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They have been removing free speech from the start.

You not only need society's permission but its active support to run any kind of business without having to have your own personal army of thugs.

The government's role is to protect me from violence and help me enforce fair contracts. It must not be allowed to dictate, what services can be offered, by whom, at what price, etc. That it increasingly does so, is an obvious violation of our liberties.

Dunno about him, but I much prefer a strong state

Yep, Statists gonna State...

over which I have democratic control in the form of my vote

Yeah? And how is it working out for you? When a business needs government's permission to offer you their service? Do you have "democratic control" over Internet-service provision, for example? Are you happy with the government's ability to shut down Uber and Lyft? With the government, that can demand your cell-phone data from your cellular provider — and get it, or else the provider may run into difficulties renewing its license? With the police, who can confiscate your life savings on suspicion of tax-dodging, or simply because you have "too much" cash on you?

Is this the "strong state" you clamor for? Yeah, I know, let's all go raise awareness — that will surely help our strong, but benevolent and kind-hearted rulers realize the errors, nay, imperfections of their ways.

The freedom to pursue happiness is oh-so overrated...

Why progressives/liberals dismiss so easily the real concerns of most voters?

I think you've got a lot of emotion here masquerading as numbers. Here are some actual statistical facts:

"Most voters" are in fact not white males. In 2016 white males will be about 34% of all eligible voters. That means 66% of the electorate has to deal with being from an unprivileged group every day of their lives. (actually more, as I'm not counting GBT white males). So if liberals (and in fact conservatives) were not looking at issues of "privilege", they would in fact be ignoring the real concerns of most voters.

Trump voters are, on average a lot wealthier than either Sanders or Clinton voters. He is not getting elected on the votes of the disgruntled "working class" in general. That's a myth.

Exit poling has shown the best correlation voting for Trump has with any position is with belief that Obama is not an American. I'm not even sure this should be news. He's been the standard-bearer for birtherisim for 8 years now. His supporters have also been shown to be far more racially and religiously intolerant than the average Republican voter.

I know it's ugly to think that a major party nominated a candidate based on what essentially amounts to White Supremacy. But we don't do ourselves any favors at this point by ignoring the plain truth.

Euros are not much better informed (am one), and Americans are no better than Russians.

Communism — first implemented in and spread with support of Russia — has killed 94 million people in the 20th century. What have the Americans ever done to you to even approach — much less equal — that?

I view both as equal threats to European countries.

I invite you to compare Western Germany, dominated by Americans, with Eastern Germany... Are you still certain, the threats are equal? Or are you too young to even know, what I'm talking about?

Stalin is — thanks in part to the propaganda campaign described in TFA — once again a Russia's hero. A "strong leader"... The moment it "rose from its knees" (Russian propaganda's favorite expression), the country went on to attack neighbors. And not just to right wrongs — real or perceived — but to annex territory and expand borders. With overwhelming support from the citizenry — who forgive their own squalor to their rulers in exchange for military victories. Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine — all European countries — have already become victims.

America's last land-acquisition was Hawaii... Are you still sure, the threats are equal?

5 months after legalization.

A doubling of hospital admittances 1 year after legalization.

Different story, same result. 1 year after legalization.

2 deaths from marijuana use 1 year after legalization.

Third death the following year.

Unreported death due to marijuana.

The last article raises the question, how many more deaths as the result of marijuana use have gone unreported? We know more and more traffic deaths have marijuana as a cause.

But please, let us here more excuses how none of the above is related to marijuana use. Drug users are good at making excuses, especially when presented with facts.

The only negatives I've heard of so far are more impaired driving.

Or finding employees who can pass a pre-employment drug test.

That hurdle partly stems from the growing ubiquity of drug testing, at corporations with big human resources departments, in industries like trucking where testing is mandated by federal law for safety reasons, and increasingly at smaller companies. But data suggest employers' difficulties also reflect an increase in the use of drugs, especially marijuana — employers' main gripe — and also heroin and other opioid drugs much in the news.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/business/hiring-hurdle-finding-workers-who-can-pass-a-drug-test.html

At some point one of them would be a recognizable human being that you would happily grant rights to, and your genetic codes would be compatible enough for reproduction. [...] There is no definite point

I'm used to opponents contradicting themselves, but usually it takes them longer to complete the circle. Congratulations!

