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History?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gchq-spying-edward-snowden

The real history is that the UK found it didn't have the resources to fund Bletchley Park without American help and by the end of the war most of the work was being done in the US:

By December 1943, 120 machines were installed. For the remainder of the war, the US took care of breaking the majority of German Naval Enigma traffic and in particular the messages of the dreaded German U-Boats.

http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/bombe/

Yahoo: http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

This is false. Violent crime is on a downward trend in the UK.

Not false; you just can't seem to understand simple statements. The original claim is: "in the decades since England banned guns, violent crime has gotten much worse."

The big gun ban in the UK was passed in 1968. Violent crime has risen greatly since the ban. Another law was passed in 1988, and crime continued to increase. Violence in the UK peaked a few years ago and is on a downward trend now, but no gun bans have been passed recently. Conclusion: it would be stupid to claim that gun bans caused a decrease in crime in the UK... correlation does not prove causation, and you don't even have correlation on your side.

Look at the graphs in the link you yourself posted: do you seriously want to claim that this shows that crime went down after the gun control law was passed in 1968?

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/13/violent-sexual-crime-statistics-england-wales-2013

You are arguing that the USA is more violent than the UK for cultural reasons

Yes... maybe you can understand simple sentences?

and yet you think the answer is to make lethal weapons more available in this violent society. That doesn't make sense at all.

Nope, false alarm, you aren't tracking after all.

Let's try again. The bad guys will be armed no matter what you do. We can't even stop druggies from buying drugs every week, hell, maybe every few days. Unless you can wipe all drugs from the streets, I'll never believe that you can get all the guns off the streets. Thus, the bad guys will be armed.

So yes, I think "the answer" as you put it is to let the law-abiding have guns as well. I would hate to see the bad guys armed and the good guys disarmed and helpless.

Citizens with legal firearms use them defensively up to two million times per year, usually with nobody even harmed. Do you want the crimes that were prevented by this to occur? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Ban guns, or at least put restrictions on where they can be carried and how they must be stored and you will at least see several hundred fewer people being shot accidentally each year.

According to this link, accidental gun deaths are at an all-time low. The most recent year in this paper, 2001, had only 800 accidental firearms deaths; cars are 51 times more likely to kill you accidentally than firearms.

So let's ban cars, yeah? Or at least make it much harder to get them and drive them, yeah?

Swimming pool accidents are also much more likely to kill you than firearms accidents. You want to ban swimming pools? No-one really "needs" a swimming pool.

And, in the decades since England banned guns, violent crime has gotten much worse.

This is false. Violent crime is on a downward trend in the UK.

http://www.theguardian.com/new...

You are arguing that the USA is more violent than the UK for cultural reasons and yet you think the answer is to make lethal weapons more available in this violent society. That doesn't make sense at all.

Ban guns, or at least put restrictions on where they can be carried and how they must be stored and you will at least see several hundred fewer people being shot accidentally each year.

Because "the huge deviations" do not actually exist?

Often the claims that the models don't match reality are based on incompetence or worse.

As a bonus here are some simpe trend comparison graphs.

The Economist essentially says: "We can't be sure he intentionally fudged the numbers, and he says he didn't, so we'll take his word for it."

I don't think that's anywhere near a sufficient summary of the writer at The Economist says, no.

That is an extremely weak defense.

You have committed a very serious error of thought. Choose your presumptions with greater care!

Before you go accusing anyone of murder, rape or serious academic misconduct you had better have some real evidence to back it up. I trust you are not claiming that Giles' points of attack are sufficient to establish so serious an allegation to any reasonable level of proof?

Be sceptical about Picketty's treatment and use of data, of course, but there can be no serious suggestion that Picketty "intentionally fudged the numbers," and it is scurrilous to imply he may have. Yes, we ought certainly "take his word for it." To do otherwise, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, is beyond contempt. Seriously!

Besides, that piece was hardly a defence, but rather a fairly neutral assessment of the dispute. For a more spirited, and highly informative, defence, today's data analysis piece in the The Guardian is more in order.

