Slashdot Mirror

To be fair:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57565102/new-zealand-to-get-rid-of-pet-cats/

Some people ARE talking about getting rid of the cats. They are ridiculous.

On September 10th, 2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced the pentagon could not track 2.3 trillion dollars. To this day, the Pentagon cannot be accurately audited For an institution with organization and discipline as its creed this is laughable. If Congress mandated that they would not receive one penny in funding until they got their house in order this problem would be solved overnight. Unfortunately the power of fear, obstinate Militarism, and the federal reserve corporations ability to manufacture unlimited debt provides no impetus for Congress to take the necessary corrective action.

SS has never been a 'paid for' plan. It was always predicated on more and more current workers paying for the retiree benefits. Sometimes a surplus to be sure, but never 'fully funded' for an individual by that individual's contributions.

For 50 years, far more has been collected than was needed to pay current obligations. This was done so that the coming of the baby boomers wouldn't cause a financial crisis. Since the 80's, That process has been undercut by congress "loaning" then money to itself in the form of special bonds, and then using the proceeds to offset spending (such as excessive defense spending, welfare, and reducing taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans). As a result, we have effectively given the money to the defense contractors, the extremely poor, and the 1% (same as the defense contractors). We borrowed against the future social security income to do it. The end result is that we have exactly the social security funding crisis that was envisioned, but the solution that was put in place has been systematically destroyed and we have the crisis anyway. The only good way to fix it now is to cut defense spending down to the core, put taxes on the 1% back to 75%+ where it belongs, or go and get our money back at the point of a gun. The choice is yours.

-=Geoskd

When was the last time N Korea arrested visitors saying they were CIA spies? On the contrary, N Korea is very welcoming to foreigners, including Americans.

Charges as CIA spies? How bourgeois. It is much simpler and a better reflection of North Korean socialist morality to just hold a trial.

2 U.S. reporters get 12 years in N. Korea - June 08, 2009

Two American television journalists today were convicted of a "grave crime" against North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor, a move that increased mounting tensions between the U.S. and the reclusive Asian state.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were sentenced by the top Central Court in Pyongyang in a two-day trial that started Friday as U.S. officials demanded the release of the two women.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency reported that the court "sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor" but gave no further details.

Because the pair were tried by the nation's highest court, there can be no appeal.

Of course the North Koreans are not especially shy about grabbing Americans.

North Korea says it has arrested American citizen - Sun December 23, 2012
North Korea arrests American; continues shelling near disputed border - January 28, 2010
North Korea arrests US man - December 29, 2009

And foreigners? The North Korean government loves foreigners. . . in a sort of "collect them and trade them!" kind of way.

Japanese kidnapped by North Koreans return home in tears
Kidnapped by North Korea
Armed North Koreans kidnap Chinese sailors
Jenkins Photo Proof Of Kidnapping? - ". . .she is a Thai national who was kidnapped by North Korean agents. . ."
Did North Korea Just Kidnap Two American Journalists?
Kidnappers Incorporated
Japanese families fear that North Korea is still abducting - North Korea had kidnapped nationals from at least 11 other countries, including France, Italy and the United States.

It seems they want to impress them, not arrest them.

Impress them in a Potemkin village sort of way, yes.

Welcome to Lenin Disney: North Korea’s otherworldly tourism experience

The surreality of visiting North Korea begins at customs. Officials in full military dress — and there are a lot of them, judging by this clandestine video shot by a Canadian tourist — announce that anyone carrying a cell phone must surrender it, to be returned on leaving. The experience gets weirder from there, based on the numerous travelogues and reports that have emerged since the country lifted many of its restrictions on American tourists in 2010.

Tourism is an opportunity for North Korea, whic

Do you consider yourself to be a better investor than Eric E. Schmidt, K. Ram Shriram, Charles Simonyi, Larry Page and Ross Perot, Jr

People like that have a lot more disposable income than I to risk on a lark on a high-risk venture.
My investments need to pay off in ~20 years so I'm not eating cat food in my old age. meow!