Just the same way as there is no clear point at which a human egg becomes a human being.

Conception? Birth? Cutting of umbilical cord? First sound made? First tooth? Death of the father (or explicit emancipation) — as in ancient Rome? These are all "clear bright lines", that lawyers love so much.

All we can do it set some kind of limit we are somewhat happy with, erring on the side of caution.

Yep, and that is, how it is usually done.

Just when a blob of cells becomes a human being is the subject of the debate. That it is wrong to kill it once it happens is uncontroversial and there is nothing wrong in opposing any "choice", where such killing is an option.

link http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05...

Ever since I read about Gawker taking a quote out of context and basically destroying someone's life, it's hard for me to feel sorry for them.

Since when the whole story came to light, Gawker didn't do the responsible thing and discipline Biddle, I conclude they didn't learn anything about responsible journalism. News flash: creating news is explicitly not part of a reporter's job.

No need for automation, drive through can be outsourced to call centers according to this 2006 article...
-slew

But Wright archly noted that Myhrvold once worked at Microsoft, so "is responsible in part for a lot of bad software."

Question: Is there evidence that Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold know much about technology? They wrote a really, really poor book together, The Road Ahead. Quote from the Wikipedia page:

The New York Times review called the book "bland and tepid" and reading "as if it had been vetted by a committee of Microsoft executives"; it is "little more than a positioning document, sold in book form with accompanying CD-ROM and designed mainly to advance the interests of the Microsoft Corporation."

That New York Times book review suggests that Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold were deliberately engaged in fraud, and deliberately eliminated anything of value from the book before it was printed.

Or, maybe it wasn't fraud, or only fraud. Maybe they actually don't know much about technology.

Well, this relies on the Press being free enough to criticize the government, and be clever enough to realize when they government is lying to them and investigate to reveal the truth. Suing the media for lying isn't nearly the same level of problem, particularly when the media is 100% in the wrong as in the Hulk Hogan case.

Rhodesâ(TM)s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. âoeWe created an echo chamber,â he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. âoeThey were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.â

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over Americaâ(TM)s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. âoeIn the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,â he said. âoeWe had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.â He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. âoeWe drove them crazy,â he said of the dealâ(TM)s opponents.

The Presidency played the Press like a fiddle and they fell for it hook, line and sinker. They lied, lied, and lied some more and no reporter bothered to investigate. THAT is more destructive to democracy than a lawsuit against clear Press misconduct.

So even self-professed liberals powerful enough to directly shape US foreign policy openly admit the press is an echo chamber for their views?

WHO KNEW!!!!

Well, this relies on the Press being free enough to criticize the government, and be clever enough to realize when they government is lying to them and investigate to reveal the truth. Suing the media for lying isn't nearly the same level of problem, particularly when the media is 100% in the wrong as in the Hulk Hogan case.

Rhodesâ(TM)s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. âoeWe created an echo chamber,â he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. âoeThey were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.â

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over Americaâ(TM)s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. âoeIn the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,â he said. âoeWe had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.â He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. âoeWe drove them crazy,â he said of the dealâ(TM)s opponents.

The Presidency played the Press like a fiddle and they fell for it hook, line and sinker. They lied, lied, and lied some more and no reporter bothered to investigate. THAT is more destructive to democracy than a lawsuit against clear Press misconduct.

Sorry, but unless you recently started your strict calorie limit of 1500 per day, or you are exceptionally short, or you have some bizarre medical condition, there is no way your are being honest.

Could be mismeasuring the amount of calories he's consuming. But it does appear that dieting can permanently alter a metabolism in a negative way.

The New York Times had an article on the study of the 2009 Biggest Loser contestants who regain their original weight. Their metabolism slowed down from dieting (expected) but never recovered seven years later(unexpected). If they ate a normal diet for their height and weight, they still ate an extra 400 to 800 calories because their metabolism slowed down. It's almost as if their body wanted to regain the weight back.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html

Some do, others eat healthy foods, but their bodies have betrayed them.

