Slashdot Mirror

You lie! Only Google reads its users' emails! Microsoft would never read its users' emails for financial gain!

I was under the impression that the Olympics is already a competition of which country can spend the most on training facilities for its athletes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
http://www.yellowfinbi.com/YFC...

Since it's always going to be about who can spend the most either way, I don't see why an engineering competition is any less interesting than an athletic competition.

Motorsports (Formula One, Le Mans) are already like this, and I find it interesting because you get to see engineers push the boundaries of technology. It would be fantastic if we could push the boundaries of prosthetic technologies for disabled people.

That didn't last long -

"Brazil judge lifts WhatsApp suspension"
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

are an environmental catastrophe. Solar panels and wind turbines require huge quantities of rare earth elements, and they all come from China today--even the ore mined in the US is shipped to China for processing. Until this is addressed, the so-called "green" technologies are not remotely green. Restoring our local rare earth industry would also enable local manufacturing of high-tech products, most all of which has been moved to China, for access to their rare earth resources.

There is no shortage of rare earths, and they could be mined and produced locally in an environmentally friendly manner. However, it would require changing the insane regulations surrounding thorium, which drove the industry to China in the first place. Concentrated ores invariably have high thorium concentrations, and the thorium could easily be separated and safely stored if only regulations allowed it. It is just barely radioactive, not water soluble, found in rocks everywhere anyway, and probably the least problematic of the mining wastes. Even ingesting it is essentially harmless; only inhaling thorium dust is of real concern. As it is a metal, there is a rather trivial way of preventing that from happening.

While this town may be shunning solar for the wrong reasons, there are good reasons. The area looks heavily wooded as well, and clearing vast areas of forest to collect a pitiful amount of unreliable solar energy is not productive. Moreover, unlike wind, PV solar does not coexist with vegetation at all, as even a stray leaf can damage the cells. The entire solar farm becomes a lifeless monument of irony to Big Green, which will long outlive the panels themselves.

Sadly, the greenest and most promising energy source is equally hampered by insane regulation. Nuclear is not only the least resource intensive, it also has the least environmental impact by far, and has proven to rapidly scale and displace fossil fuels in a number of countries.

You're right - denying a visa is an incredibly violent thing. Taking that application and saying "no" is as bad as cutting of a head - or burning someone alive.

The B-52 is great at bombing people back into the stone age, so long as the people were not that advanced to begin with (i.e. as long as the people can't really shoot back). This was evident even back in the Vietnam war.

Want to bomb some insurgents in south Vietnam who don't have surface to air misses or fighter aircraft? No problem.

Want to bomb north Vietnam, which has some fighters and reasonably good surface to air missiles? Danger!

For example, look at operation Linebacker II, the American bombing campaign that "ended" the Vietnam War. The US used 207 B-52s, which flew 741 sorties during the operation. The North Vietnamize had 14 S-75 missile batteries distributed over their whole country. The S-75 design was about 15 years, so not super high tech even at the time. (The USSR had newer missilea, but they didn't give them to North Vietnam.) These 14 missile batteries shot down 15 B-52s. Granted, that's only a 2% loss rate per sortie, but imagine if North Vietnam had more than 14 missile batteries! Imagine that the missile batteries used modern technology rather than 1950s technology. The B52-s would be mincemeat even with more modern countermeasures. If the B-52 had a 2% loss rate in Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not be seeing the above headline.

That's the fundamental issue with the B-52. It's not a threat to a modern and competent foe like China or even Russia. Iran just bought a bunch of modern surface to air missiles (with a ~250 mile range) from Russia, so who knows how B-52s would fare in Iran.

Short version: The B-52 is great against people who wield AK-47s and drive around in Toyota pickup trucks. It's not clear how useful the B-52 is against a reasonably modern and competent military. I should add, rightly or wrongly, that is the logic for why the air force wants to ditch its A-10s, which fly at lower altitudes than the B-52 and are thus more vulnerable to man-portable surface to air missiles.

Meanwhile Erich Schmidt is proposing a ContentID-like system to suppress "hate speech"

Pick your poison, left or right, up or down, makes no difference.

Meanwhile Eric Schmidt proposes a ContentID-like system to suppress "hate speech".

Pick your poison, left or right, up or down, makes no difference.

