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I'm not saying nurses are "unaccomplished" or that what they do is trivial, but it's not like they're tenured professors

Then why did you bring them up in a discussion about tenured professors?

1) "While sure, a black woman can get a job as a software developer easily because "diversity," she still has a tough row to hoe because her 90% white male geek colleagues bond over "Star Trek and Grand Theft Auto" and she will have a hard time fitting in."

Fitting in is the least of it. She's entering a world where the entire worldview has been co-opted by the desires of young men. It's why when there was a study of 250 evaluations, fully three-quarters referenced the woman's personality, using words like "abrasive" and "demanding" where only two referenced a man's personality. Because a woman coming to work in tech is expected to be "one of the guys" or will be seen as a "frigid bitch" (one of the terms used in an evaluation).

No, it's not just fitting in at the lunch room or around the water cooling. It's dealing with structural exclusion. And judging from the butthurt expressed in a lot of the comments here whenever the topic comes up, I don't see how anyone can honestly say there is no structural exclusion.

And the worst part, is the structural exclusion is to the detriment of the company or organization. A different study from 2013 showed that diverse workplaces make for more profitable companies and productive organizations. And that friend, is the reason companies are pushing for more diversity. It's not about "social justice" or feminism or whatever cockamamie conspiracy is cooked up in the heads of mens' rights advocates. It's dollars and cents. Diversity is good business.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

I wish - and I know this would never 'fly' - that we would make their lives as uncomfortable as ours - or even more so. they are really offended when their women are even looked at by westerners. what I would love to see is that we go OUT OF OUR WAY to fondle and embarass all the muslim women - ALL OF THEM - that enter or leave any western country. yes, its payback and its meant to inflict a return feeling for all that have 'done' for us.

WHAAA???!? This is modded "insightful"?

the fact that we let them ruin our way of life - and they got away with it - means that they are boldened to keep doing this crap to us.

What the heck? Who is doing this to whom? We are doing it to ourselves. Who does the TSA work for? Our government.

We did this to ourselves, and for nothing. Is there any evidence whatsoever that the TSA has prevented ANY terrorist attacks since it was instituted? NO.

There are countries that have experienced REAL terrorism. Places where random buses get blown up periodically, or random bombs go off in the downtown area of a city -- from a coordinated effort of terrorists. (See, for example, situations in Israel/Palestine, or England when the IRA was particularly active.)

We have NOTHING like that. If there were any significant number of Muslim terrorists out there just dying to "ruin our way of life," they could easily do so -- bomb some malls, bomb public transport, heck -- shoot up an area right outside the security zone at an airport. Remember after 9/11 when people were actually freaked out about such things? I remember people afraid to go to malls -- afraid that someone would put some chemicals or poison into the water supply, etc., etc.

How much of that happened? Nothing really. We just forgot about it. We didn't really make "security" around any of these things any better. Hell, we can't even keep our weapons-grade uranium safe with any real security.

We're doing nothing for any number of major terrorist targets, and the terrorists are doing nothing to attack them. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion is there aren't a significant number of real terrorists. (Well, except for the retirees that the FBI entraps by hanging out with them at Waffle House for months and convincing them they should attempt a terrorist act...)

So, given that it's clear we've done this whole TSA thing TO OURSELVES, why exactly is it that you want to lash out at Muslims everywhere, as if they were ALL represented by a handful of folks who plotted 9/11??

if we do a tit-for-tat (as childish as that might initially seem) then maybe the escalations and wars would come to a stand-still.

"Tit-for-tat" implies that there's some sort of actual targeting of people who did something. If a red-headed guy goes on a murder spree in a subway, and afterward the police start just randomly searching and beating the crap out of people on the subway to instill fear and dissuade anyone from attempting a similar act, your response is, "Let's go and starting beating the crap out of all redheads everywhere! That's tit-for-tat, and it will show them!"

(Don't get me wrong here -- I know the analogy is not exact, and there are militant Muslim extremist groups, whereas I don't know if there are militant redhead groups... but hopefully my point is clear. The ones doing the bad stuff at the TSA are our own fault, and saying we should use them to harass others because we allow them to harass us is one of the stupidest things I've seen modded up on Slashdot, and that's saying something....)

The school had a multi-million-dollar advertising and legal budget, and created a chilling effect. At one point, they even got government websites warning about the school censored.