The New York Times had an article on a scientific study of the 2009 Biggest Loser contestants who regain their weight because their metabolism slowed down while dieting (expected) but their metabolism never recovered (unexpected). If they ate the normal calories for their height and weight, they would be eating an extra 400 to 800 calories that their body wants to regain the lost weight.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html

Even if the crop wasn't consumed directly, it arguably displaces food crops from aerable land, and could be used to feed livestock. The same objection holds with switchgrass, which can also be used for grazing.

The link between ethanol subsidies and world hunger has quite a lot of data behind it. The New York Times editorialized specifically on the effect on Guatemalan food prices due to the shift of US corn production from food to fuel. Or there is this artcile from Forbes. Or the Wall Street Journal.

no where did I find them agreeing with your 89% figure

The article cites the figure and then proceeds to explain, why it is acceptable — without disputing the number. In other words, they accept it. The article (known as Watts 2009) is thus entered into evidence.

no where does it say that primary raw temperature data has been lost, just that the CRU does not have it any more

Had a copy still existed somewhere, they would've procured one to avoid the embarrassment. And it was a major scandal — two months later NY Times ran a "rebuttal" (the dishonest newspaper's first mention of the problem, apparently), which still would not say, other copies exist. You are grasping at straws — and drowning anyway.

80 mm is right at the top of the uncertainty range in the graph

You wrote yourself, that the prediction was 50-60 mm, while the actual values — according to, once again, you — was 80mm. That's a fail... You may recall, that one of the rules I put down was that the cited predictions, if quantifiable, be correct within 20% of the predicted figure(s).

Don't you consider it significant that real world observations have been greater than predictions?

It may be significant, but it is unclear, of what. That the seas are rising may be observable and measurable (preferably without "weighting" and "adjusting" the observed figures, of course). That they are rising because SUVs — that is not clear at all.

10 thousand years ago Tasmania — already home to some humans — was cut off of mainland Australia by rising seas. A few thousand years earlier ancestors of Kodiak bears became separated from mainland grizzlies — by rising seas (or, maybe, the melting ice — another phenomenon blamed on humans today). Kodiaks are now a distinct subspecies... Humans crossed into Americas over what is now a straights, but was a land bridge until seas rose .

Were all those calamities due to the crime of Prometheus, perhaps?

Climate scientists today blame humanity with the intensity of ancient shamans. But, to establish their scientific bona-fides to people actually familiar with scientific process, they need to make scientific predictions — verifiable, falsifiable, as well as verified and not falsified. And that's where my challenge and your (so far — failing) attempts to answer it come in...

I am collaborating with no one.

I'll take your word for it. Most comforting, thanks.

But how much? And do the taxes on it cover the costs?

Debatable, to say the least.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

HOLY FUCK!

The "invested $168 in the facility" link's URL is fucked up.

It is currently:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/05/21/236254/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/google-pulls-the-plug-on-a-renewable-energy-effort

When it should obviously be:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/google-pulls-the-plug-on-a-renewable-energy-effort

And it's not "$168", for crying out loud. The article clearly states (emphasis added),

Google still has invested $168 million in the venture

I don't expect a lot from the editors here, but holy fucking moley, this is just inexcusably bad! Fix the goddamn link URL! Fix the goddamn amount of money!

You can start looking here. [noaa.gov]

Gee, yeah. "A recent study by NOAA found no evidence of mistakes by NOAA". Right. The NSA would totally exonerate themselves too, as would Enron.

Sorry, hon, if 89% of your data-collection stations aren't positioned right, your results are junk no matter, how you "adjust" them. Turning a turd into chicken salad has a better chance of succeeding.

There are lots of links to NOAA's methods and reasons

Sure, there are. And they may even be perfectly reasonable. The point was, they are themselves subject to reason — not as objective, straightforward, and indisputable as writing down values from thermometer would've been.

No one has destroyed any of the raw data

Funny, that's not, what the NY Times article says... It acknowledges the destruction (emphasis mine):

"Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."

Funny, they could not spare one more tape for the originals and chose to use the space for the "value-added" data instead — even though reproducing the "value addition" would've been easy with a straightforward algorithm and the raw data, whereas going back to the originals is now impossible.

you will continue to gullibily believe the people who tell you those things

What "the people" told me — that 89% of weather stations were incorrectly positioned — is undeniably true. Police presenting evidence collected this sloppily would have their case thrown out from court, and rightly so. Yet, you wish me to believe you, that some algorithms can correct the sloppiness? Just how gullible do you think I am?

