Slashdot Mirror

The shooter had a known history of drug abuse.

And other mental health issues. And a long rap sheet for various petty crimes.

He was a very recent convert to Islam. Interestingly enough, even his friend at the mosque thought he was "erratic" and perhaps "mentally ill".

Leaders of religious organizations can't always lead if their followers don't listen. The problem with your other statement about separation from religion is, "who chose you to be god?". It's obviously only you who can decide what is barbarism... isn''t it?

TFA is right. Ebola requires not an "Ebola Czar" but a team of people who are well trained with comprehensive strategy to tackle / combat / defeat Ebola

Right now, as it is, the fight against Ebola has been a sham --- this disease was not a new phenomenon, Ebola has been known since the 1970's, but because it had always been confined in the African continent, the continent in which the "low class people lives" (to the uninitiated that ain't my opinion but it has been the opinion of the colonial elites) nobody takes Ebola seriously other than very few cases of vaccine experimentation sponsored by military of various countries

The fact that WHO has to resort to collect the blood of those who survived Ebola to make a "serum" trying to cure Ebola tells us how unprepared the world is against this disease

Until now the establishment still insists that Ebola is not airborne but at least one experiment in Canada has indicated that Ebola could spread through air ( see these links --- http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

http://healthmap.org/site/dise... )

If the establishment until now still does not want to tell us the truth, who can we trust ?

The problem is there are not enough pedophiles to prosecute. The state has been forced to "create" pedophiles.

That doesn't really seem to be the problem. It is more like something approaching the opposite.

Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds

Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal is tip of iceberg, says police chief

There will be more Rotherham-style child sexual exploitation scandals unearthed in the coming months as the “stone is lifted” on the scale of abuse perpetrated on the young, one of Britain’s top police officers has warned.

No. But such is the moral panic over child molestation in the UK that no-one dare stand up and defend him.

I don't think you could build a good case that "moral panic" over child molestation is the biggest problem the UK has in this regard, viz:

Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds

Prof Jay said: "No-one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013."

Revealing details of the inquiry's findings, Prof Jay said: "It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered."

The inquiry team found examples of "children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone ....

The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham".

No indeed, it appears the "moral panic" you are looking for is not about child molestation.

Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal is tip of iceberg, says police chief

There will be more Rotherham-style child sexual exploitation scandals unearthed in the coming months as the “stone is lifted” on the scale of abuse perpetrated on the young, one of Britain’s top police officers has warned.

Children are being abused an hour after being groomed online, Rotherham sex abuse scandal expert warns

Paedophiles are abusing children in real life within an hour of grooming them online, the professor who led the investigation into the Rotherham sex abuse scandal has warned.

Professor Alexis Jay, who compiled a report into how gangs of mainly Asian men groomed, terrorised and abused 1,400 girls as young as 11 in Rotherham over a 16-year period said sex abuse went on undetected in many other areas across Britain.

This isn't about trolling.

This is about abusive, manipulative, disruptive and often threatening behavior that would not be tolerated off-line in the name of free speech --- because it is the enemy of free speech.

Free speech cannot survive in an atmosphere of fear.

Free speech cannot survive when speakers are shouted down, bullied and hounded off stage.

Free speech cannot survive the mob.

No, this law is mostly about drinking and tweeting, and tweeting racist things as a result.

In the UK, the maximum penalty for someone drinking and driving, when a life isn't actually lost as a result, is up 6 months in jail. However, if you happen to be drinking and tweeting (and not driving), then that maximum penalty is multiplied by four.

Free speech cannot survive when speakers are shouted down, bullied and hounded off stage.

Free speech cannot survive the mob.

May be, but not in the tweeting cases prosecuted by the Crown. In each case, the mob sided with the target of the tweets, not the offender. And of course, we're not talking about online school bullying with this particular law. If this law was aimed at stopping school bullying, there would be a provision for underaged offenders, which there isn't. And it would be applied to those school cases, which as of now it hasn't.

...that would not be tolerated off-line in the name of free speech

That's a nice idea, but you haven't spend any time around drunk people. When a drunk person gets belligerent, you throw them out of the premises, or if you're not the owner of the premises, you walk away from them. Throwing them in jail is the last possible resort, only to be used, when that person is a danger to others, or a danger to himself (like when he or she is hitting other people, or trying to drive a car).

