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While you guys are cracking jokes on ROT13, a letter to NYT ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?_r=0 ) caught my attention

- - - B Missouri Reader
        Missouri

On the one hand, âoeIn the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,â but on the other hand the liberties of Americans are at risk by such programs.

In other words, we face a situation where the strongest, most secure nation can no longer be a nation that guarantees the rights of its citizens.

Privacy is not simply a convenience, but it is intimately linked to free speech and to the future prospects for democracy in America. Key elements of the Constitution provide a framework where incumbents can be challenged in free elections, ensuring that better ideas and better leaders will become available to guide the nation. But nobody can win an election against an incumbent with unlimited access to the communications of its rivals. We're not there yet, but the trend is in that direction.

It is high time that members of both parties in Congress get off of their high horses and address this growing threat to our democracy. Technical and legal hurdles must be cleared, and it may even be necessary to make significant changes in the way the internet works. But time passes very quickly in the technology world, and the clock has already been ticking for quite a long time."

Yeah, you sure can edit those to hide the context of those to pretend it's about all guns. Nice use of the ellipsis there, and with no link back to an original source.

A+ for effort!

How about video?

She said it.

SHE is after our guns. SHE admitted. WE know it. YOU are either lying or ignorant.

And Here's a source for Cuomo's statement.

Yes. He was looking at confiscation or forced sale, which is just compensated confiscation.

NTITE

It's here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/unlocking-private-communications.html?ref=us

So do you want the NSA to break Syria's encryption about their chemical weapons attacks?

I'd like us to continue treating encryption as weapons and regulate its export accordingly. Unfortunately, it is not really possibly — any enemy worth the designation would be able to get it anyway, because moving an algorithm is much easier than a gun. And, unlike guns, you only need to move an algorithm once.

So charity or privacy? What's it going to be?

I wish I had sufficient confidence in my own government to be able to sincerely pick charity... Unfortunately, I do not. If the President can already ask the IRS to hurt opposition's finances, what's to prevent him from asking the NSA to look into the opposition's e-mails? The sort of thing, that got Nixon to resign is barely an issue with today's Americans...

However, according to an earlier article about Snowden's interaction with journalist(s), PGP (with sufficiently large keys) is still unbreakable even to the NSA — at least, as far Snowden was aware:

This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key — allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key — but she didn’t think much would come of it.

So that's, what a particularly private person should be using for all of his communications...

There are a surprisingly large number of public key generators with weak random number generators:

• "Debian OpenSSL Package Random Number Generator Weakness"
• "Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method"
• "NetBSD Intel Hardware Random Number Generator (RNG) Failure Encryption Weakness "
• "PasswordSafe 3.0 weak random number generator allows key recovery attack"

And those are the ones we know about.

For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.

Weak keys don't just let the NSA in. They let the People's Liberation Army of China in, too.

But its implementation is flawed in a way that will prevent it from being a useful currency. Here's a couple good articles that explains a few reasons why (there are many such articles out there by various economists):

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/bitcoin-is-no-longer-a-currency/274859/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/adam-smith-hates-bitcoin/?_r=0

I'm ready for a another attempt with the same goals as Bitcoin.

As if to underscore my point, this just in:

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

And:

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

New York Times: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

What an utter joke! So, yeah, what is this bullshit discussion about "cybersecurity" meant to accomplish? Participating in this ridiculous dog-and-pony-show is collaborating in a conspiracy of silence.

Yeah, I can linkspam too http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2113410/US-soldier-kills-16-Afghan-civilians-deadly-shooting-rampage.html http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-soldier-describes-thrill-kill-innocent-civilians-afghanistan/story?id=11732681 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/us/20soldiers.html?_r=0 You know, if I were in that position, I would do whatever it takes to kill the bastards that invaded and possibly killed members of my family just for being in the wrong location at the wrong time (see collateral murder). And no, you are not protecting some fancy idea of freedom or some other bullshit, you are thugs, criminals, the scum of the world. The world would be better off if your country was nuked from orbit and every piece of it destroyed.

You may note that Iraq is primarily Shia and the US worked to protect it.

Can you elaborate? I'm confused as how come the war on Iraq can qualify as protection.

I doubt the House of Saud is strongly interested in reestablishing the Caliphate since they would have to pledge fealty to it.