That said, my post you replied to was modded down one notch at about the same time your reply appeared — the pattern I've been noticing before... You would not have a collaborator here, would you? Someone helping you "fight denialists" to "save the planet"?

Anyway, still waiting for a list of successful climate predictions from you... You know the format...

NSA started the chain of events by breaking the law. They absolutely did not operate "with a high degree of integrity", or they wouldn't have been slapped down by an appeals court.

My point is that the actual laws dictating an executive's responsibilities rarely care at all about the shareholders. Rather, they usually only require that the company follow its charter, and it's that charter that defines the goals, and that's usually done vaguely.

In Apple's case, I don't see any definition of what the shareholders' interests are. It has been upheld in court that such a term can be construed to mean many things beside the often-assumed short-term profit goal. If Tim Cook thinks (and convinces the Board) that it's in shareholders' best interests to pay taxes to bring cash into the United States, then he can do so.

In essence, my point is to question the point of the original comment. Corporations are beholden to the laws of their jurisdictions, and those laws (in the US) make them subject to their charters. Blaming shareholders and invoking the profit myth implies that somehow the executives are being forced to do something distasteful, whether it's outsourcing or polluting or keeping foreign cash. The reality is that the executives have a wide range of options, and usually they only have to make a passable justification like "our polled shareholders said they care about the environment, so we're spending billions of dollars to have recycling in all facilities".

The myth essentially shifts the blame from the corporate executives to "the system". It's the same as the hippies' stereotypical disgust with The Man, the modern rebels' jealousy of the 1%, the historic persecution of Jews, and the vilifying of banks. Rather than a specific mechanism to effect change, such as participating in a shareholder poll or vote, the myth provides a vague target for outrage that the masses can rally against, feeling good about their impotent rebellion. It satisfies a craving to be a noble warrior in a community of fellow underdogs, fighting against a powerful oppressor... but it doesn't require the drudgery of actually changing anything.

That Apple funnels US profits in a Nevada shell company to avoid paying state corporate taxes, including taxes in California where corporate headquarters are located.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html

If you don't like this, change the rules. Its all just whiney BS.

And in the end, people pay taxes, not corporations. You raise their taxes, they raise their prices and cut their costs. Either way, their customers (aka you and me) pay the burden. If the US was smart, they would lower the corporate income tax to near 0%, and change the laws to allow that money to be repatriated to the US. It would be nice to see it invested here, rather than languishing in some other country.

But then, that would require politicians with a lick of sense. I try to vote some smart ones in, but pickings seem slim...

That Apple funnels US profits in a Nevada shell company to avoid paying state corporate taxes, including taxes in California where corporate headquarters are located.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html

I'm not saying the story's wrong, but could you have found better sources than the Daily Caller and Zerohedge?

How about The American Lawyer

Now get your head out of your ass and realize Obama with his unconstitutional executive orders is far worse than anything the "blame BOOOOSH!!!!" crowd ever dreamed up.

Don't like the laws and statutory deadlines you wrote for Obamacare because they'd allow the US populace to realize they bought a pig-in-a-poke before Crooked Hillary! can bamboozle her way into the White House? Change the law by executive order?

Don't like immigration law? Ignore it, and then LIE to the judge overseeing the case when 26 states get fed up and actually sue the President for not following the law.

Where Bush arguably tortured terrorists, Obama summarily executes US citizens.

And never forget lying is the Obama modus operendi .

Of course, the NY Times (is that a good enough source to satisfy your partisan closed-mindedness?) didn't characterize Ben Rhodes and Obama as "liars". Nope. They sold the Iran deal by "rewriting the rules of diplomacy".

You would expect that most records would be broken in the early years of registration.

And, maybe, they were — but no one would profit from emphasizing the fact, so we do not know about it.