Please correct me if I am wrong but whale populations in the world have been recovering. And multiple species are less than a decade away from not being endangered any more. So the opposition to whaling is from people who don't want to kill whales per se. I am not arguing for premature killing of whales that leads to extinction and I know that has been as issue in the past. But that problem for most areas is going away. And it really only remains a big problem in Oceania. But if you eat meat and your culture eats whales why not eat them? I know that many people here don't eat meat and that is increasing in the Bay Area but consider that not everyone lives in that cultural bubble.

And using whale products for other purposes such as for their skins and oil is much better for the environment than making synthetic products from crude oil. Generally animal products produce fewer allergies and have fewer carcinogens than synthetic materials.

So isn't all the griping here just a matter of people who never want sustainable whaling to resume. But they don't have that right. If they don't want to eat whales or use their skins - that's fine - but they don't have the right to ram down their viewpoints down everyone else's throats, particularly other countries. It reminds me of abortion - if you don't like it, then don't have one but leave other people alone.

Slashdot != CNN.

If you want up-to-the-minute news of general interest, read CNN. Or if you prefer (as I do) the BBC, which posted the same story about 30 minutes ago.

Canadians have a lot of guns, ranking 12th in the world in per-capita ownership. The low number of incidents in Canada has to do with population (1/10th that of USA), and societal differences. It has nothing to do with gun laws or easy access to guns.

I've noticed that the gun-grabbers shift the goal posts when their desired strict gun laws come into effect, but turn out to be ineffective. They then turn the claim to neighbouring areas and blame them for the the weapons and demand that they too turn up the heat. All the while ignoring the fact that their governments are the biggest arms dealers in the world, and are flooding the planet with weapons, even going to farcical extremes like dropping them out of planes for terrorists to take. But yeah, let's focus on preventing law abiding citizens the ability to defend themselves.

Everyone knows Google spies on students, even if they deny it. But we all know that Microsoft would never read any student's email account for their own gain.

I love how the headlines on CNN (and now WSJ) lead with "Pilot Error" but the BBC leads with

Faulty equipment was a "major factor" in the AirAsia plane crash last December that killed all 162 people on board, Indonesian officials say.

AirAsia crash: Faulty part 'major factor'

Yes the crew were not fully trained, but according to Airbus the plane couldn't get into the situation it was in, so why train pilots for that? Also the faulty part had been faulty for a significant amount of time. This flight was not the first flight that had issues with the particular equipment.

Re 'So how do illegal"?
In the distant past it was simple: One person has photo ID that is acceptable at a state and federal level. Rent it out to a person who has the same basic appearance and they can rent a home in your name. Only do that one time and a steady flow of cash is paid for the cover ID owner, paper work is paid for by a group of people living in that home under the cover name.
It works as different state, city, federal databases could often never be shared as the name is not on any gov list to be reconciled.

"Under the radar with the UK's illegal migrants" (24 September 2015)
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-343...
"Instead of buying a set of fake documents, he paid someone to share their legitimate national insurance number with him."

What nations need to do is have a set of ID, photo ID at every level of interaction with work, tax, banks, gov services, when seeking any form of accommodation, free gov medical services, post offices services, private sector work, as university students still doing registered (eligible) course work, as tourists, private medical services, gov assistance at a state or federal level, when buying a car or later registration/reporting over the years.
Traditional charities, gov departments and social workers could easily help a nations own citizens or eligible individuals with the new paperwork if they need help to sort, upgrade, apply or request.

The methods are very easy with todays digital gov databases to find the every expanding vast pool of fake and shared ID's.
The other method is to have a system of camera networks to capture face and licence plates on all vehicles at random heavy traffic areas. Does the face match the paperwork and face on the ID, if not a chat down?
The other option is to have long term legal guests who are working, living, or are undertaking a form of real education in a nation, register with the police at set times and if their circumstances change. No need for a "carry at all times" national ID card, just make every aspect of a functional life interact at a city, state and federal level in real time with any issued photo ID. No need for an expensive passport or drivers licence, just offer a "free" state or federal photo ID card based on an interview and a long list of interconnected, supporting documentation.
Why is this not been done in more advanced nations? Too many business leaders like their union free, interchangeable, tax free, no paper work, disposable workers and are allowed to hire such workers by political leaders over decades.

You can see a picture of a billboard here. It clearly shows that all people's identities are obscured in the billboard.
(Yes,, that link is to the op)

So privacy for business, but not for us plebs? http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

TFS's link is broken.

