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According to the first paragraph in my link there's 26,000,000 mobile bank users in the US (I'm using this, the lowest possible valid number of account holders for this, as fewer people for same fraud means more fraud/person). I got this number by assuming 200,000,000 total account holders (108,000,000 x 2 approximated, as 108,000,000 was 46%, and currently 13% use mobile banking). If we take the US total fraud (approx .5 of 7.6 billion) and the 26 million numbers, we get about $136 per a mobile account holder, if we use the 200,000,000 number (total account holders) we get $17/account holder.

At $136/account holder it's probably worth it, at $17 it's probably not (as you mentioned the largest fraud segment would not be prevented). I think the fact that US banks haven't implemented it on their own says a lot about the over-all cost to value ratio, keep in mind, that in the IS at least, the banks eat almost all of the fraud.

note, this assumes 3.8 Billion in US bank fraud, if it was in the same ballpark of that 86 million number to be fixed I'd say no way.

Links:
http://www.ibtimes.com/mobile-banking-rise-46-us-bank-account-holders-use-service-2017-report-747697
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/credit-debit-card-fraud-more-common-banks-lose-ground-hackers_n_994690.html

Yet
"On average, 1,276 manufacturing jobs were lost *every day* for the past 12 years. A net of 66,486 manufacturing establishments closed, from 404,758 in 2000 down to 338,273 in 2011. In other words, on *each day* since the year 2000, America had, on average, 17 fewer manufacturing establishments than it had the previous day."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-nashhoff/manufacturing-jobs_b_1382704.html

I think it's great if we SHARE the fruits of all these automated jobs with the rest of society. But at least half the population doesn't want to.

And robots don't pay social security tax. (Time to make a property tax/social security tax that applies to robots).

At some point, americans have GOT to start getting the cheaper medicine, cheaper DVD's, etc. that other countries are getting. We can't continue to pump money out of the economy for more than another decade or so.

"That drop in stock price, too, has cut some of HP's executive pay in the form of restricted stock awards from earlier years, according to the proxy filing. The payment of these awards were tied to the firm's per-share performance against the Standard & Poor's 500 Index over a period of time.

HP changed its compensation program last year, and is now giving stock options that vest if the company's stock price meets or exceeds specific goals or thresholds.

Whitman's base salary was just $1. Her bonus was $1.7 million, while the remainder of her compensation was granted in the form of Hewlett-Packard stock options, stock awards and other income, according to the proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday."

Meg Whitman's Pay Package Tops $15 Million After HP Posts Net Loss In 2012
Reuters | By P.J. Huffstutter Posted: 01/12/2013 11:11 am EST
via Huffington Post

There were at least two serious petitions that were blown off - legalization of marijuana and elimination of TSA.

Kudos to the White House for changing the URLs so that Google searches return bad links, and no search on the petition page.

Oddly, searching for "Neill Franklin" the author of a petition, returns no results. His petition is discussed here

Searching the White House petition page for "TSA" also returns zero results, despite it having been open for voting.

I find it astonishing that anyone with an IQ over 120 supports this administration.

> they need the extra killing power of an assault rifle.

First off, assault rifles are already banned. Assault rifles have at least one mode where they fire more than one bullet per trigger press.

The "assault *weapon*" bans ban scary features. A bayonet lug, for example, does nothing to the lethality of a gun.

As for the magazine size restrictions, there's a big difference between a self-defense situation and premeditated mass-murder. As recent events have shown, you can put 5 bullets in an attacker, and have him still be functional enough to drive away. Had the burglar not been alone, she and her kids would have been defenseless. In self-defense situations, one often doesn't have a spare magazine, and reloading under that kind of stress is a difficult proposition.

I've personally been in a position with my wife where we had a carload of individuals hollering at us and trying to chase us down and box us in in their car. We managed to keep them on the other side side of the road median, we were luckily close enough to make it to a store, we were lucky enough that they didn't follow us in, and we were lucky that the cops came quickly. I don't know what they wanted, but it wasn't good. One of my sisters was raped about the same time of night by a stranger, and LGBT people are regularly victims of violence.