Over the last 20-25 years, we've seen a disproportionate amounts of records being broken

We have also seen a large number of people profiting from the idea of AGW during the same period.

average temperature of 1 or 2 degrees is massive on a global scale

We don't even know, if that's true — for example, satellite observations disagree (until "adjusted") on this with ground-based thermometers. And no wonder:

we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source

The AGW-proponents acknowledge the problems, but claim, they are properly addressed by "adjustments":

when processing their data, the organizations which collect the readings take into account any local heating or cooling effects, such as might be caused by a weather station being located near buildings or large areas of tarmac. This is done, for instance, by weighting (adjusting) readings after comparing them against those from more rural weather stations nearby.

Who is doing the weighting (adjusting) and how? What #define-s do they use in their code? Would they not stop "adjusting" before the results show the trend, which they sincerely believe must be there? See, what is "sold" to the public as objective recordings of scientific instruments are, in fact, results of "adjustments" by unknown programs using unspecified parameters...

And the raw — unadjusted — data sometimes go to sleep with Hillary Clinton's emails... But not to worry, the "scientists" tell us — it was processed correctly, trust us... So much for reproducibility being a requirement for scientific method — these guys are frauds, not "scientists"...

But even if it really is true, that temperatures rose 1 degree since 1850 — so what? 10 thousands years ago Tasmania was attached to mainland Australia. It was also possible for bears to cross from mainland Alaska to the islands of Kodiak archipelago (either over land or ice-fields). Then something substantial enough happened to isolate these lands. Whatever it was, it was not the humans discovering fire, was it?

NYT wrote about it, but it's a paywalled source. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05...

Well, yeah. We've already seen how Apple expects a good worker to act, and they're not alone. Of course you wouldn't want anyone who would take a vacation to Colorado, they need to be on-call for a 12 hour shift in the middle of the night.

President Obama has guaranteed a clear path to nuclear weapons in only a decade, and to whom Putin is selling advanced missiles to defend the associated infrastructure.

And remember that Obama's own guy, Ben Rhodes, has now bragged they used the stupid gullible liberal journalists at liberal press outlets to mislead the public about this "deal" which was actually with the hardliner theocrats and not with some imaginary moderates.

Yes, but also in Manhattan, there's this.

And of course there's that whole "can't show up without your ladyparts / manparts covered" feature of our society as well. And this "you have have sex for free, but you can't sell it" bit. And the "you can drink your liver into oblivion, but you can't smoke pot" thing. And so on.

We're plenty good at oppressing our citizens. But, just like Islamists, we have... "reasons." So it's okay.

You can go to Europe now and find that easily. In fact, they are having teaching the Muslims how not to treat women

How fucking backwards is a culture when you have to be taught not be a complete fucking animal?

Do you really think the TSA would be able to remain funded and functional without having the airlines and airports actively consenting to their presence?

https://www.tsa.gov/for-indust...

"The Passenger Fee, also known as the September 11 Security Fee, is collected by air carriers from passengers at the time air transportation is purchased. Air carriers then remit the fees to TSA. The fee is currently $5.60 per one-way trip in air transportation that originates at an airport in the U.S., except that the fee imposed per round trip shall not exceed $11.20."

Mind you, if people don't fly, Congress could just retask the TSA to collecting fees from buses, trains, and ordinary citizens trying to use the highway in order to keep their special interests afloat...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...

Upon booting I'm presented with a Login screen that insists on a password. This machine never had a password on it, but now it does and I have no idea what it is. I cannot get in to my own PC now. Apparently I need some sort of Windows Live account or some other password, but I honestly have no idea. I am locked out of that entire partition.

Look closely at the screen. There'll be a bypass very well-hidden. It's yet another of the dark patterns MS's UXtards use to exploit people into giving up their data. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/technology/personaltech/when-websites-wont-take-no-for-an-answer.html?_r=0

(As was the "Upgrade now / Upgrade later" dark pattern, where the correct response is the counterintuitive "click neither, and click the red X in the corner of the box instead")

Microsoft's entire business strategy post-Win7 has been indistinguishable from that of malware manufacturers.

And I demand the right to cure my children by torturing their bodies until the demons possessing them flee back to Hell. Which one of you idiots gets to get shot trying to stop me?

Joke all you like, but you're closer to the truth than you think...