Maheshwar Peri and other journalists who went up against them took a tremendous personal financial risk. As the Newsweek article makes clear, they were sued repeatedly, and had to defend each case. See also Siddhartha Deb's story: Siddhartha Deb’s Publishing Odyssey, ‘Why I Took On Arindam Chaudhuri’.

The stark truth is that Wikipedia was part of the problem here, not the solution. This is in part due to Wikipedia's own chilling atmosphere towards critics, a topic discussed right now on Jimmy Wales' talk page.

Whistle-blowers taking on an admin run a significant risk of being sanctioned themselves under some pretext like "battlefield conduct" or "incivility".

The reason there are mandatory appeals, a long pre-execution process, and significant legal expense above and beyond life imprisonment is simple: executing someone cannot be reversed and cannot be adequately compensated should an innocent person be executed. "Blatantly obvious" is not a legal standard, and the United States constitution requires that states afford their citizens equal protection under the law.

Unfortunately, even the current expensive process has proven inadequate. Carlos DeLuna [1] was executed in 1989 despite provably not committing the crime. Cameron Todd Willingham [2] was executed for an accidental fire in his own home, based on the testimony of "arson investigators" whose conclusions were not based on scientific evidence or best practices. If you really want to see how bad it can get with reduced legal barriers to execution, George Stinney (1944) was propped up on phone books at age 14 and electrocuted to death after a two-hour trial. His conviction was officially vacated 70 years after his death. Though not documented specifically in this case, the electric chair frequently causes eyes to dislodge from their sockets or explode.

There are thousands of cases where "convicted criminals" were later found to be innocent; many of these were crimes like murder that would be eligible for the death penalty [4].

I don't want to live in a country that shrugs off the risk of murdering innocent people. Bringing the cost of an execution and life imprisonment to parity would only serve to magnify this already-tangible risk. The marginal (supposed) increase in victim closure between an execution and life imprisonment is not worth this risk, regardless of its magnitude.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
[4] http://www.law.umich.edu/speci...

You can expect anything you want, but it isn't happening. Here for example, is an innocent executed by Texas using a bogus "expert."

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

You've never heard of the "Innocence Project", I take it.

Vengeance by the state is certainly not the same as revenge, it is a severely broken system, fed by an electorate that is easily swayed by simplistic made-up origin stories (Fox News), prosecutors who want scalps for career advancement, and in love with militaristic nonsense; and a system which is disproportionately harsh on minorities.

nor do they think it's a secret

No, it's simpler than that. They just don't think. In regard to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's most significant achievement is realizing the profitability of ignorance and apathy. It's why he considers Facebook users to be "dumb fucks". His words, not mine.

There are a total of 12 business models that are known to have ever made money at all.

What? That's a horrific oversimplification. And if you're going to do that you may as well go all the way: There's only one business model that works -- make more money than you spend.

you don't exactly hear the Porn industry complaining that the Internet ruined their movie business, do you?

Nope, not ever. And that's just a few from the first page of Google results.

recognize the obvious: Distribution online is effectively free.

While true, recent history has shown that this isn't the biggest issue. The problem is that piracy is more convenient. If I want to watch a movie legitimately I have to obtain the discs, plug it into the machine, sit through 1-2 minutes of unskippable copyright warnings (being shown only to the very people who aren't infringing.. I get that legally they need those warnings but there's no reason to make them unskippable.) 30 seconds of stupid menu animations, probably a handful of ads for other shit (which are thankfully mostly skippable but still..) Then sometimes you get shown the damned copyright notices again after you finally get to the menu to hit play. 4-5 steps and several minutes of useless shit in order to finally view your show. Assuming you're wanting to watch something old enough to have discs available in the first place. And you're paying for all that shit.

Oppose that to a torrent. Yes you have to wait for the download but with modern internet speeds that's usually less than an hour and frequently only a few minutes depending on number of seeders and the quality (file size) you're picking up. Less time than having to go to the store to pick it up for a lot of people, and far less than ordering from Amazon or other online sellers. And when you get it you hit play and you're immediately watching your movie. Two steps and no wait time beyond the initial obtaining which is comparable to obtaining a legitimate disc.

Thanks mostly to Netflix and Apple, this is improving quite a bit -- primarily in the sense that they've mostly proved that people will actually pay for content if its a) reasonably priced and b) convenient. The recording industry has mostly realized this and most music is available through iTunes, Google Play and a few other big name services (often available through all of these services.) That's exactly what people want and will pay for. Simple, fast and not unduly expensive.