Clearly, you missed the 60 Minutes report this week about Credit Rating companies and their dispute process (source).

In a nutshell, your dispute is never sent to someone who will approve it, and you basically have to sue them to fix it. Its a multi-year case and you better be well documented.

" As ethanol produces the same amount of CO2 per gallon as does gas its much lower energy density results in MORE CO2. We need to stop burning the stuff and quit adding it to gasoline. burning ethanol actually produces 54% more CO2 as global warming pollutant than gasoline due to the fact that ethanol has lower fuel efficiency." Add to that burning it releases a lot of VOCs, some of which are carcinogenic and the plants that produce it are turning out to be major polluters. Now add all the pollution from growing and harvesting the corn which is hard on the land and takes lots of chemicals as well as a very large subsidy to even make it viable economically . (pollution from making) http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-508006.html (Pollution from burning) http://www.intota.com/docs/ethanol-pollution.asp

" As ethanol produces the same amount of CO2 per gallon as does gas its much lower energy density results in MORE CO2. We need to stop burning the stuff and quit adding it to gasoline. burning ethanol actually produces 54% more CO2 as global warming pollutant than gasoline due to the fact that ethanol has lower fuel efficiency." Add to that burning it releases a lot of VOCs, some of which are carceneogenic and the plants that produce it are turning out to be major polluters. (pollution from making) http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-508006.html (Pollution from burning) http://www.intota.com/docs/ethanol-pollution.asp

Well, you'll get charged with something, unless you work for the government. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57568368/christopher-dorner-manhunt-two-innocent-women-shot-by-lapd-officers-had-no-warning/

If you're a cop, it's just a "tragic mistake," and you go back to abusing civilians.

It's getting pretty hard to differentiate between living in North America under corporate controlled government and China under government controlled corporatism.

It's not so hard. Go outside and take a look around you. Then, come back and take a look at Beijing. Your corporate controlled government likely still manages some useful "socialist" regulations.

That "Game of Thrones" show has been stealing blatantly from the "Song of Ice and Fire" book series for 2 years now.

But if you're going to flag anyone, how about you get those thieves at Fox for pirating music from Jonathan Coulton? I think a fine of $22,500 for everyone who downloaded the Glee version sounds about right.

/. needs a mod flag of "Applause"

That was the best relevant and true thing I've read in ages.

If you make a habit of reading polls on a a variety of political and social issues, you'll learn a lot about Americans and specifically you might come to the conclusion that about 25-35% of Americans are basically so disconnected from scientific and social reality they're functionally insane and their opinion should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY be classified as "non-truth related".

For instance, and famously, about 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html

But also 10% think that prosecutors who send innocent people to jail should not be prosecuted:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-exoneree-testifies-20130204,0,3950542.story?page=2

25% think Obama is not an American citizen:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056061-503544.html

30%^ think God decides the outcome of sporting events: http://rt.com/usa/news/super-bowl-result-god-337/

And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism :

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.

right.

About 25-30% believe that events on Earth are assiduously overseen by an all knowing God who "sees them when they're sleeping / and knows if they're awake / and knows if they've been bad of good..." and what happens in everything from their personal life to world events is really of no consequence except to the extent that it is a reflection of an eternal, ongoing battle between good and evil being fought on an unseen cosmic plane. This is something they have this is common with every Muslim extremist who ever strapped a suicide bomb onto himself.

Americans have a deficit of rationality, a deep and persistent belief that something other than outcome based, welfare of humans is the proper measure of human morality, are scientifically illiterate and constitutionally incapable of perceiving in their thinking just the kinds of bugs that the referenced article details.

There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming. The fact is, democracy stops where science begins. This isn't going to lead to anything good.

The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.

You can come to this conclusion now when there's still time to do something about global warming or you can come to this conclusion later, when there's no possibility of doing anything about it and the starvation, the concomitant societal breakdown and mass, uncontrolled immigration, the tidal wave of anti-Western (Big Oil / Big Coal ) terrorism and collapsing centralized governments take not just the denier's civil liberties and Con

That "Game of Thrones" show has been stealing blatantly from the "Song of Ice and Fire" book series for 2 years now.