Throwing trolls in jail isn't going to solve the problem of trolls. For one thing, there will still be people trolling from outside the UK (they will do so just because they can, as a taunt against the British authorities). And for a second thing, people aren't going to stop drinking and tweeting, even inside the UK, so the angry judges and politicians are likely to be even more frustrated with the results and come up with even more draconian measures.

How do you know it was stopped in Nigeria? Because the Nigerian government, who have a strong incentive to protect their billions of dollars in trade with the rest of the world say they stopped it?

No. We know it because US health authorities and the WHO reported it.

And they could appear to be clean runners to boot.

So, I take it you're in favor of doping because that's an individual, intrinsic activity.

Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Biology is inherently unfair. The Kenyans who keep setting these records have a genetic advantage (they are from a particular tribe), and males have such an advantage over females in many sports that natural females whose unaltered bodies hypersecrete testosterone are forced to undergo surgery/hormone therapy in order to become "female enough" to be allowed to compete. Yes, forcing dangerous medical interventions upon healthy individuals in the name of righteousness.

At some point, these idealists have become twisted, unethical Torquemadas, a parody of themselves wherein at least some of the dopers are on better moral ground than they are.

Actually, an EU Commissioner (Günther Oettinger) said so. He also said "Stupidity is something you can only partly save people from". Quite refreshing, but of course the chattering classes laid into him over it; unlike some others, he refused to apologise.

They did that once already in the UK back in 1997... Still washing up to this day

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

But then, we should be using gallons-per-mile instead of miles-per-gallon, too.

A car that does 50MPG is twice as efficient as one that does 25MPG. What's so hard about comparing numbers in MPG? It sounds like me like someone's got a case of the "technically correct"s.

Because they're all bad numbers.

Honestly, we should be doing it in gallons/minute or gallons/hour (or litre/minute, litre/hour respectively), and move to single-speed engines that operate at peak efficiency that simply power an electric drive train (measured in KW/mile and KW/km). You'll get much more meaningful information regarding the efficiency of the vehicle.

As it stands, MPG/KmPG doesn't take into account how long you idle at lights, in traffic, etc. A good chunk of driving is completely missed in the calculations, assumed to be accounted for by the accel/decel in the structure of the testing. Only reason we do MPG/KmPG is due to the variable speed ICE systems we deploy in the vehicles instead of systems like http://www.bbc.com/autos/story...

What an agreeble culture!

Yes, they're so agreeable that no one visits beaches after September 1st.

From the article:

"Many of us are so submissive to authority that we will never think to challenge the status quo," says Sato.

Indoctrination starts at school. Children are drilled: "Follow the rules. Don't be selfish. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."

Right now, this is happening in Hong Kong:

In Hong Kong, pro-democracy demonstrators are looking for new ways to communicate.

News about the protests in Hong Kong have been suppressed in mainland China, where the picture sharing site Instagram has been blocked. Messages posted to Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site similar to Twitter, are being blocked in far greater numbers than normal. And on Sunday, rumours reportedly circulated that the authorities in Hong Kong might shut down the city's cellular networks.

In response, a different type of social network has come to the fore. The Firechat app allows smartphone users to talk to one another "off-the-grid", in the absence of a mobile signal or access to the internet. By making use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, messages are spread in a daisy chain fashion, jumping from one user to the next. The system is particularly effective when large numbers of people are congregated together - like at a music festival, or a political protest.

Micha Benoliel, CEO of Open Garden, the firm that makes the app, tells BBC Trending there has been a huge surge in downloads from Hong Kong, as more than 100,000 new accounts have been created in less than 24 hours. Usage spiked during protests in Taiwan and Iran earlier this year, but never before on this scale, says Benoliel.

Inside the app discussions are arranged either according to theme, or how close you are to other users. At one point on Sunday 33,000 people in Hong Kong were using the app at the same time.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

Hi Ken,

If I understand your comment correctly, you argue that all renewable subsidies ought to end. And in particular, argue that Net Metering laws are an especially pernicious subsidy that forces utility companies to buy energy from homeowners at inflated rates. You use the common 'buggy whip' metaphor for disruptive economic shifts due to technological advancement to explain this rationale, presenting the hypothetical: what would happen if government had subsidized buggy whips?

So I'll counter, there are two kinds of renewable subsidies at play here.

The first are manufacturing subsidies. China subsidized manufacturing buildout of solar assembly lines with the hope they would take a dominant position in the world market. They're betting solar will be a high growth high-tech market and these subsidies will have long term benefit to the Chinese economy. This is no different from the US betting big by subsidizing pharmaceuticals through medical research grants. Or the initial funding of computer science and packet switched networking (ARPANET), what we now enjoy as the Internet. Those subsidies funneled wealth toward industries each nation expected would show long term economic benefit.