The TV industry is slowly catching on. They're not there yet. Every studio is making their own access site which destroys that "convenient" aspect that's so important: If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I have to know which site is distributing it in the first place, and if its not one I've signed up for I've got to go through that whole hassle. Rinse and repeat for every single show I'm interested in.

That "knowing who distributes it" in particular is terrible. If they want to create a competitor to Netflix and Hulu for whatever reason then great -- but having 47 competitors that all offer only one or two (popular) shows each isn't going to solve anything (of course they'll use the fact that nobody cares enough to sign up for that much shit as yet more evidence that copyright infringement is destroying their business, even though that's not the underlying problem.)

The movie industry on the other hand is still stuck in the past for the most part. They usually distribute "ultraviolet" codes with discs nowadays which is great but it means I still have to pick up the discs.

Thought this sounded familiar.

There was an article in 2013 about the LIDAR system they used to find the city and the process of getting the government to agree to allow the mapping.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

While not as many nice pictures, I think it has more of a background on both the city, the state of the politics in honduras and more historical info.

That's a myth dreamt up by people wanting to protect the environment, but who had never taken any higher-level math or engineering courses and had no clue how dynamic systems function.

Was that at Arrogant Douchebag U? Must not have had remedial biology as an elective.

They're not fragile at all. If you perturb them, it just re-stabilizes at a new equilibrium point.

Like how New Zealand has "re-stabilized" with a quarter of its birds extinct after the introduction of rats.

Police who commit misconduct of any kind is are the extreme minority

When sharing an opinion that is counter to public sentiment, it is often helpful to provide links to sources that back up your point.

As of now, there is just your claim of "extreme minority" to go against documented cases of entire police departments having a "pattern of using unreasonable force" while entire divisions within still larger forces have been implicated in actual criminal conspiracies; and even entire town's police forces abusing civil forfeiture laws to STEAL from those passing through town.

"Extreme Minority" you say?

Prove it.

I'll say. If you turn down a plea bargain because you're innocent, you can still spend 3 years on Rikers before they bother to drop charges.

I wasn't familiar with the Reid Technique, but once I learned what it was, it struck me as an incredibly unfair and abusive interrogation technique. It's also the technique we see often on a lot of those police investigation television shows: There's a presumption of guilt, all of the questions are loaded. I never knew it had a name, I always called it, "The Asshole Interrogation Technique," because you have to be an asshole to use it.

For those who are interested, the Wikipedia has a short article but The New Yorker has a much more interesting one.

I wish I had the actual news story to show you. The point was, he believed exactly what you do. But it wasn't true.

He thought that he could confess, retract the confession, and they couldn't convict him without some other evidence, because he wasn't really guilty.

He believed false convictions in a murder case just couldn't happen in this country.

However, as the New Yorker article said http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... when a jury has a confession, they always believe it. Even if the suspect retracts it, even he was manipulated into confessing, even if the police lied, and even if there's independent evidence that he's innocent.

That's not what the research says. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

What happens is the cops wear the suspect down. They go on for hours, insisting that the suspect is wrong, that they have conclusive evidence, and that if they confess it will go better for them (or even that if they confess, they can go home). They try to get the suspect actually believing that he might have done it, if these authority figures say so with such confidence.

The New Yorker story had an example of this:

I saw this effect in a video of an interrogation that an Iowa defense attorney sent me. His client, a young man who was eighteen at the time of the interview, had been wrongly accused of molesting a three-year-old girl at the day-care center where he worked. The detective never raised his voice or appeared anything other than sympathetic. But, in under two hours, he had the young man saying that he had blanked out and fondled the little girl. As if in a trance, the young man said, “I know it happened but I don’t remember any of it. . . . I guess it must have happened.” After a break in the interrogation, during which the young man was allowed to see his sister, he retracted his confession and maintained his innocence. The district attorney dropped the charges.

Basically, don't talk to the police without a lawyer present. Period. I mean, I'm not going to stonewall a cop that pulls me over for a broken taillight, but if the line of questioning goes any further than what's immediately relevant to said taillight, that's when I shut up. And you can guarantee that I will be videotaping the entire encounter! Cops are under no obligation to tell you the truth about anything; it's up to you to know what your rights are in a given situation and assert them.

According to the New Yorker story http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... after the police read a suspect his Miranda rights, only about a third exercise it. I couldn't figure out why.

