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yes, he's a nonviolent person, but we don't know that

Of course we knew that. If he had nefarious intentions, he wouldn't have warned your beloved authorities in advance or flown a 200 lbs capacity gyrocopter.

It's time to put away the plastic sheets and stop wetting the bed on command for the national insecurity state, the greatest pork project in the history of the world. Your couch is more likely to kill you than a terrorist, so stop hiding under the bed and throwing your rights away anytime someone knocks on the door.

The basis and history for our religious freedom laws precludes such a decision.

This article on Jefferson's VA Statute for Religious Freedom for example:
http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...

Not all that many more. NPR misrepresents the situation. For as long as the US Department of Labor has kept records, men have been prevalent in computing.

Engineering has been male dominated throughout history.

The whole "men pushed women out" narrative doesn't hold water.

It may surprise you that in the days before the electronic computer, the word "computer" often referred to a human operator that performed calculations. Most of them were women.
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

The workforce has always been pretty hostile to women, but it wasn't always that way. China and Russia have plenty of women engineers. My Soviet-raised wife always scoffs at these SJW threads because it simply wasn't a problem where she grew up. But for some reason, it's a thing that happens in Western countries.
http://www.paristechreview.com...

There are probably several societal and cultural factors that have been discouraging women from tech fields, but guys being insufferable dicks is the only one I really have personally witnessed. For my part, I just find smart chicks hawt and would prefer working with more women instead of hanging out with a gaggle of dudes all day long.

This is the future of American police: http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...

Key things to note from the article: 120 military grade surveillance cameras, 35 microphone systems, large and continuous police presence, military grade weapons. Some things not listed in this article: Fines are passed out to people seen walking in the same area multiple times for loitering. People are told to move along if seen sitting or standing on street corners. Anyone "suspicious" is stopped and questioned. All license plates registered outside the area are sent notices that their car was caught in illicit activity regardless of why they were there (no charges are filed against them, they are just mailed a notice).

Too lazy to google?

http://www.globalpost.com/disp...
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
http://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/...

> Colorblindness is a form of diversity. You don't hate diversity, do you?

This is only slightly funny. I've some colleagues with deaf children who came under enormous social pressure for getting cochlear implants for their children. It's described well at:

                          http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

The sentence is correct, because professional linguists.

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

The problem with this statement is that, well, itâ(TM)s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes. If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRAâ"and most state RFRAsâ"do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to âoethe free exercise of religion.â The federal RFRA doesnâ(TM)t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolinaâ(TM)s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: âoeA person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.â (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has âoefree exerciseâ rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last yearâ(TM)s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Courtâ(TM)s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employeesâ(TM) statutory right to contraceptive coverage.

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a businessâ(TM)s âoefree exerciseâ right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, thereâ(TM)s a lot of evidence that the new wave of âoereligious freedomâ legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the coupleâ(TM)s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in âoepublic accommodationsâ on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexicoâ(TM)s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the stateâ(TM)s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply âoebecause the government is not a party.â

Do you have evidence that they were pursuing The Bomb in violation of Clinton era agreements? [...] all the information I can find seems to show the entire thing went into a rapid "build a nuke quick" tailspin only after Bush called them part of the Axis of Evil

First of all, according to the timetable in the above highly "informative" post, NK started to demand compensation from the US on pain of having their nuclear program restarted in 2000 — before Bush even got elected. They increased the demands and threats by June 2001 — three month before 9/11 and the very coinage of the "axis of evil" term (January 2002). That takes care of any accusation, Bush's rhetoric was somehow responsible for aggravating the gentle hearts of the North Korea rulers.

Do I have evidence of them continuing their nuclear-weapons work after promising to suspend it in 1994? Of course — that they were confident in making the above-mentioned threats is the evidence, they kept on the work. And that they were able to test a nuke shortly afterwards is proof.

What *was* Clinton's damage?

His fault, if we must, once again, lies in supplying North Korea with foodstuffs and energy, which helped (if not allowed) the regime to continue nuclear-weapons work and hastened the work's completion. But whether or not Clinton was stupid is not so relevant now — for Obama certainly is.

The naivete was and remains astounding — who, but a pampered Westerner could believe, a belligerent hermit like North Korea or Iran would ever stop trying to arm itself over a piece of paper?

Iran has seen, what happened to North Korea, which fooled the West, and to Libya's Qaddafi, who came clean. Both lessons are clear and expecting Iranians to be dumb enough to not make the right conclusions is to exhibit racist anti-Persian bigotry.

