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It's not patronizing, you're misinterpreting. It's pointing out how awesome it is.

It's not that girls aren't interested, or that they aren't smart. It's that they are often told they can't do it. Boys, rather than girls, are constantly encouraged to go into STEM related fields.

But things are changing, and that is why it is worth mentioning. Not that long ago this wouldn't have happened. This Science Fair was actually pretty evenly split between genders, and it is a sign that gender equality in these fields is improving.

This article is a decent read and provides commentary about this.

To quote the article:

Dr. Cerf said that a common thread among the finalists was that they had explored science enthusiastically for years with the encouragement of their parents.

This. This is not common. It's becoming more common, but it still is not.

Here is a nytimes blog post also going into this. Here is one providing data about women in tech fields.

Women are starting to be more and more dominant all across the board, and this is a good thing. It is not patronizing to point out since it was pointed out not because girls are becoming smarter, but instead society is changing to let women have equal footing and everyone is more accepting. One day it won't matter, but it's not today. This shows progress.

((Hm, I'm not sure how /. views these types of gender issues. I guess I'll see))

It's not patronizing, you're misinterpreting. It's pointing out how awesome it is.

It's not that girls aren't interested, or that they aren't smart. It's that they are often told they can't do it. Boys, rather than girls, are constantly encouraged to go into STEM related fields.

But things are changing, and that is why it is worth mentioning. Not that long ago this wouldn't have happened. This Science Fair was actually pretty evenly split between genders, and it is a sign that gender equality in these fields is improving.

This article is a decent read and provides commentary about this.

To quote the article:

Dr. Cerf said that a common thread among the finalists was that they had explored science enthusiastically for years with the encouragement of their parents.

This. This is not common. It's becoming more common, but it still is not.

Here is a nytimes blog post also going into this. Here is one providing data about women in tech fields.

Women are starting to be more and more dominant all across the board, and this is a good thing. It is not patronizing to point out since it was pointed out not because girls are becoming smarter, but instead society is changing to let women have equal footing and everyone is more accepting. One day it won't matter, but it's not today. This shows progress.

((Hm, I'm not sure how /. views these types of gender issues. I guess I'll see))

It's not patronizing, you're misinterpreting. It's pointing out how awesome it is.

It's not that girls aren't interested, or that they aren't smart. It's that they are often told they can't do it. Boys, rather than girls, are constantly encouraged to go into STEM related fields.

But things are changing, and that is why it is worth mentioning. Not that long ago this wouldn't have happened. This Science Fair was actually pretty evenly split between genders, and it is a sign that gender equality in these fields is improving.

This article is a decent read and provides commentary about this.

To quote the article:

Dr. Cerf said that a common thread among the finalists was that they had explored science enthusiastically for years with the encouragement of their parents.

This. This is not common. It's becoming more common, but it still is not.

Here is a nytimes blog post also going into this. Here is one providing data about women in tech fields.

Women are starting to be more and more dominant all across the board, and this is a good thing. It is not patronizing to point out since it was pointed out not because girls are becoming smarter, but instead society is changing to let women have equal footing and everyone is more accepting. One day it won't matter, but it's not today. This shows progress.

((Hm, I'm not sure how /. views these types of gender issues. I guess I'll see))

So they should have this ready for practical applications in the consumer market right about the same time hard drive component manufacturing becomes available and, coincidentally, about the same time the hard drive industry jumps on the Thunderbolt bandwagon. Perhaps this trifecta will also coincide with the Third Coming of Steve Jobs -- with no hard drives available, almost no one using his new Thunderbolt, and no ability to store his entire movie collection on one hard drive, he figured he'd leave Earth for a while and come back when we were ready for him.

Anyone else pick up on the note in TFA about how this technology uses 96 bits to make one byte of data? I wonder if the drive sizes will be advertised in bits to make them seem even more ridiculously impressive!

Except there was a Dutch study done a few years back that showed smokers cost the health care system less money over their lifetime than non-smokers. There were several other studies that also back this up. As far as I know, there has been nothing to show otherwise since. Basically smokers get cancer and die earlier than non-smokers. Non-smoking "healthy" people tend to live much longer and get more exotic diseases which cost more to treat.