Yes the email seems to exist :)
http://time.com/137530/nsa-to-...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
"He goes on to cite a list provided in the training that ranks presidential executive orders alongside federal statutes in the hierarchy of orders governing NSA behaviour.
“I'm not entirely certain, but this does not seem correct, as it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same precedence as law"
With an unnamed individual sending back "“correct that EO's cannot override a statute” but that they have the “force and effect of law”."
Would seem to show a legal question in one email was 'found' and is now been presented with spin to the wider media.

Actually, thanks to the Affordable Care Act the HHS has full rights to access your medical history for... research purposes...

Of course they're bound by the same HIPAA laws so they would never, ever, leak such information for personal or political gain...

http://watchdogwire.com/florid...

http://abc13.com/politics/dan-...

And not even the UK is spared...
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

We already know how it works with peer reviewed journals. Opposing AGW is a sure way to ensure that your paper is not published. Pretty easy to get those kinds of numbers when you can control who gets published.

So you think there is a conspiracy among all journals to keep out contrary evidence? Really? Don't you think one of them would break from their secret pact and scoop the others?

Show me the peer reviewed article published in 1999 that correctly predicted global average temperature throughout the 2000s. Show me the article published in 2005 that correctly predicted the state of the antarctic sea ice in 2014. You can't because they don't exist.

http://news.slashdot.org/story... - When the 1981 paper was written, temperatures in the northern hemispheres were declining, and global mean temperatures were below their 1940 levels. Despite those facts, the paper's authors confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions.' The prediction turns out to be remarkably accurate

http://www.theguardian.com/env... - The paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.

Is this Richard Lendzen MIT dude not at all respectable?

Would that be the Richard Lindzen who has been funded by Exxon and OPEC, who actually does accept the basics of anthropogenic global warming, but disagrees with exactly how high the earth's climate sensistivity is (ie the amount of temperature increase you'll see from a doubling of CO2 levels). The man who been a keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute, who writes opinion pieces for the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Stree Journal, and who recently joined the Cato Institute?

Not so much, no.

This. And the planet isn't even remotely as hot as it USED to be either. (not even talking the early days of lava pools and chaotic surface, I mean even only a good billion years back)

That doesn't help us toady. Nor any other species alive.

Are the scales going to break one day? Sure they will, but it ain't now.

This is wrong. The scales have broken. Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn.

But for now, Earth is pretty damn stable

This is also wrong. It is unstable.

We ain't becoming Mars just yet.

We are, however becoming an earth with continuous sea level rise for the foreseeable future, and acidifying oceans.

And just to throw this out here, humans actually HELPED make the climate MORE stable on average.

WTF? According to science the big greenhouse effect you see since the industrial revolution is caused by greenhouse emissions. Particularly CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels.

the stable controlled burning of forests to prevent total meltdown in hot times

Deforestation doesn't make it cooler if you burn the wood. It releases the greenhouse gas CO2.

Another ice age is coming sooner or later, we just don't know the exact time.

We were quite happily in an Ice Age, which means that there are significant ice sheets in both hemispheres. We may well be coming out of the ice age, and that means 15-80 metres of sea level rise over time. (Depending on whether the East Antarctic Ice sheet goes too or not.)

We know that ice ages come about when the weather gets out of control, but we still have some distance left before we hit the chaotic bouncing between hot and colds before the eventual collapse of ocean streams that carry most of the heat through convection to the north and south.

WTF?

Right now this is baby steps at best between summer and winters chaos. It is going to get MUCH more worse over the coming decades.

There are going to be more weather extremes. But the mean difference between summer and winter is reducing.

Coastal areas are going to get smashed so hard.

Yes. Sea level rise+warmer ocean surface, does smash coastal areas.

Even mines when it is relatively safe behind a huge chunk of land that mostly protects it from the Atlantic.

Huh?

This is just another one of the many, many balancing mechanisms in nature.

No, it's not. Ice albedo feedback is strongly positive. In fact the west Antarctic ice sheet is over the tipping point and will collapse
.

Another obvious one is that more heat causes more evaporation, which causes more clouds, which causes less heat.

No it doesn't.

The largest feedback from evaporation is water vapour feedback which is very strongly positive.

But observations show that cloud-feedback is small or positive.