Which doesn't matter, because the world dithers for a few years accusing Iran of providing the material, Iran denying this, right up until Iran has what they feel like are enough nuclear weapons.

With very few (Saddam's Iraq) exceptions nearly every nation-state lined up behind the United States after 9/11, an event that claimed a paltry (in the historical sense) 3,000 lives. The notion that the World would "dither" for years after a nuclear attack on any country (never mind one of the Big Five) is laughable on the surface. Such an occurrence would bring global condemnation and unite the civilized world against whomever was responsible.

Ok, not quite ready but basically ready by the time Iran wants to use them.

You'll forgive me if I take your "source" with a healthy dose of skepticism. Which is it though? Is Iran going to attack us like a conventional nation-state or sell the bomb to terrorists? Here's a thought exercise for you: Fire up Google Earth and use the line tool to see which large nuclear armed power an Iranian missile would have to overfly to reach CONUS. Spoiler alert: It's Russia. Iran is going to wage nuclear war against both the United States and Russia? Good luck with that.

I'm highly dubious we'd actually do so. Crossing that nuclear line is too high a bar now, even in response to a nuclear attack.

You can't have it both ways, simultaneously worrying about Iranian nukes raining down on us while claiming that the nuclear line is "too high a bar." Iran is not immune to geopolitical forces.

I said they wanted the same thing

You're misinformed. ISIS has an end times ideology and mindset. Iran is driven by an entirely different ideology and set of motivations. They're a radical regime, nobody disputes that, but neither their actions nor their rhetoric suggest that they're ready to commit mass suicide. If a glorious death for Allah was the driving force behind Iranian policy why did they end the Iran-Iraq War? Why limit their actions against Israel to proxy warfare? You don't understand the Persian mindset nearly as well as you think you do.

Rare earth minerals actually aren't rare and we have tons of proven reserves. We just stopped because it's a dirty business.

You are incorrect. The Federal RFRA and most state RFRAs do just that - generally require the government to enact laws in a manner least-restrictive to religious considerations.

However, the Indiana bill has two additional provisions: "First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to "the free exercise of religion" (and not just individuals)...Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business's "free exercise" right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government." (Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...)

This means EXACTLY that a restaurant would now have a strong legal defense against a private lawsuit if the owners decide they don't want to serve gay people. It is NOT limited to making sure the government enacts laws in a least-restrictive-to-religion way.

Fine, pass it, and after enough old conservative white people have died and such blatant bigotry is made illegal in the same way that refusal to serve black people was made illegal, then the Indiana RFRA will be by law unable to be used to defend this bigoted hysteria. But those two viewpoints are on the same side of history, and will suffer the same fate.

N.B. And from the looks of it, the Alabama bill you reference has the second part - it isn't just applicable to how AL enacts legislation, it is applicable to all lawsuits whether the government is party to them or not.

Baby eating is a bit outlandish, but how about blueprints for a domestic Predator Drone base to deal with protestors and terrorists? You can't call that a 'nothingburger' after the NDAA, which allows military detention without trial.

It's only those damn Russians are doing this, all other countries are saint.

Excluded middle much? Other countries may be doing this — or planning to catch-up — but Russia has been doing this on massive scale for many years — all the while, in a classic fit of projection, accusing others of it.

Another difference is, the US, for example, may consider such propaganda a war-fighting tool to be used outside, but Putin's regime — according to TFA — is happy to use it to prop the government domestically.

Then, I suppose, for knuckle-dragging simpletons happy to equate Joe McCarthy with Lavrenty Beria, none of the above makes any difference...

OOOOHH, so not just some random person walking down the street, you're actually referring to someone operating a public business, and that person being allowed to decide that they don't want to deal with an entire group of people, even though they deal with everyone else, and the government saying that it's ok for them to do that if that's what God told them to do.

Specifically, that's NOT what they do. From my linked article: the Huguenins' photography business does serve gay and lesbian clients, just not same-sex weddings.[1]

So it's actually very close to what you say. They provide photographs to all classes of people, but they don't provide photography services for certain events: Gay Marriages, Photographs depicting violence, and nude maternity photos.[1]

In other words, the Huguenins are being sued for being required, by law, to attend and participate in a gay wedding.

Sources:
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

As for the photographer, if he is freelance, he should be able to pick and choose, but if he works in a wedding chapel and sells wedding pictures, well he should photograph anyone who gets married in his place of work.

The photographer linked in my original post here was a freelance photographer being sued for "picking and choosing".

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

By "participate in a homosexual wedding", do you mean "take pictures of the wedding and then charge for the service?" If the photographer doesn't want to offer their services to the public then they have every right to stop being a public business.