Unless the House of Saud delivers the caliph. Which, based on its military potential, would not surprise me or others.

Al Qaida considers the House of Saud to be bad rulers, not Islamic enough in the right way for their tastes. As a result al Qaida has long been trying to overthrow the Kingdom.

Doesn't stop them from being financed now and then by the bad rulers, does it?

Really? You'd think that if you read Pinker's book on the decline of violence, but not if you re-examine his statistics. By examining only the worst events in a particular period, he provides a skewed view of the risk of death by violence. Much better to consider the probability of dying by all violent causes in a particular year/century. Given that some major atrocities in centuries past were exaggerated, it's likely that the 20th century is at least the second and possibly the most violent in the last 2K years. (And killing only gets more efficient with time and technology...)

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/MC11slides/sp-Slide039a.JPEG
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html?ref=sunday

So why the angry rich people hating on Oracle? As far as I can tell, They're angry and running about calling it "cheating" over what appears to be a simple case of not understanding the horribly dense and overly-complicated rules, in a new ship class that just debuted this year.

Well... As mentioned in this article:

The America’s Cup, dating to 1851, might be both the oldest and quirkiest trophy competition in international sports. The winner of the trophy gets to set the parameters for the next competition — when, where and what kind of boats. There is no governing body to guide regularity.

Ellison won in Valencia, Spain, in 2010, ...

Therefore, Larry Ellison - aka Oracle - gets to make the rules, which they, themselves, then violated... Kind of a dick move, even for Larry. Or perhaps I'm incorrect; in any case, the America's Cup is a just very rich sport for very rich people who, apparently, have nothing better on which to spend their time and money.

Actually, autism is not purely genetic: it is a condition with multiple causes, lumped together for diagnostic purposes...

You may be interested in this article Study Ties Autism Risk to Creases in Placenta:

But a new study raises the possibility that analyzing the placenta after birth may provide clues to a child’s risk for developing autism. The study, which analyzed placentas from 217 births, found that in families at high genetic risk for having an autistic child, placentas were significantly more likely to have abnormal folds and creases.

Okay, from what I'm reading here, this sounds like a gross over-reaction and a lot of rich old people taking shit way, way, way too seriously --

Have you heard about the covenants in gated communities? (Hope you don't want to ride a scooter!) You are talking about a bunch of rich guys. Their self-appointed function in life is to tell other people what to do, because they know better. The Augusta National golf club just started admitting blacks in 1990 and women just last year . Let us ponder on that for a moment.

Says who? The GAO says 12.6%. But keep spouting that nonsense that any big companies actually pay the sticker price.

For example: Korea has huge class sizes, and they kick our ass in math and science.

Propaganda from teacher's unions always say to just, randomly, throw money at the problem.

Korea pays their teachers way, way more than the U.S. and most other countries, relative to GDP. From the nytimes:

In the United States, a teacher with 15 years of experience makes a salary that is 96 percent of the country's gross domestic product per capita. Across the O.E.C.D., a teacher of equivalent experience makes 117 percent of G.D.P. per capita. At the high end of the scale, in Korea, the average teacher at this level makes a full 221 percent of the country's G.D.P. per capita.

Please add the most important project: The Great Uprooting (massive Urbanization of the Rural population).

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Mark Sumner mentioned that there are already prebuilt massive silent cities that he has seen, awaiting the future industrial workers of China.

Since the summary is full of links not-to-TFA, this might be useful:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/science/applying-new-rigor-in-studying-education.html?pagewanted=all

Sesame Street Widens Its Focus: On Sept. 24, the material - as well as new videos, online and mobile games, and parent and teacher resources - will find a new home online when Sesame Workshop unveils a hub on the Sesame Street Web site called Little Discoverers: Big Fun With Science, Math and More. In one game, little fingers manipulate a virtual spring to launch pieces of trash into Oscar the Grouch's trash can, a Sesame Street version of Angry Birds.

What the hell was the Nokia board thinking?

The New York Times has that quote:

In a statement, Risto Siilasmaa, chairman of Nokia’s board and Nokia’s interim chief executive, said that “the deal offers future opportunities for many Nokia employees as part of a company with the strategy, financial resources and determination to succeed in the mobile space.”