>> (engineers) are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists

The Paris terrorists didn't seem that "religious" or "conservative". From AFA: "She loved partying and going to clubs. She drank alcohol and smoked and went around with lots of different guys." (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3325180/Two-fingers-world-Pictured-Europe-s-female-suicide-bomber-booze-loving-extrovert-nicknamed-Cowgirl-love-big-hats.html)

She also wasn't a suicide bomber.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

The people blowing themselves up are most certainly extreme believers or they wouldn't be doing it.

I agree entirely when it comes to "tolerable" and "reasonable" and "obnoxious." Even if we completely ignore the fact that Yahoo's advertising network has been repeatedly compromised and used to serve up malware, the "legitimate" ads they display are from the gutter of the internet.

Going to any Yahoo site with ads enabled is like visiting a newsstand in the red light district. Lots of pictures of scantily clad women being used to promote something entirely unrelated; that's a grenade waiting to go off if you visit Yahoo at work. Lots of pictures of gross skin conditions and other medical problems. Lots of click-bait captions ("Surprising Ways Coconut Oil Can Change Your Life!," "20 product features you never knew existed!"). Lots of trashy, scammy sounding ads that remind you of the junk you see on TV at 3AM ("Search For Mesothelioma Lawyers," "How Much Can You Save By Refinancing?"). And on many Yahoo properties, each page will load a dozen or more 300x156 images all down the side of the page. Seriously, fire up a sandbox VM and go scroll through this page on Yahoo News without an ad blocker, it's unfuckingreal!

Yahoo Mail also insists that you enter your cellphone number in order to create an email account. This is a hard requirement and can't be bypassed. Gmail will try, and if you don't enter your number they'll remind you at every opportunity, but as of yet won't force you to link your email account to your pocket government GPS tracker. I know a lot of folks are attached to long-held @yahoo.com addresses but surely nobody new is signing up for this shit.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25653664

Meh, many people want locked down worlds where hackers can't infect their systems.

That doesn't work. It's security theater.

Furthermore, there are ways to achieve that security theater without keeping the hardware locked. Plenty of Android manufactures do it.

Okay, here's the BBC's version, then. Enjoy.

(We have the Metro in Stockholm as well. Same thing, only in Swedish, with yesterday's Swedish news and lots of ads.)

Just look at all of what was said. He talks about his famous wall, about people having to come into the country legally, all about border security and illegal immigration immediately before and after those questions and specifically in response to some of them without missing a beat. Yet you and plenty of others seriously want to believe that right in the middle, he broke stride and talked about something completely unrelated to those subjects for two sentences.

Ever watched a press conference on something that's not currently the #1 story the media is droning on and on about? Reporters always try to change the subject to the thing their networks are droning on and on about.

If you can't figure that shit out when it's happening, in real time, then you ain't gonna be a very good President.

That's pretty damn foolish if you ask me. The media is known for taking comments out of context and trolling with them. Hell, it's an inbred part of politics it seems. And yes, I'm refering to brother and sister becoming mom and dad because it always seems to be the same ones trying to smear the same people or types of people who are not part of their family. It appears you are caught up in it hook, line, and sinker too.

Of course it's the same people. They always do it to the front-runner because "front-runner is DOOOMED! DOOMED I TELL YOU!" is inherently more ratings-worthy then "Bobby Jindall once again implies he does not love his mother."

It goes in cycles. For awhile it was new (and thus ratings-worthy) to bash the hell out of Hillary. Biden was going to come in and steal her lunch money. "Feel the Bern" was more then an impotent expression of white liberal rage. There was a lot of smoke to the Benghazi scandal. Polls that indicated she might lose the whitest states in the country were huge news, despite the fact the exact same poll showed she;'d wipe the competition out in the next two states.Then that got old, and not ratings-worthy; so as soon as that idiot implied that Benghazi was political, and she didn't stink up a debate, she started walking on water again. In about a month two or three relatively trivial other things (probably related to her continued weakness in the white/Iowa/New Hampshire vote relative to Sanders) will be merged with some other random piece of vaguely anti-Hillaryish infotainment and she'll be doomed again.

In Trump's case he actually prefers the negative attention, because the guy who said that 15-20% of the potential ratings points are "rapists" despite all evidence to the contrary, is never gonna be embraced by the media.

Either Trump's not smart enough to figure out that he is answering a totally different set of policy questions then the reporter is asking, in which case he should be pilloried in the media for not understanding the requirements of the job he is trying to get.