Read up on "Faith Healing" and the states that allow parents to withhold medical care for their children and provides immunity to charges for abuse or neglect, even if the child dies due to lack of medical care.

Indeed. There's a fuzzy line between freedom of religion and child neglect. Jehovah's Witnesses and their attitude re transfusions, for example. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08... and http://news.discovery.com/huma... for another. kind of goes along with the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of child abuse. sorry, child rearing.

Are these driver-less cars are so sophisticated that they require a college-educated person to sit behind the wheel? Or is this like a law firm requiring a college degree for a filing clerk position?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html

No, they're just looking for indentured servants. Nothing like someone buried in debt desperate enough for $20/hr to make the model slave.

Are these driver-less cars are so sophisticated that they require a college-educated person to sit behind the wheel? Or is this like a law firm requiring a college degree for a filing clerk position?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html

The CIA's bogus vaccine incident is well documented

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

I think the reason that they mention "people of color" separately (I don't know why they didn't just say minorities), is that being a person of color is correlated with having low income.

That's not the reason. People of color are generally shut out of the same banking products that we take for granted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10...

There's been several studies now that show that with a black family and white family with exactly the same income and credit scores, the black family is less likely to be given loans and more likely to be steered toward "sub-prime" type of banking products, even though they're repayment rates are the same.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blo...

This is what a 21st century energy program looks like: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04...

And yes, at the same time the country is building as much solar and wind as it can manage. It's just under no illusion that these sources are sufficient for an industrial baseload.

It may have a potential to hurt Google's brand. That's enough for Google to win a lawsuit. They can afford really good lawyers. Trademark infringement cases have been won on shakier grounds.

That's not nearly enough for Google to win a lawsuit. Just because your brand is hurt -- for example, by every news agency in the world reporting that you've cheated on emissions tests -- does not mean that you can sue for trademark infringement.

To infringe a trademark, the accused infringer must be using the trademark in commerce:

15 U.S.C. 1125
(a)(1) Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact... shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
* * *
(c)(1) Subject to the principles of equity, the owner of a famous mark that is distinctive, inherently or through acquired distinctiveness, shall be entitled to an injunction against another person who, at any time after the ownerâ(TM)s mark has become famous, commences use of a mark or trade name in commerce that is likely to cause dilution by blurring or dilution by tarnishment of the famous mark, regardless of the presence or absence of actual or likely confusion, of competition, or of actual economic injury.

News reporting is commerce, but is usually exempt from the potential infringement issue due to the first amendment and the concept of nominative fair use. To report upon businesses and products, you pretty much have to use trademarks to efficiently refer to them.

All snark aside, politics is not commerce. I don't see any indication from any of the summary's links that she's even selling items like hats, T-shirts, buttons, and other items. Which leaves you with a nebulous theory of "trademark dilution." But if you look even further down in the dilution subsection there's an exception for "Any noncommercial use of a mark." Which reemphasizes the fact that you can only control commercial uses of a trademark.

Thus, no. Google would be fools to take this to court, and really good lawyers would advise them that it is a really bad idea. Someone may get the bright idea to send a nasty letter, but Sue Googe would be an even bigger fool to pay attention to it. A lawsuit would provide the sort of publicity and news exposure that money cannot buy, and what exactly can Google claim for monetary damages? Come November, the campaign is over and any lawsuit would be dropped for being more trouble than it was worth.

I went and read up on the supposed death camps run by Eisenhower. That turns out to be total bullshit. It was one author who basically used smoke and mirrors to try to drum up something to sell his books. Try doing a little reading.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I don't know if the Donald is being genuine or just opportunistic

Here's a hint, read this article and then determine if Trump is genuine in his business deals. From my reading of it, at every turn he over boasted, put down projected numbers as reached goals, and had a very embarrassing moment when his son indicated 5% less condos were sold than he did. Eventually, he settled to keep his name out of the courts, and whatever you stance is on how much he knew, NOT knowing is indicative of a business man that doesn't even know what his business is doing.

If you can't figure out if he's genuine after that, you're not smart enough to be reached.

Yeah ok.. the same way he protected those American jobs in Florida right? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02...

I would follow up the accusation with more or less vigor depending on the supporting evidence.