Had I been forced to defend myself and my wife, there's a big difference between facing four assailants with 5 bullets, and facing four assailants with a larger magazine (like the one that came stock with my current pistol). Someone who is planning a mass murder is free to pre-load as many magazines as they want, like the Virginia Tech shooter (who used standard capacity magazines, including 10 round magazines, which are legal even under states with strict size regulations). Even NY's new 7 round limit grandfathers in pre-ban 10 round magazines, ensuring even the rather strict new laws still wouldn't have limited his ability to go on the rampage he did).

The sandy hook shooter was shooting children, and ended his life as soon as emergency services arrived. An extra few seconds spent reloading in a classroom wouldn't have made a difference. He killed 26 people in about 20 minutes, and even a bolt-action rifle can easily accommodate that.

> Your argument is basically this: we shouldn't ban hand grenades or rocket propelled grenades because some asshole can always make some sarin or fly an airplane into a building using a box cutter.

No. The argument is that politicians are basically saying "Something must be done! This is something, therefore, it must be done!", while none of the offered "solutions" would actually do anything to prevent the problem they are claiming to try to.

You know how you stop a bad guy with a gun?

A good guy with a gun. Anything else is handwaving bullshit.

Where's the school shooting going to happen?

Looks like the is posting as Anonymous Coward!

what you/he said is patently false: the Taft school shooting in California (few days ago!) was stopped when a High School Science Teacher ended the shooting rampage with a conversation.

what is handwaving bullshit is hiding behind the second amendment and talking about it in complete isolation with the rest of the constitution. the second paragraph of the US constitution talks about an inalienable right to Life. that has to mean something.

“In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.

director of national intelligence from december, dwindling food production over a ten year span.

Maybe the US will have to defy the statists and stop burning our food.

A burglar gets stuck in a chimney

A truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away

A wild antelope knocks a man off his bike

A candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire

Someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark

The US Justice System is there to enforce the law.

No it isn't. Start with this: https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/myths-of-the-criminal-justice-system_n_879768.html

And the problem is that it's becoming nearly impossible to know what the law actually is. The U.S. Constitution outlines just three federal crimes -- treason, counterfeiting, and piracy. Various projects have tried to count the number of federal criminal laws passed since, and many have simply given up. But by most estimates, there are at least 4,000 separate criminal laws at the federal level, with another 10,000 to 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally.

In his most recent book, the civil libertarian and defense attorney Harvey Silverglate argues that most Americans now unknowingly commit about three felonies per day.

link to the book referenced: Three Felonies a Day, how the Feds target the innocent: http://www.harveysilverglate.com/Books/ThreeFeloniesaDay.aspx

The Federal criminal system is designed to give the Feds total power and control. A government can take such control in several ways. The transparent manner is for a government to just do what it wants without explanation. Such governments are rightly despised as despotic. The US Federal government has chosen a different method. It has made so many crimes of such a vague nature, that everyone commits them without even knowing it. As a result, the Feds have no difficulty figuring out how to persecute a person should they decide they don't like that person for one reason or another. They just shuffle the deck and "pick a crime, any crime."

Now, whether Swartz committed a crime or not is sort of beside the point. Even assuming that he did, how does a 35 year prison term fit into what he did? It doesn't. It lacks all proportionality. What this lack of proportionality does do howver, is give the Feds absolute despotic control over people's lives, a power which they can exercise at will, with total immunity, against any person they decide to hate.

And worse, despite its ruthless disproportionate persecution, a signficant portion of the population will respond like you by blaming Swartz for being a crook. Problem is, with so many laws on the books -- you too are a crook. You just don't know it and not knowing the law is not a defense (except for police and prosecutors). That's a nice catch 22. You can't use lack of knowledge to defend yourself, but the code is so vast, vague, and disorganized, you can't know the laws.

By making an example of Kansas City ...