This is the biggest strawman I've ever seen. If you were the photographer here: http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

How exactly would you be able to offer photographic services to people without being a public business? It sounds to me like their options are:
a) Can't work as a photographer
b) Be required to violate their religion

I have a problem with forcing them to do it either way. And if I was a gay couple, I sure as hell wouldn't want them photographing my wedding anyway--their heart wouldn't be in it, and they'd probably do a terrible job.

It's not like they have a monopoly. Find another photographer who cares to do your wedding.

would Jesus refuse to deal with a gay person?

It's not clear whether by "gay person" you mean someone attracted to the same gender or someone who has sexual relations with the same gender. In either case, Jesus would interact with them like he would interact with anyone else--with love.
The story of the woman caught in adultery shows his actions clearly:
John 8:11: “Then neither do I condemn you,”Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

But this law isn't just about dealing with, talking to, or being friendly toward any group of people. It's about forcing people to participate in activities that they view as evil. http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

If I owned a printing shop, I would refuse to produce material for the Westboro Baptist Church. Similarly, it seems reasonable to me that a evangelical Christian photographer should be able to politely decline to participate in a homosexual wedding.

You should have the right to decline work that compromises your morals. I have a friend who is vegan, and he turned down a website job at a hunting magazine. That was his right.

Bitch, please, that's not even a contest.
Branson started off with a magazine & record stores before launching an airline; Elon sold a space shooter video game as a 12yr old and was studying physics & material science at Stanford, is invested in SOLAR energy, considers running SpaceX to be his primary job & still found time to put his thoughts on the Hyperloop on paper while showcasing the launch of the most kickass electric sedan ever made.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

It may be that there's someone more deserving of the title than Musk but it ain't Branson, not now, not ever.

http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...


http://www.theguardian.com/us-...


http://www.theblaze.com/storie...

They're not educating people. They're teaching rote memorization.

A friend of mine was in the Peace Corps teaching science in a small village in Africa.

They had never seen ice before.

He decided to show them ice. He used a portable gas-powered refrigerator to freeze some water. He put a piece of ice in a test tube, heated it with a candle, and showed them how the ice became water.

One kid, who was a little more clever than the others, challenged him. The kid didn't accept my friend's argument that the ice became water. He thought that the water was coming from the candle.

Actually, that's a good point. How do you know that the water is coming from the ice rather than the candle?

You could come up with an experiment and see what happens. Then you'd be doing science rather than memorizing facts.

How could you possibly teach a lesson like that with "scripted instruction"? http://m.theatlantic.com/educa...

The really important lesson comes when the kids come up with an idea that isn't in the script, and ask a question that isn't in the script. The scripted instruction teachers will be helpless in that situation. They'll just tell the kid to be quiet and go on with the script. They have to. The teachers are being rated according to how well they follow the script.

I said that the US honors its agreements.

And you're wrong. I'm sorry but the US is no different than any other democratic nation in this regard. Public opinion will always limit the options available to American policymakers. We abandoned South Vietnam to an adversary that didn't have the ability to vaporize American cities, simply because of the body politic was tired of the war.

If you'd stop waving the flag for a few moments you could fully absorb what I'm telling you. I did not say that we would definitely not march for the Baltic States. I merely question that it would be as automatic as it would be if say Great Britain, Canada, or Germany were attacked by an outside force. You really think the American public would get behind a war for the Baltic States? You're talking the theory of power, I'm talking reality, the United States is a democracy, and you'd have to sell the people and legislature on the concept.

We are the head of a political and military alliance.

There is no "head" of NATO as such. It operates on consensus. No consensus, no response. As a practical matter, there's not very much the United States could actually do for the Baltic States without involvement by the Western European powers, so now we're talking about the body politic in other democratic countries, countries which are even more risk adverse than the United States. It's easy to man the ramparts as an American, we haven't fought a real war on our soil in over 150 years.

If members of the alliance can be struck without a response from the US then that diminishes our credibility.

You're proceeding from the assumption that the body politic gives a shit about American credibility.

That is one of the reasons Putin's actions were so unbelievably stupid. The US is interested in pulling out of Europe entirely. We want to focus more on east Asia. If Putin had simply kept it in his pants a bit longer, we'd have left and he could work slowly to gain goals.

Of course, claiming territory is only a small part of what he wants. He also needs to bolster his domestic political position. And for that he needed to get the Russians all stirred up with patriotic furvor. And so far apparently the Russians hate America more now than they did during the Cold War. So well done Putin.