In case you missed it in all that PR-talk, the Nokia board believes that Microsoft has the strategy to succeed in the mobile space, despite the fact that Microsoft's failed strategy and partnership with Nokia is what caused Nokia's failure. In other words, he's been asleep for the last three years.

A better question is "what was Microsoft thinking?" Nokia makes good hardware, but so does Microsoft. What Microsoft needs in the mobile space is a good operating system, which Nokia had until Microsoft convinced it to supplant it with Windows. Nokia's not failing because it didn't make a good phone, it's failing because it filled good hardware with Microsoft's software. Now Microsoft is buying a company allegedly for its expertise in cramming poor MS software into good hardware? It doesn't make any sense. If your head doesn't hurt yet, wait for the claims that Microsoft only bought Nokia to get Elop back to take a leaf out of Apple's playbook, buying next to get Jobs back.

A brief history of Stephen Elop:
-CIO of Boston Chicken (Boston Market) when it filed for bankruptcy protection and left that year. The company was bought by McDonald's for its real estate holdings two years later.
-CEO of Macromedia, acquired by Adobe three months after he took the job.
-Worked at Adobe for a year, resigned.
-Worked at Juniper for a year, resigned.
-Worked at Microsoft for two years
-Named CEO of Nokia three years ago this month, big contribution was throwing out in-house work and betting the company on Windows mobile, and ultimately oversees the sale of the company to Microsoft.
-Next up: Back at Microsoft, poised as the only act who could possibly top Ballmer as worst CEO ever. For the record, he doesn't throw chairs... he throws phones. "I can take care of that for you right here. It's gone!" Remember those words when Windows is the next "burning platform." The problem is... Elop doesn't have anyone to sell Microsoft to...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/explaining-twerking-to-your-parents.html?_r=0

why are we talking about this when we should be talking about the woman who was the first person to swim from cuba to US? 52 hours and she's 64 years old!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/sports/nyad-completes-cuba-to-florida-swim.html?hp

Oh, don't get me wrong: the US 'intelligence community' is rotten to the core, as are its major corporate collaborators, and some theoretically not intelligence agencies that have taken on the ugly trappings of one (Is there any aspect of the 'war on drugs' that hasn't been a total clusterfuck for America and Americans, much less some of the poor bastards in countries we don't even pretend to care about?) are in the same boat. The FBI, of course, never really had a non-dangerously-corrupt-and-abusive period in its entire history, so it's harder to say that it has 'rotted' in any meaningful way.

However, I'm hard pressed to think of any countries where pissing off the clandestine services is legal, or where they don't treat legal restraint as an inconvenience to be avoided (at best, some lucky countries may simply have relatively vestigial and underdeveloped ones); and I'm hard pressed to think of countries that don't also have additional restrictions on speech (whether it be Britain's ghastly libel laws, 'hate speech', being a nazi, assorted vague 'materials contrary to social order and security' things, blasphemy/offending religious sentiments restrictions, 'gay propaganda', etc, etc.) that the US doesn't have.

We (among others) need to shoot a lot of spooks if we want to even pretend at rule of law, representative democracy, or other cute concepts; but we have atypically narrow restrictions outside of that context.

The most important "support of the community" you can have are parents with higher incomes. Everything about school is easier if your home life is economically stable. The impact of economic class is much more important than any other type of involvement; there was a good class breakdown in the NYT a few years ago. Teacher quality and parent involvement in studies all pales in comparison to just being in a higher class neighborhood. The heavy variation in school quality in the US is more due to the massive wealth inequality of the country than anything else.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/the-yosemite-rim-fire-in-the-context-of-forest-policy-ecology-and-climate-change/

Just in case anyone wants to actually, you know, read the article rather than being taken to a login screen.

Jason DeParle has been writing about poverty in the U.S. for years and knows far more about it than you or I.

None of the 3 have professional jobs, so if the purpose of education is to improve your financial prospects, their huge investment was a waste. Melissa might or might not get a professional job when she graduates, but the employment market in the U.S. is the worst it's been since the 1929 depression. So your reason for optimism is that she might finally get a good job. Or she might not.