From that perspective, fossil fuels receive significant subsidies today, even as solar manufacturing subsidies decline. See this BBC article:

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

But there's a second kind of solar subsidy. The one you argue is especially pernicious. That of Net Metering, whereby utilities buy back electric generation by rooftop solar. This subsidizes not the manufacture of panels but their purchase, deployment, and use. As utility companies complain, Net Metering essentially is forcing those companies to diminish the value of their investments in gas and coal fired power plants. Since they've put billions - half a trillion wordlwide - into these investments, a general popular shift to rooftop solar means that as local solar ownership increases so too does the value of central production decrease.

Why should laws force them to buy the knife that's slitting their own throats?

I argue because increased energy production - in aggregate - is a net good across the board. The solution is not to limit deployment of renewables, particularly since they're already cost effective, but to find alternative use for those gas and coal burning plants during this transition period. You won't get buy-in from utility investors unless they see some kind of ROI on prior investment. Otherwise, they'll fight this to the bitter end, which would delay renewable deployment longer than planning to maximizing use of current fossil fuel infrastructure anyway.

But let's get to your buggy whip argument. Because I think this is particularly flawed. Here, you conflate a manufactured good - the buggy whip - with an energy resource. It takes net energy to make buggy whips. If they're useless, regardless of subsidy, that's a net loss to the economy and society in general. The whip will sit unused until it decays and is thrown away. Energy production is different. This can be stored for use another day. Whether that's direct use in smelting and manufacturing, as I proposed, or in storage - say mass hydro by pumping water uphill, hydrogen gas production and storage, whatever - energy production can be converted and saved in ways that a useless manufactured object cannot.

The analogy fails because the two (subsidized energy production vs subsidized manufacturing) are not comparable at fundamental levels.

At least, that's the perspective I take. I look forward to your counter-argument. Best. -M

hahahhahahaha.. Oh man. You are hilarious.
Anyone who thinks American bureaucracy is over bearing and paralyzing clearly hasn't dealt with other government.
My experience with the India's bureaucracy was that it is the worst. Sudden fees(Bribes*) , being shuffled to other family members fr more sudden fees*. It's realy bad.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.bbc.com/news/102276...

I have good news for you** the American Bureaucracy is pretty damn efficient and honest.

*really bribes as in, it's going into this guys pocket.

**sadly, like most Americans these, you won't like facts and just ignore this good news it it's counter to you belief.

hahahhahahaha.. Oh man. You are hilarious.
Anyone who thinks American bureaucracy is over bearing and paralyzing clearly hasn't dealt with other government.
My experience with the India's bureaucracy was that it is the worst. Sudden fees(Bribes*) , being shuffled to other family members fr more sudden fees*. It's realy bad.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.bbc.com/news/102276...

I have good news for you** the American Bureaucracy is pretty damn efficient and honest.

*really bribes as in, it's going into this guys pocket.

**sadly, like most Americans these, you won't like facts and just ignore this good news it it's counter to you belief.

BBC's headline of this story: "Seattle to fine residents and businesses for wasting food"

I'm sure the Beeb is in on this Vast Right Wing Conspiracy too. If you think Slashdot is "too conservative," you might want to look into getting some professional help. Seriously.

I'm going to regret jumping into this fray, but the venerable BBC's headline states:

      "Seattle to fine residents and businesses for wasting food"
      http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Although the body of their article also has the same Croll quote and finer details.
Perhaps reading comprehension and summarizing skills are in greater demand than we thought...

India couldn't have built the first university because the university is an institution of thoroughly Medieval European character. Universitas is a term from the European Middle Ages (derived from the Roman law) for a specific kind of "corporations" being self-regulated bodies of people with some shared interest (basically guilds). The things we call "universities" today just happened to be "universities of teachers and students", as opposed to other kinds of universitates.

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

+1 Subtle Irony. Well played, sir or madam!

Ukraine conflict: 'Russia has taken control of Crimea'
Boat collisions spark Japan-China diplomatic row

Why not consider that whole community broadband thing that people have been doing in other countries (UK, Germany for example)?

http://www.thelocal.de/2014060...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
etc.

From what I understand, the costs of DIY broadband for people living in remote areas isn't as significant as the prices quoted above - and it's another way you can tell the big ISPs to f* off.