Sec. 103. Assistance Capability Requirements. (a) CAPABILITY REQUIREMENTS.â" Except as provided in subsections (b), (c), and (d) of this section and sections 108(a) and 109(b) and (d), a telecommunications carrier shall ensure that its equipment, facilities, or services that provide a customer or subscriber with the ability to originate, terminate, or direct communications are capable ofâ" (1) expeditiously isolating and enabling the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, to intercept, to the exclusion of any other communications, all wire and electronic communications carried by the carrier within a service area to or from equipment, facilities, or services of a subscriber of such carrier concurrently with their transmission to or from the subscriber's equipment, facility, or service, or at such later time as may be acceptable to the government; (2) expeditiously isolating and enabling the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, to access call-identifying information that is reasonably available to the carrierâ" A before, during, or immediately after the transmission of a wire or electronic communication (or at such later time as may be acceptable to the government); and B in a manner that allows it to be associated with the communication to which it pertains, except that, with regard to information acquired solely pursuant to the authority for pen registers and trap and trace devices (as defined in section 3127 of title 18, United States Code), such call-identifying information shall not include any information that may disclose the physical location of the subscriber (except to the extent that the location may be determined from the telephone number); (3) delivering intercepted communications and call-identifying information to the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, in a format such that they may be transmitted by means of equipment, facilities, or services procured by the government to a location other than the premises of the carrier; and

Combine that with the PATRIOT act which basically allows the government to screw with US citizens at its leisure, means that the government can basically tap your phone for any reason that it sees fit.

And the (as you would put it since you obviously don't have a clue what is going on in the world) conspiracy theory website The New York Times reported in 2010 about a bill that the US government was considering that takes CALEA further by mandating that all encryption be able to be decrypted by the government (in CALEA encryption was left up to the government to decrypt on its own) https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html

Also, according to Slashdot, quoting US laws are "lame".

Not true at all, not when you have so called 'anti-trust' legislation thrown against you by the government.

I am not saying that Kodak would have survived for sure if government wasn't attacking it earlier, but you can't say they were at fault for their business when government was heavily meddling with it.

It's similar enough with the government interfering with AT&T and T-Mobile. Gov't prevents the merger and later one or both companies will suffer enough damage that may put them out of business, but you will say: it's definitely their fault, they couldn't survive in the market. Well, how do you know that the merger would not have given them some sort of an edge that they need to survive?

You can't have government interfering with private businesses, private property with all these unconstitutional regulations and laws and taxes and counterfeiting and then say - these companies were definitely destined for failure or these entire markets were definitely destined for failure.

The only thing we know for sure is that when government interferes with market, it causes failure.

Here is what will happen to the company if it goes bankrupt: various auctions, where parts of the company will be sold, or maybe just one buy out for a fraction of the cost, then there will be restructuring, which means assets will be salvaged, jobs eliminated, maybe departments will be sold off maybe technologies will be sold off, maybe the company will be rebuilt as a different company with some income generating streams, whatever. This is the same thing that happens when they take down an old ship or a plane or a train for example - parts and materials are salvaged, whatever can be sold is then sold.

The point of this is huge - it's to allow reuse/recycle of technologies and possibly jobs (even departments). Of-course Buffet is in this business, that's why he likes death taxes, because it gives him more opportunity for business, because taxes mostly can be paid only after assets are sold, such as businesses. Romney was in that business and now Gingrich and Santorum and Huntsman are saying he is a 'bad person' for doing this? Those sell outs.

When companies go down, just like any other assets, you have to reclaim what can be reused and recycled, otherwise untold amounts of useful technology and knowledge can be lost and even existing customers will go without any support. This is useful.

Of-course Kodak was attacked by the government in an anti-trust case and that is likely why the existing company with its existing management couldn't make the company survive.

Government loves to talk about jobs. Well here are a bunch of jobs they helped to destroy.

There are some great infographics that show the debt over time and the effect Bush's unfunded programs had on the debt. I think it was even shown on the Daily Show one night. Looking at the first graphic, the white area at the bottom is what the deficit might look like if neither Bush nor the economic downturn hadn't happened. You might have a hard time seeing the white area, it's very small. Looking at the second chart, you'll noticed the single largest contributing factor to the debt is the Bush tax cuts, and it's contribution gets larger each year. In theory, if Bush had been replaced with an inanimate carbon rod, the U.S. debt would be almost half of what it stands at today.

Of course, there are other informative graphics, like this Debt as a Percentage of GDP graphic. The most important fact to note from this graphic is that the rate of growth of the debt is actually slowing. If Obama were making the problem worse, the debt should be growing faster.

There's also a pair of infographics on this article from the New York times. The first one shows the difference between Clinton's policies and Bush's policies. At the end of Clinton's (Jan 2001), the Congressional Budget office was predicting 10 years of surpluses, if Clinton's policies were continued and the economy continued to grow at the same rate. At the end of Bush's term (Jan 2009) the congressional budget office was predicting 10 years of massive deficits if Bush's policies were continued even if the economy returned to normal growth.