Per story submission...

an unlikely incubator for startups and tech entrepreneurs

Why is Kansas City an "unlikely incubator?" Because it's fucking Kansas City (no offense intended). Putting Google Fiber there will not change that. Look, I have been to KC, and enjoyed the hip downtown district thoroughly, etc. - but putting Google Fiber in any given town is not going to make it a good place to put technology businesses! Or has everyone magically forgotten Missouri's attitude towards teaching evolution in schools just because Google bought some fiber there?

There are lots and lots of other places that have fast, cheap fiber. Slashdotters love to talk about how they have 50 Gbps Internet for $5/month in Sweden or free cloud-based dick-sucking anime robots in Korea or whatever. Yeah, we all get how much broadband access in the US sucks.

And yet... none of these magical places have somehow displaced the US and its terrible, awful, no-good Internet as the center of the tech world. Silicon Valley is still what it is due to the physical proximity of employers and investors. I love what Google Fiber is doing, but it isn't going to make anywhere else the new Silicon Valley, any more than all the other places in the world with cheaper Internet displaced that region before... which is to say "none."

Google FIber is not going to magically make anywhere a Mecca for technology. What really makes a place a tech center is a.) the tech companies that are already there are form an ecosystem; b.) the universities or other talent pools to draw from; c.) the local state or country's tax policies for residents/companies + immigration/visa policies for new entrants; and d.) the quality of the cultural, educational and political environment to attract new employees and their families to the area. Sadly, Kansas City does not excel on all four, whether cheap fiber is there or not. And if Google Fiber comes to your hometown of East Dead Cow Skull Texas, it doesn't mean that you will be able to attract tech companies either - sorry but it's the truth.

Since when was "physical proximity" an issue when obtaining VC funding? What, do you think they still deliver the money by horse-drawn carriage? I suppose we'll have to wait weeks to get overseas talent, as they only travel by fucking sailboat.

A "tech center" can be built with a damn forum online. And I've probably gathered more good information that way in the last 5 years than I have in the previous 30.

We (as in the US) perhaps remain the center of the tech world regardless of our shitty internet speeds due to the talent that is driving that, not the technology itself. Perhaps pull your head out of the 90s and realize that the only way we're going to stand a chance of growing is through innovation in all aspects of the game. If the Internet has proven anything, it is that location should not mean jack shit anymore. And there's always Kickstarter if you find investors with their head stuck in the 90s too.

By making an example of Kansas City ...

Per story submission...

an unlikely incubator for startups and tech entrepreneurs

Why is Kansas City an "unlikely incubator?" Because it's fucking Kansas City (no offense intended). Putting Google Fiber there will not change that. Look, I have been to KC, and enjoyed the hip downtown district thoroughly, etc. - but putting Google Fiber in any given town is not going to make it a good place to put technology businesses! Or has everyone magically forgotten Missouri's attitude towards teaching evolution in schools just because Google bought some fiber there?

There are lots and lots of other places that have fast, cheap fiber. Slashdotters love to talk about how they have 50 Gbps Internet for $5/month in Sweden or free cloud-based dick-sucking anime robots in Korea or whatever. Yeah, we all get how much broadband access in the US sucks.

And yet... none of these magical places have somehow displaced the US and its terrible, awful, no-good Internet as the center of the tech world. Silicon Valley is still what it is due to the physical proximity of employers and investors. I love what Google Fiber is doing, but it isn't going to make anywhere else the new Silicon Valley, any more than all the other places in the world with cheaper Internet displaced that region before... which is to say "none."

Google FIber is not going to magically make anywhere a Mecca for technology. What really makes a place a tech center is a.) the tech companies that are already there are form an ecosystem; b.) the universities or other talent pools to draw from; c.) the local state or country's tax policies for residents/companies + immigration/visa policies for new entrants; and d.) the quality of the cultural, educational and political environment to attract new employees and their families to the area. Sadly, Kansas City does not excel on all four, whether cheap fiber is there or not. And if Google Fiber comes to your hometown of East Dead Cow Skull Texas, it doesn't mean that you will be able to attract tech companies either - sorry but it's the truth.