No offense, but you don't know as much about Russia or Vladimir Putin as you think you do. In fairness, neither do our policymakers, not in the Executive or in the Congress. Start with this article and branch out from there.

And no, we're not going to meet them in open combat.

I agree that it's unlikely but never say never. If nothing else there is plenty of room for miscalculation. People in the know, who watch both Moscow and Western Europe seem to think it's possible: "Carl Bildt, the former Swedish foreign minister, said a war between Russia and the west was now quite conceivable."

In any case, this whole conversation started because I question your assumption that American policy treats all members of NATO equally. It might appear that way on paper but you've yet to convince me that the American body politic would march for the Baltic States (or the new members in the Balkens, for that matter) as readily as it would march for Western Europe. I'm a student of geopolitics, recognize the dangers in not upholding our treaty commitments, and even I'm not certain that I would be willing to march for them. I'm not sure how old you are but I'm old enough to remember when nuclear weapons were aimed at me; that's a sobering thought that tempers my blind enthusiasm with a healthy dose of reality.

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

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

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

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

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

It has been proven (as if it needed to be) that we've executed an innocent person.

http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...

Any idea that you can "humanely" murder someone is a damned lie.

Moreover, remember the Central Park jogger case? Where they rounded up five minority scapegoats and said they brutally raped a pretty white girl? Everyone, including Donald Trump himself, was rallying to execute these kids. Now, it turns out they were all innocent. They spent 15 years of their lives in jail and they were LUCKY because they weren't executed. They had all of their primes taken away from them but they still get to live what's left.

The death penalty is for revenge, not justice. And the ones who pay the price when we're wrong isn't the prosecutors. Life in jail means innocent people have a chance. Death penalty removes that chance and replaces it with a false sense of faith in the system.

By that logic, you can never punish anyone unless there is absolute logical certainty as to their guilt. You even touch on that yourself when you say the kids convicted of the Central Park "wilding" "had all of their primes taken away". That can't be returned to them any more than an executed person can be brought back to life.

And you seem to miss the fact that "justice" is nothing more than society's revenge dressed up with procedures and pomp. Underneath all the trappings, it's enforced by the threat of brutal violence.

It has been proven (as if it needed to be) that we've executed an innocent person.

http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...

Any idea that you can "humanely" murder someone is a damned lie.

Moreover, remember the Central Park jogger case? Where they rounded up five minority scapegoats and said they brutally raped a pretty white girl? Everyone, including Donald Trump himself, was rallying to execute these kids. Now, it turns out they were all innocent. They spent 15 years of their lives in jail and they were LUCKY because they weren't executed. They had all of their primes taken away from them but they still get to live what's left.

The death penalty is for revenge, not justice. And the ones who pay the price when we're wrong isn't the prosecutors. Life in jail means innocent people have a chance. Death penalty removes that chance and replaces it with a false sense of faith in the system.

Kinda like this questioning then link
Glad to see the rest of the world is learning from America, a truly inspiring nation.

Reagan and the NRA started the whole gun control craze when the Black Panthers started open carry demonstrations teaching black people how to protect themselves. They pushed for and passed the California gun control laws you hate so much to try and disarm blacks.
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

In 1991 Reagan backed the Brady Bill which placed a 7 day waiting period on purchasing guns and allowed for background checks.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03...

Along with former presidents Ford and Carter, Reagan signed a publicly posted letter backing the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
http://articles.latimes.com/19...

need any more info on Saint Ronnie's anti-gun position?

> There's a big difference between promoting gun safety at home, and putting it into law.

Tell that to Florida, who wrote a law forbidding doctors from even asking if people have guns at home, much less recommending that they keep them secure.

http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

And more importantly, the propaganda is intended for domestic consumption, not "the world".

Oh, how one may wish, this were true! It is not. Compare, for example, the world's reaction to US invading Iraq in 2003 — it caused, what Time magazine would later call "World's biggest coordinated protest in history" — with Russia's invasion into Ukraine and annexation of a jewel of a province after a fraudulent "referendum".

What few protests in the West this caused, they were organized (and attended) mostly by Ukrainian expats — without sympathetic locals.

Because, somehow, both Left and Right in the West were providing Russia with propaganda-cover. Some called Ukraine's new government "Nazis" while others dismissed them all as "Jews" — without arguing with each other both helped Putin.

Now, are all of these people on Kremlin's payroll? Probably, not — but they were carefully fed custom-crafted lies by the Kremlin analysts, who approach the government propaganda the way Western corporations approach advertising of goods...