Alternatively, if there's any mountains or hills in the area, broadcasting some wireless might be another option (if you don't mind compromising with wireless) - it seems to be a feasible thing to do in the US if you can't trench some fiber - the Ubiquiti forums have a few stories to tell.

If you look at this map, you will see that the northern islands (Orkney, Shetland), were the most opposed areas.

Um...that's where the oil is.

I suspect that the new nation of Caledonia would have had to mount an immediate invasion of those islands, or they would have been completely screwed (not to mention that the companies that already run the North Sea Crude rigs are not Scottish).

What happens when cooling systems at a nuclear power plant are taken offline by an aggressor?

Then I would say that the management of the facility has been negligent in their duties and should all face criminal prosecution. The same would go for water treatment plants where someone could access a computer over the internet, or any other utility.

I'm not sure if parent was referring to this incident or Stuxnet in general but in no case the target system had Internet connectivity.
It isn't as simple as just not connecting the control system to Internet. Since the attack vector was configuration changes carried over USB sticks the entire work path has to be done with computers that has never touched Internet.
Considering that we have seen software infected when it leaves the software houses due to the developers computers being Internet connected it is unreasonable to expect that the rigor needed can be upheld. Running a modern computer without software seems pointless.

Also, read up on Stuxnet, it is really quite interesting.

From the researcher's blog, quoting Canon:

We intend to provide a fix as quickly as is feasible.

They...

will have a username/password added

Aw, heck. They're "fixing" it the wrong way.
The right way to deal with DOOM running on a printer's LCD is not to remove this feature. They should simply turn DOOM into official menu option.

Yep. That is the gist of America's new oligarchy.

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

I'm actually unsurprised by the way it dropped - lead was removed from gasoline, and as a result you've had a generation of people grow up without lead poisoning. This lessening of brain damage means that people have better impulse control etc. See

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

Observe the graph towards the bottom of the article. Note how the decrease in crime closely tracks the lead levels.

Now when my family was on the farm we had a number of rifles & shotguns for keeping down predators etc (including an absolutely classic 100 year old double barrelled English shotgun), so I wouldn't say I'm afraid of them.

It's just that there seems to be an increasingly unhinged group of nuts & extremists associated with guns, your preppers & survivalists, and you get those occasional outbreaks of lunacy, like Sandy Hook. There seems to be no movement within the gun owning community to put a lid on such nonsense, which is disturbing. And all these guns still haven't stopped the NSA from spying on you, or stopped the police from murdering your citizens.

Lets not forget how countries that have gun bans tend to have massive stabbing sprees. So the issue isn't guns or even weapons in general, it is people. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

The impact on CO2 emissions has been immediate. "There has been an increase of between 5%-7% in CO2 in the past two years," says Prof Claudia Kemfert, head of energy at the German Institute for Economic Research.

And on Japan how can you claim that Japan lacks coal plants? Japan has 18 Coal fired power plants and according to that other article they are planning more.

Alas, that particular reference might be lost on americans slashdotters.

Methinks BBC did what they did on the advise of their lawyers, and I am sure that there are still plenty of good people within BBC who can discern good from bad, right from wrong

So ... why don't all of us contact BBC and tell them what we think ?

Their website is at http://bbc.com/

You can contact them via http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/cont...

Or file a complaint at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaint...

Their worldservice email address is at worldservice.letters@bbc.co.uk

Their FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/bbcwo...

Let them know, let BBC know how wrong they are about VPN

FTA: "In the belly of the beast, gases like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrochloric acid" HYDROCHLORIC ACID GAS? Screw the CO2, the last thing I want anywhere is air that literally eats you alive from the inside out!

As you tacitly requested, here's your daily dose of depression:

BBC: Sulphur mining in an active volcano

tl;dr: the workers can't afford masks, so the gases cack their lungs and dissolve their teeth while they're working in the volcano.

You're welcome.

China's biggest e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding says it expects to price its initial public offering (IPO) at between $60 and $66 per a share. It has filed to sell up to $24.3bn (£15bn) in stock, in what will be the biggest technology listing in the US.

Ironically: today France delivered the first response by western nations that Putin really cares about.
It will not deliver the two advance helicopter carriers as agreed since "the conditions are not right".

The article mentioned that delivery of the helicopter carriers would have resulted in "a marked improvement in Russia's amphibious capability".

As a trend, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge seems a bit played out, but gosh darn it we're going to wring all the money out of it. Every last drop.

Ice suicide challenge

"They could have blamed Berkut officers who escaped to Crimea. Yet curiously there are no witnesses of actual shooters."