The second New York Times graphic shows the contributions of Bush and Obama to the debt by policy change ($5.07 trillion for Bush and $1.44 trillion for Obama). $1.136 trllion of the Obama's debt contribution is stimulus spending and stimulus tax cuts. $0.278 trillion is non-defense discretionary spending and $0.152 trillion is health reform and entitlement changes. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Bush tax cuts each were responsible for more debt by themselves than all of Obama's policies combined (projected costs across 2 terms to make the numbers comparable).

This is exactly what Eben Moglen would like to do with his FreedomBox. Basically Diaspora (plus other stuff) in a plug computer with an easy setup.

You won't vote for Ron Paul because you disagree with him on a single issue, thus you will be voting for a candidate whom you disagree with on a whole bunch other of issues, but who pays lip service to the gay marriage issue. Makes perfect sense. BTW, who is the candidate who openly supports gay marriage? It sure as heck isn't Obama unless you believe he's evolving right around the time when he's looking to get precious votes from gay donors.

Question: what is the greatest ally in the growth of Western Cultural influence in China?

Answer: The Chinese Central Government, for working so hard to make sure that Chinese Culture can't grow.

They think that controlling culture, and growing it, are compatible concepts. Culture grows when it freely crosspollinates with other world cultures. Japanese culture has freely been assimilating culture from around the world and we still recognize a distinctly Japanese culture. The game of controlling culture and "protecting" culture from "illegitimate" influences is the game of the insecure little person who believes Chinese culture is inferior. The person proud of being Chinese is freely dabbling in world culture, infusing their own thoughts, and defining Chinese culture as strong and new. Culture needs to crosspollinate to survive and grow. Sit on it, control it, keep it in a box, and your culture dies.

Look at what these ignorant insecure douchebags are doing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/world/asia/censors-pull-reins-as-china-tv-chasing-profit-gets-racy.html?pagewanted=all

I know: I can hear the typical snobby Western voice now: "I wish my government would censor the Kardashians and Jersey Shore."

And for thinking that way, you have merely identified yourself as knowing nothing about how culture actually works, and have allied yourself with authoritarianism. congratulations, you're ignorant and you're an asshole. i'd much rather have people watching jersey shore than some government entity telling them what to see and watch. and there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of empty guilty pleasures, that's a PERFECTLY VALID SEGMENT OF CULTURE. think of it as creative ferment from which greater cultural products spring forth. without the base of empty silly nonsense, the "higher" cultural products have nothing to grow out of.

for helping us build more robust Tor protocols

Oh, you thought you were going to actually kill the average Chinese citizen's desire for free access to information? You didn't understand that a stronger Tor protocol or something even better than Tor is the actual result of your escalation of the arms race?

You're pretty ignorant about basic human nature, aren't you, you authoritarian assholes.

Oh, and btw you grumpy old shitbags:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/world/asia/chinas-president-pushes-back-against-western-culture.html

The reason you are lamenting the influence of Western culture on China, and not basking in pride at the influence of Chinese culture on the West, is because YOU CENSOR EVERYTHING IN YOUR CULTURE. So Chinese Culture is hobbled and decimated. Because you think you can control, nevermind why you think you should control, Chinese thought. Instead of a great big strong tree, you have a demented little broken bush. Because of YOUR efforts at preventing Chinese culture from growing, by censoring everything, you morons

You ignorant controlling douchebags. Your average Chinese citizen understands this, why don't you you stupid old and decrepit paranoid control freaks?

It's a pretty safe bet that many Pakistanis probably feel the same way about us, and they have nukes, too. Are you going to lead the revolution against the powers that be here in the U.S.? No? Didn't think so. Perhaps you'd better be careful what you wish for, and think through the implications of what you're saying before spouting off.

Almost all the phones out there, including iPhones and Androids and even Windows phones have the ability to open a socket and leave it open until it times out (15 to 18 minutes later) to detect when there is something to send, (an email arrived, a message, etc). Apple use the Microsoft method and expanded it big time in their push technology to prevent polling by several apps for multiple email accounts, etc. Google, Apple, Microsoft all support some form of this for email, calendar, and messages.

Unfortunately, the Facebook crowd can't live with out knowing instantly when someone updates a page in some dank part of the inter-tubes, and therefore many apps poll. Bandwidth has become so reliable that nobody bothers deploying push technology if they can avoid it. People want instant weather, news, stock quotes, etc, and its just easier for these software developers to poll for this data while the phone sleeps in your pocket.

