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I see someone else listens to Secretary Schneier's podcast! Good stuff. But yes, incorporating biodata as well as personal data under the "all works attributable thereto" moral-rights clause has meant that the various predatory biotech companies you see in much of the rest of the developed...

The wargaming roots of RPGs raises another issue: most governments will not want the peasants to be practicing faux-military planning as a hobby, in the same way that they would not want the peasants to be training with military weapons as a hobby. (Even relatively democratic governments will go...

A good POD might be killing this guy France has its nuclear program going on during this time and seemingly wouldn't be averse to having a junior partner if it could get one. A more right-wing France that decides it wants to cling to Algeria would really really want Egypt to stop backing the...

How committed are the Anglo-French to having this be "a straight-up war between Germany and the USSR?" If this is Iran-Iraq: The Prequel and the Germans know they will not intervene no matter what German conduct looks like (or they're even slightly backing the Germans) then it shouldn't be...

Sure. So what? The same is essentially true for, say, modern Mauritania, and the United Nations hasn't sent in the repo men yet to say "sorry, you don't exist, this goes back to France." Again, whether a national identity and culture exists is entirely distinct from whether you like that...

Who cares? "But those guys are, like, totally mean and I don't like them" is not and has never been a factor worthy of any sort of consideration whatsoever when determining whether a people have legitimate claim to a national identity. A culture, or a nation, exists regardless of whether it...

Southern nationalism was about as legitimate as any other kind, and if the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tells us anything, it's that nationalist thought can't generally be suppressed by having the police go shoot at its adherents until they go away. The Southern belief that...

A late 1980s Soviet breakup turns into a military coup and then into a nuclear war. Five hundred years hence, much of the former United States has been overrun by barbarian tribesmen, followers of Ditt'Ka, the Northern Bear God.

Countries generally develop their militaries based on strategic necessity. So, to determine which countries would be susceptible to having their politics dominated by a large and extremely influential air force, we would have to determine what kind of country would find it most valuable to...

Why not? I think "Taiping North Korea" would be on surer footing than the historical Taiping, and criticism of the latter as "pseudo-Christianity" is mostly confined to an essentialist fringe. Fundamentally, the major difference is that, in the North Korean case, the usual twisting of the...

What about an established state converting to Judaism? My proposal would be North Korea. The Kims adopted quite a lot of ideological influence from Imperial Japan, which was actually quite pro-Zionist and went out of its way to promote Jewish settlement in the hopes that American Jews would...

I think this is a good take on it, but potentially you could even eliminate #5 if you swapped out the destroyers for Caspian Sea Monster-style ground effect vehicles which could conceivably fall under the purview of the USAF. (That seems like it would be tough to pull off, but might have legs...

Did the OP actually specify which Alexandria? POD: President Washington is more involved in the negotiations that led to the Residence Act, and as such a site on the Virginia side of the Potomac is prioritized from the beginning. (Alternatively, nobody thinks to include a provision in the 1791...

Considering Virginia reacted to independence by immediately banning the importation of slaves, it seems somewhat unlikely that Virginia had such sentiments (if we are considering them as part of "the South") or that "the South" would have made common cause with a rebellion where even their...

You had to go and say "stable." I was wondering why everyone was ignoring the elephant (heh) in the room, but if we adopt a generous definition of "stable" like "no territorial losses and no rebellions against the overall governing structure, and nearly all organized political violence manages...

Leo Amery succeeds in getting the British to annex Antarctica like they tried to do OTL (14,000,000 sq km)

With a POD in 1939, how many Indian princely states could we see become independent countries? Many of the princely states weren't really on board with union OTL (Hyderabad, Jammu & Kashmir, Sikkim, Travancore...) so it seems possible for some to be able to become independent monarchies if...

An independent Yucatán would qualify; around 40% of the territory speaks Yucatec Maya. POD: the "Treaty of Tzucacab" fails or isn't reported on, and the US Congress does not stop its ongoing discussion of the Yucatán Bill. The US ends up annexing the territory and grants it independence during...

Korea could have been kept as a protectorate by Japan instead of being annexed, and the Korean emperor could have been replaced with or established as subservient to the Japanese one. Hmm. Is a post-1900 French monarchical restoration of any kind completely ASB or just very unlikely?

Maybe they could have the hijackers smuggled on as cargo? We know from the recent drug smuggling scandal that FedEx's inspection policies are either not that great or can be subverted; they probably would've been worse then without a decade of terrorism scares.