Correct.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

It's not a good idea to wander round the City of London wearing a Tshirt or carrying a sign saying "Scientology is an evil cult" - you WILL be arrested.

(It's happened a few times in the past, but this is the most recent example I could find)

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i...

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/...

Thankfully the UK crown prosecution service has more sense:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/No...'

Lots of links off the bottome of the last article.

Thomas Piketty's economic data 'came out of thin air'

The Financial Times has suggested that Piketty's work contains a series of errors that appear to fatally undermine large parts of his thesis. The normally restrained paper claims that some of the data Piketty uses to support his arguments about yawning inequality in Britain and Europe are dubious or inexplicable. Some of this, the paper suggests, may be down to straightforward transcription errors. More damningly, the FT claims, "some numbers appear simply to be constructed out of thin air"

"Oh, that's just a right-wing smear from EVUL RETHUGLICANS!!!"?

Yeah, but if The Guardian isn't good enough, how about Mother Jones?

Chris Giles Challenges Thomas Piketty's Data Analysis

Chris Giles of the Financial Times has been diving into the source data that underlies Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, and he says he's found some problems. The details are here. Piketty's response is here.

Is Giles right? Experts will have to weigh in on this. But Giles' objections are mostly to the data regarding increases in wealth inequality over the past few decades, and the funny thing is that even Piketty never claims that this has changed dramatically.

Wut? Per MOTHER JONES, Piketty says wealth inequality HAS NOT BEEN INCREASING?!?!

Here's an outside link http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval

The fact they have police powers is tantamount to corruption and furthers my point.

I would appreciate someone undoing the -1 unjustified mod to this post.

http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5204513&cid=47097925

True. haha. The correct link: http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

City of London Police are a very strange entity, since the Corporation of London isn't really a democratic body, and their police force should be viewed as serving the interests of their corporate masters, rather than the people at large. As such, I wouldn't obey any instruction from them without a court order.

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Everything is relative. If you're making 87 cents an hour then almost any tax is high.

many people would love to earn $87 an hour

I call BS.

Do you now?

And they treat their staff exceptionally well.

Well let me clue you in. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

We, as a society, shouldn't put up with this.

The only way to stop boring people is to stop being boring.

I think it's a lot more complex than that.

Of course it is.

We're starting to see news stories that children can operate tablets, but can't use building blocks.

Future-shock news stories are a perennial favorite. The news story you linked is Yet Another concerned teachers story. Come to me when you have the results of a peer-reviewed research study to share.

A friends daughter can use a tablet, but she also reads (or something close to it), and plays with lots of actual toys and the like. But they know some children in her age group which seem to have some lesser skills when it comes to actual physical tasks instead of digital ones.

Anecdotes, confirmation bias, and hearsay. I mean, seriously, come on... how the heck do you know how much those other kids play with toys at home, or whether they might just naturally be less adept at these things, or even whether your friends might be naturally biased in favor of their own kid's abilities?

You start a 2 year old playing games on your smartphone or tablet, and they're going to always view it as a game.

In your opinion. A 2013 report from The Milennium Cohort Study showed conduct problems, emotional symptoms, and relationship problems among kids who spent more than three hours a day watching TV and other video content, but did not show the same negative behavioral effects from age-appropriate videogames.

I can't tell you how often I see mothers with their very young children playing on the phone as a keep them quiet measure.

In public. Where their kids might otherwise be climbing on the clothing racks in the store, like I did, when I was a kid, because I was incredibly bored. So what?

Are they doing the same thing at home? You don't know. The previous generation left the TV on to keep their kids out of their hair. As I showed above, that may actually be worse.

I'm not saying that it's not possible that tablet or phone usage may be causing some kind of trouble. I'm saying that I want real, scientific evidence of this, and not piles of "concerned" people spouting unproven hypotheses and biased anecdotes. Those are no basis by which to form any kind of sane public policy or parenting guidelines.

And I'm not at all surprised to see that by the time they reach school they've not got the attention span (or in some cases motor skills) they should.

Anecdotally.

And, if every time they've gotten bored or fussy someone gives them a phone, then when they hit school and that's not really an option, they're going to have NO idea of what to do, because they've always been given these things to keep them quiet. They've never learned that sometimes they have to suck it up and deal with it.

