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Whenever these stories come out, I am uncomfortably reminded of conservative constitution-worship. "As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions."

Sure... throw the constitution over board to gain "fiscal stability". Somehow reminds me Hitler's ascension to power.

To excerpt from a post at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4113917&cid=44632619 I suggest it serves these people:

Child prostitution -SOMEONE at Dyncorp and the US government for employing them to do so.
Blackmail -SOMEONE at Pfizer.
Smuggling -SOMEONE at Chevron.
Espionage Hilary Clinton and the State department.
Perjury - James Clapper. Illegal warrantless espionage against US citizens on US soil. And no, FISA is not looking over their shoulder.

More generally? The kind who think, "Screw the world, got mine, getting more." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but-to-banks-pure-gold.html

Whenever these stories come out, I am uncomfortably reminded of conservative constitution-worship. "As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions."

William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre (murder of 304 civilians) server 3 1/2 years house arrest.

Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years, and must server 1/3 to get parole which they will of course deny him.

President Obama authorized the killing of Americans without trial, something illegal under the very rules of the U.S. (constitution)

One of those Americans killed was a 16 YEAR OLD BOY who was murdered by his own government, without trial.

The United States no longer pretends to be the land of the free, it now openly favors corporations (Apple given presidential override of import ban), rich individuals and political cronies.

Today is a very sad day. The truth is the enemy, justice inconvenient, and money/power the one true ruler of this country.

Considering today news is breaking about the NSA monitoring 75% of all domestic US internet traffic, and logging all domestic emails, as well as their plans for a national facial recognition system (as in live video feeds), it seems obvious to me that they sentenced him today and announced it in this way in an effort to distract us from what really matters.

Sources: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-has-access-75-percent-us-internet-traffic-says-wsj-6C10967780
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/us/facial-scanning-is-making-gains-in-surveillance.html?_r=0

The same things a national security letter could, and almost certainly did, demand from Groklaw.

(A) All emails
(B) All account information for every account
(C) IP-addresses and any other data on hand that can be used to track ever Slashdot user
(D) to install a surveillance box on the network to scan and log every packet of everyone who views Slashdot (regardless of whether they post)

The would probably also demand (E) to copy the entire database of all posts by every user and all other publicly available information. Category E is stuff anyone can get merely by scanning the site over the internet, but doubtless they'd take it because they can and because it saves them a lot of work trying to crawl the entire website themselves.

And based on what happened with TOR recently, and based on the available information on the Lavabit situation, it seems very possible the government has moved beyond "passive listening" and has moved into the realm of forcing active code onto websites to attack/subvert visitors' machines. As I understand it, Lavabit was set up in such a way that the Lavabit servers literally didn't have access to the information the government would need to access the mails... that the only way the government could obtain useful information would be to hijack the Lavasoft servers and use them to actively extract the required information from visitors.

Note that the government has already beenhacking into cellphones and car ONSTAR type systems to turn on the microphones an use them as "roving wiretaps". Those aren't even National Security Letter level stuff, those are court cases of regular law enforcement doing it.

So yeah, no big shocker if they're demanding websites host attack code to trace people who's true IP address is hidden behind TOR or a proxy or otherwise hard to trace.

-

Add to diet sleep, stress, electric lightning, gut bacterial unbalance, air conditioning, popular alcoholic beberages (because in any meeting you must have a beer, or better yet, drink a lot, else you are an outsider), lack of exercise, and several etcs. Most of that is under your control, but who controls you? Tried to go to a supermarket?

That food corporations are more interested in selling addictive food than of your health don't help a lot.

Metal manipulation by Goldman Sach is why metals cost so much.

This is offtopic, but the source article is a longish, but really good read:
A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold

Banks: not only too big to fail, but also too big to be controlled, and the main reason for all large scale economic troubles.