But if you're going to flag anyone, how about you get those thieves at Fox for pirating music from Jonathan Coulton? I think a fine of $22,500 for everyone who downloaded the Glee version sounds about right.

I'm thinking it should be, "Federal IT Capabilities Limit Ability for Federal Gun Control." And that isn't a bad thing.

"Universal Background Checks" sounds all nice and good right up to the moment that you realize any such system would require a database of every known felon, every person found incompetent mentally, for just a negative-control system. (As opposed to a positive system confirming an SSN or Driver's License belongs to that person.)

The Government has such a great record with massive databases:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-02-05-immigration_N.htm

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/16/158932528/states-arent-submitting-records-to-gun-database

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57432795/family-of-no-fly-list-toddler-wants-apology/

They've done so well, after all, I'm sure this will be no trouble for them.

TFA discusses traumatic brain injury (TBI), which reminded me of another FA that I read a while ago about detecting TBI with MRI machines.

Two guys, Dr. Walter Schneider and Dr. David Onkonwo, are using MRI to identify neural tracts throughout the brain. Their new technique, HDFT, is able to visualize the brain's wiring, and it can identify where the wiring has been broken.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57389325-10391704/new-technology-could-change-how-traumatic-brain-injuries-are-diagnosed/

Well, if we didn't say it, they'd all make their passwords "password", their own first name, or some other amazingly simple word.

They always glaze over when you try to explain strong passwords. No matter what you tell them, you can always sit down at their desk and say "what's your password?", just to find out it's "Password1" or "1234567A"

For everything outside of my place of work, I use a password safe program and (if I can) at least a 42 character password using the largest possibly set, generated randomly.
At work, where I'm not allowed to use a password safe and am required to memorize no fewer than 30 passwords, most of which have to be updated at least monthly, and cannot use any password I've used in the last 6 months.... my password is my first name and last initial, followed by a number which is how many times I've had to reset it. Yes, it's weak. No, I really don't give a shit. They drove me to this point with their dumbass fucking password policies and I've got better things to do with my time.

The reason why my eyes glaze over is because I'm having visions of murdering your stupid fucking ass in the parking lot after work. If you were worth even half a shit at your job you'd never need to ask my password in the first place.

Well, if we didn't say it, they'd all make their passwords "password", their own first name, or some other amazingly simple word.

They always glaze over when you try to explain strong passwords. No matter what you tell them, you can always sit down at their desk and say "what's your password?", just to find out it's "Password1" or "1234567A"

You mean the propaganda campaigns that always turn out to be untrue, such as the bogus claim that organic sprouts were killing people in Europe? When they tested all of the sprouts every test came back negative. That didn't deter the fear mongering propaganda. Why let evidence get in the way of a good conclusion?

Please forgive the digression but I heard about this just today..... and the NRA effectively stymied Congress from funding a CDC study on gun violence. So, no, there are some studies Congress won't fund.

It looks like Hasbro and Mattel both manufacture Scrabble, according to the omniscient* Wikipedia. Hasbro has copyright in the US, while Mattel has copyright everywhere else in the world.

*sarcasm

Those companies may own a copyright but scrabble is actually manufactured in China. The only thing I found surprising is that the packaging was still made in the US and hadn't been outsourced as well. Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-202_162-589970.html

Why would doing something you like for money stop being fun. Sure some parts of the job, may not be enjoyable but others our. Even in hobbies you may not enjoy every single aspect of that hobby.

I like my job, solving problems is great fun. Are there things I would rather do yes, but that doesn't mean work is not enjoyable. There is nothing about work that implies that it cannot be fun.