And thirty years ago, this would have read: "And if every time they've gotten bored and fussy someone puts them down in front of a TV, then when they get to school and that's not really an option, they're going to have NO idea of what to do, because they've always had a TV to keep them quiet. They've never learned that sometimes they have to suck it up and deal with it."

Me, I'm not surprised at all that people are seeing this.

I'm not surprised that there are people who see the Virgin Mary in pieces of toast.

Hell, I see a lot of kids where they're all looking at their phones -- and I wonder if they're texting one another from 3 feet away instead of interacting wi

Do you realize that there is a difference between voluntary assisted suicide and involuntary execution?
Here are some actual numbers if you are interested rather than just ranting "thousands" (hint: looks like less than 1000 worldwide over the past 10 years).
http://www.theguardian.com/new...

"According to this study the rate is about 4.1%. The rate of people currently being found innocent after being sentenced to death is 1.6%."

Actually, the article says "[...] at least 4.1%", not "about".
I haven't read the full article, but that 4.1% doesn't include the % of people who were innocent but nobody - or not the right people - found out.
No one knows, really; who knows how many innocent people get killed.

I think when you are killing over 4% of people who are innocent then you need to be talking about whether you should be using the death penalty in the first place.

According to this study the rate is about 4.1%. The rate of people currently being found innocent after being sentenced to death is 1.6%.

The only way to stop boring people is to stop being boring.

I think it's a lot more complex than that.

We're starting to see news stories that children can operate tablets, but can't use building blocks. They've never done the basic mechanical tasks, they've just played with things on tablets.

A friends daughter can use a tablet, but she also reads (or something close to it), and plays with lots of actual toys and the like. But they know some children in her age group which seem to have some lesser skills when it comes to actual physical tasks instead of digital ones.

You start a 2 year old playing games on your smartphone or tablet, and they're going to always view it as a game. And if it is affecting their attention span (because they're bored and have moved onto something else), then they're going to have an awfully hard time doing some tasks.

I can't tell you how often I see mothers with their very young children playing on the phone as a keep them quiet measure. And I'm not at all surprised to see that by the time they reach school they've not got the attention span (or in some cases motor skills) they should. And, if every time they've gotten bored or fussy someone gives them a phone, then when they hit school and that's not really an option, they're going to have NO idea of what to do, because they've always been given these things to keep them quiet. They've never learned that sometimes they have to suck it up and deal with it.

Me, I'm not surprised at all that people are seeing this. By the time kids are 7 or 8 they seem to have their own phones, and spend lots of time using them.

Hell, I see a lot of kids where they're all looking at their phones -- and I wonder if they're texting one another from 3 feet away instead of interacting with one another. And, if they're not texting one another, are they just moving around in herds texting someone else and ignoring one another?

Breaking news I'm sure will come as total shock to people of Afghanistan especially Taliban members who had no idea they were being targeted for death from above from their mobile handset.

So you haven't read anything about how the NSA shifted focus to domestic monitoring after the recession started? It may not be a top priority for the military on a whole but it is a top intelligence priority.

And here's the link just in case you want to read it:

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

You assume thugs need math. They don't.

It takes a few smart folks to set up the systems, and a bunch of dumb ones to follow the flow charts and deploy the automated exploit vectors.

They don't really need hackers at the FBI. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to shill online forums and manage the perception of "national security".

The education system sucks because a well educated public is the hardest to control.

You clearly have no idea. Here's your blue pill:

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Look I'm all for allowing them to smoke on their own time, but I don't show up to interviews or work buzzing off of a couple bloody marys. Relax the drug screenings yes, but showing up high? That's just immature IMHO.

Imagine you're going to throw your morals under the bus. Wouldn't you be plastered or stoned in your FBI interview? The shitty thing is, aside from my anti-war and anti-spying activism, shitfaced or not they'd hire me on the spot after seeing my resume.

The people that could protect this country, wouldn't agree to work with the NSA and FBI anyway, that would be counter productive to said goal. Look, if they wanted to end cybercrime then our guys would be discovering exploits and patching them. We'd be buying up vectors on the black market and submitting patches or reports to the OS vendors, not leveraging them with some automated exploit deployment framework -- That's the opposite of security.