It didn't work to well for the "Happy Birthday" song (which is listed as a Folk Song on Wikipedia): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/nyregion/lawsuit-aims-to-strip-happy-birthday-to-you-of-its-copyright.html?_r=0

the privacy question is far more mature than in the USA. It's not a government vs peoples fight,

Yeah, Switzerland is the mature one, what with all your banning of minarets. The rest of our republics certainly have their faults, but rarely can they be compared unfavourably to a racist homeowners association.

But back to the topic. An important thing to note is that in Switzerland there is a very large and much more obvious commercial interest in privacy protection: the banking secret. Those who find it most important to keep their affairs secret, and can afford it, are already banking in Panama, and Luxembrah, and yes, Switzerland. Thanks to those guys, your privacy matters more, as it is associated with a powerful and historic interest which the government will find much harder to fight. As for the rest of the world, we had to forget about about our banking secrecy some years ago already. Much as today, seven years ago the press exposed a secret government program that was scrutinising our private matters under the guise of tracking terrorists. And much as it happened then, this NYT editorial seems appropriate.

Not good: China Takes Aim at Western Ideas

You spoken too soon.

In the NYT article about Poitras and Greenwald's initial contact with Snowden there is mention of the use of, "air gapped" computers. At first it struck me as odd, but knowing that everything transmitted over the internet is tracked and that MAC addresses can reasonably be used to identify specific hardware, it no longer qualifies as paranoid to suspect that nearly any computer that's ever passed an IP packet could be singled out by some claiming to have been sent by the government just to help you.

The Guardian article indicates that the lack of a constitution renders this type of situation something from which UK subjects have little protection, implying that you're safer in the US. Apparently after Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, the new & improved FISA courts and the I Have a Drone program, anyone who believes they are protected by a 225 year-old historical work might be forced to seek medical advice for their own personal intracranial air gap.

Namely, from the follow-up article: "Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden." In the helpful clarification from Wonkette, "he was actively participating in transporting secret documents that were stolen, and which it is illegal for him to possess." On a trip paid for by The Guardian. So, maybe not quite as innocent a bystander as he initally makes it seem. But that was probably the point, and now British politicians are getting hammered for the abuse of power he baited them into. Well played!

Are you a complete idiot? All of this was known or guessed from the start. No one ever claimed he wasn't helping his journalist partner, the whole point is that even if all that you say is true, where is the connection to terrorism? You know, the direct association with terrorist acts that is required by the statute that he was detained under? It appears that all he was questioned about had to do with the Snowden affair. Even if you think Snowden was guilty of espionage, that is not terrorism! And helping to publish the leaked details, even if they are supposed to be secret, is not even remotely terrorism. It's pretty clear that the law in question was abused in order to send some kind of message, probably at the behest of the USA, despite the denials coming from Washington.

Namely, from the follow-up article:
"Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden."

In the helpful clarification from Wonkette, "he was actively participating in transporting secret documents that were stolen, and which it is illegal for him to possess." On a trip paid for by The Guardian.

So, maybe not quite as innocent a bystander as he initally makes it seem. But that was probably the point, and now British politicians are getting hammered for the abuse of power he baited them into. Well played!

"It was still a bad thing." - yes the clearance level on diplomatic gossip was low and now the press worked that aspect out.
As for you spying link vs "personal vendetta" some more info on the use of http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/asia/drone-war-in-pakistan-spurs-militants-to-deadly-reprisals.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 use of tracking chips (electronic tracking devices) for later drone strikes.

That is exactly why they are so badly needed. Not Glass, but a continuous recording device.

Several cities started pilot programs with cop-cameras, and mine was among them buying 80 cop-cams. We had a few bad cops fired, complaints against cops almost vanished, and now the city is trying to make it mandatory for all cops on duty. They provide strong evidence both to support your innocence and to support your guilt. They also provide evidence against bad cops.

Look at the New York Times article regarding the results from one city: Complaints about abuse and civil rights violations dropped by 80%, use of force dropped by 60%.