As for the percentage of the population who enjoy there work it is hard to say because I can only draw from my personal experience, probably the same as you

quick search give a bunch of numbers:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2011/11/11/your-emotionally-disconnected-employees/ 70% unhappy
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-10-04/strategy/30001895_1_new-job-passion-careers 80% unhappy.
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-6056611.html 55% unhappy and rising but you would expect that sort of thing with shrinking job market, since more people have to settle.

... that would neither have prevented nor (further) criminalized the scenario it was drawn up in response to.

On the plus side, we're not "fighting the last war". On the down side, we're not "fighting the next war" either.

As of 20 hours ago, cbs says 'It's still unclear what motivated the attack." Very hard to counter motivations like his, without knowing what his were.

And sadly, we have people spending time studying Adam Lanza's DNA, hoping for "extreme violence" tendency clues. Much like hoping to find whether a CPU has "goto tendencies". Or like tearing apart Einstein's brain, looking for where the genius node is.

1) Smaller clips? Bring more guns. Adam already did.
2) Background checks? Nobody has said Adam would have failed.
3) Tougher penalties? Adam committed suicide. Who you going to penalize?
4) Programs to cut gun violence? That's nice, if you can predict why or where. That isn't the case here.
5) "Well, we have to do SOMETHING!" - maybe for political reasons, yes. But as Slashdot says about the TSA, security theater doesn't make you safer.

Like this guy who crashed into an IRS office?

I found that you are 7.5 time more likely to die from a Broken Heart

Also, if teens drink they are 7.5 time more like to die.

If you are a fat ass, you are 7.5 time more likely to have Choledocholithiasis.

If you are a loser 45 year old then you are 7.5 times more likely to waste money.

Lastly (on the Google search results) if your PSA values are between 2.0 to 2.9 ng/mL you are 7.5 times more likely to die of Prostate cancer.

But nothing about guns being 7.5 times more deadly than....what? Hammers? nope. Baseball bats? hmmm..nope. I know! knives! drag...sorry, not knives either.

So I have to conclude you just pulled that out of your ass. Hint: Brady Gun Control propaganda is about the same thing as your ass.

Re:What happens if you get rid of their backdoor...
.

Probably something similar to what happened to the guy who found the FBI's GPS tracker on his car and ended up with them coming to him to retrieve it :
.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/08/1413240/College-Student-Finds-GPS-On-Car-FBI-Retrieve

.

http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/D/5/1/caught_spying_on_student_fbi_demands_gps_tracker_back/

.

CBS News: FBI Spies on Student, Retrieves GPS Device
.

.

Then, in March of 2012, the FBI claims that it turned off about 3000 GPS tracking devices following a Supreme Court of the USA ruling that was not in their favor. Techdirt points out that they claim to have turned off 3000 GPS trackers and that they were having trouble retrieving them.

I don't think you 90% scenario is very realistic. Have some copy/pasta:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57554856/ancient-life-found-in-buried-antarctic-lake/

        Beneath the icy surface of a buried Antarctic lake, in super-salty water devoid of light and oxygen that is also cold enough to freeze seawater, researchers have now discovered that a diverse community of bacteria has survived for millennia.

The findings shed light on the extreme limits at which life can live not just on Earth, but possibly alien worlds, scientists added.

Researchers analyzed Lake Vida, which lies encapsulated within ice at least 60 feet beneath Antarctica's surface. Past studies revealed the brine in the lake has been isolated from the surface for at least 2,800 years.

Your figure is probably from one of the articles quoting 2007-- a singularly bad year for the wealthy due to the equity collapse.

More recent figures...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57391283/income-inequality-1-percent-still-going-strong/
2009-2010
The top 10 percent in the U.S. take now take home nearly half of all income (47 percent), driven by the top percent who account for 20 percent.

So logically, the top 10% should pay at least 47% of the taxes with the top 1% paying about 20% of the taxes.

The entire bottom QUINTILE (20%) earns only 5.1% of the total income of the country- so at best, they should pay 5.1% of the taxes.