This is most likely it. It is completely supported by his answers. Look at his answers to the MSNBC reporter...

It's definitely possible.

It's just as likely he knew exactly what he was answering, and he knew that his supporters would watch the video and then go into paroxysms of pro-Trump rage against the biased media, and therefore he did it anyway.

But given the aforementioned Mexican immigrants are rapists thing,* I'm not gonna give him the benefit of the doubt on any ridiculous ethnically-based statement.

*Which was just stupid. If you're a criminal of any type in Mexico, especially a rapist, why the fuck would you leave? You can kidnap 16-year-old girls, have your way with them, murder them, bury the bodies in the hills and nobody with arrest powers cares. Granted state-side we get our share of ethnic Latino criminals, but most of them are at least raised in the US, they tend to be from Central American countries that are not Mexico, and they aren't any rapier then us natives.

Quoting http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

>

Over the last couple of centuries Britain and France (particularly) and latterly the US have ridden roughshod over national sovereignty and human rights in the middle east whenever it suited their political or economic purposes.

Do you imagine the MIddle East had liberal democracies before the US and Europe came in and destroyed it? The Middle East has been a totalitarian shithole for a long, long time. It never had "human rights" in the Western sense. And the whole point of many of these Islamic movements is to get rid of "national sovereignty" and restore an Islamic empire. And creating that Islamic empire isn't for the good of humanity, it is to take revenge for the fact that Europe successfully defended itself and kicked out the first few Islamic empires.

Now, I disapprove of the US and European governments meddling in the Middle East. It is clearly not very effective, it is very costly, and it just riles up the people who live there. But the West does not bear any moral responsibility for the plight of the people in the Middle East, and it isn't our responsibility to ensure that they have "national sovereignty and human rights". In fact, the Middle East probably has achieved more "national sovereignty and human rights" with US and European meddling than without, it's just that the price we are paying for it is too high for us.

You've just proved my point. The West has a history of supporting repressive regimes (like Saudi Arabia) because it's "good for business". The West talk a good game when it comes to democracy in the middle east but in reality they only want "friendly" regimes in place. They say they want free elections, but when there is one and the people use their votes to elect the "wrong" party there's suddenly a coup to restore the status-quo. Here's a recent article in this very topic from the BBC; Does the West want democracy in the Middle East? - BBC News.

So now we know for sure which are the propaganda mills in "mainstream" news. I read anti-encryption articles on at least CNN, MSN, Fox, and Infoworld. Are there any others worthy of mention in this context? They are now off my list of "reputable news" sources, though they may be useful for staying up on current events... take it with a grain of salt.

The BBC: Paris attacks: Silicon Valley in crosshairs over encryption
Some gems from the article:
"And I do think this is a time for particularly Europe, as well as here in the United States, for us to take a look and see whether or not there have been some inadvertent or intentional gaps that have been created in the ability of intelligence and security services to protect the people that they are asked to serve."

while attitudes towards creating government backdoors were "hostile", that atmosphere "could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement". Paris may just be that event.

Also, some jackwagon New York prosecutor is calling for legislation mandating phone manufactures use weak encryption and provide backdoors for law enforcement:
A New York prosecutor is calling for federal legislation to weaken smartphone encryption

It's just ridiculous. Intelligence agencies and police have unprecedented data and location tracking on nearly every person in the world and it's STILL NOT ENOUGH for them. They will never be satisfied, even if every person in the world provided them a 24/7 video feed they would demand constant brainwave scans to "protect our children". It's time to say enough is enough and remove the people in favor of a surveillance state from a position of power, either by voting them out of office or voting the people who appointed them out of office.

From the commander-in-chief:

The US does not make good decisions "based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks"

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34859604

And yet, they just became my manufacturers of choice, because they are actively trying to do something about airspace incursions and in doing so, are opening peoples eyes to the potential dangers ("we are imposing these restrictions because x y z") of flying in close proximity to things they shouldn't.

I'd never give my money to a company that is arming idiots with tools that can interfere with airport operations, drop electrical grids and god knows what else. People will always whinge about being told they can't do something after the event, however if that something is clearly noted at point of sale as a limitation, they have the option of not buying it, or buying it and operating safely. More power to them.

Look, they found what causes your delusions of grandeur!

http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Maybe they will finally find a cure.

Wow. Look at all of those replies he posted.