Bonus points are that the camera footage is evidence. If they are notified to keep the footage, they MUST do it and the MUST turn it over to your defense. As this type of footage grows we can demand "pics or it didn't happen". Just like the dash cams transformed traffic tickets (rate of claimed abuse plummeted, rate of fought tickets increased because there was video evidence) the same should spread to all aspects of police work. Around here it is already transforming defense lawyer's approaches because they can get unmodified views of the crime scene from every officer's point of view. (This becasuse the recordings are evidence, and any potentially exculpatory evidence must be shared with the defendant.)

I hope it takes off. If an officer says there was anything from a 'confession' of a crime or there are claims of police abuse, if there is no cop-camera footage the judge and jury should be asking, "what is this cop trying to hide?"

The Rialto PD did a real world study, with a write up in the New York Times plus a formal report by a Cambridge University Professor.

The results were overwhelming positive. Use of unnecessary force on citizens dropped. Bogus complaints against officers dropped. Time spent dealing with he-said she-said situations dropped.

Big cities should be jumping on this technology. In 2012 New York City spent 735 Million Dollars on settlements. I suspect cameras would dramatically reduce that number, both from officers being forced to be more careful but also from bogus citizen complaints being quickly dismissed with video proof.

Is Google Glass the right answer, no. It does way more than just video, and has cost and durability concerns. However personal video cameras are the answer, every cop (and probably firefighter and paramedic) should wear one.

airports like LAX and SFO are quite financially sustainable.

It's easy for them to be financially sustainable because they were built with public money. Only one airport in the USA was ever financed privately.

the highway system is only profitable because of the fuel tax

They aren't profitable. Even if gas tax funds "were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."

The "sugar high" may well be propaganda, but sugar toxicity is not. (Or if you prefer print over video, this is a pretty good summary.)

"Also a modern jet fighter is a testimony to mankind's ingenuity, not his wisdom."

Yes, including because the same technologies (including the surrounding bureaucracy) if organized differently could likely relieve the resource-related conflict that the jet fighter was invented to solve in other ways. Thus my sig and essay on the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. Or, as Isaac Asimov had one politician character (Salvor Hardin) say in "Foundation" series, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". Or Einstein's point on the need to change our way of thinking to adapt to the change from high technology (unleashing the atom especially, but it applies generally). Or Bucky Fuller's words about how whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.

The fact that the US missions to the moon started by President Kennedy were, as you say, funded mainly to prove a military point about ICBMs by the US is sadly a big part of why significant further work on space settlement never happened...
From: http://whitehousetapes.net/clip/john-kennedy-james-webb-robert-seamans-hugh-dryden-jerome-wiesner-fly-me-moon
"President Kennedy: So obviously you wouldn't put it on that priority except for the defense implication..."

Although I guess one could argue some clever engineers took advantage of the military-oriented political dynamic to do something more worthwhile for humanity? While playing catch-up to the Russians who stated explicitely they wanted to build space settlements?

Still, as US$30 a watt, OTEC is going to have trouble competing with less than US$1 a watt solar panels (and falling). Sounds like OTEC's big economic benefit may be improving fishing harvests.

I was under 10 when the moon landings happened, so maybe just a little too young to understand the significance of the initial landing. Somehow, I can't say that affected me as much as seeing sci-fi movies like "Silent Running" though, or various other TV programs (Space 1999, Thunderbirds, Star Trek) even though some of those were no doubt inspired by the spirit of the times. James P. Hogan's scifi novels set in space habitats or huge space ships were a huge inspiration as well (like voyage from yesteryear, two faces of tomorrow).

These days, as the USA descends into what seems to be self-destructive madness as it becomes an obese unhealthy unequal fearful addicted surveillance state, putting cameras in living rooms instead of on the Moon, profiling potential troublemakers to imprison them instead of help them be contributing engineers or whatever, and letting its physical, moral, health, and political infrastructure decay for ideological neoconservative/neoliberal reasons, these days it's kind of hard to remember there was a time that both young kids and politicians in USA seriously aspired to walk on other planets whatever the political justification... It's even hard to remember there was a time when half of Congress passed something like a "basic income" law under Nixon (passed the House, but failed in the Senate in part because some thought it not big enough), or even just that we aspired politically to have bridges and water mains and roads everywhere that were in good shape.