But the fact is they pay high fixed taxes ( sales tax, cell phone tax, booze tax, cigarette tax, property tax in their rent (don't even get to deduct it), etc. while the top 1% pay under .03% on the same fixed taxes, they need to pay less than 5.1%. I really think they are so poor that they should pay no federal taxes. As it is, the fixed taxes take up 12% of their income and social security and medicare are taking another 15% for 27% of their income gone in taxes.

It appears that we'll have to wait for the shows to air before we'll see the footage.

January 27th on Discovery Channel for most of us.

January 13th on NHK if you're in Japan.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-46840313/google-political-donations-where-company-execs-put-their-cash/

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000115&cycle=A

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?cycle=2012&type=P&id=D000022008

Bottom feeders? Whatever - we're used to hearing that from the predators in the republican party, and the !% that the party seems to represent. Bottom feeders. Thanks a lot.

It's probably worth noting that the Tea Party also did not have any widespread criminal side effects

Damn straight! I searched high and low for the usual felonious shenanigans associated with protest movements, and suddenly find none. I find it pretty fucking hard to imagine my FBI failing in their self-appointed mission of Constitutional violation as if the Tea Party was somehow exempt.

No, people fly planes into buildings, people fly ships into space, and people do a great number of other things. What separates the ones flying planes into buildings from the ones flying spaceships is that the first group is crazy in a bad way, and being crazy in a bad way is wholly independent of religion.

For instance, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, identified his religion as science and claimed to be agnostic, the crusaders identified as Christian, and the 9/11 terrorists identified as Islamic (quick note: I'm not suggesting that science is a religion; rather, I'm suggesting that crazy acts can be perpetuated by someone regardless of their claimed religion or lack thereof). The most you could say is that certain religions attract that sort of crazy more often than others.

Fascinating. When McVeigh was "executed", it was widely reported that no "Autopsy" of his "dead" body was performed "because of religious grounds."

More proof that Oklahoma City was faked, and that "Terrorist" Timothy McVeigh had nothing to do with it (other than to play his part in a Psyops road-show). (Remember that other story about how he was "captured" while "driving out of town" in a car "with no license plate."?)

Curious, I read it. It demonstrated nothing about inflation, in fact it said "I’ll consider the inflation objection at length in my next post".

However, I don't need a Interwebs wacko to tell me that you can dry water and drink it. If you produce money with no actual wealth to back it up, be it old-style gold reserve or economic worth of the issuing country, it will cause inflation the moment it hits the economic system. Of course if you kept the quadrillion-dollar coin under your bed and told no one, it would cause no inflation as no one would know it existed; but if you use to pay the US government's debts, you have more currency around and no wealth to back it up; by simple supply and demand, value of currency will plummet (there is less than a trillion dollar circulating worldwide), i.e. inflation will boom so much it will make Zimbabwe look like Switzerland.

Even if the quadrillion-dollar coin would not start inflation, it would tell the rest of the world that the US are ready to issue fiat currency to pay their debt: that would start a bank run to get rid of their petrodollars (guess what, there is no fiat fuel, and you would not be able to buy much oil with those petrodollars). See the link above, according to the Fed most dollars are outside the US, a lot of them in the coffers of countries that need to buy oil.

What the US need is not "more" or "less" spending, it is more of the right spending and less of the wrong spending. The US have humongous military spending, which is by definition unproductive (in fact, destructive by its very nature, though the destruction is usually externalised to other countries). Yes, the military also finances R&D, but that R&D would be better aimed for the US economy if it were financed by universities or the private sector with governmental financial support, instead of being trickle-down adaptations of military technology.

The US have too low welfare, with insane amounts of poverty rampaging across the country; these people have no opportunity of becoming productive citizens because they never receive appropriate education. The point is not giving the poor food and shelter (which is of course still necessary), but giving their children good public schools that give them an alternative to crime as the best option for gaining wealth.

Also, there is a disproportionate amount of inmates in US jails. US prisons house more inmates than China, not just per capita— in absolute numbers . All these have to be fed, clothed and guarded, and this is expensive. It is way cheaper to institute education programs to make sure they don't recidivate, but then again some politicians would not look though on crime, which seems to be more important than to be smart on crime. Also, several states outsourced jail management to privates, who are paid by the inmate and have thereby no interest in re-educating their inmates (in fact, they do want their customers to come back!). More government, less market here.

