pleboidal

Just look at the way crime sorts itself out, and it's pretty obvious. People robbed banks, got away with murder, disappeared and took up new lives in the circus.

Now? The really pent up people just snap, shoot a bunch of people, and kill themselves, because they know they can't get away with anything anymore.

  fingers and teeth all there; clearly not foul play; maybe accidental overdose during interrogation?

You presume every strategic professional murder involves a torture session. Operating in hostile territory doesn't guarantee time, safehouses or personnel to cover every action every time. Norway clearly wasn't clued into the cloak and dagger games happening in their territory. Whoever did this, they weren't behaving with legal immunity. They may have had to organize a team on short notice, and act fast. Some people just don't have the stomach to cut off fingers and rip out teeth. If pressed for time, and blocking exfiltration is more important that learning details, and they were short on resources, a team might skip the dungeon.

  possible suicide, why not?

Pills, gasoline, secrecy, destroyed evidence and fake foreign passports all sound like parts adding up to professional homicide.

  latent poison as murder weapon; she did it to hasten a very slow death; she had bad skin;

Nope. Doubt it. Sedatives are a pretty classic complement to a professional murderer's toolkit. They packed her with barbituates to calm her down, and knock her out then took her some place quiet, and did her in. The skin cream, if anything, hints that maybe she was British. Eczema is a pretty common hereditary problem with the Brits, and this is a BBC story, after all.

  polonium, biological weapons, secret laboratories, tooth decay, dentistry, mushrooms...

I'm sorry but I think you should get over the Litvinenko assassination, put down the comic books and come to terms with the fact that many professional murders are not nearly so elaborate. This is from the 1970's and these kinds of things weren't trying to be tales of science fiction. A hit was a hit back then. Getting shot, stabbed, blown up or in this case, drugged and burned is pretty much how things went down.

  unmarked clothes, no giveaway

Makes a lot of sense. I agree this strengthens the spy narrative.

Interesting, though, that the concepts expressed in this narrative, had they been written in 2010, and promptly rejected, might have provided all the more grist for the paranoia mill.

Yeah, thanks for the downvotes everybody! The title is changed to the more accurate headline, but fuck me for voicing any criticism!

Here's another shitty comment you can downvote. Have fun. This is what you get for frivolous downvotes. More bile.

Fuck this karma-whore rating shitshow.

Watching the whole video, you can safely overdub everything Steve Jobs said with the phrase "My words are meaningless, because by the time any of these ideas represent credible threats, I'll be long dead."

Seriously. Everything Steve Jobs says, whatever point he argues in favor of, listening to it is like letting the dead sell you cigarettes.

"Here, try this amazing thing! Yes it's bad for you in all the ways described by critics, but so what?! I need to live an incredible life right now, before a terminal disease kills me (just as the bad times begin), so give me as much money as possible."

Takes her out of the game. The pills don't produce a conclusive casualty in under an hour. She might survive by incidentally vomiting, recover and fly home. There might be others, undercover, tailing the kidnapping, and waiting to rescue. Rescue might simply be incidental first responders. Since she wasn't rescued we might assess there were more layers of interference in the murder. Lookouts, participating as accomplices.

The burning kills quickly (minutes or less of smoke inhalation), and even if ineffective in killing due to interruptions, certainly produces scars that won't be easily hidden in the future and puts someone on the sidelines.

It also sends an unpleasant message to everyone who didn't bring her home, and we still don't know who that is. Given that she wasn't even recovered, one might presume her original identity was marked deceased in a contrived accident, conincidentally, thousands of miles away. Maybe her family already knows the real story, and remains quiet.

Everything about this says dead spy caught by other spies. The interesting part won't be her real identity, even though that would be a critical window into the things that are actually interesting.

No theft, no sexual abuse, no emotional yarns, bloodless, no noise yelling or fighting, drugged and burned, and obscured identity, effective for decades. The murderers were professional state operators, so whoever did it, collects a paycheck for killing people like this woman, above all ordinary law and order. Some of the rival operators may have been women, staving off sexual transgression, since that doesn't always remain professional on its own.

What was she trying to do? How did her cover blow? Whoever killed her, they had clear understanding that she wasn't who she claimed to be, and no one knew who she really was. Once they discovered mystery girl, if they weren't ordered to take her out, all they had to do was phone home and ask if they were supposed to have peers in the vicintity, if not, she's the enemy.

Based on this, you can assume by geography that she was a cold war spy, attractive, with money heading into Eastern Europe, not westbound out of Europe. If she were sourced from Eastern Europe, she wouldn't have been caught and erased so quickly while still mainland. Closer into Eastern Europe, she'd have had more protection. Operating alone like this, she may have been a canary. Bait, doomed from the start, but unaware of her role in the operation she proved as hazardous.

And dead people, and destroyed cities.

And purges, and violent warlords siezing power, and military coups.

And refugees, and food shortages, and torture chambers, and sabotage.

And unprecedented political polarization, and oh maybe disappearances and murders that look like suicides...

Billions of what? People? Dollars?

  How are they going to enforce that and
  guard against a revolution?

So, your telling me you want people to fly to Mars, under oath that they will always pay the rent, pay the tithe, and disavow ownership of the equipment their lives depend on, possibly letting others enable or disable it based on fealty and political alignment?

  Who owns the equipment sent from Earth?

The people riding it to Mars and using it when they land. Anything else is pretty much suicide. When you go to Mars, you might not come back. No one wants a EULA between them and their life support system.