I don't think you can brush off $44,000 (or $61,000) of debt. That's an impossible burden for somebody who's making $8.50 an hour, and it's increasing with interest and fees. It's like being an indentured servant. In return for their efforts and expenses, they're financially worse off, not better off.

If high school advisers want to be honest, they have to tell bright working class kids that if you go to college, work hard, and spend a lot of money, it's more likely than not that you'll wind up in debt, you won't get a degree, and you won't get a professional job either.

It wasn't always like that. In 1970, you could graduate a state university with no debt, get married, and buy a house for a $50,000 mortgage (in today's money). Now you graduate college with that much in education debt, without the house. In 1970, almost everyone who graduated college could get a professional job, such as teaching. Now those jobs are gone.

If you look at the big picture, and the statistics, this is typical, not exceptional. Contrary to myth, there is very little social mobility in the U.S. Compared to other developed countries in the world, we're at the bottom, with the U.K. and Brazil. There's also more inequality in the U.S. People used to come to America for opportunity. Now working-class kids like this would have more opportunity if they could emigrate to a European country. You have to be making at least $100,000 a year before you're better off being an American.

In most European countries, college tuition is free, or almost free. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/world/europe/Germany-Backtracks-on-Tuition.html Germany Backtracks on Tuition, By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE, New York Times, August 25, 2013

We used to have the same situation in the U.S. City College of New York was free, and the state university systems were almost free. They gave stipends to cover living expenses, like the Europeans do. You had the children of tailors going to school with the children of bankers. The result was the greatest scientific and economic development the world has ever seen. Now the no-taxes-for-us-rich people have destroyed that system.

Relating it back to the original story, and to your point that this is a success -- the system is placing an impossible burden on working-class kids like this. They're supposed to figure out this enormously complicated system, which as it turns out was too complicated for them to figure out. Rich kids and their parents use financial advisers. Part of the problem, as the Science magazine article says, is that one burden of poverty is that it makes it difficult for people to make economic decisions like this. Professionals who work with poor people always observe that their daily life is more difficult. It's a burden just to cash a pay check. It's a burden to buy school supplies. It's a burden to buy groceries.

The American system is in trouble. We have to recognize that and change it, not try to excuse it. Let's do what worked well before.

Speaking of personal responsibility, they're holding him personally responsible for his actions.

...and we certainly can't have that! It undermines the whole basis of corporate capitalism.

This guy is an asshole. Anyone who bottles and resells tap water has a place in the special hell. Anyone who profits from exploiting the name of a great thinker ("Bucky"balls?) has a place in the special hell. He dissolved the company in order to avoid paying for the recall. Special hell.

Some more neutral coverage than the WSJ's:

• ABA Journal: Dangerous desk toy Buckyballs voluntarily recalled by retailers
• ABA Journal: Should this toy be saved?
• NYT: For Buckyballs Toys, Child Safety Is a Growing Issue

Depends what you mean by "choice". Of course nobody will choose poor if given a magical choice between being rich and being poor. But give them a choice of getting a minimum wage paying job, working long hours, giving up booze, drugs and cigarettes, living responsibly and saving small amounts of money on the side while looking for a course at a community college to improve their skills, studying at night while working during the day, then getting a better paying job and working hard at it. While you are right about mental issues being a major cause of homelessness, there are other issues involved and those include choices that they have made daily throughout their life, such as choosing an easy short term option (getting high) or hard (waking up early and going to a shitty job day after day).

That's a right-wing fantasy used to justify the present state of inequality by claiming that people can get ahead if they really try hard. Psychologists call that the "just universe fallacy." Here's a reporter who actually went out and found the facts (my summary; click on the link for the full story). And the Science magazine report fits right in with this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html
For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
By JASON DePARLE
Published: December 22, 2012
3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality.”
"Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net."
  Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. She’s working in her boyfriend’s furniture store for $8.50 an hour.
  Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans.
  Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist.
Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon,

Look at our Vice President. I guess winning the election is tantamount to a pardon.

I think the underlying concerns are more about capital-biased technological change than of the technological merits of increased automation.

What they did actually worked to a large degree and things don't seem so bad unless your a Anne Rand level Libertarian.

Why is the EPA still pushing through new regulations? Why is it finding novel and unconstitutional ways to enforce its regulations?