More on China vs. the USA:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=0
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today."

Still, to be optimistic, the world is waking up globally, including via the internet, and it is overall becoming wealthier and healthier (see Hans Rosling), so the future is still in play even as the USA be

It's paraphrased, but here's a source NY Times

In my experience this is fairly typical of large corporations. They DO have a lot of dead wood, mostly in the form of bloated middle management. But unsurprisingly, those are NOT the people they fire during layoffs.

That's probably true, but I was interested to read this quote from the Cisco CEO in the nytimes article about the layoffs:

"We've got to take out middle-level management," he said. "What I'm really after is not speed of decisions but speed of implementation."

Seriously, what competent IT shop pushes out maintenance updates during peak viewing times ? Our company schedules that work for Friday nights, just in case something unexpected happens. At the very least they should have saved the update until the late evening shift.

The NY Times doesn't sound like they are telling the entire truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/business/media/new-york-times-web-site-returns-after-hours-offline.html?_r=0

Submitter here.

The NYT themselves claims they weren't hacked. This probably would have been a better choice for the first link than the humor column I originally chose. This non-attack-related downtime cause is elaborated on further in this article posted to zdnet (thx trb).

On the other hand, Fox Business is also citing an unnamed source in saying it was a cyber attack. On the other hand, an unnamed source in a burlap sack is worth the sack.

Thing is Jobs didn't invent stuff.

Seriously?!?! contrary to some popular opinion, the man was a prolific inventor. A quick USPTO search will cure that notion.

The German economy is a ticking time bomb due to sub replacement birth rates and a unaccommodating immigration policy coupled with negative attitudes towards Muslim immigrants.

It's also well-known that Germany's long term care system is unsustainable due to the demographic problem.

A recent census shocked German politicians when it showed a population 1.5 millions smaller than expected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/world/europe/census-shows-new-drop-in-germanys-population.html?_r=0

Worse - you don't bring a paintball gun to a tactical nuclear weapons fight. Sure, us little guys can buy gizmos and change habits but if you have the power of any major government after your ass, you're toast. Even sophisticated people like Laura Poitras are hassled to the point of having to leave the country.

Unless you've got some major new technology that can defeat the status quo, the only answer is to fight them at the ballot box.

Goodluckwiththat.

in an inverted fashion from how Nate Silver surfaced way back in 08 that under-representing cell-phone-only voters in polls under- represented the young, it'd seem that using twitter as a representative sampling will under-represent the old - e.g. those who vote more than the young do? http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/obamas-lead-looks-stronger-in-polls-that-include-cellphones/?_r=0

a better question is, why do so many gays (and others) want so very badly to be in a place where they are so clearly not wanted and appreciated?

It could be due to the fact that they were Scouts when they were younger and want to carry on the tradition. In many areas the Boy Scouts are the only organization that offers outdoor activities. Many gay fathers would like to be a Scout Master in the troops of their children.

we would not allow a straight man to sleep in a tent in close proximity to young girls who are not his offspring because he might be a sick fuck

At coed camps adults of the opposite gender sleep near children all the time. There are female Scout Masters who are allowed to sleep in a tent in close proximity to boys; why not gay men? You are also incorrect as the Girl scouts allow male volunteers.

Q: Who can volunteer?

A: Membership is open to women and men 18 and over who accept the Girl Scout Promise and Law.

The USA health care system has some of the worst possible perverse economic disincentives. At literally no point is there a clear economic incentive for you to be healthy and taken care of.

1) Consumers have no interest in keeping costs down. They pay the same deductible no matter what happens. Unfortunately, this is only up to a point (see #4 below) but that's not going to enter casual consideration.

2) Hospitals have no interest in keeping costs down. They blatantly inflate their costs knowing that the insurance companies will only pay a fraction anyway. They also have no incentive to keep supplies costs down since they are paid "cost +" by insurance companies. They'll tend to buy whatever sponge or soap dispenser is in "the catalog".