For example, I once sat in a library and went through 12 years of Ms. magazine counting the pages of cigarette advertising (several pages in each issue), and looking for an article on smoking and health (none). Then I called Ms. magazine to make sure I hadn't missed anything (I hadn't).

This is what I call strong evidence of political bias. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...

Whenever I write about something I have strong feelings about, I make a particular effort to talk to people I disagree with, and get their best argument. About half the time they have something useful to say. Sometimes they convince me to change my mind.

Newspapers - holy god, have you never read the WSJ?

I know something about the WSJ. I read them for 30 years. I was a journalist, I ran into their reporters, and I used to pick up stories from the WSJ all the time, adding my own reporting, and frequently interviewed/fact checked the same sources they interviewed.

For all that time, the WSJ had an uncanny reputation among left and right for objective, accurate, unbiased reporting that was not influenced by their advertisers or publisher. That was unusual in the news business. One of their reporters, A. Kent MacDougal, wrote a great article for Monthly Review about how he, as a socialist, could write anything he wanted as long as he backed it up with facts.

The great moment that established the WSJ's credibility was when in the 1950s they got a leak of General Motors' new cars, and GM didn't want them printed. GM threatened to cancel all their advertising in the WSJ if they printed it. The WSJ printed it. GM cancelled their ads. GM needed the WSJ more than the WSJ needed GM. GM finally came crawling back, and it was a long time before the WSJ took them back. There really aren't too many newspapers or magazines that would stand up to a major advertiser like that. I used to read stories on auto safety and pollution in the New York Times that were effectively censored by their auto advertisers. Ms. magazine throughout its history published cigarette ads (which according to Ms. advertising policy, were a seal of approval), while running stories on every cancer except lung cancer.

The reason for that, I concluded, was that the WSJ was owned by a wealthy family, the Bancrofts, who were politically liberal but believed in free speech and balanced journalism, and weren't out to maximize their profits. If every wealthy corporate owner was like the old Bancrofts, America would be a better country. But the next generation of Bancrofts were more interested in money than principle, and sold out to Rupert Murdoch. That's my great man/woman theory of journalism.

Under Murdoch, the WSJ has indeed become a corporate whore. I tried to give him a chance, but stopped subscribing when they started writing about "death taxes." Great journalism was worth $250 a year. Murdoch propaganda is worth zero.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at The Journal
David Carr
THE MEDIA EQUATION
DEC. 13, 2009

A little over a year ago, Robert Thomson, The Journal's top editor, picked Gerard Baker, a columnist for The Times of London, as his deputy managing editor. Mr. Baker is a former Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times with a great deal of expertise in the Beltway. The two men came of age in the more partisan milieu of British journalism.

According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper's Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper's circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there's nothing to suggest that The Journal's readers don't approve.
Continue reading the main story

Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits â" "health care reformâ is a generally forbidden phrase â" and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)

The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly st

If he were really the son of a textile mogul, I doubt he would have become a traveling salesman, and I doubt that he would have sent the money home for his parents to live on.

This isn't something I've researched beyond 5 minutes of googling, so if I am missing something, let me know. But both Wikipedia and the NYT obit of HRC's father indicate that HRC's paternal grandfather was merely an employee of the textile mill where HRC's father worked before becoming a traveling salesman.

However Hough Rodham did well enough to retire from business at 59, so he may have wound up fairly well off.

Interestingly I read an article just this morning about how persecuted this group is professionally by people who have your exact same dismissive tone: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05... Good job keeping hate alive :-)

I wasn't sure if I saw that story posted here or on the other site. Must have been the other site. It was a fascinating read at the very least.

I also found that it seemed to be somewhat fatalistic and depressing. Humans want to fight against nature and remake the world as they think it should be. It seems like in the ultimate "joke's on you" moment, the very nature of people's bodies has started turning against them all over the developed world. At least this human still wants to fight against nature, to figure out what the answer must be, confident there must be an answer to be had. I don't have funding, and I doubt I'd have the first clue of what to do to figure it out. Debuggers are my thing, not microscopes.