I have noticed that on a lot of TV police programs, the cops start interrogating the suspect and he doesn't exercise his right to be silent. They treat it as if it's an intellectual game and the suspect has to convince the cops of his innocence. It's like TV cop programs are propaganda for the cops to convince people that the "right thing" to do is to convince the cop that you're innocent.

a) CPS is authorized to take children away from their parents without reason or cause.
b) The parents have legal rights on paper, but in court rarely do they ever unless someone like the ACLU gets involved
c) See A

You do realize it is perfectly legal for a state highway patrol officer to pull you over, take all cash you have on hand, and take your children away from you until you sign a written document that the cash on hand is a "fine" being paid?

If you exercise your right to not have your property stolen, they can arrest you on the spot, have your children taken away into foster care, and even after the cop admits there is NO basis in law to allow this, have a judge sign off that it is still legal.

A quote from http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
(But please read the entire article!)

According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, "a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics," to Linden, "a known place to receive illegal narcotics." The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county's district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie's Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for "money laundering" and "child endangerment," in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. "No criminal charges shall be filed," a waiver she drafted read, "and our children shall not be turned over to CPS," or Child Protective Services.

"Where are we?" Boatright remembers thinking. "Is this some kind of foreign country, where they're selling people's kids off?" Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

Later, she learned that cash-for-freedom deals had become a point of pride for Tenaha, and that versions of the tactic were used across the country. "Be safe and keep up the good work," the city marshal wrote to Washington, following a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband.

...if they ever consider "Facebook For Work". Mark Zuckerburg is backstabbing sleazebag who has no conscience. Consider how he joined the Winklevoss twins' "Harvard Connection" (aka ConnectU) project, stole their ideas, and delayed the ConnectU project whilst he set up his own project (TheFacebook.com) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... His attitude to users is one of absolute contempt, and total disregard for their personal data confidentiality. Does your management really want him having access to your internal emails? If it's not blocked by your worksite due to NSFW language, point your management to http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... Here's a relevant snippet from the article

=== Begin Snippet ===
The technology site Silicon Alley Insider got hold of some of the messages and, this past spring, posted the transcript of a conversation between Zuckerberg and a friend, outlining how he was planning to deal with Harvard Connect:

        FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?
        ZUCK: yea I'm going to fuck them
        ZUCK: probably in the year
        ZUCK: *ear

In another exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:

        ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
        ZUCK: just ask
        ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
        FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
        ZUCK: people just submitted it
        ZUCK: i don't know why
        ZUCK: they "trust me"
        ZUCK: dumb fucks

=== End Snippet ===

The open ballot worked fine in the US for 100 years.

Are you seriously referring to the era of American history when slavery and Native American genocide were at their peak, when women and those of the wrong skin color were deprived of the vote, when worker revolts were regularly put down by armed force, when violence at the polls was a regular occurrence, as a time when voting "worked fine"?

Here's how we used to vote. Any claim that this system "worked fine" is disconnected from reality.

The ahistoricalism of American political discourse never ceases to amaze me. Nor does the desire for technical fixes to social problems: to get voters to vote, we don't need on-line voting, we need better candidates, a reform of ballot access and campaign finance laws. (And a preference ballot and ad binding "none-of-the-above" option.)

The New Yorker had a good piece on why their lounge chairs have very little to do with their success. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... All the best engineers are 40 year olds, show up at 8 take an hour lunch and leave at 5. All the tech start-ups are still led by pitchman selling oil. Cubicles, now hated, were invented as a solution to the open office problems and were meant to improve worker comforts. And what was old is new again.

I make no claim about the veracity of this link. Or this one. Or even this one.

But googling for "nixon enterprise nukes india", those are the first 3 results.

Do I find it implausible that America threw around some weight to bully someone into doing something they wanted for their own ends?

Not even a little.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

You will enjoy reading this New Yorker article:

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Why is it that I'm the only person that knows how to use google?

Like... seriously. I typed this into google:
obama says race

And I got this:
âoeThereâ(TM)s no doubt that thereâ(TM)s some folks who just really dislike me because they donâ(TM)t like the idea of a black President,â Obama said.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

The implication from the article is that obama's poll numbers are falling because he's black. Which is weird because the demographics of the country didn't shift that much during his administration. Which means somehow when white people vote for Obama it just people voting their conscience. But when they vote against him the only explanation is racism.

I can also cite Eric Holder making the same claim... and of course endless numbers of leftwing pundits which have been trying to sell this narrative for years.

Once a check has "cleared," the money is in your account and the Bank can't take the money back out even if the check bounces later.

If the check is a forgery, yes they can. For example, employee at XYZ Corp forges a company check to a friend. The check clears. It's later found to be a forgery. Bank can take the money back.