Wow, you sound completely clueless. It's extremely hard to get a job as a public defender these days, and jobs as a FEDERAL public defender have always been very competitive and prestigious. Everyone who gets those jobs has many years of dedication to public service under their belt.

That doesn't make them not underpaid and overworked.

That said, okay, we can compromise in that some - some - PD positions carry a good bit of prestige with them. But "competitive" doesn't mean much in a massively oversaturated field, and the cream of the crop doesn't waste time mucking about for little pay and too much work.

(Captcha: "Guilty")

The real problem that you are actually listing is size of the government in USA, which is constantly growing (and it's growing way beyond the willingness and the ability of the economy and of the individuals within it to pay for this government)

That would be numbers:
1. drug war

2. various 'feed the poor' programs, agriculture subsidies including high fructose corn syrup

3. size of government coupled with entitlements and with disincentives to stay married, in reality it's an economic issue.

4. the failing public education system

5. drug war

6. economic self-destruction leading to more crime

7. definition of rape is too broad, which includes things like 'statutory rape', it includes sex when women are under influence of any alcohol or drug, however this disregards the condition that the men are in, so it's always possible to accuse men of rape if any alcohol was consumed for example.

9. Too many laws, the gov't is too big, so you can be accused of a crime for doing anything.

10. Police jobs are welfare jobs. It's a welfare state.

11. The gov't is in bed with drug companies, insurance companies, the costs would be dropping every year if it wasn't for 1964 or 65 when Medicare was introduced. With Obamacare and nonsense like the affordable condom act it will get worse. Actually health care should be handled completely by the private sector, but if you are going to have government involvement, then private sector shouldn't be getting monopoly status, otherwise you end up with the worst parts of both systems (health care becomes sort of like them military industrial complex)

12. Medicare and Medicaid and any subsidies to drugs, combine that with the war on 'illegal dugs', you get that issue.

13. Economic situation, drug war and again, subsidies for medicine.

14. Government supplied loan guarantees, which cause tuition fees to rise because the market is not set by the individual decisions but by gov't centrally planning the economy and spending on education. It's the same exact thing as the military industrial complex and health care and housing market bubble and stock market bubble before it and the bond market bubble now.

16. Trade deficit is the problem that is created by the government.

17. Military industrial complex, the war economy. Even USA top charlat..... 'economists' call for more war, even if with aliens.

18. ditto

19. Unconstitutional income taxes of all types are even unconstitutional for the reasons that you state. A real constitutional law is not supposed to confuse the shit out of you.

20. This is completely a government created problem: collectivism, central planning, anti-individualism. The debt is growing because the people are brainwashed not to care about their future, they only care about instant gratification, so they vote for politicians who promise that (however impossible to deliver), but the promise contains in itself this question: can we please go around the law even more? Can we bend the law more? Can we throw th

Unless of course I missed the epidemic of cops beating and shooting little children.

Yes
you
fucking
did!

Sorry - forgot my link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/voter-id-laws-minorities_n_1878893.html

It's happened... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/24/unsecured-wifi-child-pornography-innocent_n_852996.html not sure if he was able to sue or not.

vacationing on years of Unemployment and Food Stamps

Another big slug of borrowed Chinese money dumped into sit'n on the couch checks.

First off, RoundUp is the most talked about, but far from the only pesticide used

Second, the whole big thing with pesticide resistant crops is that it allows you to use more of the pesticide on your farm. This is leading to increased pesticides in soil.

Manufacturers have a history of toxic pesticides being used than proven dangerous decades later only to be replaced by new products.

We are now getting reports that manure compost is testing at times with high enough levels of herbicides to post a problem.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesticides-idUSBRE89100X20121002

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/10/how-gmos-ramped-us-pesticide-use

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/genetically-modified-crops-pesticides_n_1931020.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/pesticides-gmo-monsanto-roundup-resistance_n_1936598.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090817143610.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8308903.stm

http://www.motherearthnews.com/killer-compost-herbicide-contamination-zl0z1211zkin.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Human

GMOs infected non GMO products. Yes, we were originally told this wasn't a risk.