That's a lot of text. I am a very fast typist and it would take me a significant investment of time to a) type that much and b) get a bunch of proxies [or whatever it is he does] to get around the Slashdot posting limits. Hell, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he won't open-source his hosts program because it includes a backdoor, allowing him to use other peoples' computers as HTTP proxies so he can spam Slashdot. I can't say whether or not this is true, but I can definitely 100% say that it wouldn't surprise me and in fact, it would explain a lot. He certainly does appear to have something to hide, since a guy working in security should be aware that security through obscurity is automatically suspect.

Anyway, normal people understand that folks on the internet will say things they don't agree with. Normal people would have better things to do than waste all of that time and effort overreacting to someone who disagrees with them. In my opinion (you see that part, APK?) the man is not remotely normal at all.

It's amusing how he will write 20x more words than we do. We can expend the slightest effort posting our honest opinions and he goes nuts, expending tremendously more effort than we did. He doesn't seem to understand how he puts himself at a disadvantage. He really seems to believe that if he just repeats himself hard enough, somehow his false views will become righteous.

I appreciate the sanity you are contributing to this discussion. You are raising the signal-to-noise ratio that APK keeps obsessively trying to lower and that's a respectable act. I hope you keep up the good work!

Look, they found what causes your delusions of grandeur!

http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Maybe they will finally find a cure.

I do not support any government that indiscriminately kills civilians (ie Israel) and I hold my own accountable when accidents happen.

Israel doesn't make a practice of indiscriminately killing civilians, and the "investigations" making those sorts of accusations tend to have "issues".

Goldstone: You Cannot Undo a Slander
Israel’s Heroic Restraint
Scandal Rocks the U.N.
The U.N.’s Grotesque Gaza Inquiry
Another Effort to Destroy Israel

Of course they have issues as Israel has an extremely strong propaganda arm.

One might as well argue that the Israeli reports saying otherwise 'have issues'.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or this:

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

Yeah, sure the release wasn't Anonymous, but it still identified people who were clearly not in the KKK.

You're referring to the La Castellane estate in Marseille. It's the most dangerous place in the most dangerous city of Europe. A bit sensationalist, but unfortunately all true:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/po...

The chants about Mohamed Mera refer to this POS:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Tbh, Marseille has always been sleazy. Not surprising since it's a port town and a gateway from Africa and ME to Western Europe. But these, ahem, people, take it to a whole new level. AK47, anyone?

If you look at France: They have a huge problem integrating immigrants (or at least treating them reasonable well).If you read an article like this:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
you have to wonder, if this is really about religion or about the youth having no future and then finding a reason for getting violent.

Ah, the old "they're just poor and misunderstood" argument. That myth has been debunked a million times by terrorism research, but it just won't die. The muslim world is full of this type of violence, and thousands of young men have joined Deash from Algeria alone. Are you claiming that Algerians in Algeria are not integrated and are marginalized by Islamophobes?

Different countries have different ways of dealing with immigration. Whatever the approach, all western countries have to deal with islamist terrorism, as well as plain old muslim antisocial and criminal behavior. This behavior is caused by the ideology, mentality and cultural values that have been imported from the muslim world. Some examples:

Forced virginity tests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Honor killings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Challenging authority: attacks on police, firefighters, mailmen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Sectarianism in the classroom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Turkish (Anatolian) thugs take over German school:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Muslim misogyny, racism, triumphalism, glorification of violence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

PS If you'd read the Guardian regularly, you'd know it's not a credible source. They argue that Thomas the tank engine is racist. They ignore issues like this because it doesn't fit their narrative. If they can't ignore it, like these 2 major domestic scandals, they downplay the religious / ethnic aspects:

Pakistani (child)rape culture in the UK
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...

Trojan Horse school scandal
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...

If you look at France: They have a huge problem integrating immigrants (or at least treating them reasonable well).If you read an article like this:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
you have to wonder, if this is really about religion or about the youth having no future and then finding a reason for getting violent.

Ah, the old "they're just poor and misunderstood" argument. That myth has been debunked a million times by terrorism research, but it just won't die. The muslim world is full of this type of violence, and thousands of young men have joined Deash from Algeria alone. Are you claiming that Algerians in Algeria are not integrated and are marginalized by Islamophobes?