Add to this carriers tracking your phone's position without your knowledge. Several carriers sell this service to their customers for tracking family members. Then there is the whole Carrier IQ debacle. Its hard to know how much data this really pushes, but I suspect it is small.

But most of the traffic is stuff that customers specifically ask for. They want the Facebook updates. They want the weather. And they insist on using pop mail accounts that don't support IMAP Idle and therefor have to poll for messages every few minutes.

Server side services, search, SIRI, are also growing in popularity, but again this is by user request. You don't have to strut around asking what your calendar looks like instead of tapping an icon.

So I don't thing the Carriers are guilty here of much beyond offering what their customers want in terms of connectivity.

The problem here is that the Carriers realize just HOW MUCH the customers want this, and are currently in that phase of their business plan where they are milking it for all they can, pretending there is a bandwidth shortage, and applying caps and tiers to maximize revenue. I suspect it is mostly to prevent calls via Voip from being cost effective, and to hold down those people who tether an entire household to a single 3g phone. We've seen this all before. Just about the time the bitch level raises high enough to attract regulatory attention things will become free again. Just like long distance calls. Just like text messaging.

Its a passing phase. As soon as LTE is as widely deployed as 3G today, carriers will stop selling minutes and just sell you bandwidth, and you will make calls over the net. Voip and sip will go from being virtually banned to mandatory.

Then prices will come down as tiers will expand, and they can launch the next phase of artificial shortages and over charging for what ever feature is next to strike the fancy of consumers.

I find article by New York Times much easier to read: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/technology/top-1-of-mobile-users-use-half-of-worlds-wireless-bandwidth.html

You have to pay attention to the fact this talks of *global* mobile users. That includes, for instance those hundreds of millions in Africa that don't have a data contract of any kind. In addition to not having data contracts, they use calls very sparingly. They have to. Western countries are relatively small portion of mobile subscribers when it comes to subscriber count, although they certainly form a big piece of the global operator profits pie. Data users, in general, are even better, and even a large portion of westerners either don't use or don't pay for data.

NYTimes mentions Finland as a country with considerably higher data usage than the European average. I live in Finland. Yet, operators have shown only miniscule interest towards traffic shaping or bandwidth caps. I guess it's a question of having working competetive landscape, and building your network to serve the customers...

A great idea with only two drawbacks. One, you'd lose the tax income from those retirees, and two, you'd have to pay out more money in social security to those retirees. Social security isn't exactly a drop in the bucket as it stands.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/students-of-virtual-schools-are-lagging-in-proficiency.html

The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, according to a new report being published Friday, and far fewer of them are proving proficient on standardized tests compared with their peers in other privately managed charter schools and in traditional public schools.

http://www.kunc.org/post/report-finds-more-virtual-k-12-students-are-falling-behind

The number of private companies operating full-time online K-12 schools in Colorado and other states continues to grow. Meantime, student performance is declining. That’s according to a new report by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.

These articles pertain to K-12 schools but I think the dynamic behind why these schools don't work very well can be generalized. Probably nothing works as well as direct face-to-face instruction.

Good luck making that work. The government crime data that this feature will be using is usually out of date and highly massaged by police departments and officials with a stake in the crime rates. See, for example this NY Times article.

That's very informative, thank you.

However, AFAIK Fukushima already *has* rendered a considerable zone inhabitable (just like Chernobyl). A quick google search reveals this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/world/asia/22japan.html?_r=1 , which among other things states:

"While it is unclear if the government would specify how long these living restrictions would remain in place, news reports indicated it could be decades. That has been the case for areas around the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine after its 1986 accident." - is that also FUD? Considering the consequences of disasters not nearly as bad as Chernobyl, which also had terrible consequences (i.e. death), I would say the risk of rendering areas inhabitable for decades or centuries is still very real. Maybe the reactors were a bit outdated, but how many other outdated reactors - such as the ones from Japan certainly were, as they have rendered a big area inhabitable for decades - are in operation throughout the world?

That's how ANY country normally treats terrorists.

Except Muzzie countries where they throw roses at their feet and welcome them.

THAT explains the Citytime fiasco, eh - maybe he's looking to get in on the Nth version
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/nyregion/bloomberg-administration-admits-mishandling-citytime-and-nycaps-programs.html

I'm not necessarily against taxing gasoline. However, before we start using a gasoline tax as a tool to force people to behave a certain way, maybe we should consider eliminating the billions of dollars of subsidies given to the oil industry so that we can see the *true* price of gasoline?