If a cop pulls you over, he legally can't just take all your cash and then not press charges.

Happens all the time under Civil forfeiture.

An undercover cop must answer honestly if you ask him if he is a cop, and he can't initiate an illegal transaction because that would be entrapment.

Oh, you are SO naive. Cops can lie to you about anything. And only the most outrageous police misconduct works as a defense against entrapment.

A judge can't reject a jury's verdict once it is rendered.

Sure they can.

The president can't order the assassination of American citizens without due process.

The "hit list" includes some Americans who were killed w/o due process. Scroll down to read the DoJ memo if you want to.

A woman can't get a man convicted of rape if she has no evidence or witnesses to back it up

Absolutely not true. People are convicted based solely on the victim's testimony that the sex was not consensual.

Zero for 6.

I don't think Google cooperates with the NSA in the same way that AT&T and Verizon cooperate, and I think it's important to see that difference.

With political things, yes, that's definitely true. However with scientific things it's not; there's real science (which is falsifiable and evidence-based), and there's bullshit and pseudoscience and religion. Of course, it's possible to BS people with "science" by presenting false evidence, covering up key evidence, etc., but if you teach people the scientific method (instead of teaching them to believe in BS like homeopathy for instance, or in Creationism which isn't science) eventually the truth will come out and people will believe the correct things once the evidence is presented and understood.

I'd love to think you're right. However, there's a lot of evidence that once people believe something, you can show them factual proof that they're wrong... and they'll end up believing whatever it was they believed in the beginning, even harder. Here's a discussion of this specifically about people's beliefs in vaccination and here's one that's more general, about beliefs across a wide variety of topics on which people, if shown facts that contradict their beliefs, merely believe them even more.
This is in fact precisely why Creationists try to peddle their ignorant junk in schools: they know very well that if they can get their beliefs in kids before the kids are able to recognize them as junk, they most likely have the kids for life, but if they don't get them then, they're very unlikely to get them as adults who can actually think well and question what they're being told.

Democrats, Republicans... anyone who thinks there's actually a difference between them is a dumbass.

It does seem to matter when it comes to picking Supreme Court Justices. Nobody would claim that Alito and Scalia are interchangeable with Kagan and Sotomayor. Are you really saying it doesn't matter who chooses the next few justices?

And this has an impact on a lot of real world issues: http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

There is also the five-finger speech. It generally comes when a new clerk asks, in dismay and outrage, how a majority of the Court has arrived at a decision he or she feels is flagrantly unjust. Justice Brennan holds up his hand, wriggles his five fingers, and says, “Five votes. Five votes can do anything around here.”

Counterpoint: chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen.

That's not say video games are good for you or anything, but the whole "different from the unwashed masses" stereotype is just a victorian holdover.

"It left China with either letting go of censorship, or breaking significant chunks of the Internet for their population."

I love the tiny minds at work here. People who cannot see outside of themselves, nor consider any perspective but their own Western one. As if there were any choice involved! China doesn't block websites because they're evil, they block websites because they are damaging to China's body politic. These overseas actors want to harm China, and like antibodies reacting to bacteria, China's government reacts to block the damage. You can cry censorship all you want, but the fact remains that it's for China's own good that these actions are taken.

I remind everyone that the Chinese Communist Party is made up of the smartest people in China. It is full of scientists and engineers, people with analytical minds, and people who are qualified to make decisions for others. If Slashdot were based in China, the most thoughtful constantly-modded-up users would be mostly CCP members. Think of John Gruber, the MIT economist who helped get the badly needed Affordable Care Act passed despite opposition from lesser minds. There is nothing particularly scandalous about what he did. The seriousness of the deception depends on the extent of the harm done. Getting healthcare for millions of uninsured is the same as China's blocking these harmful websites. A little harm is done, mostly to people who intend harm in the first place, and much good is done to people who badly need it. It is a Faustian bargain, but it is worth it. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

The Western mindset that censorship is automatically bad is outdated and unsuitable for 2014 and beyond. We need to just relax and let the smart people do their thing. We're better off with them in charge rather than the mob. If you disagree, then say so - but don't doubt China's justification for its own point of view, which I doubt anyone, especially those in this "freedumb center", has even taken a moment to think over.

An introduction, for the lazy:

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven't been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes.

http://gothamist.com/2014/01/1...
How The NYPD's Use Of Civil Forfeiture Robs Innocent New Yorkers
Any arrest in New York City can trigger a civil forfeiture case if money or property is found on or near a defendant, regardless of the reasons surrounding the arrest or its final disposition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10...
“Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?”
The federal government does.
Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes.