Different countries have different ways of dealing with immigration. Whatever the approach, all western countries have to deal with islamist terrorism, as well as plain old muslim antisocial and criminal behavior. This behavior is caused by the ideology, mentality and cultural values that have been imported from the muslim world. Some examples:

Forced virginity tests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Honor killings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Challenging authority: attacks on police, firefighters, mailmen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Sectarianism in the classroom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Turkish (Anatolian) thugs take over German school:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Muslim misogyny, racism, triumphalism, glorification of violence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

PS If you'd read the Guardian regularly, you'd know it's not a credible source. They argue that Thomas the tank engine is racist. They ignore issues like this because it doesn't fit their narrative. If they can't ignore it, like these 2 major domestic scandals, they downplay the religious / ethnic aspects:

Pakistani (child)rape culture in the UK
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...

Trojan Horse school scandal
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...

If Europe had American style gun control laws then it'd probably have an American style problem with mass shootings happening every day due to ordinary white citizens going crazy, instead of every few years or so due to poorly integrated Muslim men who are radicalised by the blowback from foreign military campaigns.

Somehow that would not seem like an improvement.

It looks like every time someone finds a gun and pulls the trigger in Europe (a place larger than America), crazed yanks immediately pop up and start saying it could have all been avoided if only literally everyone was carrying guns including in cafes and rock concerts.

The reality is a lot more boring. The combination of strong borders and gun controls do work. The experience of the UK is unequivocal. Gun crime is virtually unheard of, guns being involved in merely 0.2% of all crimes, and that proportion has been steadily falling for a decade. Guns are so hard to obtain in the UK that gangs have been observed using antique 19th century weapons and the few that do still exist tend to be owned by professional "armourers" who rent the guns out, often to opposing sides in the same dispute. Gangs literally rent the same gun to go shoot at each other with.

I've noticed that the UK experience is sometimes dismissed by US gun advocates using misleading statistics. For example it's commonly pointed out that after gun controls were tightened in 1996 the number of gun offences went up. Actually that's an artifact of changed police reporting standards that increased all types of crime figures simultaneously and it doesn't show up in the British Crime Survey, which gives an independent measure of crime by polling randomly selected people instead of counting police reports. Also there tends to be an assumption that merely passing a law immediately implements working gun control, whereas in reality it can take police forces quite some years to drain the supply of weapons even when they have all the tools they need.

Nonetheless, the outcome 20 years on is quite clear - mass shootings are so rare they're basically non-existent, gun crime in general is falling towards extinction, and the local people are happy with it.

Why is this not happening in France? Well, France is inside the Schengen border free zone and that zone has recently accepted a number of former communist states where there are large stockpiles of Soviet era weaponry still easily accessible. West Europe can't implement UK style gun control even if they wanted to (actually, French gun control law isn't even as strict as the UK anyway). There isn't any easy solution to that beyond waiting for the eastern countries to step up gun law enforcement and track down/destroy the remaining weapons, which could easily take decades. Americans should therefore be careful about over-generalising from the mainland European experience to all gun control everywhere. In island nations like the UK and Australia it tends to work a lot better.

France has been bombing terrorists in Iraq and Syria. Just last week they announced they were sending their aircraft carrier in for another tour.

Exactly right. IS is striking back at France in retaliation of France's attacks on them in Syria.

See http://www.theguardian.com/wor... for example.

Note that I'm not trying to justify anything.

With that said, I do not think that it makes any sense whatsoever to try to fight religious lunatics by killing them. These people dream of being "martyred" in battle, because they think it will secure them a better spot in their afterlife. When we think that killing the Islamists will work we are projecting rational thoughts and motivations onto people who are motivated by irrational beliefs.

If we should to do something rash here in Europe (which I'm not sure we should) internment camps like the ones the US put US-Japanese citizens in during WW2 would be a much better idea. The Islamists do like their freedom as much as the rest of us. God's powers apparently do not extend inside the walls of prisons.

France has been bombing terrorists in Iraq and Syria. Just last week they announced they were sending their aircraft carrier in for another tour.

I predict that we will begin to see (more?) product placements in TV shows. It's an easy way to defeat cord-cutters and DVR'ers. Hey, they've been doing that in movies for decades.

Exactly, product placements are becoming more common (and more blatant), so cutting down on commercials means more time for more product placements.

And now they can do dynamic product placements, no need for a static can of Pepsi on the show, they can show Pepsi to some audiences, and Coke to others:

http://www.bbc.com/news/entert...