3) Providers of supplies to hospitals have no interest in keeping their costs down. Hospitals get paid on a "cost +" basis by the insurance companies so charging $35 for that "medical grade" sponge that cost them $0.35 wholesale has 99% profit margins as its incentive.

4) Insurance companies have some incentive to keep costs down, which they generally do by axing their most expensive customers with any of the myriad of technicalities written into their eye-gouging 10 page contracts full of inverted double negatives and exceptions. A good example is somebody with a job who gets cancer. Sure, he/she may have excellent health insurance, but what about when he/she loses his/her job because they didn't show for four months while undergoing chemo therapy? Even so, the myriad of regulations in place (and a legal department that ensures that one plan can't be compared to another) provides an opaque enough service offering that customers are unable to distinguish which plan is actually "cheaper".

5) Doctors had to just about kill their mother to get through medical school, and are saddled with enough debt to make anybody contract stress-related symptoms. Since they get paid for the work they actually perform, they have every incentive to declare a medical emergency and take you under the knife, regardless of whether or not it's necessary or even beneficial. I'm not saying every doctor will give you heart surgery when you come in with a rash, but I'm not alleging something that doesn't happen. Citation 2.

The majority of bankruptcies in the United States are for medical reasons, and the majority of *those* are by people who had health insurance at the time they got sick. Anybody who says this ridiculous would-be-laughable-if-it-wasn't-true system is lying or misinformed.

Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.

There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.

Combine that statement with wait times in some places of half an hour to over 8 hours to cast a ballot, and you now have an answer for why so many people don't even bother going out to vote anymore. There aren't anywhere near enough idealistic people who'll wait in line long enough to cast votes for a "non-evil" candidate who has nearly zero chance of winning.

An aside: such astronomical wait times make the US presidential election process look about as bad as developing countries with emerging or pseudo-democracies. Except the US and its states and counties have had a few centuries to identify and fix wait-time issues, so there's zero excuses for such incompetence (or malicious intent, if the unspoken goal in some districts is disenfranchising "undesirable" voters).

This is from the memorandum in the case. There are many other accounts like this.

DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.

OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf

1. Unconstitutional Stop and Frisk

a. Leroy Downs

i. Findings of Fact

Leroy Downs is a black male resident of Staten Island in his mid-thirties. On the evening of August 20, 2008, Downs arrived home from work and, before entering his house, called a friend on his cell phone while standing in front of a chain link fence in front of his house. Downs used an earpiece connected to the phone by a cord, and held the cell phone in one hand and the black mouthpiece on the cord in the other.

Downs saw a black Crown Victoria drive past and recognized it as an unmarked police car. The car stopped, reversed, and double-parked in front of Downs’s house, at which point Downs told his friend he would call back. Two white plainclothes officers, later identified as Officers Scott Giacona and James Mahoney, left the car and approached Downs.

One officer said in an aggressive tone that it looked like Downs was smoking weed. They told him to “get the [fuck] against the fence,” then pushed him backwards until his back was against the fence. Downs did not feel free to leave.

Downs explained that he was talking on his cell phone, not smoking marijuana, that he is a drug counselor, and that he knows the captain of the 120th Precinct. Without asking permission, the officers patted down the outside of his clothing around his legs and torso, reached into his front and back pants pockets and removed their contents: a wallet, keys, and a bag of cookies from a vending machine. The officers also searched his wallet.

After the officers failed to find any contraband, they started walking back to the car. Downs asked for their badge numbers. The officers “laughed [him] off” and said he was lucky they did not lock him up. Downs said he was going to file a complaint, and one of them responded by saying, “I’m just doing my [fucking] job.” Charles Joseph, a friend of Downs who lives on the same block, witnessed the end of the stop. After the officers drove away, Downs walked to the 120th Precinct to file a complaint.

Downs told Officer Anthony Moon at the front desk that he wanted to make a complaint and described what had happened. Officer Moon said that he could not take the complaint because Downs did not have the officers’ badge numbers, and that Downs should file a complaint with the CCRB. As Downs left the station he saw the two officers who stopped him driving out of the precinct in their Crown Victoria, and he wrote down its license plate number on his hand.