The SCIENCE is there...you just want to be ignorant.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129010499

First off, RoundUp is the most talked about, but far from the only pesticide used

Second, the whole big thing with pesticide resistant crops is that it allows you to use more of the pesticide on your farm. This is leading to increased pesticides in soil.

Manufacturers have a history of toxic pesticides being used than proven dangerous decades later only to be replaced by new products.

We are now getting reports that manure compost is testing at times with high enough levels of herbicides to post a problem.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesticides-idUSBRE89100X20121002

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/10/how-gmos-ramped-us-pesticide-use

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/genetically-modified-crops-pesticides_n_1931020.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/pesticides-gmo-monsanto-roundup-resistance_n_1936598.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090817143610.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8308903.stm

http://www.motherearthnews.com/killer-compost-herbicide-contamination-zl0z1211zkin.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Human

GMOs infected non GMO products. Yes, we were originally told this wasn't a risk.

The SCIENCE is there...you just want to be ignorant.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129010499

Given that the last couple of rounds of quantitative easing had zero impact on inflation

But the Fed continues to pay interest on excess reserves of banks held by the Fed. If they stopped doing this, it would free up this tremendous amount of money, and I suspect you would see inflation.

We can tell from other parts of the world that simply focusing on austerity makes things worse, not better.

The track record is that tax cuts cause stimulus, but there is no evidence that spending increases cause economic stimulus, and there are many counter examples where cutting spending in combination with tax cuts has been stimulative.

That said, the US probably has more leeway to raise taxes than say Greece, as we actually have a ton of wealth, and Greece just doesn't.

It is true that Mediterranean countries would likely be better off massively deregulating their labor rules and selling off state owned enterprises than "austerity".

More American voted for Democrats than for Republicans in the house. The only reason the kept the house is because of gerrymandering.

The author of that article you link to is also either badly confused, or trying to mislead the reader. Elections for representatives in the House are on a per-district basis only, it isn't based on some sort of national tally. A heavy Democratic party vote in a couple of large states could easily result in an aggregate house vote count nationally for Democrats well above that for Republicans, but that is meaningless nationally since each district votes to elect its own representative. A million to 1 Democratic votes in San Francisco, California, doesn't help a Democrat running in Reno, Nevada.

There is a lot more to it than that. Of course, even then it isn't quite so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, it is?

Michael Barone: Republicans Find Refuge in the House

The GOP has now won control of the House in eight of the past 10 congressional elections, dating back to 1994. When I began following politics it seemed like that would never happen. Republicans failed to win a majority in the House in the 20 elections between 1954 and 1992. Political scientists wrote articles about how the Democrats would always have a lock on the House. . .

Democrats seem to have a structural advantage these days in the Electoral College. . .

The House is another matter. Here the Republicans have some structural advantages which, with good luck, have given them House majorities eight of the last 10 times. That is important, because since the mid-1990s Americans have become straight-ticket voters, seldom voting for candidates of different parties.

One structural advantage is demographic. Democratic voters tend to be clustered in black, Latino and gentry-liberal neighborhoods in metropolitan areas. Republican voters are more spread out. In 2008, Mr. Obama carried 28 congressional districts with more than 80% of the vote. John McCain carried zero congressional districts by that margin; Mr. Romney may have gotten that much in a couple of districts in Utah.

Those heavily Democratic neighborhoods contribute to the landslide margins candidate Obama has won in states like California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois. But their voters don't do as much to elect Democratic House members as they would if they were spread randomly through the population. In addition, many such areas have been losing population and therefore representation in the House.

On top of this is another Republican structural advantage: the Voting Rights Act. The prevailing interpretation of this otherwise benign law is that redistricters must maximize the number of "majority-minority" congressional districts. That means packing blacks and Latinos into certain districts and keeping them out of adjacent districts that tend to go Republican. This results in districts with grotesque and elongated boundaries to fit the bill of majority-minority. . .