This is not really a purely online college, as the poster describes. It's an interesting mix between online and offline: all the students are supposed to live together; they do their classes on computers. The physical location can change annually too. The Atlantic had a better article about Minerva a couple of months ago, and it's not behind a paywall: http://www.theatlantic.com/fea... What's really interesting is the instant and continuous feedback from the professor described here as the Minerva method. It sounds like truly scientific learning, a much better technique than the big lecture hall format, with students zoning out half the time.

You make some good points, but Snowden is stuck in Russia, and I intentionally did not want to get in to "Who is Worse?".

But it's unavoidable. It's like trying to watch with a straight face as Chris Brown gets a lecture on how to treat women....by O.J. Simpson.

Murders of Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, and now Nemtsov are just the tip of the iceberg.

Pennies on the hundred dollar bill - and that's assuming Putin ordered or condoned their killings. Obama has killed thousands of innocent people with his drones, including barely 16 year old boys for political speech their fathers made.

If you are referring to Mohamedou Ould Slahi

I'm referring to the more than 50 people who are still being held in Gitmo, some of which have been cleared for release from when Obama was still a Senator. The cop-out that 'their home countries wouldn't take them back' never held any water, since the U.S. spent years ignoring Urugay's offer to take some in, before finally freeing six men late last year.

Please go read this article in full:
http://www.theatlantic.com/fea...

Then come back and tell us how ISIS is "perverting their religion," when everything they do is justified by Islam's holy books and teachings? Beheading of apostates is a religious duty - and I'm pretty sure that back in the early days of Islam, not everybody had their mom's best Cutco knives to make a quick and surgical process of it.

You've no doubt heard the term "headsman's axe" in some fantasy novel or another... do you think they just chopped right through on the first stroke? Ever see a lumberjack do the same with a tree? Pro Tip: beheading may be considered "dignified and humane," but it's also never been a smooth and easy way of killing someone. Those guillotines you're referencing were a pretty new addition to the beheading scene.

How about you learn from someone who was a Marine who knows how the system works

I'd be happy to learn from him, how to operate a weapon, but why would an average Marine know "how the system works" any better, than a software engineer, a construction worker, or a janitor?

But if you hold Marines' political savvy in such an esteem, why don't you accept their other opinions today? They are rather Conservative for one thing — do you share that too, or are you only going to quote the few cherry-picked among them?

This article describes it well.

They want to lure the western powers into a giant war in Syria because their religion tells them that this will lead to the End Times.

Not if you are a butterfly:

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

A mainstream academic economics department is in some ways essentially a modern theocracy.

The book "Disciplined Minds" helps explain the social dynamic behind that (which applies to some extent in most graduate programs, but may be most extreme in some like economics these days):
http://disciplinedminds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Supporting examples include "The Market as God": http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. ..."

And "The Mythology of Wealth": http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. For 6000 years, society has organized itself into social classes. The people who do the work are always in the lower classes. The harder and nastier the work, the lower down in the social order you sink. The people who don't do this work must justify their position. They do it by establishing their "worthiness", and a variety of cultural devices have been concocted over the millennia to accomplish this. The pharaohs, you may re

As a lawyer, I can tell you it is very possible under a negligence theory. In fact, there's a very recent Atlantic Monthly article on just this subject.

No, Buzz Aldrin did leave exposed film on the moon, out of retaliation against Neil Armstrong.

He didn't.

This entire discussion is just like every other on any "tech" forum whenever the discussion of Apple's success comes up. It is filled with complete and total ignorance of the entire field of product management.

You are fixated on the people behind one of the parts of an iPhone. Not all of them, just one of them. That part is important, but by itself it does not make an iPhone. Those engineers in Taiwan were compensated for those parts, and that's all they provided ... parts. And even if they had somehow been responsible for all of the parts of an iPhone, that still would not mean they deserve the overall credit for the iPhone's success.

Why? Because the iPhone is a product, not a bunch of parts. A product is much more than the sum of its parts. It's about how they fit and perform together. It's about the total experience they form. Where those parts go, how they interact, what's included and what isn't, how it's packaged together, etc. are all integral to any product's experience. Have a look the intro video -- Steve Jobs talks for a long time before he even shows the phone, and then even longer before he actually starts using it. He spends a lot of time showing what's included and what's not included, particularly vs. other devices. But most importantly, he walks the audience through multiple use cases and shows the audience how great the overall experience and flow are compared to what they are used to. And it is important here to note the distinction between features and use cases. He doesn't just show off this or that individual part, he actually takes the time to talk about common tasks like checking email or browsing the web and explain how the iPhone's overall experience is meant to make these easier and more pleasant. The experience is an emergent property of the device that doesn't come from any one individual part, but from how they all work together in concert.