Downs then returned to the station. He tried to give Officer Moon the license plate information, but Officer Moon said that he should give the information to the CCRB instead. Downs waited at the station until he saw the two officers come through the back door with two young black male suspects.

Downs pointed out the two officers to Officer Moon and asked him, “Can you get their badge numbers?” Officer Moon talked to the officers and then told Downs “maybe you can ask them.” At that point, Downs went outside again and took a picture of the license plate on the Crown Victoria, which was the same number he had written on his hand.

Eventually, Downs spoke with a supervisor, who said he would try to get the officers’ badge numbers and then call Downs. The call never came. Having spent a few hours at the station, Downs went home.

Read the memorandum in the case.

Many of those stops were on Broadway. I've walked down those very same streets many times. I'm white and I've never been stopped, even when I was walking home late at night. Black guys get stopped.

The thing that impressed me about their testimony is that they sound like really cool guys. They're black law students, medical students, teachers, social workers, etc. They're getting hassled by cops all the time, they're tired of it, and they're responding in reasonable ways. The cops are unreasonably arbitrary and rude, and according to the judge's decision, the cops repeatedly broke the law. These guys filed protests with the police department, complained to the ACLU, and finally took the cops to court. They've got balls. They're complaining that they're being singled out all the time because they're black, and if you read the court documents, they made a pretty good argument.

DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.

OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf

CICO does not work in the long term for the majority of people. Everyone who has statistics says so. The idea that it's useful is a pop culture phenomenon. Most of the weight loss in the first few months of an exercise program are water.

Both diet and exercise changes can lose fat that way for a while. Your body will fight you to return the lost weight eventually though. There's really no proof CICO works at all in the long term. There's a long list of studies debunking each angle of the problem (and how the wrong ideas spread) detailed in "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" by Gary Taubes I can't do justice to here. Data since that was published, like the 2011 Harvard study results, continue to show CICO is busted in all kinds of ways as a useful model.

Either it's constitutional or it's not. And the way I read the fourth amendment there isn't much question it's not.

I'm pretty sure that's why the judge ordered the cameras.

Several precincts around the country started wearing cameras.

When police wear cameras, complaints about civil violations go down by about 88%, overall use of force drops by about 60%

Simply knowing that their actions are being recorded is enough to make cops think twice.

Locally our police departments have cameras on them, as do various cities in Arizon, Connecticut and Texas. They were introduced in response to claims of police abuses. Cameras are cheap, the policy should be nation wide.

In my view, it should be completely mandatory. If there are claims of police abuse and the officer does not have their camera running for any reason, the officer's negligence should be an automatic win for the citizen. The video should be part of the evidence for every violation from an improper lane change to what goes on inside the police interrogation rooms. Apart from bathroom breaks and such, there are few good reasons NOT to have cops record everything they do.

Reminds me of a recent piece in the NYTimes about wells in the midwest being used for center pivot irrigation-- you know the circles of green you see from airplanes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/us/high-plains-aquifer-dwindles-hurting-farmers.html?pagewanted=1

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

There is only so long earth can sustain an exponentially growing human population.

According to the stats I've ready, your health care costs were rising exceptionally slowly. According to the New York Times, during the Bush years health care costs rose between 6.2% and 9.7% annually. Since 2008, that rate has slowed to around 3.9% (the lowest rate since the 1960s). So it looks like if your costs were rising only 1% year on year, your health care plan probably wasn't sustainable.

You actually believe Obama made that decision himself?

Well, not entirely. There's also the bipartisan lobbying by Obama's fellow USians. Despite the fact that Apple dodges most of its US tax via the Double Irish, and indirectly Apple employs 700,000 Chinese to make its gadgets (vs 43,000 in the US), it's still marketed as a "United States" corporation. So it plays on the sympathies of its "local" politicians.

But you know, a couple of hundred grand goes a long way. If Samsung had been paying as much, maybe it would have got more consideration.