A third Republican structural advantage used to belong to the Democrats: the South. . . . The Solid South helped Democrats maintain House majorities in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. . . But as the Democratic Party became more liberal, white Southerners started voting Republican for president in the 1960s, and in the straight-ticket 1990s Republicans replaced white Southern Democrats in droves. . . more

More American voted for Democrats than for Republicans in the house. The only reason the kept the house is because of gerrymandering.

Apple does attend CES -- last year they had 250 or so people attending . No, they don't have a booth, but they felt the need to spend a couple of million dollars to have people go to stay in touch with the consumer zeitgeist.

And that's the whole reason for trade shows. I would never go to a trade show to find information on a particular product -- if I know what I'm interested in, there are a number of better ways to find out about it online. What is unique and vital about trade shows is the serendipity. I see one product here, one presentation there, talk to an old buddy at lunch, and all of a sudden I can put those things together into something new and revolutionary.

I'll be there!

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.

They are certainly much better than Fox "News" probably most news networks are way better than them. I wonder how Fox "News" is even legal in the U.S.A. considering that it's forbidden to direct propaganda by foreigners against U.S. citizens. Fox "news" is owned by foreigners australians and saudis but I'm guessing they are trying to dumb down the american people and make them self-destruct through ignorance.

Fox was unable to start up a Canadian subsidiary because their current practices don't allow that sort of journalism to be called "news". Of course, snopes disagrees, but - as the original post says - you shouldn't judge what you havn't experienced.

Time-Warner Cable has dropped Current/Al Jazeera's network post-haste.

I suspect other providers (cable companies and satellite companies) will soon follow, for the same reasons they choose not to carry Al Jazeera before they bought Current - whatever those reasons were...

It has been reported that Current couldn't garner more than 22,000 viewers during prime time... The sale of current gives these providers a chance to dump this complete waste of spectrum Current/Al Jazeera. (That was 22,000 viewers out of a potential 40 Million - that is one half of one-tenth of one percent of their potential viewers.)

Every time I fly back from the states I have a note from the TSA saying they looked in my bag. They are authorised to search for vibrating objects, as well as remove and tamper with them

Pretty much every time I've flown in the last 11 years -- which is as little as possible -- I find open zippers and sometimes stuff falling out of my bags. And they never even leave me a note. I assume they were just looking for something worth stealing, but apparently the possibility of getting caught and punished is so remote that they don't even need to attempt to cover their tracks.

Except that the passenger was not present -- the offending article was in a checked bag.

an electric toothbrush began vibrating inside a bag checked onto an AirTran flight

You think baggage handlers are authorized to do anything but hit the panic button?

Every time I fly back from the states I have a note from the TSA saying they looked in my bag. They are authorised to search for vibrating objects, as well as remove and tamper with them

You can pretend no such thing happened to support your world view or you can simply admit that the world is more nuanced. Regardless of if what Manning did was right, he certainly did reveal all sorts of very bad crimes (murder, torture, etc).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-assange/wikileaks-bradley-manning-testifies-cablegate_b_2215387.html

From what I'm reading there was a settlement.

"In 2007 the U.S. embassy in Baghdad obtained a copy of the Iraqi government's final investigation report on the massacre of 17 civilians on September 16th, 2007 in Nisour Square. The report concluded that the incident was an unprovoked attack on unarmed civilians, asked for $8 million in compensation for each death and $4 million for each injury, and demanded that the private security firm Blackwater be replaced within six months. Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq for two years afterwards, and the U.S. Embassy compensated victims with $10,000 for each death and $5,000 for each injury. Five years later, the offending Blackwater mercenaries have escaped from accountability to Iraq, and attempts to bring them to justice in the U.S. have resulted in a long chain of dismissed cases and one undisclosed settlement."

This is something which can be handled in court. Do you really think this amounts to war crimes? If you think it does, how exactly does the media exposure change anything?

You can pretend no such thing happened to support your world view or you can simply admit that the world is more nuanced. Regardless of if what Manning did was right, he certainly did reveal all sorts of very bad crimes (murder, torture, etc).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-assange/wikileaks-bradley-manning-testifies-cablegate_b_2215387.html

Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/

And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools

The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8

See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism

The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.

There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).

Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html

See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im

Exactly what type of "horrible shit" are you talking about?

Basically, standard big business horrible stuff. This is behavior that lots of megacorps engage in, Monsanto just uses a new set of tools.

I don't consider their GM stuff to be evil, but Monsanto's predatory practices are pretty shameful, and organic farmers do tend to take it in the shorts, more than most.

Monsanto is certainly not alone in these types of scandals.

This is one reason why I think that classifying businesses as "people" is ridiculous. If people behaved the way that corporations do, they would be locked up. However, corporations are rewarded for that type of behavior.

He picked the wrong battle.

Whenever a Mr. Natural starts lecturing me about how we need to all return to hunter-gathere lifestyle, I counter with "No problem! We just need to exterminate about 90% of the human population on Earth. Would you like to start?"

Whether we like it or not, the future is here, and we can't survive without factory farming, container transportation, nuclear and fossil energy, farm fishing, etc.

There's just too damn many of us.

The only answer to "too damn many" is "culling the herd."

Some pan handlers actually make some serious dough. There was a recent article about a guy making $60k/year: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/shane-warren-speegle-says_n_1694577.html and according to studies, panhandling can net hundreds per day: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2255/how-much-money-do-beggars-make but most of those panhandlers will spend the money they get and not beg again until they run out.

Agreed...this is a win for google: U.S. antitrust regulators added that they have found no evidence to claims that Google unfairly favors its own services in search results.

I've made a snap decision not to moderate on this topic, though it interests me immensely as I'm a bit of an Ameriphobe if that's the right expression. Reminds me of an insightful article by Michael Moore who wrote recently:

Who are we?
  I'd like to try to answer that question.
  We are a country whose leaders officially sanction and carry out acts of violence as a means to often an immoral end. We invade countries who didn't attack us. We're currently using drones in a half-dozen countries, often killing civilians.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/gun-violence-united-states_b_2358115.html
From the outside looking in, USA has a lot of problems - an elected government that can't compromise, shackled and impotent, increasing rate of poverty, delusional media and massive debt. The Y and Z generation must do something to shake things up and get something working. I don't know what though.

If only we/they would do the same with some political contributions to those who are trying to change things for the better (human rights, privacy rights, less spying, copyright/patent reform, tort reform, etc, etc, etc).

I've tried that. Politics merely sucks out your energy and makes you feel like you're a part of something, when in reality control is completely outside of your hands. Politics is opium for the masses!

It's technology that makes individuals free, by making governments obsolete!

--libman

I bet the government is giving them tax breaks for implementing it.

I bet they're not.

They basically don't pay taxes anyway, so the point is moot.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/facebook-foreign-taxes-profit_n_2376055.html

And the bottom 50% of the population own just 1% of the country's wealth. Just sayin.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/households-wealth-american-1-percent_n_1687015.html

What was your point again?

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.

- NYTimes, 2002

By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Red herring.com (1998)

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion

In July 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) "didn't do any subprime lending, because they can't: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn't meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income." (New York Times, July 18, 2008)
How did Krugman get it so wrong?

Antibiotic resistance is probably one of the worst things we're facing down in the coming century or so,

This is true, and finding MRSA in the wild brings this much closer be becoming a far more universal problem.

The playing field is vastly different than in the pre-penicillin days when the only hope of finding a "cure" was an exhaustive search to find a compound that would kill the bugs. The very name MRSA stems from resistance to penicillin type drugs. Now with rapid DNA sequencing we can not only identify MRSA much faster, but we _should_ also be able to find additional ways to kill it, including some physical means against which there is no way of developing resistance.

I suspect the way forward will be in designer drugs rather than the happening upon something that works being found on moldy toast.

DNA sequencing has also shown that there is many more than one form of MRSA.

For a moment there, I thought you were talking about Salman Rushdie, but then I realized that he just wrote an unfunny 'let's stir some shit up' book, not a movie.

My bad.

So wait, which one do you think deserved to die again?

(I think I still have Satanic Verses in the bookshelf somewhere, just that I can't be arsed to crack it open.)