(NY Times on oil subsidies: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/04bptax.html)

All the posters here keep crying about how "the open market" has failed, but we aren't in an open market, so that is nonsense.

Except that's just for show. From the article:

Mr. Bloomberg’s use of the subway to get to work appears to have declined over time. In January 2002, he reported taking the train all but one day of his first three weeks. Nowadays, it appears, the S.U.V. is his primary mode of transportation.

Wrong.

But when DNF was supposed to come out, $15 could fill your gas tank AND have enough left over for a pack of cigarettes.

You also earned less then you do now. I really hate this argument as it never takes into account the rise of wages. $15 in 1998 != $15 in 2012 as it fails to account for changes in wages, purchasing power, inflation, cost of living et al. Yep life cost less dollars in the past but we had _a lot_ less disposable income.

You are wrong about having less "disposable income" back in the day. We had HIGHER income in 1998 then we do now when adjusted for inflation. Check out this article from 2009 regarding a decade of income LOSS rather than gain. So dropping 15 bux for a movie back then was in fact easier (since we had higher incomes) then dropping 15 bux, let alone the $20 adjusted for inflation, now.

Oh come on, don't be surprised, it took 2 minutes of googling.

Yahoo Renews Deal to Use A.P. Material

Well, maybe it's harder to find when you're searching on Yahoo!

And how do you know they don't have a license to put that up???

To be honest I don't. I would be surprised, though, if the various news agencies they use all gave yahoo carte blanche to display their work in such an outlandish way. I also haven't seen yahoo claim anywhere that they already pay news agencies for their work. So, I can't prove that they do or don't, but it doesn't seem likely that yahoo are compensating sources.

Oh come on, don't be surprised, it took 2 minutes of googling.

Yahoo Renews Deal to Use A.P. Material

Indeed. The trifecta of "at-will employment", "right to work", and destruction of worker protection laws have been the means by which Republicans have pretty much destroyed the middle class in states where they've held control.

A good state to look at is Texas. The "Texas Unmiracle" is one of the greatest examples of the Greed Over People party's MO. Texas Republican politicians will lie to your face, especially with Rick Perry running for President, claiming they have a "great success story" in their state - actually, it's a complete shambles.

And that's before we get to what their creationist kook governor and corrupt as hell legislature did to make their education system dead last in the nation, too.

Indeed. The trifecta of "at-will employment", "right to work", and destruction of worker protection laws have been the means by which Republicans have pretty much destroyed the middle class in states where they've held control.

A good state to look at is Texas. The "Texas Unmiracle" is one of the greatest examples of the Greed Over People party's MO. Texas Republican politicians will lie to your face, especially with Rick Perry running for President, claiming they have a "great success story" in their state - actually, it's a complete shambles.

And that's before we get to what their creationist kook governor and corrupt as hell legislature did to make their education system dead last in the nation, too.

It's worth noting that in his previous race that Obama's monetary base was made up hugely of small donors.

We don't know where the small donations came from. They might have come from small donors, they might have come from big business or Wall Street, or they might have come from space aliens and/or the global caliphate. Also, it's worth noting that Obama now receives most of his campaign funds in small donations (how much of that is unreported is unclear to me since the reported $250 upper limit in the Obama report is conveniently different from the reporting threshold of $200).

My view is that we'll see this unpopular president rack up record amounts of donations below the reporting threshold.

Because the results are not binding anyway, there's no need for a recount, or so the NYTimes says:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/no-need-for-recount-in-iowa-caucus/?scp=1&sq=iowa%20recount&st=cse

Linked:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/technology/hacker-attacks-like-stratfors-require-fast-response.html?_r=1

Level of integrity? Huh?! Google just got caught doing the exact same thing that JC Penney got totally reamed for early last year. JC Penney even gave the same excuse, that they didn't know what the SEO company they hired was doing. They're not different at all from the others.

The punishment isn't even a punishment, because Google pays itself to place a Chrome ad at the top of the search results regardless of what the search engine actually returns beneath it.

It almost sounds like you were already a supporter of Google, and you are using this as an excuse to shrug off negative criticism. Getting caught being hypocritical isn't something worth praise, nor is it proof that they're different--it's proof that they're the same!

I'm able to get to it through this link though:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/technology/hacker-attacks-like-stratfors-require-fast-response.html

This simple act underscored a problem possibly bigger than SOPA: the fact that as with far too many of our elected officials, technology legislation isn't even on his radar.