The couple, Chantell and Michael Sackett, had started to fill the home site with dirt and gravel to prepare for construction. But the EPA intervened, announcing that the property was a regulated wetland. Agency officials ordered the couple to restore the land to its original state or face up to $75,000 a day in fines.

The Sacketts disputed the EPA's wetland designation and filed a lawsuit to litigate the issue in federal court.

The EPA argued that the Sacketts' lawsuit must be dismissed because the EPA's Clean Water Act compliance order did not amount to final agency action.

In other words, the EPA claimed that the plaintiff's didn't have standing to sue the EPA even though they were being fined by the EPA $75,000 a day if they didn't comply with costly reversal of their construction efforts. One doesn't have to be an Objectivist to think that's very unfair.

The thing here is that the EPA pretty much fixed the problems that led to its creation. Yet it's still growing. It should be like a fire department where it's funded a fixed amount to do a set job and doesn't keep enlarging itself to do more and control more.

And the EPA is far from alone in this mission creep. The NSA is another fine example which has extended itself to the point where it's eavesdropping on the entire world. A little while back in the Fast and Furious scandal the ATF was equipping the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico with high quality US firearms under the pretext of trying to stop gun smuggling. And it appears that such guns were found at crime scenes involving more than 200 murder victims in Mexico and the US.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/us/uut-and-uup-add-their-atomic-mass-to-periodic-table.html?src=pm hinted at
''It's just incredibly exciting. It seems to open up the possibility of synthesizing more elements beyond this.'' and
''Scientifically, just for the pure science of it, wouldn't you like to know just how many chemical elements there are?''
As with other research we might get better nuclear weapons and something like household smoke detectors or win big with the next elements?

Your post is an example of confirmation bias, you're only seeing what you want to see. The fact is the situation is far less straightforward than your post implies:

"2. December, FSA rebels posted Youtube videos of home made chemical agents killing rabbits."

Can't say I've ever heard about this but what exactly does it prove? Simply that some rebels were experimenting with chemical weapons along with all the other home made weapons they've created? Great, but it's no proof of usage in actual combat or even effectiveness of chemicals against humans.

"3. December, German hacker broke into a UK military contractors email and found messages stating roughly the US and UK are paying enormous funds for us to sneak CWs into Syria, use a CW shell from Libya of Russian make similar to what Assad would have, and blow it up. Experts have determined that the emails look to be legit."

I've encountered this before though afaik it was a Malaysian hacker not that it makes a difference either way. I don't think "experts" can determine anything much, an e-mail is so trivially possible to make look legit it's meaningless, all they can really say is that there were no mistakes made in making it look legit, but seeing as a simple checklist is enough to avoid that then I don't know that it matters. Even taking the assumption that it was legit then it's not a smoking gun because it provides no verifiable evidence that anything concrete ever came of it.

"4. February chemical weapons were claimed to be used. The UN determined in March that it was the FSA using these weapons. Interestingly, the US claims contrary to the UN without evidence. Of course the war drum banging was minimized by media, perhaps too close to the emails suggesting false flag?"

This particular comment is painfully one-sided. The UN didn't determine anything. Russia, Assad's close ally made the claim that they had irrefutable proof that the FSA had used chemical weapons in response to evidence provided by the US and others (including independent organisations such as human rights and medical charities) that the Syrian military had used chemical weapons. Effectively it was a he-said she-said, but most definitely wasn't the one-sided no-doubt about it FSA only used chemical weapons scenario you're claiming. At best if reports are all assumed to be true then both sides made small-scale usage of chemical weapons though the problem is the Russian evidence is least credible because it could only come from one source, the Assad regime itself, and was not backed by independent third party sources.

"5. March, Military.com reported that FSA rebels were caught attempting to transport chemical weapons through the Turkish border into Syria."

Again, quite possibly true and a big deal, but transport of weapons isn't equivalent to use of weapons. Just to highlight why this is the case then consider that the Assad regime has been in control of a stockpile of chemical weapons for decades and it's pretty clear that up until recently that demonstrates no evidence that they've used them. I guess at best your point is an attempt to build the case that they had access to them so they could potentially have used them.

"8/20 videos start being uploaded to Youtube showing victims of CWs. Date stamps put many of these videos ahead of the reported attack by at least 12 hours."

