Surely you aren't making a covert reference to America, Citizen. Remain where you are... Freedom drones are coming to you! But more seriously -- you have a real misunderstanding of our own military. I have no doubt that if there were mass protests, our own military would tell Hoeland(tm) security to take a long walk off a short pier. Our military teaches its soldiers at all levels of command not to follow unlawful orders and to make independent decisions and have autonomy as much as possible during combat operations. This is not typical of most militaries, and is one of the reasons why our military is so much more effective on the battlefield; A front-line soldier has the authority to assess the situation and speak directly to the command authority responsible for authorizing, say, an air strike on a civilian target (say, a building filled with terrorists temporarily occupying the residence) We have a chain of command of course, but it is far more flexible than with other militaries. This is why our response time to certain situations can be measured in seconds, not minutes.

Our soldiers are not dull automatons "just following orders, me-lord", and they are not about to mobilize domestically to keep a dictator in power. Reign in your own paranoia here -- I despise the surveillance society we're moving into as much as you do, but I have some perspective here: Obama is not watching live drone feeds of your masturbating sessions. -_-

Devil here: This isn't a budget problem, this is a management problem. Going all the way back to the Challenger disaster, NASA has shown a pattern of disregard for proper engineering practice. Richard Feynman chewed their ass out in Appendix F of the Challenger report to congress, and it was so scathing that both Congress and NASA tried to kick him off the board and discard his results... prompting the entire senior engineering staff of all branches of the Shuttle project to sign a petition saying: Either publish this, or face our wrath.

This isn't a technical problem -- this is management having shitty project management skills. If the budget is insufficient, then the project scope has to be reduced. It's just that simple. This is not the engineers' fault, or is it the fault of the technology... this is management trying to do too much with too little.

Detroit has had massive funding and infrastructure problems for some time now. It's a dying city with much of the suburbs either abandoned, being reclaimed by nature, and generally being both in appearance and substance as a 3rd world country. It's so bad it has gotten national attention -- an emergency financial planner was sent in to try to right their budget, with limited success.

You can't judge Detroit the same way as you could, say, Chicago. They're no longer really part of the first world. This wouldn't be news if it happened in Afghanistan, for example. It's a sad state of affairs, but this is the inevitable result of a slide into the third world... our bridges and other key infrastructure is also rotting. Detroit is just foreshadowing what will happen to many of our cities over the next 15-20 years as our economy continues to slide into the ocean of wealth inequity.

Canada isn't in Europe.

In a practical sense, it's not different. In a legal sense that the Executive Branch can use for justification "in the court of law", it's an important distinction.

Well, you know, spying on you own people and spying on other countries are two different things.

Here in the United States, spying on your own is generally held to be distasteful, and very often illegal. But while we project our own ideas of law on other countries, often they have no such squeamishness about domestic spying.

As to American spying on it's own:

* First the Obama Administration said "Weâ(TM)re not doing this."

* Than they said "Weâ(TM)re doing it to ferret out Terrorists!"

* And now they justify what Snowden and others have revealed by saying "Well, EVERYONE ELSE is doing itâ¦"

As an American, while in an abstract way I care what the French are doing to their people, my opinions are really only applicable to my own country - in other words, as far as NSA spying, what the French are doing is not relevant.

I'm sorry, are you serious? "Doing a job"? And they are recruiting people who will be "just doing their job" in the field of domestic spying. Also, if you are interested in "cops just doing their jobs", consider that Seattle is currently under a Consent Decree with the DOJ for "just doing their job". Maybe *YOU* sould apply to the NSA to âoejust do your jobâ.

See this link?

That's an ad. Them posters ain't free.

Not a bad ad, not an obnoxious ad, but still an ad.

No plugins at all. It's the release that FireFox pushes through.

No, it doesn't contribute to global warming, the carbon released came from the atmosphere a short few months earlier. Global warming comes from carbon that was sequestered for millions of years being released.

As to pollution, you've got to be joking. One revolution of an internal combustion engine releases more pollution than you could generate smoking pot all month.

Post the house odds first, dear... I want to know where Antigua and Barbuda are on the list... because I'm guessing long odds there and I intend to "leak" their intelligence operation to the Washington Post shortly after you put it up.

This has been known publicly since the release of the book the Sword and the Shield in the 1990s, and well-known by most larger companies since well before that even. We're persecuting Snowden for being the Captain Obvious of the intelligence community. "Oh noes! The french are spying on us!" Dude. Fucking duh. The french have been spying on everyone since the dark ages. Hell, where do you think the word sabateur comes from? The french pretty much invented industrial espionage.

In other news... why are we threatening the lives of other countries leaders and going on a mad witch hunt for Snowden, wheeling and dealing in backroom deals reminiscent of the cold war era again? Oh right... because he came forward and confirmed what everyone either already suspected, or knew. Which was only necessary because so many people are living in a level of denial that makes the comment "Windows 8 is the best operating system ever!" look like criticism. -_-