Here is how you boost your child's high school basketball team.

There's a big debate in Medicine about following best practices and if just following algorithms would work better. Some note it would reduce unneeded tests and procedures. Others have noted that actually, doctors are much better at noting when something is going really wrong and that following a script could lead to unnecessary deaths that would be avoided by relying on clinical judgment.

At least one US doctor tried implementing something like a precursor to this and got some pretty interesting results.

The journalist did mention her game. It wasn't a review but was definite positive exposure for a game that would not have gotten if they were not close friends.

According to Wikipedia, with a bunch of cites so I assume it's verified:

While Grayson had written an article about the failed GAME_JAM web reality show that Quinn participated in[23] and Kotaku had also mentioned her game,[24] both occurred before the relationship began.[20][8]

References are:

• [23] http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...
• [24] http://kotaku.com/depression-q...
• [20] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...
• [8] http://kotaku.com/in-recent-da...

So it does appear to be demonstrably exposure for a game unrelated to the relationship between Grayson and Quinn.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/...
http://www.digitopoly.org/2014...

Look at how the Netherlands organized it, we have the best internet in the world :)
Everyone in the US knows this, but the political system is broken and unable to do anything other than obey the powerfull cable companies.

If you have time to read 12,000 words, the New Yorker ran an excellent article last year detailing US surveillance programs and Senator Wyden's efforts to rein them in.

"State of Deception"

There shouldn't be too much debate, chickens are very smart. We used to raise them when I was growing up, and they seemed capable of rather complex deduction. They're basically little velociraptors, though they're friendly enough if socialized. We didn't eat them, but that's because they were egg-layers. It wouldn't have bothered me to eat them, regardless, but my sister treated them like pets and once we started having them she never ate chicken ever again (and has since become a vegan, ugh).

I've known a few cows in my day, too, and they're incredibly dumb animals. I don't think we have to worry about anyone making an intelligence argument for them. You're right about pigs, though.

Anyway, however intelligent our prey animals may be, we are so, so far beyond them that it really doesn't matter. Whenever somebody makes the intelligent food argument, I like to just point out that plants are smart too and anyone arguing that animals "feel pain" and "have feelings" should stop chowing down on their veggies if they don't want to look like hypocrites. The fact is that all life survives by destroying other life. Even those plants sucking down light energy from the local star are part of a cycle of life that depends on death, and plenty of plants murder other species or members of their own. Either deal with it, or stop trying to stay alive yourself.

An octopus is a highly specialized form of life with some impressive tricks. But that doesn't make it intelligent, just well-adpated to its environment. Nothing in TFA demonstrates even modest octopus intelligence, merely excellent specialization. The two concepts should not be confused with each other.

Humans evolved to be intelligent because their ancestors were generalists and social, and the right environmental factors forced adaptations that proved beneficial to survival. They lacked a high degree of specialization except in the area of physical endurance (not a lot of marathon runners in the natural world), and the only reason they survived was by learning how to think about cause and effect, and understand how other creatures around them thought (especially other humans). In order to hunt dangerous animals with limited physical traits, you need to coordinate an attack, which requires you understand what your hunting partners are thinking, and what they'll do next. Other animals will hunt in packs, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought or speculation involved, mostly trial-and-error learning and instinct. Humans are the only hunters on the planet that track prey by footprints (or hoofprints). Other predators will go after prey they can directly see, or smell, or touch, but we seem to be the only animals to have ever recognized that when another animal steps in the mud they leave an indentation that can be recognized and followed days or weeks after all scent of the animal has been blown away. Other animals can communicate, but humans seem to be the only ones to ever ask any questions. We don't just scream out into the world "I'm here!" or "There's danger!" or even "Hey I found food!", we also say things like "Why are the elephants all headed that way? Is there water over there?" and then try to find out. Elephants may remember where all the watering holes are, but humans entering a new area for the first time can find those watering holes by recognizing elephant tracks and imagining that elephants all traveling in one direction may be heading for water, without ever having even seen the elephants who left the tracks.