This has firmly been debunked as idiots getting confused by time zones:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/confused-by-how-youtube-assigns-dates-russians-cite-false-claim-on-syria-videos/?_r=0

Now contrast and compare this to the evidence for the latest chemical attack:

1) The munitions used in the attack were launched into the region from a firmly Syrian military held area

2) There is no evidence the rebels have access to any type of weaponry which can launch the type of munitions in question

Actually, considering tests such as this where chimps will rationalize away useless steps while human children will follow instructions, the chimps could be considered 'smarter' but 'education' the difference.

The NYT also published an Op-Ed today entitled Bomb Syria, Even if It Is Illegal. I think it's quite easy to imagine some nationalist Syrian hackers targeting the site. That seems far more likely than some dark government conspiracy. Many major international players are already signalling support for the US bombing Syria. Why would Obama fake a minor hack against some newspaper? What would he have to gain? The downside if caught seems much, much greater than the tiny potential upside.

Clicking a link on their home page attempts to take you here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/business/media/hacking-attack-is-suspected-on-times-web-site.html
But that won't work, so you want to change it to:
http://170.149.168.130/2013/08/28/business/media/hacking-attack-is-suspected-on-times-web-site.html

The CSS is still pointing to nytimes.com, so the page will look funny, but at least you can read it.

They spent the next year using their network of reporters (many of whom did speak Arabic and Farsi) interviewing people around the world trying to figure out why they hated us. .... One of the themes that kept coming up again was Israel. ... The way to protect our country is to do real intelligence, find out what the rest of the world is thinking, and go after the basic causes.

Al Qaida has long been attacking the Saudi government with the goal of replacing it with a religious government that will rule according to their principles. The Saudi government is not a supporter of Israel. Al Qaida has important roots in Egypt where one of its pre-al Qaida components was attacking the government to try to replace it with a religious government that would rule according to their strict version of Islam, and al Qaida itself continues that work today. Egypt did sign a peace treaty with Israel, but I don't think you can call them a big supporter of Israel. Al Qaida is active in Yemen where it is trying to overthrow the government to replace it with a religious government that will rule according to their principles. Yemen is not a supporter of Israel. Al Qaida sent many people to Iraq, and recruited man locals to fight the government and try to establish a religious government that would rule according to their principles. Iraq is not a big supporter of Israel. By now you should be discerning a pattern.

Al Qaida's primary goal has little to do with Israel. Al Qaida actually came to the anti-Israel cause very late, and it is a peripheral goal to them. Their main objective is to replace the governments in Muslim countries with religious governments that rule according to their principles - strict Sharia law with their interpretation, restore the Islamic Caliphate government that was dissolved in 1924 with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, continue with the long interrupted Muslim conquest of the world until all countries are ruled by Islamic governments that they approve of, and the world's peoples turn to Islam.

When Bin Laden wrote his letter to America he made a series of demands. The first one: convert to Islam. He followed that with demands to replace the Constitution with Sharia law, and begin behaving according to Islamic law (no alcohol, no drugs, no pornography, no blasphemy, etc., etc., etc.). This is consistent with al Qaida's long range goal. Once again, Israel has nothing to do with that.

The correct information regarding al Qaida's goals has been available for more than 11 years, and it has been 17 years since Bin Laden issued his original fatwa, his declaration of war, at the start of the conflict. Despite this you advocate intensive research to figure out what is already known, and then derive the wrong answer, blaming it on Israel. The only way I can see that happening is that the correct answer does not agree with your stated liberal politics. That is a European problem as well.

I'm afraid you are going to have more disappointments in the future since various Muslim and Palestinian groups are ready for peace, just not with Israel, the Jewish state - ever. They fundamentally reject Israel's right to exist at all. They do not accept the state of Israel in any form, nor do they accept Israel's stewardship of Jerusalem, the only possible site for the Jewish temple, and the current site of the third holiest site in Islam. Conflict in some form is practically guaranteed to endure.

The fact that the Palestinians and Israel have unsettled differences is no excuse to accept aggression by al Qaida.

As Bruce Schneier says, you don't find a needle in a haystack by piling on more hay.

With all due respect, Bruce is not an oracle, he is serving in this case a

I suppose you can take it as confirmation of other research that American production is flat. Meaning that there isn't a lot of geographic variation (except in agriculture) in what people do in different states.

