I hate Brian Williams, won't watch it. But I may respond to others if they choose to waste their time with viewing and then care to comment.

Maybe instead of telling your readers to not use IE, the webmaster should fix the problem.

There is zero reason to still use IE when there are ton of other well-supported, much better browsers out there. Spending 80% of the cost on 20% of the users just doesn't make sense. Change your browsers people. Chrome & Firefox are both excellent choices and free. What's your excuse for not using them already?

@3

Well put DavidG. New and Improved browsers are always the best. I bought my latest dishwashing soap because it said New and Improved on the label.

@3

Granma and Grampa are never going to stop using the browser that comes with windows. It sucks, but that's the way of it for the next 20 years or so.

Don't care what browsers people use, but I can't bear to watch that narcissistic assclown. I mean Snowden, not Williams.

Oh yay! Another stupid "my browser is better than your browser" thread!!!

@5

Funny you say that, because outside maybe Savage's kink-and-gay centric following, the rest of us Sloggers are grandparent age.

Snowden ruined his own life so that we would know the government can climb completely up our assholes without retribution and commenters are talking about browsers.

Why the Brian Williams hate? The national evening news is what it is, he does as good a job at it as anyone.

I can understand Snowden's fears of turning himself in, Frontline's recent two part coverage even shows how badly whistleblowers (and suspects) are still mistreated, but I still think the country would be better served by his day in court. If he wants to emulate the the Pentagon Papers, he needs to come back.

On an odd side note, when the british government went to the Guardian to destroy the computer that held the documents, they specifically destroyed controller chips to the keyboard, mouse and power. It's hard not to think that the modern equivalent to the Clipper chip has been implemented.

https://www.privacyinternational.org/blo…

@11- "..., but I still think the country would be better served by his day in court."

He won't get one. Not a public one. Not until he's spent years in solitary, getting driven mad by sensory deprivation. Then he won't be allowed to utter a single word that hasn't been vetted for "security" reasons.

@12

Dwight, that sounds like a good TV movie plot. Or has a Snowden movie already been made? The guy who played "Iron Man" would be good in the lead role, I think. Oscar worthy perhaps.

@13- I stole the plot from what actually happened to Chelsea Manning.

@ 14 Manning got a fair trial, she was not convinced of the most serious charge, shows wasn't just a kangaroo court.

And seriously Paul need to complain about Williams now, are you bitter?

@15- Manning got no such thing as a fair trial. The US government knows how to put a decent PR spin on it's kangaroo courts.

@3 Irrespective of browser usage, auto-play is a feature of the embedded object, NOT the browser, and associating failure to turn off auto-play to "browser choice" is pretty ignorant. Casting blame the wrong way is often the modern answer to tech problems, but -- this isn't IE's (or any other affected browser's) fault.

Autoplay is a setting upon the embedded media object. Since The Stranger is using an iframe to host an NBC news link, the autoplay setting is entirely controlled by the HTML in that iframe and NOT any browser. Consider that if The Stranger was directly embedding the video object they could directly set autoplay. But since they don't, they're reliant upon NBC's implementation.

Source: wrote web media playback apps and helped various companies with their media playback app's browser integration.

@11: Snowden was not a federal employee, but an employee of a business with which the feds contracted. He cannot not receive whistleblower status.

@12 & 18 Yes it will be extremely hard for him to gain legal whistleblower status, and yes recent precedence sucks. He won't be in a military court like Manning, but He would have to luck into a sane federal judge out of the DC district no less. Can it turn out as good as the Pentagon Papers? Extremely doubtful. If he would have followed the 1998 law he'd have a better chance. I didn't mean to oversell it. But remember that Thomas Drake did find a sane judge... it could happen.

Snowden, basically by himself, against the agitprop of the combined intelligence forces, duking it out through the media? Dood's gonna lose. Give him him a smart, vocal defense and support team and even restricted, you have a show trial. Chances are high that he won't get the lack of punishment he deserves, but any public light he can shine on the government's abuses would spur more changes, and hopefully a true tipping point.

Snowden can stay out in the cold, hampered but free. Or he could risk it all and take a more direct route to help finish the job. I don't blame him if he doesn't, but the payoff for all of us would be better odds if he did.

@20 Dood, there are admitted IE USERS defending their choice in the thread, and I'm the one who sounds ignorant? Pshaw I say! PSHAW! You mean the map divvying up Iraq that Cheney's pre 9/11 "Energy Task Force' wasn't just random?!?!?! Paint me shocked.

@22: I think you didn't read the article I referenced, so I'll quote part of what Trevor Timm wrote there:

Snowden will not be able to make the case he’d like to make in court because, contrary to common sense, there is no public interest or whistleblower exception under the Espionage Act. In recent cases, prosecutors have convinced courts that the intent of the leaker, the value of leaks to the public, and the lack of harm caused by the leaks are irrelevant, and are therefore inadmissible in court.

This means Snowden would never be able to tell the jury that his intent was not to help foreign countries or harm the U.S., but to inform the American public about the government’s secret interpretations of laws used to justify spying on millions of citizens without their knowledge.

Snowden would also not be able to explain to a jury that his leaks sparked more than a dozen bills in Congress, and half a dozen lawsuits, all designed to rein in unconstitutional surveillance. He wouldn’t be allowed to explain how his leaks caught an official lying to Congress, or that they’ve led to an unprecedented review of government secrecy.

The jury would also not be able to hear how there’s no demonstrable harm to the United States in releasing this information. And if the prosecution argued that some harm was suffered, Snowden wouldn’t be able to explain that the enormous public benefits of these disclosures far outweighed any perceived harm.

@23 Do you believe that a trial wouldn't spur more bills, lawsuits and investigations? That on the off chance the judge say "I'll allow that", it wouldn't open even more avenues to attack on the security state? My best wishes would be for a judge to rule that since the 1917 law doesn't preclude contractors, Snowden would be covered for their ruling, but that's ancillary to the point I'm making. His impact would be greater in court than in Russia, even with him railroaded.

see also: Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree…

@24- "His impact would be greater in court than in Russia, even with him railroaded."

So what you want is a martyr.

I'm not going to blame a man for being a hero and choosing not to be a martyr in the process.