Once you start asking questions about the world, and trying to learn answers, that's when all the magic happens. In all our research of animal linguistics, we've never been able to find any non-human animals asking any questions. Chimpanzees can be taught enough sign language to understand and respond to questions, but they can't seem to form any of their own. Non-human animals are capable of learning from their experiences, but learning is not intelligence. Non-human animals are capable of exchanging information, but communication is not intelligence. Humans have the ability to consider the future and the past, form hypotheses, and question the nature of not only their own experiences, but those experiences of others. Intelligent animals can understand that a symbol, word, or hand motion can represent a specific kind of food. Very intelligent animals can chain together sentences like "Bob likes bananas." Only humans can say "Does Alice like bananas?" That may not seem so important, until you realize where that leads. "Bob likes bananas but Alice doesn't like bananas. Do bananas taste differently for Bob than Alice? Is her experience different than Bob's? Why is that? What is taste, anyway?"

What I do know is that octopuses don't ask questions, but they do taste delicious. I also know what taste is, and why people like different kinds of seafood, because I was smart enough to ask. I don't feel bad about eating octopus, and neither should you, but I can understand that your thinking on the subject may be different than mine. You're wrong, but I understand that some people other than me are wrong sometimes. An octopus would never even consider that your thoughts on a subject would be different than his.

Plants are intelligent too, by the way. Should we not eat them?

Yes, Cheney is crying also*

*I know, don't spoil the thread...

The earliest "gun control laws" were applied by Imperial governments to colonists, to control a growing civilian population with a remotely managed and badly outnumbered Imperial military in _every_ nation's colonies. Then there was a long gap, due to the War for Independence and the 2nd Amendment, then it started up as a US federal policy in the 1930's applied to machine guns and sawed off shotguns. It grew in the 1960's _due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King_, which illustrated the growing risk of assassination for respected leaders.

Not quite.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
April 23, 2012 Issue
Battleground America
One nation, under the gun.
By Jill Lepore

As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”

Although these laws were occasionally challenged, they were rarely struck down in state courts; the state’s interest in regulating the manufacture, ownership, and storage of firearms was plain enough. Even the West was hardly wild. “Frontier towns handled guns the way a Boston restaurant today handles overcoats in winter,” Winkler writes. “New arrivals were required to turn in their guns to authorities in exchange for something like a metal token.” In Wichita, Kansas, in 1873, a sign read, “Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check.” The first thing the government of Dodge did when founding the city, in 1873, was pass a resolution that “any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the State shall be dealt with according to law.” On the road through town, a wooden billboard read, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.” The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona, Winkler explains, had to do with a gun-control law. In 1880, Tombstone’s city council passed an ordinance “to Provide against the Carrying of Deadly Weapons.” When Wyatt Earp confronted Tom McLaury on the streets of Tombstone, it was because McLaury had violated that ordinance by failing to leave his gun at the sheriff’s office.

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Ja

Is there any count of how many people do not pay taxes, receive no government assistance, have no permanent mailing address, are completely off the grid yet somehow qualify as a registered voter and manage to get to the polls every two years yet seem to disappear after that. Who are these people?

In fact, there is a count. There have been investigations into voting fraud in every state and at the Federal level by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The number has never been more than a handful.

So to answer your question, "Who are these people"? They are the people who live in your imagination and the imagination of AM radio talk show hosts.

The Voter Fraud Myth:

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

I guess you haven't seen the crack shacks that pass for million-dollar homes on Vancouver Island. Places that would be tear-downs anywhere else in the world ... Vancouver real estate is insanely priced. A million bucks gets you a fixer-upper. Or a small unit in a condo that was slapped together quickly to benefit from the condo boom.

This is from 2 years ago - it's actually gotten worse.

or this from June of this year ...

We cannot attract new businesses here because they cannot transfer their employees. Existing businesses and faculties cannot attract excellent talent to the city because employees will not take what amounts to a cut in their standard of living to live here.”

Housing in Vancouver has become one of the most expensive in the world, outstripping international cities like New York, London and Paris.

As The New Yorker put it in May:

The most expensive housing market in North America is not where you’d think. It’s not New York City or Orange County, California, but Vancouver, British Columbia.

Let's just start by pointing out that we have copious examples of the fact that markets are not actually efficient (eg. http://www.newyorker.com/news/...).

We'd also need to explain why the wage gap has been closing. Have women become more competent / men more incompetent? Has industry moved toward things that women are relatively better at? Were businesses not insatiably greedy 50 years ago?

I propose that discrimination against women in, say, the 1950s, was worse than it is now, and that these changing attitudes can, at least partially, account for the closing pay gap.

On a related note -- what is the right "natural" level? Why is the assumption that the world is right today, when there is clear evidence of change that has continued into very recent history? To be perfectly fair it is plausible that we could keep asking this question after we've overshot some omniscient objective notion equality.