I don't think even laser coms are all that secure anymore.... http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

All you do is park a listening satellite near the sub's target bird and watch for communications to happen, volia you have a good position on a sub.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/sto...

http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Now, are you willing to listen?

Global warming pause Is now such a widely understood concept that even the IPCC talks about it.

If you want to really understand things, you have to stop being a closed minded denier of data.

Seriously?
1) Start setting up shelters well ahead of time, so that immigrants can be housed in decent semi-permanent accommodation rather than makeshift camps that they have to vacate every few weeks. Even in crowded countries there is plenty of land (you don't need all that much), and plenty of empty office buildings that can be converted if you're given a bit of time.
2) Long term accommodation in the form of regular houses is harder to arrange (and much more expensive), but not insurmountable. And it helps if you:
3) Separate the refugees from the opportunists. The place to start doing that is at the border, meaning that Greece and Hungary need a lot of help to channel, shelter and process refugees. Just busing them to the next country is not the solution.
4) Also: close the border with Turkey; it's a safe country and by treaty we are under no obligation whatsoever to accept refugees from there. No, walls never help and you can't stop everybody, blah blah blah, but even if you can't stop then all, at least you can register a good many of them (and later deport them at your leisure).
5) Make it crystal clear that there is no future here for opportunists. No more "Wir schaffen das" from Mutti Merkel, but deportation of illegals in all cases where that's feasible. That starts with 3 & 4, if you know from what country they entered Europe, it legally is a lot easier to send them back. And do what Australia does: make deals with transit countries to help them cope with refugees on their land (where by UN treaty they should remain), or threaten sanctions if they do not cooperate.
6) All this costs money, but not all that much. It's not like we're bailing out a bank or anything like that.

There's no silver bullet here and all of these measures have their logistical, financial and political pitfalls, but doing bugger-all is not the solution. And in case people wonder why so many Europeans are worried about immigration or a backlash against immigrants: it is not because we think all immigrants are baby-eating savages. It is because the situation as it appears to be at the moment is: the borders are open to any and all, and we are expected to feed and shelter however many people decide to come here. It's completely open-ended; no politician even dares ask the question "how many can we reasonably accommodate and assimilate this year, the next, and in the future?". Or "How much is this going to cost?". Instead we get a bunch of wishful thinking and outright lies about how this will help (or ruin) our economy, about the nature of the immigrants, about how well (or poorly) they will eventually integrate, and so on. Politicians spreading lies and avoiding the obvious but important questions have us think that there is a much larger problem or an agenda that they are trying to hide, for example the idea that "The EU should undermine national homogeneity". And meanwhile, we are indeed not doing anything about the source of the problems in Syria.

As are all other manufacturers, so that does not really affect resale value. The alternative for a buyer would be another car with MPG values that have also been artificially lowered.

I think you are spot-on the crux of the issue. This will determine the future of fully-autonomous vehicles. Even if there are legislative/regulatory decisions in place before the first fatality, the ambulance-chasers will do their best/worst to get around them.

This is clearly not a show-stopper.
Volvo says it will accept full liability for accidents involving its driverless cars, making it "one of the first" car companies to do so.
There will be some legal issues if ambulance-chasers start to abuse this, but they will be going up against a large car manufacturer with a legal department, not another driver without court experience.

There's the small chance the BBC could cease to exist, of course, but then the world would have way bigger problems than a few of us Brits not being able to rewatch Doctor Who box sets.

There's a rather larger chance the BBC will not exist in its current form in the medium term, especially given some of the noises the Tory government are making. But that's not the only issue. From the T&Cs:

https://store.bbc.com/terms

'We cannot guarantee that you will be able to stream or re-download Content that's in your BBC Store account forever. Where our right to make content available has expired, you will no longer be able to stream or download that content from your BBC Store account. We'll try not to take down expired content without first notifying you that it is due to expire, so that you have the opportunity to download and playback the content through the Store Download Manager.'

If your 'purchase' is no longer available from the store, downloaded content presumably only lasts as long as the device does.

because not everyone is a coward without a gun. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Well go batshit insane with a gun on the train. He was quickly subdued. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Unfortunately, they are allowed to - the rules say very little about whether and how the car may be prepared and the official driving cycle hasn't changed since the 1970s. All manufacturers pull such tricks. They didn't use to, but since governments started to base taxes on CO2 emissions and since the EU set CO2 targets for the car industry, they have been looking for ways to artificially lower the reported values.