With NASDAQ next door, there has to be gobs of fiber running along Times Square.

NASDAQ isn't there at all. The NASDAQ put that sign in years ago to give them a visible presence in New York. NASDAQ corporate HQ is downtown at 165 Broadway. The signage is strictly for PR purposes.

Operationally, NASDAQ is distributed. The data centers aren't in New York. Neither are those of the NYSE; the main one is in New Jersey, but there's a backup elsewhere.

After Hurricane Sandy, the NYSE and the NASDAQ closed for two days. But not because they couldn't operate. The NYSE operations people wanted to transfer operational control to the NYSE Arca offices in Chicago and come back up the next day for online trading. The floor traders and the Wall Street financial community screamed. They were terrified of the financial system running without them. Especially if it worked just fine.

There is no border between a retarded state like Texas and a sane one like New York

You mean the same sane state that says you can't buy anything larger than a 16oz soda?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57512246-10391704/sugary-drinks-over-16-ounces-banned-in-new-york-city-board-of-health-votes/

or that restaurants can't put salt on the table?
http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2010/03/proposed-ny-law-would-ban-salt-in.html

or that bans food donations to homeless shelters because they cannot asses the salt content?
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/03/19/bloomberg-strikes-again-nyc-bans-food-donations-to-the-homeless/

Sounds really sane to me.

Except that in this case, their status is a result of their actions.

The problem is that in the US, "sex offender" is a catch-all for many different types of behaviour, not simply pædophelia. Therefore many people who are "registered sex offenders", but who pose absolutely zero threat to minors, are being grossly punished. (And this applies to many things far outside of online gaming, for certain.)

A great example is of a 16-year-old girl who takes a naked picture of herself and sends it to her 16-year-old boyfriend; an authority finds out; and she is charged with felony production and possession of child pornography. It has happened. A lot.

Fortunately, some places are trying to bring common sense thinking to this. But not enough, not yet. (Btw, the douchebag threatening felony charges against the 16-year-old girl was District Attorney George Skumanick, who was thankfully voted out of office in part because of this in 2009.)

This is a great sigh of relief to people like Julian Assange, Private Bradley Manning and those who respect their leadership and courage to share information about what their government is up to.

Ah, yes, I am sure there are directives in there about no longer hounding Assange, no longer blocking Wikileaks donations and letting Manning off for the inhumane treatment he suffered. No?

This wouldn't be coming from the same President Obama who publicly declared Manning to be guilty long before any trial?

The rifle was an AR-15, and AR-15's are semi-auto only. It doesn't matter what the official called it, it was not an assault rifle.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57559725/popular-ar-15-rifle-at-center-of-gun-control-debate/

It is, however, a rifle with good accuracy and little recoil, so it really doesn't matter if it was full auto or not against unarmed children :(

Also, FWIW, these rifles are restricted in Canada in the same way that handguns are.

Oh, and the guns part is American, but the odd insane violent attacks, that is not.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57559179/china-school-knife-attack-leaves-23-injured/

Yep, good idea, lets ban guns, because no one will ever just stab the fuck out of a classroom. It seems likely that the chinese guy wasn't trying to kill student, because a knife is very deadly if intended to be. Us Americans have a violence problem that is not going to be solved by banning anything. Every time something is banned we just seem to make a bigger more violent black market for it. I'm not sure what the solution is. I'd start with getting rid of the "OMFG it's the fucking end of the world, everyday" news we have to put up with. Hear that message everyday and you are apt to flip out, seriously, why keep on living if it's so bad. You'll get the depressed and insane thinking that they are doing the kids a favor by taking them out of this evil place.

Given that 2/3rds of these alleged 100 fire arm deaths per day are intentional, its easy to see the futility of attacking the tools. Intent has a way of finding means.