I don't think you understand SOPA. SOPA isn't a problem with Technology. It's not going to physically break the backbone routers we need for the internet. It's not going to present technological challenges. What it's going to do that is a problem is rape free speech, make user-generated content (like what I'm doing right now) nearly impossible and on par with China's arcane policies as well as a number of other things. It threatens uploading content, it threatens internal networks, it threatens open source software, it threatens DNS, DNSSEC and internet security. And the worst part is that it's going to be completely ineffective at what it aims to do!

You don't need to understand technology to read the pieces on how this is a direct assault on free speech. Screw their understanding of technology, frame this piece of shit legislation as a direct assault on basic civil liberties! Let them chisel into stone memos about their dry cleaning, who cares if they don't use e-mail. Just make sure they understand that this is first and foremost diametrically opposed to free speech when you simply consider the internet as a means of communication and expression!

The best we can do for the short term is to throw everything we can behind legislation to reinstate the OTA (Office of Technology Assessment). From 1974 through 1995, this small group with a tiny budget served as an impartial, nonpartisan advisory to the U.S. Congress on all matters technological.

Another government office or agency? Man, don't we have enough of that bullshit as it is? I think you're deflecting and focusing on something that will sidetrack us from getting this crap shut down. Call your representative and senators and tell them that you feel that your First Amendment Rights are being threatened by H.R. 3261 and forget trying to lecture them about how DNSSEC works.

You want to effectively stop this? Here's a commercial I'd like to see Google air on national TV:

*woman sits behind bars with a look of remorse on her face*
Woman: I uploaded a video less than half a minute long of my toddler dancing to music on Youtube.
*clip of cute toddler jamming out to some pop music plays*
Woman: The video went viral. Then I received a letter in the mail from lawyers saying I owed them the cost of that song for every view. Instead of just taking it down, I'm now in a criminal lawsuit facing bankruptcy and jail time. Please call your representative to stop SOPA and prevent this from happening to thousands of people.

Fight fire with fire, 15 second ad. Let's see it, Google.

You have a strange interpretation of Jim Crow since Occupy protestors clearly appeared involved these crimes:

1. NY: 10/1/2011 Police Arrest More Than 700 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge
2. Madison, WI: 10-27-2011 Madison Occupiers Lose Permit Due to Public Masturbation
3. Phoenix: 10/28/2011 Flier at Occupy Phoenix Asks, “When Should You Shoot a Cop?”
4. NY: 10/18/2011 Thieves Preying on Fellow Protesters
5. NY: 10/9/2011 Stinking up Wall Street: Protesters Accused of Living in Filth as Shocking Pictures Show One Demonstrator Defecating on a POLICE CAR
6. NY: 10/7/2011 Occupiers Rush Police More
7. Cleveland: 10/18/2011 ‘Occupy Cleveland’ Protester Alleges She Was Raped
8. NY: 10/10/2011 ‘Increasingly Debauched’: Are Sex, Drugs & Poor Sanitation Eclipsing Occupy Wall Street?
9. Seattle: 10/18/2011 Man Accused of Exposing Self to Children Arrested
10. 10/12/2011 Iran Supports Occupy Wall Street
11. Portland: 10/16/2011 #OccupyPortland Protester Desecrates Memorial To U.S. War Dead
12. Portland: 10/15/2011 #OccupyPortland Protesters Sing “F*** The USA”
13. Chicago: 10/17/2011 COMMUNIST LEADER Cheered at Occupy Chicago
14. 10/15/2011 American Nazi Party Endorses Occupy Wall Street‘s ’Courage,‘ Tells Members to Support Protests and Fight ’Judeo-Capitalist Banksters’
15. Boston: 10/14/2011 Coast Guard member spit on near Occupy Boston tents
16. Boston: 10/11/2011 Boston Police Arrest Over 100 from Occupy Boston
17. New York: 10/11/2011 You Can Have Sex with Animals.
18. New York: 10/15/2011 Harassing Police with Accusations of Phony Injuries
19. New York: 10/9/2011 Occupy Wallstreet Protesters Steal from Local Businesses
20. New York: 10/25/2011 Three M

>Don't be so hard on yourself. With tens of thousands of security cameras across your cities, That is mostly the brits. But I grant you the point.

> rampant hoplophobia, With a murder rate less than a 6th of that rate in gun loving USA, I consider this wise.

Non sequitur. What are your population numbers, in relation to that of the US?
Statistically, there is no causality between gun ownership and murder rates in the US; quite the opposite in many places.