Maybe you've got the wrong idea about the FBI. Better wise up. The FBI and NSA preserve "National Security", that means shit like spam-shilling online forums with state propaganda and manufacturing false evidence against anti-war activists.

The context of this whole discussion is way off. They're looking for more goons to follow flow charts and deploy automated spying tools or troll facebook, twitter and 4chan threads. Not even joking. You want to not sound like an idiot then: s/(FBI|NSA)/KGB/gi and re-read the story.

find it nothing short of absurd that someone can be gagged from talking about Trifigura's crimes over a libel suit,

It is. Fortunately that specific problem doesn't apply to all of Europe. As The Guardian wrote:

It's true that the company has also threatened journalists in the Netherlands and Norway, but the law is less kind to such plaintiffs in those countries, and its threats were taken less seriously.

Having read sites like Groklaw it seems to me that you have your own share of frivolous law suits that only huge corporations can afford to defend themselves against. Your legal system can be devastatingly unfair too. We all have our flaws.

[someone] forbidden from talking about someones past felonies or bankruptcies due to a "right to be forgotten"

I have some trouble seeing the automatic generation of a search index by computers owned by a huge corporation as being the same as *someone* *talking* about something. Although the ruling has pretty vague wording, it is clear that not all references to this person/situation are te be removed from the internet, just the search engine index, that a person has to make a request to remove it, that the information must not be recent, and that it applies to searches on the person's name, and other conditions. The way Google processes the data makes it fall within the criteria for processing personal and private data.

I'm not at all sure that this is a good decision, although my perspective is European enough to think that privacy matters a lot (also as a prerequisite for freedom of speech) and that conflicting rights should be weighed against each other. What you (and many others) seem to be missing is that a ruling like this will worry a lot of people within Europe too, including politicians, and that legislation may be amended to repair unwanted consequences of the current laws. I don't expect this ruling to be the final outcome.

shut down on your website for providing default router passwords because of "security concerns" in Germany, and arrested in the UK for tweeting something that offends someone else.

I don't know about those.

For all the flaws we have over here, at least we can say fairly nasty things about our president and not worry about the jackboots kicking down our door and declaring our mode of thought as "undesirable".

So can we about our own politicians, you're extrapolating our flaws into problems we don't have. If I were to do the same with your country's flaws your country would probably scare the hell out of me.

US?

What a bunch of arrogant, hypocritical pricks. The whole NSA SHITHOUSE comes down around their ears, with backdoored network devices and eavesdropping on world leaders - then these paragons of fucking virtue blame "cyber war" on individuals in a foreign government?

Why the fuck don't they haul meglomaniac Keith Alexander off of his fucking starship and drag his sorry arse, along with Elmer Fudd^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Michael Hayden, into the dock?

China has a developed diplomatic culture. This type of International behavior from the US is pure "play at home" propaganda, with the diplomatic effect of a bull in a china-shop, so to speak. Offensive, ignorant, unnecessary, and duplicitous.

It's not made up, but the NHS probably is far worse than you think.

Net neutrality proposals needs to die and quickly.

You may have intended this as sarcasm. If not, I'd suggest you haven't fully understood the problem.

Look at the current UK government's record, for example. First they introduced mandatory "porn" filtering - which you must formally opt-out of - in the name of "saving the children"; of course, even in it's first incarnation, it was blocking things that were clearly not porn.

Then they swiftly moved to "leverage" that to block "extremist" material. The problem, of course, is that extremist is a nebulous term; UK politicians have described groups as diverse as the Countryside Alliance and UK Uncut (a tax pressure group) as "extremist", and it's these same politicians - not the courts - who are deciding what should be blocked.

Maybe you really do want to live in an internet bubble where the only things you see are whatever the government of the day has decided is "safe". But most of us would rather make our own minds up.

Net neutrality proposals needs to die and quickly.

You may have intended this as sarcasm. If not, I'd suggest you haven't fully understood the problem.

Look at the current UK government's record, for example. First they introduced mandatory "porn" filtering - which you must formally opt-out of - in the name of "saving the children"; of course, even in it's first incarnation, it was blocking things that were clearly not porn.