The entire cell phone industry was turned on its head the day the iPhone was revealed to the world (yes, even the beloved Android had to drastically change in reaction, see here). Apple showed everyone the world what a modern smartphone experience could and should be.

To point out which parts weren't invented specifically for the iPhone is to miss the point. In fact, as some people have pointed out, no doubt in frustration over not understanding the value of the iPhone, every individual part and technology in the iPhone existed in some form prior to its unveiling. Many companies around the world could have built something just like the iPhone and beaten Apple to the punch. But they didn't.

Product management is elusive and intangible. You can't quantify what makes a great experience, you just know it when you see it. But that doesn't mean it isn't real. Even if a great experience can't directly be measured, the side effects can be, via sales, popularity, and customer satisfaction & loyalty. Clearly, this intangibility can be very frustrating for literal-minded engineers when they look at products side-by-side and can't understand why one is loved more than another. The checklists of features can often appear nigh-identical, and we all know that such checklists of features are all there is to it! Since the notions of product management are invisible to such people, they will, in their frustration of not understanding, spin all sorts of explanations as to why things like the iPhone are successful. It had better marketing. Better celebrity endorsement. Or the old standby: the people who buy those items and love them must be stupid! And now we have "control of the licensing fees ... largely a legal play". Why yes, the entirety of the work in putting the experience together deserves no credit! It doesn't even exist! Voila, we've solved it again!

Who was Steve

"Transhumanism is currently a hodgepodge of religious nonsense, visionary science fiction, "

So is Space Nutterism. I can even trace its origins!

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

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

" we are making copies of our minds, so even if my mind joins the singularity, I will still die"

Ah, the old Theseus paradox. Guess what? *YOU* are making copies of YOURSELF already! EVERY DAY! Are you dead?

Shit, the molecules in my brain aren't the same as the ones as last year. Some of my memories are GONE, and some new ones are formed!

AAHHHH!!!! The 2014 ME IS DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All I am is a 2015 COPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'M DEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!!

Now, this is completely off topic but reminds me of a funny paragraph in a recent Atlantic article about writer Jeff VanderMeer.

Sometimes, you have to change your coffee shop, too. At the end of one increasingly jittery week of writing, the barista asks me, “Feel any different?” “In what way?” I ask. “I dunno,” she replies, “I’ve been adding more espresso shots to your coffee, gradual, to see what would happen.”

With a shameless plug for his recent Southern Reach trilogy (as is the whole article).

But you have to wonder about coffee shop regulars. This might explain some of their behavior.

So, by your logic, the NSA would have no reason to purchase black-market vulnerabilities for their exploit and exfiltration systems... but that is what they do.

The fact is that I too write very secure code. Provably secure, in fact. Computers are finite thus every boundary can be tested, every function call fuzzed and every code branch verified to fail-safely any incorrect / unexpected inputs. We have code coverage tools, unit testing, fuzz testing, (and automated test stub generation to ensure functions don't get "forgotten"). However, this is expensive. There's really no excuse other than lack of resources, that and the maintainer labels "stable" that which has not ever been tested...

People do NOT value their security. They say they do, but they do not value security enough to pay for what secure code authoring entails. The consumers accept rushed unfinished code as a valid purchasable item, with the expectation that the mistakes made in the code will be patched periodically. The code is so buggy that when the patches stop, the user is forced to upgrade to newer supported codebases -- This would not be the case if the code were secure. Can you now see that planned obsolescence and forced migration could be incentive for publishers of software to NOT make the code secure?

Since end users accept the shite state of computer security they do not allocate resources so that programmers can allocate time to the task of securing systems. A routine unit test test would have caught this bug, let alone an input fuzzing test (which is what everyone should be doing, since that's what crackers use against code to suss out exploit vectors); However, the code was allowed into the codebase without proper testing. You don't have to trust the coder if you can show that the code is secure against said tests.

I blame the maintainers, but primarily the public for accepting this state of affairs. If you are not willing to pay (CPU) time and/or money for security, you will simply not have it.

I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited

Austerity for an entire government simply sucks. Cutting expenses is a great idea for an individual, but for a government that's more like trying to balance your checkbook by taking a lower-paying job close to home (Hey! Gasoline expenses are way down!). Or more accurately, a company trying to balance its ledger by selling less products. Adherence to this idea is why Europe is still deep in recession while China and the USA have been back to economic growth (and in the USA's case, falling real dollar deficits) for over a year now. If it needs to do so, a government should cut expenses during a recovery, not during a recession.