Europe, too.

... Last I heard it was in the [US] a burglar could sue the owner of the house he broke in to if he broke his leg during the heist. And win.

Only in the People's Republic of California.

>Don't be so hard on yourself. With tens of thousands of security cameras across your cities, That is mostly the brits. But I grant you the point.

> rampant hoplophobia, With a murder rate less than a 6th of that rate in gun loving USA, I consider this wise.

Non sequitur. What are your population numbers, in relation to that of the US?
Statistically, there is no causality between gun ownership and murder rates in the US; quite the opposite in many places.

Europe, too.

... Last I heard it was in the [US] a burglar could sue the owner of the house he broke in to if he broke his leg during the heist. And win.

Only in the People's Republic of California.

In summary, the law signed by Obama has no effect on the Occupy protesters.

Unless there is a secret interpretation of the law. And don't tell me that doesn't happen.

You didn't even try to read what I posted. If East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania underwent four decades of dictatorship much worse than anything the Shah did, how come Iran has so much trouble moving forward?

Because the United States refuses to allow them to move forward. Iran does not do as they are told, so our goal in the region is to strangle them through economic, political, and military policy. Consider our allies Saudi Arabia: women are treated as property, people are regularly beheaded for spiritual crimes, and there's not a single synagogue or church in the whole country. But since they sell us oil and play along with our plans -- they like being friends with a military power with the same regional interests -- last year we agreed to sell them 80 billion dollars worth of military equipment. Saudi Arabia makes Iran look like a democratic paradise, but we don't care. Iran could start holding legitimate elections and dismantle their religious police tomorrow, but if they were still critics of American policies, they'd be under constant threat of economic strangulation and warfare.

The United States has the world's largest economy, and the world's largest military, and we use that leverage to punish nations that don't serve our interests. We aren't exceptionally bad; we just behave exactly as you would expect any other empire to behave. We demand loyalty and trade -- fair or not -- from countries that have resources we want, or we strangle them. That's been an open secret since the end of WWII.

The only nations that get better deals are powerful nations like China. Remember Tiananmen Square? US investment increased after they ran over students with tanks, because Beijing proved they were in control and could provide a stable place for investment. Morality has almost nothing to do with our foreign policy. Turks are free to slaughter Kurds because they play ball.

"The government said China’s population was 1.34 billion, an increase of 73.9 million, or 5.8 percent, from the last tally in 2000. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/world/asia/29census.html?_r=1

You know, a bunch of real admirals thought the same thing you did: that the US Navy has sufficient defense in depth to defend against an attack by dozens of small, fast ships with Sunburn, Exocet, or Silkworm missiles. They were proven dead wrong. The Millennium Challenge '02 was one of the largest war games in history. In that war game, the mad general in charge of the mock enemy force sunk sixteen US ships, including a carrier and two helicopter carriers filled with Marines.

How did this happen? The enemy force was composed of small ships and light aircraft. They went around the US fleet for hours until the US fleet had a hard time tracking them. Eventually, US fleet was surrounded by the bad guys. Then suddenly, they all attacked at once. Some speed boats made mad suicide dashes at the fleet while attacking with guns and rockets. Prop planes began making suicide dives. Other speed boats opened fire with a whole bunch of Silkworms. All the while, the enemy forces closed with the US fleet, which was busy engaging ships, aircraft, and missiles. An enemy boat got close enough to loose a Silkworm at a carrier, which was sunk when its over-burdened defenses failed to stop the missile.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html

Lesson: it pays to be paranoid.

I've been puzzling over the corruption caused by business influence on government for awhile.

Setting it up as a problem in game theory, the tenet "candidate who spends the most money wins the election" makes the outcome a foregone conclusion: elected government officials will be in the pocket of corporations, in all cases.

This may be a way out.

We've bemoaned our inability to influence the political system, but here we see a striking example of the population rising up and affecting specific government actions.

Public outcry stopped the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, or at least it helped. Similarly, public outcry attempted to hurt Bank of America and GoDaddy over their political beliefs.

If we can make this work it will give us the fine control over government that we have been missing. We've been able to affect small companies - HBGary, Stratfor, Ocean Marketing, Sony. (OK, Sony isn't that small, but it was a slice of Sony much smaller than BOA.)

Future companies may need to think twice before supporting oppressive or corrupt legislation - if only because of the chance that the people will rise up and hurt their bottom line.

We haven't had an effect on the really big companies yet (BOA), but I'm hoping that this grows to be a worldwide trend. We need to install a healthy dose of respect for public opinion. To put it succinctly, the companies have to fear the possibility of public retribution, both legal and extra-legal.