There's also the fact that businesses are composed of people rather than perfectly rational actors with infinite loyalty to their business principles. It's perfectly plausible for the business as an abstract whole to explicitly preferentially hire women, but a critical mass of employees are dickheads. I'm not saying that's true in any particular case, just that it's a plausible explanation for why the invisible hand isn't working.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

From your link a few paragraphs, you posted AC, but this story needs to be modded up a bit.-----

....The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

Later, she learned that cash-for-freedom deals had become a point of pride for Tenaha, and that versions of the tactic were used across the country. “Be safe and keep up the good work,” the city marshal wrote to Washington, following a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband.

Unless you are incredibility stupid, or actually doing something illegal, you have nothing to fear from 99.999% of law enforcement, and for that 0.001% of the time there is a risk, there isn't much you can do anyway. But you have the same things at home I'll bet.

Are you deliberately lying or is the problem that you have not yet learned to Google before posting extraordinary claims?

Your claim is directly contradicted by an article in the New Yorker that was probably pivotal in raising the alarm. Here is a small sample:

Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases target powerful entities. "There's this myth that they're cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins," Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgia's aggressive use of forfeiture, says. "In reality, it's small amounts, where people aren't entitled to a public defender, and can't afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back." In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone.

It takes only a pinch of common sense to realize that if you allow a group of people the right to stop law abiding citizens and take their money and possessions with no legal repercussions then this right will be abused.

In some places it costs well over $1,000 for a citizen to start fighting a seizure. If the cops took $500 or less then fighting and winning will cost at least $500 and likely thousands of dollars more.

In a backhanded way, you seem to be saying that the police in America are a bunch of nincompoops who haven't yet figured out that it is much easier to steal smaller amounts of money from people who can't or won't fight back than it is to steal larger amounts of money from people who can and will fight back.

The way the system is set up, it may be impossible to provide accurate statistics on what percentage of these civil forfeitures had anything at all to do with criminal activity because no criminal charges need to be filed and there are big disincentives that prevent even completely innocent people from fighting back.

Many of the anecdotal stories in the New Yorker article show how easy it is for civil forfeiture laws to be systematically abused by the police. Even if the original system was created with the best of intentions it has devolved into us basically paying the police handsomely to violate people's Constitutional rights.

Wrong. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz....

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

CBC's article is just a Canadian take on things. The original article (just as scary) is here:

Well, yes. But it's hardly "original" -- this is a problem that has been profiled extensively for years, yet few people seem to realize how far it extends. A couple of times over the past year, when posters on Slashdot mentioned random forfeitures that happened to them, they were met with comments saying, "You must have done something suspicious" or "What's the rest of the story," and I tried to provide links to point out the systemic problem, but have been met with ignorance and resistance.

For a sample of past coverage, here's an extensive piece from The New Yorker a year ago, a piece from Reason in 2012, a piece from Forbes in 2011, pieces in Slate and The Economist from 2010, a detailed piece on NPR from 2008, etc., etc., etc. Here's an extensive account of problems with the system from PBS almost 15 years ago (around the time that legal reform forced money to go to local municipalities in many cases rather than the federal government). The ACLU has been fighting this for decades.

I know some people here may be well aware of this problem, and others may find this shocking and new. Regardless, it's very sad that it may take other countries' shaming us into taking action to fix an unjust assault on our citizens that has been going on for many years.

They've been running this shake-down on Americans traveling out-of-state, too: http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Basically, if you're not a local, they'll pull you over for some piss-ant, often fabricated infraction, claim that they "smell weed" (especially if your plates are CO or WA) threate-^h...extort you with some scary-sounding charges (which you'll be greatly disinclined to accept when you're a considerable distance from home, not wanting a huge ticket, points on your license and a trial that you'll lose in a kangaroo traffic court) and then miraculously offer to "make it go away" if you fork over whatever cash and valuables you've got in your car, which they get to use to pad their budget or their own fucking wallets (because it's untraceable and you're in the middle of dogfuck nowhere, who's gonna know, right?)

This is *literally* sanctioned and institutionalized highway robbery and they've gotten away with THOUSANDS of them.

This is from the New Yorker, not a scientific paper certainly, but it's interesting and relevant nonetheless. It may explain some of the comments regarding genetic and environmental factors.

Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives.

Isn't this generally know as The Decline Effect? It's not just clinical trials, it applies to almost everything (to varying degrees). It's also been interpreted as The Half-Life of Knowledge.