In China the tool of choice for these so called "Black Swans" is the kitchen knife.

We might just as well start banning Men, because these mass murders are almost entirely Male, 17 to 30.

And Kitchen Knives.

Yeah, this falls right into the "Good luck with that!" pile--even if this were a serious proposal, it's already a dead one.

Flickr holder YHOO and FB are now in a "strategic alliance", and it's very safe to say the less financially successful of the two would rather listen to their more profitable partner than...

1. ...some random guy on the internet, or...
2. ...a POTUS who can barely convince even wealthy companies to conform to a Federal healthcare law, or the GOP to not try to kill it. (No, his strength is of a different and scarier kind, and though he has nerd blood I don't think it's dominant enough for him to give a shit about yet another site with random user-submitted pictures.)

So expect nothing (if not less) from this.

Yet they do not require any skill to kill anybody you wish to, particularly random by passers and elementary school kids.

Apparently they do.

*snicker*

Any dissent is punished by 3 generations of imprisonment in a remote work camp (that means you and your next two generations of children grow up with lifetime jail sentences if you are a dissenter, and yes, you get conjugal visits just to create additional generations to punish, but they also are brainwashed with loyalty just like other children).

This is absolutely disgusting and makes me sick -- and it's true. Here are the citations: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57556662/north-korean-prisoner-escaped-after-23-brutal-years/, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n. This was actually on 60 Minutes very recently, weekend before last.

Any dissent is punished by 3 generations of imprisonment in a remote work camp (that means you and your next two generations of children grow up with lifetime jail sentences if you are a dissenter, and yes, you get conjugal visits just to create additional generations to punish, but they also are brainwashed with loyalty just like other children).

This is absolutely disgusting and makes me sick -- and it's true. Here are the citations: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57556662/north-korean-prisoner-escaped-after-23-brutal-years/, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n. This was actually on 60 Minutes very recently, weekend before last.

Hello,

From RTFA'ing, it seems that Guatemala and Belize have no mutual legal assistance treat and are, in fact, engaged in a territorial dispute over their border, so I am wondering why Guatemala would bother sending him back to Belize, as opposed to escorting him to the airport and putting him on the next plane out of the country, wherever that might be. Or Mr. McAfee* could certainly afford a flight back to the United States, Switzerland or pretty much any other place.

Even more strange is the report from CBS News quoting Guatemala's Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla that "McAfee was detained by police at a hotel in an upscale Guatemala City neighborhood with the help of Interpol agents" (emphasis mine) as Interpol agents do not have arrest powers. Interpol can request that someone be provisionally arrested in order for them to be extradited, but a search of the Wanted Person's database on their web site reveals that no such "Red Notice" has been issued for John McAfee.

I do hope that Mr. McAfee is treated fairly by the Belizean authorities, and that his concerns of abuse and torture at their hands is simply an irrational fear.
Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

*I was told earlier that is improper to use a title of Doctor since his doctorate is an an honorary degree.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57557443/john-mcafee-arrested-in-guatemala-for-illegal-entry/

The number of people that are intollerant to milk has increased with the increase in the consumption of processed foods. This seems to be even more the case with Africans than with Europeans, the latter being most tolerant to cow's milk. Africans traditionally consumed lots of sour milk, where the proteins are already somewhat broken down, but benefits of consuming lots of cows milk (not dairy in general, since goat's milk differs substancially) have been great exaggerated mainly by the dairy industry.

A simple test: Don't drink any cow's milk or eat diary products for 1 - 2 months and then down a glass or two of fresh milk. If nothing happens in the next 24 hours, you're fine, but if, like me, your throat swells and is irritated, your nose starts running or some other symptom develops, you might be ok with milk, otherwise simply avoid it in future.

I thought we were talking about bread... Hmmm... so read about gliadin to spoil your doughy day!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57555017/chevrolet-to-feature-apples-siri-in-spark-sonic/

"Siri, set the temperature to 75 degrees"

At least the quark gluon plasma at RHIC in the US: story