I'm one of the lucky ones--that person everybody seems to know who can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound. Well, not so much as when I was younger and every weekend meant a trip to the arcade to play DDR. I wish I knew why or even how. There are better people in the world who deserve whatever it is about my body that would make gaining a hundred lbs or so if I need to for some reason seem as daunting to me as losing a hundred lbs and keeping it off is for many people I know. One person in particular whose struggles with their weight has turned into a full blown mental illness and utter despair, compounding the problem by wrecking the best tool they have to work through the problem: their brain. Damn shame. And here I am helplessly posting to Slashdot and cussing out ACs like that'll make a difference.

It's not to say that exercise isn't a factor, but I begin to wonder if the mentality of "head to the gym, stress the body to its breaking point for an hour or two, then back in the chair" isn't part of the larger problem. Maybe that works for cheetahs, just not so well for humans.

I think the best thing that people could work towards is a slower, more relaxed pace of life. Everybody is so tense and constantly on edge. Every little problem that comes up is the zomg sky is falling end of the damned world. We seem so completely detached from the essence of living, at least in an agricultural sense: preparing for the growing season, working the earth when plants will grow, harvesting in fall (along with the requisite fall feast), and spending the time of year when little if anything grows with loved ones, safe and confident that enough wood has been gathered and chopped and enough food has been stored away to last until the cycle is complete when spring returns.

In a hunter-gatherer sense: the Earth provides. There will always be enough. Don't horde and don't be greedy. Don't take more than you need.

I feel we've created a culture where everybody is driven like they're being chased down by a lion day after day after day after day. It's not really about the act of eating--that's not what I mean by don't take more than you need--, but it's about the endless 24/7 life-and-death brink-of-the-edge reality that is life in the "developed" world.

First world problems. Literally.

Holy fuck, the stupid is powerful on the internet.

George Bush signed the USA Patriot Act back in 2001 in response to 9-11 with overwhelming support from both political parties. Only 1 senator voted against it, so you partisan idiots who want to point fingers at the Republicans can shut the fuck up. This was not mildly bipartisan, it was overwhelmingly bipartisan.

So bipartisan in fact that when Obama took office he didn't repeal the law, nor did he use his executive discretion to neuter the law.... he expanded its use, and then he went to congress for an extension of the law in 2015. A group of libertarian leaning Republicans and liberty-minded Democrats blocked the bill, allowing the USA Patriot Act to expire. A deal was brokered and Obama got his spy toys back post haste, but without authorization for the NSA to collect all of our phone metadata.

Nobody is suggesting that Obama (or Bush) maniacally rubs his hands together and orders that some little piss-ant internet poster gets an anal probe. But he is more than just complicit in the violation of this person's rights. He fought tooth and nail to make sure that the executive had broad authority to go after Americans with secret court orders - placing gag orders on the companies that are served with subpoenas. He is no innocent bystander - these abuses are precisely what the opponents of these programs said would happen and he called them out as unpatriotic and dangerously hyperbolic and worrying about something that would never happen.

Well, it happens, maybe a lot. We don't know though, because most of the time it is in complete secrecy and anyone involved would be a felon for reporting it to us. We also know that this sort of power has been used for purely political purposes to attack political enemies. (One example: In Wisconsin a Democrat prosecutor used secret "John Doe" subpoenas and gag orders to attack Republican activists and fundraisers in retaliation for their support of Republican Governor Scott Walker. They tied up people's money through asset forfeiture and issued secret orders that they were unable to fight - or even tell their attorneys about. This went on for a couple of years until the legislature acted to end the practice of secret "John Doe" investigations when there is an absence of probable cause to suspect that a crime has been committed.)

But no... Let's not look at the assholes who actually caused the problem! Trump.... Just imagine if Trump got ahold of this! Why, he might..... eh... what? Have a secret kill list that only the President decides who lives and who dies?

Come on people, wake the fuck up! Trump is a populist nightmare of epic proportions, but he's not in charge of the country. These are things that are actively happening as we type. Sure, Trump as President would be like letting Curious George in to the Oval Office.... but it isn't like the asshats we have in place right now are pure as the driven snow. Or even only mildly corrupt. They are still doing everything that we hated Bush for, and much more. But don't think about that for even a moment. Let's worry about a partially shaved orangutan with a bad hairpiece. That's the real danger!