But then, even at the end of his post, Krugman concedes that there's not much point to the analysis.

Wow, that was a tortured vortex. I was losing track of which puppet hand had grabbed the microphone, or if it was just one especially wishy-washy devil's advocate.

If the bar is bad faith, we've got a problem, commonly known as Hanlon's razor:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The party being sued just needs to slit their own throat with Hanlon's razor (duh I'm stoopid) and your case melts away. Unless it takes confessing to a level of stupidity sufficient to get the other party's lawyer disbarred. Then things get interesting.

However, I don't think Hanlon's razor properly belongs in the court room in the first place, where it would more likely be the other way around: never attribute to stupidity, faulty memory, or the dog eating your homework what can adequately be explained by malice, tactical dithering, and premeditation. The line between culpability and incompetence in the courtroom is more gerrymandered than FLA. 5.

Imbalance of Power

By comparison, the dividing line between pornography and naked flesh seemed so obvious that some judge muttered to himself absent-mindedly "I know it when I see it". I suspect that same judge would give his right arm to be able to reliably discern when the defendant protests too much about his own imbecility.

It's an extremely tricky business to write laws which boil down to where having a clue self-incriminates. It's pretty easy to flush clue down the toilet for the duration.

In my opinion, a standard of abuse needs to be set such that ignorance of the law is no excuse, reducing the scope of honest error to where the nuance of the law itself is hark to grok as applied to the relevant circumstance.

Wikipedia informs me of N.C. 12 that `The Wall Street Journal called the district "political pornography."` Note that Democrats holding a huge majority in one seat benefits the Republicans in every other seat they win by a narrow margin.

But your honour, my hand slipped!

Do have medical records to show that you've sought treatment for this dangerous condition?

Uh, no. It only happened just that once.

Fascinating. I've heard that three times already this morning. What I have here (pulls out Hanlon's razor) is a very sharp and heavy blade which you shall hold above your own head for ten minutes. If it slips out of your fingers during that interval, you will receive my sincere apology and a favourable verdict to go along with your stitches.

I call BullShit
United's Pension Debacle

On Tuesday, when it received a federal bankruptcy court's permission to terminate its pension plans, United Airlines became the biggest pension defaulter in the history of corporate America. Analysts fear that Delta may also default, as well as other ailing airlines, followed by auto parts companies and perhaps even, in five years or so, the carmakers themselves.

When the court's decision is finalized, United will unload $6.6 billion of obligations onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that insures corporate pensions. Some of the 134,000 employees and retirees of United will see little change in their retirement payouts because the government insures a big chunk of promised benefits - up to $45,614 this year for someone retiring at age 65. But for others, especially pilots, who typically accumulate six-figure pensions and must retire at age 60, the cuts will be draconian.

Private pension plans have reached a record level of underfunding. As reported here, companies in Standard & Poor’s 500 collectively reported that at the end of their most recent fiscal years, their pension plans had obligations of $1.68 trillion and assets of just $1.32 trillion. General Electric's pensions are underfunded by over $20 billion. AT&T, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin all have pension plans that are underfunded by over $10 billion. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pensions, has a deficit of over $30 billion. The PBGC attributes its shortfall to its inability to charge private employers adequate premiums for insuring pensions. When a private pension plan goes bust there's no guarantee that workers will get anywhere near what they had been promised. The PBGC ensures a maximum of $45,000 a year in benefits for those who retired at 65, but considerably less for those who retired younger. The PBGC's maximum coverage for those who retire at 60 is $28,000. It's not too hard to find instances of retirees seeing their pensions falling by 50% when the company funding them goes bankrupt.

The retired general who investigated whether anyone had been harmed by the leaks said that he believed people were harmed by the disclosures but could not find and furnish a name. Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/us/in-sentencing-us-tries-to-prove-harm-by-manning.html?_r=0

Seems awesome till you consider what's been going on with education in the US. Textbooks are a lot harder to change than electronic media. I know LU isn't in Texas, but Florida is almost just as bad. If you can rewrite a cultures history, or erase it, you can make up your own and a few generations later nobody will remember a thing... like the Constitution.

"Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathersâ(TM) commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."[1]

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

No, John Metzger

How are the US public in any way confused?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/2011-ruling-found-an-nsa-program-unconstitutional.html?_r=0
Selling expensive useless encryption is not "friction".

One notable difference between a casino and the stock market is that in the stock market, the odds are in the your favor.

Not any more, for 3 reasons:
1. There is now the equivalent of the House on the stock markets, in the form a few banks who control the majority of assets.
2. The largest investment banks can and do rig almost everything, from International interest rates to aluminum commodity pricing to municipal bonds.
3. HFT combined with premiums paid for slightly early releases of information mean that by the time an ordinary investor has heard about a serious problem in one of their holdings, the damage is already done because someone else found out and reacted to it 2 seconds earlier. In other words, the true price of your assets is based on information you can't see.

From your link: "None of the windows at Halden have bars"

That's not a remotely typical prison.

The prisoners make their own meals. In a typical prison, that would result in 125 dead of stab wounds.

It's not that different from most Norwegian prisons - it just happens to be the newest one. Norway puts a huge effort into rehabilitation, and as a result the recidivism rate is 20-30% - less than half of what it is in the UK, to give one example.

While one part of me doesn't want prison to be to comfortable and cushy, intellectually I prefer this as it makes most ex-cons a valuable part of society afterwards and they don't go back to prison.

To be fair, on Slashdot you can make use of the moderating system and filter out low-scored comments. Most news sites (like WaPo) have no such functionality, and moderation is extremely rare, so really, it's not so much Slashdot that should be disabling comments, it's Reuters (OP), NYT and the other "traditional" media establishments that haven't yet implemented effective moderating systems that should be following WaPo's lead.

Yeah, it was Obama, all by himself, and Bush originated the the very first FUD strategy. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were never enacted, nor was any of it kept on as 50 USC sections 21-24. Oh, and lest we not forget, Paul Wolfowitz never wrote a white paper known as the Defense Policy Guidance, and it was never published by the NY Times, not even on March 8, 1992.

I doubt its about cleaning up the comments section.

AOL, the parent company of HuffPo, is currently refocusing its business on driving ad sales.

In line with its ambitions to become a platform for live broadcasting and programming, the company also said that it had acquired Adap.tv, a video advertising company that allows purchases across the Internet and on television. The cost was $405 million.

“AOL is a leader in online video, and the combination of AOL and Adap.tv will create the leading video platform in the industry,” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “The Adap.tv founders and team are on a mission to make advertising as easy as e-commerce, and the two companies together will aggressively pursue that vision.”

It's no secret that HuffPo is doing quite badly at selling ads.

When The Huffington Post’s weekly iPad magazine Huffington transitioned from a pay model to free last August, advertising was intended to sustain the tablet-native title, as consumers had resisted paying for it.

Almost a year postlaunch, it looks like advertisers are rejecting it, too.

A review of six recent issues found just one sponsor, for United Healthcare. Most issues feature a couple of promotions for HuffPost apps but no outside ads.

This part is the speculation. HuffPo has an audience, but can't sell ads. What is it that will bring advertisers to them? Targeted ads. But you can only target your ads if you know who is reading your page. How do you then convince your audience to register instead of browsing anonymously? By removing anonymous posting.

Plausible?

The last scary thought I shall leave with. What if J Edgar Hoover had the NSA's ability to spy on people?

I'm not sure why you're assuming that Robert Mueller is any better. Maybe because he's better at secrecy and intimidation? Think about this for a minute: After Hoover's death, when all the stuff he did came out, Congress passed a law limiting the term of any FBI director to 10 years. Yet, recently, the law was ignored and Mueller's term extended Why? Well the excuse was that it was required for "continuity", but, is that really credible coming from a Democratically-controlled Senate debating the illegal extension of term for a Bush appointee. How?

During one of the recent hearings on spying, Holder was asked if the NSA was also tapping into private phone calls and emails of members of Congress. He basically refused to answer the question, offering to "address that in a different forum." In secret, in other words. And one NSA whistle blower mentioned how the program even targeted a certain senate candidate from Illinois (yep, that one).

So we may now be in an even worse position, with a J. Edgar Hoover type leading the FBI, and with much better technology and a greatly expanded police and surveillance state.