidence to support it, they cast aspersions on the victim. Suddenly, there's no problem with being quick to blame. It quickly becomes clear that tribal, us-v-them thinking is really what's at play, here, not evidence or the presumption of innocence.

There also seems to be no connection between the control the police claim they must maintain, and responsibility for outcomes. "I did this thing to maintain control of the situation, but cannot be blamed for its outcome, because I did not control the situation. Pin a medal on me."

It's certainly true that many cops put their own safety at risk in order to serve their communities day in and day out, often working some pretty rough overtime. They will arrest the guy who burglarized your home, they will investigate your brother's murder, they will speak to you with respect, and you will be inclined to respect them in return, both for their hard work and professional behaviour. Then, their partner will mistake your phone/wallet/skin for a gun, shoot you dead, and both will claim that you put your hands in your pockets and sprinted straight at them. Neither will be punished with anything worse than a paid vacation, but your loved ones will be told that you're a violent criminal who deserved to be put down for attacking a police officer. The cops who murdered you and defamed your memory will go on to take dangerous criminals off the streets, and maybe also murder a few more innocent civilians.

We'll continue to be protected from the worst of society, by the worst of society, until we learn how to hold the police as accountable for their actions as they hold us.

I mostly use Mac OS, so "alt" is called "option" and I don't have to touch it to see the menu bar, because that's just how Macs are. This isn't about the hamburger menu.

The current Firefox UI is intolerable to me. So is the current OS X Safari version (I want my goddamn title bar back!) The only browser I can stomach right now is Vivaldi.

The thought of Google being so aware of the moment-to-moment context of my life that it can make accurate inferences about what I mean by "this" or "that" makes me want to buy a gun and go live in the woods until I die of something preventable.

Being drunk/high while *at work* is unacceptable, but after I got home from work last night, I drank a six pack. I was pretty buzzed by the time I went to bed. Woke up this morning with a clear head, even got to work a little early. A drug test would show that I'd recently consumed alcohol to excess (I think it would, anyway -- I don't know a lot about the chemistry involved) but it had no detrimental impact on my work. If someone in your office is staggering or slurring their speech or is otherwise clearly impaired, a drug test may be warranted, so that you can fire the person for cause, or attempt to compel treatment, or some kind of other remedy to your "impaired employee" problem. Pre-emptive testing is just an exercise in humiliation and control, though.

If the children in question qualify as "inanimate objects," you're probably too late to save them.

Battlefield: Vietnam was a masterpiece. I still remember messing up a hard bank in a helo and half-crashing onto my landing skids as the chopper screeches to a halt in front of a building with a collapsed wall, full of enemy troops. They blink. I blink. Then, as one, they turn their weapons towards me. Too damaged to fly, and too pinned-down to run, I just held down the trigger and fired a rocket salvo straight forward. I only killed one of them, but it kicked up enough dust and debris to cover my hasty retreat on foot. Haven't played BF3/4 because I don't want Origin. Probably, I won't make an exception for BF1, but anything is possible.

At the risk of coming off like a cranky, digital-age hermit, I increasingly feel like I'm just done with this shit. The more big companies try to entrench the value of their product, the less value it holds for me. When you just let me have the thing I paid for, we can remain on good terms, but when you place a higher premium on locking things down than you do on the experience of consuming them, I start looking for alternatives. Now, I'm not even that disappointed when I can't find an alternative. The hassle reduction I experience by canceling my sub and being done with it, outweighs the satisfaction I'd have gotten by consuming your stupid fucking content. Good riddance.

It's wildly, fantastically unlikely that he's retained anything at all. He's repeatedly said that he no longer has control of the material. If he's lying, why? It would have to be for a reason that overcomes the bad PR of being caught in a lie. What could that possibly be? This seems more like a paranoid fantasy than a sensible look at plausible risks.

Yeah, so? People can infer things from things. If this is an indictment, at the very least, it's against all national security reporting, if not journalism in general. While good journalism might not be entirely 100% devoid of all unfortunate consequence, it's benefit to a free society is far greater than ... whatever you're guessing the FSB is guessing.

Yeah, and how to defeat them. "Don't fight oppression." "Why not?" "Even if you win, you're showing your playbook to other oppressors." "Uh, I guess, but the alternative is forfeit to oppressions, so ... no. But thanks for the tip." Honestly, I think you're ignoring the important, confirmed stuff so you can focus on trivial fluff and guesswork. I'm not trying to get personal or anything, but your line of reasoning just doesn't make any sense to me unless I strip away all relevant context.

None. As Snowden himself has repeatedly explained, that would be fucking stupid. Lots of people want to see more of the documents than Snowden is willing to show, and those people could get their wish simply by killing him, if he had some kind of deadman's switch set up. He's not dumb enough to incentivize his own murder.

Well, if Snowden's saying it to the press, I'm not sure the Russians will be able to deduce any more than the Chinese or Saudis or anyone else. Not sure why you think Russia's intelligence community has privileged access to news published for public consumption.

Hopefully not much. What many people are hoping, is that its policies will change instead of being protected.

Uh, are we accusing him of inspiration via minor details now? That's ... pretty specious. Just gonna leave it at that.

He's ill at ease with being the product Facebook sells to its customers, and skeptical of Facebook's ability to treat its product (its users' eyeballs) like paying customers. Seems reasonable to me. I want to know exactly what category I fall into when I deal with a company. If I'm the product, fine, I have one set of expectations. If I'm the customer, fine, I have a different set. I don't know what to make of attempting to blend those, and I don't blame anyone for being apprehensive about how that might turn out. Probably not fair to put that on par with "despair" at all, much less "the earth's quota of despair." It's a pretty small proportion of the earth's deflated enthusiasm.

Uh, the AC I'm criticizing was succinct in expressing his point, which was that people who spell Linux in all-caps don't know enough about Linux to comment. Perhaps I've misunderstood ...

Seriously, that's the whole thing. I'm afraid that to me, it still sounds like being a spelling Nazi was the totality of his point.

Yeah, but when a word is generally spelled in title case, you can't spell it all lowercase while actively mocking someone else for using uppercase. It's a bit of a cheap shot in the first place, and with the element of hypocrisy thrown in, it's pretty hard to resist saying something.