@Claytons: Well stated.

@Joseph Paul Johnston II: No, but 99% of the material is just as innocuous. So you can go off and justify why every one of those memos needed to be released.

@Titch: You obviously haven't read the leaks. I'm talking about memos like: Hey France, our source in Iranian front company X tells us they're trying to buy this weapons component from your company Y. You should do something about that.

@HoboJoe: Why should I explain that? That's not what I'm saying. You might not have seen my addendum, so you should go back and read it since it clarifies my point.

@gcas: They already have information like that. A few days ago Assange was threatening to release it if the US government tries to prosecute him for his role in this affair.

@jbouklas: Well stated.

@Titch: It's... it's almost as if there would be someway to release that information without releasing everything else...

@SeraphX2: The government doesn't have a right to privacy. But the government does have a need for occasional secrecy.

The US government's use of backscatter machines at TSA checkpoints is wrong. But didn't your mother ever tell you that two wrongs don't make a right?

@brijazz: And it would have been a lot more handy had they used the widely supported standard that does the exact same thing.

@LegacyCrono: I second SMBC.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear you over the sound of all my DLNA enabled consumer electronics.

@T2k: Or you can, as I implicitly posed in my very first paragraph, rely on a strong fourth estate. Like, for example, the New York Times. See: Watergate, and the Pentagon Papers.

No. Just, no, Joel. Assange is not a journalist.

@jakeyoungblood: The difference is you're arguing from a point of wanting cops to be punished. I'm arguing from a position of wanting to minimize harm.

@jakeyoungblood: Which is good, since the long-term repercussions of a solid beating are far more severe than a tasering. You'll need the settlement money to pay your medical bills.

@jakeyoungblood: Before tasers? Cops used to beat people. Well, they still do, just nowhere near as often.

Julian Assange is turning into a bond villain. He's even got the hair and the name. Someone get the man a cat, and a volcano lair.

@xaronax: The Concorde wasn't retired because it crashed. It was never really economically viable (being really just a prestige project that whose development was heavily subsidized), and by the time they canned it, it had just turned into an enormous black hole for money.

Billions of stars and trillions of worlds suggests that the typical star may have thousands of planets. This seems unlikely.