Yes there is, there's actual video of it.

"Yet Putin's war crimes happened to be bloodless. There was only one fatality during the Crimea takeover."

No there wasn't. You're ignoring the countless Crimean Tatar's that have been disappeared stasi style.

"Maybe because only RT tells about such things? Have you thought about that?"

Bwahahah. Yes, that's right, RT is a magical press outlet, the only one in the world that just happens to be right. Well at least we're getting somewhere now, at least we're getting to the point that you are after all mindlessly fed propaganda by RT. You realise that defending RT is a bit like defending Fox News or The Daily Mail right? You have to be a pretty exceptional type of retard to fall for that kind of blatant propaganda.

"Oh RLY? Let's see: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media... ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... ) No, no graphic images at all. No tearful stories of "imagine what these poor passengers felt after the rocket hit"."

LOL, you have a very different definition of graphic to me. I wouldn't call a mangled toy doll graphic, but I guess you really are quite special. Wait, seriously, I have to just check, you really thought that was a person didn't you? you actually thought a blatantly plastic toy doll was a persons? You're really learning from the Kremlin about propaganda on this one - you'll really stoop to such levels of absurdity to protect your biases rather than recognise what utter stupid arguments you're making?

"Similar tragedies happen in Ukraine every day now"

Yes, because Russia thought it would be more fun to avoid than leave it the fuck alone, yet for some reason you continue to defend Russia.

"And without Western diplomatic support and pressure, there would have been NO revolution at all."

There was no pressure, the pressure came from the Russians and the majority of people of Ukraine wanting to move away from Russia, did the West support that? Of course, why wouldn't we support the will of the people to move away from a corrupt tyrrany like Yanukovych's regime if that's what they want as they did?

"Yanukovich would have been voted out by now and everything would have been OK. How about that?"

Yanukovych lost elections previously but it didn't stop the FSB poisoning the opposition did it? Yanukovych was voted out - parliament decided to vote 73% in favour to start the impeachment process against him before he fled, yet Russia still did this. Why do you think Russia wouldn't meddle in the Ukraine if it happened via normal elections? It's not like that's stopped them meddling in the Ukraine before, ever since the orange revolution they've been playing games. Putin doesn't give a shit about democracy in Ukraine, he just wants to control it, that's been obvious since Putin became president - the same is true of Georgia, Putin cannot cope with the idea of them determining their own future, he's insistent on doing it for them whatever democracy in the country in question says.

Um, are you stupid? of course they would, they're not exactly going to admit to shooting unarmed civilians are they?

They could have blamed Berkut officers who escaped to Crimea. Yet curiously there are no witnesses of actual shooters.

As opposed to the self-admitted war crimes of Putin of using soldiers passed off as civilians in Crimea?

Yet Putin's war crimes happened to be bloodless. There was only one fatality during the Crimea takeover.

So why in that case are you merely parroting RT's line and nothing else?

Maybe because only RT tells about such things? Have you thought about that?

though it doesn't show graphic photos like that, but it didn't of MH17 either so your speculation there is completely false

Oh RLY? Let's see: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media... ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... ) No, no graphic images at all. No tearful stories of "imagine what these poor passengers felt after the rocket hit".

Similar tragedies happen in Ukraine every day now, yet a note somewhere on CNN is certainly enough. Even better if it's worded in a way that tries to avoid blaming Ukrainian soldiers.

Ukraine could've quite happily moved forward from it's revolution peacefully but Moscow wouldn't allow that.

And without Western diplomatic support and pressure, there would have been NO revolution at all. Yanukovich would have been voted out by now and everything would have been OK. How about that?

You seem to have reduced renewables to just wind and assumed that I think the country should be powered 100% by wind, That is incorrect.

Tepco lie habitually. Their own statements show they don't know what's going on. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Politicians smart? They are only smart about lining their own pockets.

Hinkley point will get tens of billions in subsidies at the guaranteed rate of £92.5/MWh - roughly double what will be paid for gas, coal, wind etc.

If renewables are so unobtainable why are Scotland aiming for 100% renewable by 2020 after having beat their goal of 31% renewable by 2011 set in only 2007.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco...

Portugal hit 58% renewable electricity in 2013 and in January of this year renewables supplied 91% of their electricity.
Iceland is 100% renewable electricity, and much of their heating is renewable.
Norway is 99% renewable electricity.
Germany hit over 30% renewable electricity for last year and has peaked at 74% of renewable electricity.