Ahh, so because Obama and all other US politicians have every right to hate Apple they supposedly give them preferential treatment. You guys crack me up.

Ever considered that Samsung are criminals and get what they deserve? The fact that Apple supposedly violates Samsung's Standard Essential patents in devices with chips by one maker but not in those with chips by a different supplier? That Samsung decided not to push suits about the same SEP in the EU after Motorola got in trouble trying to pull the same FRAND shenanigans against Apple there? That Samsung's chairman had to resign because he faced jail time in the biggest corruption scandal South Korea has seen (benefitting Samsung for decades), was pardoned and return back to Samsung? That Samsung also builds most of its phones in China under worse conditions and unlike Apple actually even owns some of the factories?

You actually believe Obama made that decision himself?

Well, not entirely. There's also the bipartisan lobbying by Obama's fellow USians. Despite the fact that Apple dodges most of its US tax via the Double Irish, and indirectly Apple employs 700,000 Chinese to make its gadgets (vs 43,000 in the US), it's still marketed as a "United States" corporation. So it plays on the sympathies of its "local" politicians.

But you know, a couple of hundred grand goes a long way. If Samsung had been paying as much, maybe it would have got more consideration.

Ahh, so because Obama and all other US politicians have every right to hate Apple they supposedly give them preferential treatment. You guys crack me up.

Ever considered that Samsung are criminals and get what they deserve? The fact that Apple supposedly violates Samsung's Standard Essential patents in devices with chips by one maker but not in those with chips by a different supplier? That Samsung decided not to push suits about the same SEP in the EU after Motorola got in trouble trying to pull the same FRAND shenanigans against Apple there? That Samsung's chairman had to resign because he faced jail time in the biggest corruption scandal South Korea has seen (benefitting Samsung for decades), was pardoned and return back to Samsung? That Samsung also builds most of its phones in China under worse conditions and unlike Apple actually even owns some of the factories?

You actually believe Obama made that decision himself?

Well, not entirely. There's also the bipartisan lobbying by Obama's fellow USians. Despite the fact that Apple dodges most of its US tax via the Double Irish, and indirectly Apple employs 700,000 Chinese to make its gadgets (vs 43,000 in the US), it's still marketed as a "United States" corporation. So it plays on the sympathies of its "local" politicians.

But you know, a couple of hundred grand goes a long way. If Samsung had been paying as much, maybe it would have got more consideration.

You actually believe Obama made that decision himself?

Well, not entirely. There's also the bipartisan lobbying by Obama's fellow USians. Despite the fact that Apple dodges most of its US tax via the Double Irish, and indirectly Apple employs 700,000 Chinese to make its gadgets (vs 43,000 in the US), it's still marketed as a "United States" corporation. So it plays on the sympathies of its "local" politicians.

But you know, a couple of hundred grand goes a long way. If Samsung had been paying as much, maybe it would have got more consideration.

Not so much:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Please come out and admit ... You do know that phrase makes you sound like a pedantic twit, don't you?

This is information that is readily found by some simple Googling. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocopier#Digital_technology

As the article notes, many modern copiers operate exactly as the parent described - copying is just the linking of scanning and printing. My cheap all-in-one at home does this. And many of the larger copiers have hard drives for collating and re-printing (see: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/why-photocopiers-have-hard-drives/).

ATF uses fake drugs, big bucks to snare suspects

It's the drugs â" though non-existent â" that make that possible because federal law usually imposes tougher mandatory sentences for drugs than for guns. The more drugs the agents say are likely to be in the stash house, the longer the targets' sentence is likely to be. Conspiring to distribute 5 kilograms of cocaine usually carries a mandatory 10-year sentence â" or 20 years if the target has already been convicted of a drug crime.

That fact has not escaped judges' notice. The ATF's stings give agents "virtually unfettered ability to inflate the amount of drugs supposedly in the house and thereby obtain a greater sentence," a federal appeals court in California said in 2010. "The ease with which the government can manipulate these factors makes us wary." Still, most courts have said tough federal sentencing laws leave them powerless to grant shorter prison terms.