Greece has some systemic problems that helped get them into this mess (eg: tax cheating is practically a national sport). But when faced with a recession they have 2 basic problems. The first is that they aren't AAA borrowers like the USA, so their government can't just borrow money at will. If they want to borrow large sums, they have to cajole it out of someone (like the EU). The second is that they are shackled to the Euro, which means all the monetary policy options that the US relied on to pull itself out are not available to Greece. That means leaving the EU, or borrowing more money from it, are really their only 2 options.

It would really behoove the EU to develop some analog to the US's Fed to run their monetary policy. The problem is everything there seems to run on consensus, and I simply don't see how that's possible when you have such divergent members. They'd have to get themselves a semi-independent policy board, like the US has, or unify all their national budgets and expect to have to regularly pour EU tax dollars into poorer members, like the US does every year with Mississippi.

One thing is pretty clear though. The current middle ground the EU is trying to run just isn't working.

Thanks for the pointer! I doubt I'll find my name there. Also, I said the 3X3 display wall panel may have sparked an interest in combining speech research and Jeopardy (perhaps, in an unconscious way?) -- but Watson itself is a much broader system. I wanted to work on such systems then, and talked a bit about "wouldn't it be nice if..." like with a display wall connected to a supercomputer for solving tough problems, but I said nothing detailed as to how it would really work, beyond creating a simple system with a Linux server where you could say things like, "put stocks on panel 3" or something like that. I don't even remember in detail what pattern of utterances I set it up to respond to (it was not very complex). So, my contribution to Watson itself technically -- probably near zilch. It's just the display wall Jeopardy connection I wonder about. But now that you raise the issue, aspects of using an AI to help solve problems was part of that idea. But, sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov with Multivac or his robot stories have been taking about that for decades...

As for credit for being a spark, do people, say, always even remember some book they read years ago where an idea began to seep into their mind? How do you even quantify a degree of contribution? When I asked Ted Nelson (when he visited IBM once) about whether "The Skills of Xandu" short story by Theodore Sturgeon inspired his work, he thanked me said he had been looking for the story and he claimed to not even be able to remember the story's name! :-) Here is an audio version of that story, which is about a wearable nanotech computers supporting humans wirelessly sharing their knowledge and skills -- hot prescient stuff for the early 1950s:
https://archive.org/details/pr...

BTW, I gave a copy of that story to my supervisor at IBM Research, a master inventor with 50 patents to his name. He finally looked at it a while after I left, and thanked me, and said it was the story that got him interested in materials research based on its nanotech angle! But he had long forgotten it. I can wonder how many other inventors that story has inspired? I don't know what inspired it though. Maybe Memex? :-)
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

I've been tangentially around several development like WordNet (George Miller), "Mind Children" (Hans Moravec, who read my senior thesis written under Geoge about self-replicating robots as he was working on the book), Marshall Brain's early career (where he probably saw a simulation I made of self-replicating robots, and I wonder if that contributed to his later concern with "Manna"), and at IBM Research as mentioned with Jeopardy and Watson. Possibly some others (like my possibly talking with David Gelernter about triples I was enamored of, and him saying tuples were more general, at SUNY Stony Brook), my talking at Princeton about robotics and stores (Jeff Bezos was the year after me), my senior thesis which presaged "Evolutionary psychology" but I doubt that sparked much as not many people read it and that field was already developing in parallel. as I can see now. In no case would I claim to be clearly the driving force behind any of these accomplishments which are full of a lot of hard and inventive work. As with Watson, it's possible I was just a tangential spark to some of these projects to some degree -- or not! It is also quite possible that I ended up hanging around people like Hans Moravec because we already were thinking along similar lines. Also, sometime ideas seem just "in the air" for whatever reason. Or ideas come to people by other paths, often multiple times before we even notice them. (It's said in direct mail as a rule of thumb you need to send the same advertising letter three times before people pay attention to it.) And certainly, in all cases, a lot of sparks went the other way, to me. :-)

Voter fraud is a nonissue fearmongered and blown out of proportion to enact the real disenfranchisement: Republicans pass laws making voting harder for blacks and the poor.

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

It's interesting because it's a last ditch desperate effort to preserve a voting base of old white conservative people which is quite literally dying off.

Then there is the gerrymandering to make sure the Republican voters always dominate in any given Rorschach ink blot of a voting "district."

But after that, Republicans have a real problem keeping and growing a voter base.

Long term, they either die off, or they radically change their ideology.

It's a couple years old now, but there was this interesting article in the Atlantic about the connection between SkyMall and the company that acquired it, Xhibit. It points out some very suspicious details related to their financial situations.