This will give us the power to affect legislation, to control the corruption. This will put government back in the hands of the people.

If we can make this work...

Actually, this has the American military very worried. In the Millenium Challenge 2002, Red used exactly this tactic and wiped the floor with us in a wargame - 20,000 (virtual) service personnel dead. The military basically said "NUH UH! DO OVER DO OVER!" and restarted the exercise with new rules that would have made such tactics impossible. The leader of OPFOR (retired Marine Corps. Lt. General Paul K. Von Riper) resigned his position as commander of OPFOR in protest.

Then, of course, there was the Trillion Credit Challenge (start at the bolded "I"):

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation o

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html

In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.

“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”

Their point is: the banks wrecked the economy, probably criminally.

Uhmm ... I disagree. The banks were forced to give out loans to people THEY KNEW could not pay it back. It started with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ... and was reinforced by Clinton in 1994 - Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown.

They not only did not get punished, but they got 700 billion dollars of taxpayer money

And Banks did not want TARP ... because of the strings attached.

which they then turned around and used to pay bonuses to the people that wrecked the economy.

Attacking the banks is a nice and tidy class-warfare position that may get some traction among those who are not informed, the real culprit in this case is the Federal Government. By interfering with the "invisible hand" of the economy, it places pressure to do the "wrong thing". Of course, it makes people feel good that they helped out a nice couple trying to buy a house for the first time, however, if it is KNOWN that the payments would not be able to be made ... it doesn't help anybody.

The issue is the double standard - if I am a rich bank, I can do whatever I want, and if I get into trouble, I get bailed out with taxpayer dollars, and if I am not a rich bank, then I'm screwed.

I would argue that it is with the Government that is at fault ... the Government can screw with the economy and nearly collapse it, yet the people just hear "it's the rich's fault ... they're not paying their fair share" ... the top 1% pay >36% of the taxes ...how much SHOULD they pay? And if they don't pay ... they get thrown in jail. So ... in essence, you're saying that the "top 1%" has to be our slaves and give us their money that they earned.

what they want is the government to spend its money helping its citizens in need rather than banks who deserve to fail for their incompetence.

That's assuming that the banks did it on their own. NOT under the threat of former Attorney General Janet Reno

Fair enough. :) That used to be my reason, until they kept escalating the dangerousness of the equipment being used.

    I just spent a few days in the hospital, and got dosed with probably as much radiation as I should be exposed to in a year. At least at the hospital I know they're generally monitored, but they have failures too. At least the hospitals will eventually figure out they have errors. They also aren't hitting millions of people per year, and only checking to make sure they get an image back once a year at best. It reminds me of the fluoroscopes, except they're hitting virtually everyone that travels.

    I've asked TSA agents about the people they've caught. So far, none. At one airport, the agent told me that he heard about someone at an airport 100 miles away that was caught carrying a gun in her purse, but he couldn't confirm it.

    I was early for the first flight of the day at another airport. I had a good conversation with an agent there. We were discussing the futility of their jobs. There are so many ways to accomplish the same general idea (mass destruction). The TSA having their high visibility job simply means that most likely If a terrorist did attack, they wouldn't use a commercial airliner.

    For $500k you can get a working airliner.. You can squeeze in 20 tons of your favorite explosive (say 2,500 gallons of diesel fuel, and 20,000 pounds of fertilizer), and put it wherever you want. Knowing that bad guys intending to commit a crime aren't the most law abiding individuals, you can knock the price down to $0 on the aircraft if it's stolen.

    But why an airliner. They need specialized training to operate. How about a boat. Or a truck. Or why bring the explosion to the target, when there are so many other choices. An abandon building with gas service could be deadly. It doesn't need to be the building though. Natural gas could be pumped into a sewage system, but is less than ideal since it's lighter than air. Propane on the other hand could be catastrophic for a large area.

    I think the only reason the gov't doesn't hire me as a scenario designer is, I'd give them way too many things to worry about. It's easier to focus on "bad guy wants to get on a plane", and it creates the illusion of security, where lots of civilians have to endure the worthless security checks. Roughly 7 in 10 attempts by the FBI are missed when they've covertly audited the TSA's security. But sure as hell, they still want to touch my penis.

There's a good article from Gary Taubes that presents a good summary of the argument, along with some of the uncertainties:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=2&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

I'm sure it didn't affect the Tea Party's ability to get officials in office that they had the backing of several billionaires... nah, money has no importance in politics.