To the ATF, long sentences are the point. Fifteen years "is the mark," Smith said.

"You get the guy, you get him with a gun, and you can lock him up for 18 months for the gun. All you did was give this guy street creds," Smith said. "When you go in there and you stamp him out with a 15-to-life sentence, you make an impact in that community." ...
[A defendant's] lawyer, Michael Falconer, said he wouldn't be opposed to the drug-house stings if he thought the ATF could make sure they were aimed only at people who were already ripping off drug dealers. "But on some level," he said, "it's Orwellian that they have to create crime to prevent crime."

You know what the US government won't do for that same individual? Ensure they have a decent education, a basic level of care for their mental and physical health, a safe neighborhood, and a real shot at becoming a contributing member of society even though that would cost less than convicting them of thoughtcrime and throwing them in prison for fifteen years. Instead we pay for some kitted out machine gun-toting pigs to play cowboy rather than policing the streets like officers. Not incidentally, they're too chickenshit to get out of their cars in a lot of those neighborhoods. Yet they still collect their paycheck and their pension, live way out in the suburbs to avoid the desperation they help create with their cowardice, and pat themselves on the back for being heroes.

Now imagine you're an immigrant, or an Iraqi, Yemeni, Afghani, or Syrian. You're worth even less than a citizen. You're trash. You're not even a speedbump on the way to some policy goal rooted in geopolitical theories that have been dead to the rest of the world since the 80s. The kind of policy that sends a million troops and five trillion dollars to a sanctioned, isolated nation, and ends up destabilizing the entire region, massively aiding Iran, and stoking tensions between Shia and Sunni, all while avoiding a single hint of punishment for Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where all of the funding and most of the terrorists for 9/11 came from. Oh, and as a plus: where al Qaeda was unheard of before, they now have another weak state to operate from. Brilliant.

That's why the rest of the world despises the American government. It's not our freedom. It's our complete lack of principle, abject hypocrisy, and massive state violence that they hate. And with our apathetic political landscape, they're beginning to tire of Americans individually for being lazy, ignorant, wasteful, and greedy. We just sit here and take it; a nation of lolling toddlers waiting on the next innovation in fast food and reruns of Pawn Stars while our wealth is squandered in military adventurism that has killed millions of innocent people in only five decades.

PRISM is just icing on the rotting carcass that once wa

It seems the government has released the legal justification http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/10/us/politics/10obama-surveillance-documents.html?hp&_r=0
It seems to go like this
1) The Feds cannot legally read letters
2) But metadata collection is legal (by court rulings). i.e. addresses written on the letters are fair game. Stretching this, collecting metadata on calls (from:, to:, length of call) is legal. Same goes for emails.
3) But it is not easy to just collect metadata. So they collect everything and then delete all the "data" and retain metadata on every call.
4) Some section of patriot act authorized collection of even more data using secret courts when the issue is foreign intelligence or terrorism related. So as long as calls are cross border or of a suspected terrorist, the calls can be recorded.The broad scope of the warrant ensures this. Since there is a secret warrant backing this, this is not unconstitutional.
5) The same secret warrant covers compelling private businesses to monitor users etc.
6) Once intelligence is collected, FBI etc. can be notified.

Not saying all this is right, but this is my reading of the document.

Actually, the kindle paperwhite doesn't use backlight, it uses a light guide, or kind of a flattened fiber optic cable that redirects the light down onto the page.. Maybe not exactly like direct lighting but closer than led backlight. Or so they say.

It was five years ago I read about this, where they weakened a virus by actually re-coding in with the 'most pessimal' version of its genome. Same proteins, but reproduces three orders of magnitude slower.

And I haven't heard anything since. Does anyone know what's been going on with that?

They're still working on it.

You're not the only one. In fact, the Japanese are doing exactly that. May be available within 5 years.

Well, it was reported by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and others (ABC, Fox News, NPR, etc.).

As far as I can tell, all the major US news companies reported on the closings.