Renewable energy provides 21.7% of electricity generation worldwide as of 2013
Renewables trend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

...there are plenty of rumors about regular Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

Got anything better than rumors?

Ten Russian paratroopers captured inside Ukraine a week ago have returned home following a troop exchange

[...] robot spectators at baseball games in Japan, tele-operated by remote fans.

Um, those are for the Hanwha Eagles in Korea, not Japan. Confirm by clicking the link to the BBC article.

Oh, really? Here's a photo for you: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media... ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... ). The very first proposed law of the post-Maidan parliament was a repeal of law forbidding the denial of nazi crimes. Then the law removing the special status of the Russian language.

Sorry, but while Maidan was not a classic neo-nazi, by the end it was definitely nationalistic and anti-Russian. I had been there at the very start (and I donated more than $5k to help protesters) but had to leave for two months. When I returned, everything was different.

It is interesting that one of the basis of most religions is the freedom to choose. Most religions allow people to choose to do good or choose not to. Why does the Muslim religion seem to want to control everything? Conversion by force, death sentence for converting to another religion, hiding women's bodies so not to tempt men and now censorship. What would a religion have to force it's followers to conform? What proves a person's faith is the ability to resist temptation. Look at the trials of Job. If the people need to be "protected" from temptation then their faith is weak.

Be very careful of what your own house is made of before you start throwing bricks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... (and it's not ancient history so don't ignore it out of hand)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Of particular note might be Buddhists, who generally practice non-violence very explicitly, persecuting Muslims:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

Religious is a tool used to control the masses and will be used against anyone who goes against those in power, regardless of which religion it is.

I am of the same opinion, and I can provide evidence. ...Fast forward to 2013. The Internet is operating at Gb/s speeds in the civilized countries and at Mb/s everywhere else. Most of the content in porn, spam, fake illegal downloads, various scams and viruses.

So where is the "evidence" you claim to have? Your "evidence" seems to have originated from your gut. There is a lot less porn on the internet than you think

The dubious provenance of statistics about porn are well-known inside the tech industry.

"We are aware that a number of statistics are being used in relation to online safety and have concerns over their accuracy," said Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of ISPA, which represents net supply firms. Anyone quoting stats should check their veracity, he said.

"It is vital that any decisions in relation to online safety, like any other policy area, are based on evidence rather than myths and assertions," he added.

Pre-industrially, those two blocks would have an hour or two of waking time between them

Indeed -- it was basically forgotten for about a century, but recently historians have been finding references EVERYWHERE to "first sleep" (or "early slumber" or "beauty sleep") and "second sleep" in many cultures around the world.

The first descriptions of "insomnia" come up only in the 19th century, just about the same time that the two sleep blocks really started to disappear.

And we should not forget the role of coffee in this transition. (From the link above:)

[A researcher] attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night.

Coffee may not just ruin your sleep sometimes if you drink too much -- it may have played a major role in divorcing our entire species from its most natural sleep patterns and convincing everyone that a solid 8-hour block is most "normal."

The Russian GLONASS has its own problems, and the whole point of Galileo is a GNSS that is independent from the US. Do you think the Russians like falling back on US technology? Or do you think they're planning to rely on Beidou?

The intersection of linguistics and technology is fascinating and all, but 90% of the "natural language" data on the internet is sarcasm and/or trolls. Perhaps when the Secret Service finishes up their "sarcasm detector" they can partner up with IBM and be super villains together.

RT is claiming that Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia, in order to defect, and the Ukranian government admits this.

Now counter these pictures of tanks entering from Russia

The BBC and many other outlets have published NATO confirmations

And NATO is a guaranteed source of truth, because? Western militaries never ever have faulty intelligence? This is a military organisation that has always been in opposition to Russia. I'm not sure that's a "confirmation" any more than something announced by the separatists is. I don't trust either of them and neither should you. Perhaps Russia is invading. If it's a real invasion then we'll see soon enough.

Anyway, my "ludicrous claim" is simply what western media are reporting, including the BBC. Here's their story. It leads with "Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has accused Russia of deploying its troops in the east of his country" ... which is exactly what I said the Slashdot story wasn't claiming but should.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... has some photographs if you care.

Maybe you should start following some proper news outlets, including some run by traditional news organisations, you know, the ones that search for news and publish it. Go out of your basement and buy a newspaper or so. Or if that's too much, try the online BBC news.

If you only found out about this by reading about the removal of the video, you're really looking in the wrong places for your news.