This is a form of confirmation...

Yeah, it's not like the high-functioning sociopaths that seem so well-represented in the programmer population would be at all interested in the six-figure salaries

True. And they don't need many smart people to herd their idiotic workforce. Take a look at how Ferret Cannon (the NSA automated hacking system) works. It took a few smart people to figure out how to get exploits purchased on the black market (which are 'payload hook ready') hooked into their exploit delivery system. Someone purchases the compatible exploits, another categorizes the exploit's tech level, another adapts it to work with their system. Then a "cyberarmy" of power-tripping idiots follows a damn flow chart that tells them which level of exploit to use against a target based on the target's technical capabilities.

The morons select a target and press a button to hack them. The folks "hacking" you are less qualified than skiddies using automated pen testing like metasploit. It may have worked at first, but I know for a fact that due to their incompetence they frequently underestimate the technological capabilities of their targets; They don't know what to do about VMs and hardware with spoofed fingerprints (so they end up identifying and hacking into VMs instead of hardware's firmware), and wind up giving their 'enemies' their 'cyberweapons' meanwhile tipping them off to the intrusion.

Protip: Yank the network connection to your systems and wait a little while. Do the disconnected systems' storage devices become highly active? If you were hacked by "them", this is the spyware trying to remove itself to evade detection by offline analysis. It's a simple quick-litmus test, but you'll still have to verify the infection via diff against a known good VM image. Then, simply restore the VM to it's latest known-bad state, reconnect the network, and feed the morons disinformation.

Look, I'm not against my government, I value my country, but you can't really tell if this is a foreign intel agency or your own government hacking you (maybe "they" think you could be a valuable asset for your government). So, one might as well play it safe and fuck with "them" hard core. If you go to the FBI, they'll just stonewall you and probably refer you (or your loved ones) to a psych ward for paranoid schitsophrenia -- Regardless of whether or not you are a security researcher and carry documented proof of the intrusion -- Since that's the label they use to dissuade others from believing you, whether you're a nutter or not (and you would be incredibly enraged if you found out why the label is this particular mental disorder).

As "they" escalate their unwarranted attack against you, simply collect and document more of their technology. Put it in an encrypted insurance file and upload it around the net as things like "Justin Beaver Discography". Use a network of human and automated Dead Man's Switches, to dissuade them from disappearing you lest the leaks begin. Protip: Encrypt the most outrageous stuff first, then place some less outrageous stuff along side that encrypted blob and encrypt them both into another blob. Repeat as needed. Now you can create a timed release of the info without relying on corrupt journalists to do it for you, just arrange to have the keys released in reverse order: Each decryption reveals another more scandalous secret and another juicy blob that needs decryption. The thing to remember here is that you don't have to worry about "them" cracking your encryption methods, or finding out what's inside via hacks, because "they" already know what you know. You encrypt the data to prevent the common citizens from peering inside, and frankly, some of the shit I've seen should not be exposed since we don't need riots right now as they'll be exacerbated by the current

Movie financing is a weird game. It is easy to get hosed for a lot of money if you don't hedge your bets. Also you are dealing with a lot of different unions. I know it seems easy, find a good project, fund it. But tripleAAA titles are hard to come by, then you have to secure a director that is free, sign actors with a free schedule. That's the easy parts. Plus the exhibitors have close relations with the distributors who might not want AMC releasing other products. They can and will hold back the number of screens you can show say X-men on if you don't play ball. Costing the exhibitors a lot of their profits. Everyone worth getting has part of the profits in their contracts. Don't forget cost overruns, city funds, agent lawyers. And that is still the easy parts. The movie has to be advertised, and compete with over movies in theaters. Also see Hollywood Accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... https://www.techdirt.com/artic... http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... I predict this will end very badly

It's like I've grown up in a fairly cold climate, send a person from the tropical regions here and have him dress like me and I swear he'll think it's cold, damn cold.

Interesting. There was an article last week about cold climates and BMR. Loosely put, the hypothesis is that if you're mildly cold (55-65F), you'll burn calories trying to keep the body warm, but it's not so cold that hypothermia/frostbite are a risk. We're not talking the Arctic Circle, more like San Francisco 75% of the year. Sure enough, there's also a kickstarter. Although the plural of anecdote isn't data (it'd be difficult to do a double-blind clinical trial, althrough I suppose you could compare three populations, one wearing a vest at 55F, one at 65F, one with a big bunch of weights without coolers, and a fourth control group doing nothing), we may see some testing of the hypothesis in the coming years.