And so you illustrate the problem. For Muzzies almost anything is blasphemy. being an atheist, holdin a bible study group, or writing a love poem that quotes from the Qur'an. This is why restricting anything that makes the Muzzies riot will end up in us not being able to say anything or express our own beliefs.

Note that the proposed law gives the power to censor to the Israeli justice minister. Yaakov Neeman, the current justice minister, is kind of weird. News articles:

• "A glimpse at the life of Israel's controversial justice minister" (Haaretz)
• "Yaakov Neeman, Israeli Justice Minister, Says Jewish Law Must Become Binding " ""Step by step we will bestow religious law upon the citizens of Israel and transform religious law into the binding law of the state,"
• Israel's justice minister advises rightists on how to seek pardons for Jewish terrorists (Haaretz)

There's a sizable ultra-orthodox faction in Israel which wants a political system where rabbis run things. Neeman is from that faction. Israel already has rabbinical courts, but they're currently restricted to ruling on religious issues and divorces. Neeman has said he wants to expand the authority of rabbinical courts, which in Israel are dominated by ultra-othodox rabbis.

Ultra-orthodox groups are very anti-Internet. This goes way beyond censoring pornography. There are special censored ISPs that only allow a list of 400 approved sites, most of which are religious.

So that's where this may be going, or at least where one faction would like to go. (Israel politics is currently deadlocked worse than US politics. There are many parties, none with a majority, and shifting coalitions. Different factions control different ministries as part of the deals made to put coalitions together. Just because the Justice Minister wants something doesn't mean the Government does.)

According to this article the TSA spent 80 million dollars on scanners. According to This article they're spending 245 million dollars more to test them. According to this article a human life is worth 7.4 million dollars. We've spend an extra 40 billion dollars since 9/11 on airport security. That means we need to have saved 34 lives by body scanner alone or 5405 lives by all airport security.

It doesn't add up.

That the US government is spying on social networks is fact shown multiple places. And only the EFF seems to be doing anything to slow it.

Wait a minute...

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we should consider exceptional events to be exceptional, and not panic over shocking tragedies?

That's not what our Dear Leader says. He says "We can't accept events like this as routine" and promises that he'll try to work through the politics to stop things like this from ever happening again.

Let's not forget another major outlier like this, where a foreign adversary successfully executed an attack in an unexpected manner, using our own infrastructure against us! A brilliant maneuver by the enemy, and thanks to our kneejerk response, we've managed to avoid any recurrences for only a few trillion dollars in cost and a few thousand more American lives lost! With such a clear success rate for a panicked reaction, how can you possibly be advocating moderation?

Obviously, the politicians in charge know that the current public outrage will be the catalyst to move us forward into a safe future, where all risk is eliminated, violence is practically unknown, and environmentally-unfriendly customs have been replaced with three shells.

You didn't mention that thay hacked their website in real time, during a live radio interview. Now, that's an achievement.

First Posted: 02/25/11 07:15 AM ET | Updated: 05/25/11 07:35 PM

No, posted as "libman". (This crude mechanism of identification does not prove authenticity, but that is a separate issue. I have seen no fake "libman"s here so far... I'll fix that problem later by publishing a list of all my posts from an authenticated source.)

I'm pretty much the polar opposite of an "Anonymous Coward". I always use my real name on the Internet, and even my real address can be known most of the time from things like political donations (ex), domain name records, etc. I also take no steps to hide my IP / hostname (ex. on IRC). My career has taken a huge hit from clients Googling my name and finding much controversy and reactionary commie slander, but that's a price that I'm willing to pay. My reluctantly-AC-like activity on Slashdot is explained entirely by moderator bias, which limits my AlexLibman account to 2 posts per day.

The bad guys know where to find me.

--libman

Replying to my own above:

This is an even better response to these idiots:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/westboro-baptist-church-aurora-shooting-vigil_n_1693375.html

This wall of humans should follow these clowns wherever they go.

The video of that entire exchange is hilarious.

That woman is a hate monger and a bigot, and all I can say is that it couldn't have happened to anyone worse.