Then they swiftly moved to "leverage" that to block "extremist" material. The problem, of course, is that extremist is a nebulous term; UK politicians have described groups as diverse as the Countryside Alliance and UK Uncut (a tax pressure group) as "extremist", and it's these same politicians - not the courts - who are deciding what should be blocked.

Maybe you really do want to live in an internet bubble where the only things you see are whatever the government of the day has decided is "safe". But most of us would rather make our own minds up.

No, it's not. Or at least, there are no clear arguments to support this claim (see the article from Cory Doctorow in Guardian, explaining this in more detail: http://www.theguardian.com/tec...).

The only vague argument available is along the lines "netflix transfers a lot of data => it's important => we'll loose a lot of users if we don't support EME". Which is quite weak implication, IMNSHO. For example it's absolutely unsupported claim that users will abandon Firefox completely - there were times when I had to use IE occasionally, because dumb webdesigners made it work only with IE. But I was using FF or some other browser, because it was superior in every other aspect.

Second, it absolutely absolutely ignores countries not covered by Netflix - which is pretty much everywhere outside America and northern part of Europe.

And finally, this DRM is as futile as all the other DRM technologies - it's going to be broken sooner or later (rather sooner), and there are other ways to pirate movies. DVDs/blurays, recording DVB-T ... so the only people not suffering by this are going to be pirates. Just like with all the previous technologies.

Anyway, I always thought the goal of Mozilla is not to acquire the highest browser marketshare, but to offer a truly open-source alternative. Also, browser is not the only project they have. This could have been a great education opportunity - showing a page briefly explaining the DRM issues, why Mozilla decided not to implement it, etc.

Partnership with Adobe, one of the companies most hostile towards open-source, that's a slap in the face.

However, Mozilla is not the only offender here - the first step was done by W3C, who allowed EME to be become part of the standard.

Let's not also forget two other particularly powerful points made in the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) essay:

• "We understand that Mozilla is afraid of losing users. Cory Doctorow points out that they have produced no evidence to substantiate this fear or made any effort to study the situation."
• "More importantly, popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission. In the past, Mozilla has distinguished itself and achieved success by protecting the freedom of its users and explaining the importance of that freedom: including publishing Firefox's source code, allowing others to make modifications to it, and sticking to Web standards in the face of attempts to impose proprietary extensions."

Brad Kuhn builds on these points in his essay discussing Mozilla's announcement: "Theoretically speaking, though, the Mozilla Foundation is supposed to be a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity which told the IRS its charitable purpose was: to "keep the Internet a universal platform that is accessible by anyone from anywhere, using any computer, and ... develop open-source Internet applications". Baker fails to explain how switching Firefox to include proprietary software fits that mission. In fact, with a bit of revisionist history, she says that open source was merely an "approach" that Mozilla Foundation was using, not their mission."

Speaking of how people criticize the FSF without reading what they say, the FSF is not an "open source advocate" despite /.'s insistence to the contrary such as is stated in this story's headline. The FSF and the free software movement predate the developmental methodology known as open source, and the FSF fights for values the open source movement sets out to deny, namely software freedom. The FSF has published more than one essay on this topic (1, 2) and RMS includes a clear and cogent explanation of this point in virtually every talk you'll hear him give. Archives of these talks are readily available online in formats that favor free software. Mozilla's choice here is another example of reaching radically different conclusions given different philosophies: Mozilla's open source choice versus a free software activist's choice to reject DRM for many valid reasons the FSF points out.

Nope. Probably because we don't discriminate against them.

HA HA HAHAHAHAHAA!

http://www.gmu.edu/programs/ic...
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Sorry, you were saying something? Europe is absolutely racist, it's just a bit less visible because the minority population is smaller, less visible, and doesn't try to hold power. Also, the historical repercussions of your past racism are less visible because you guys mostly kept your slaves in your colonies rather than in your backyard: it's a lot easier to pretend that Nigeria isn't your problem any more than to abandon Birmingham.

Killer robots allow to solve conflicts without sacrifice.

If you think they won't be turned against you, Educate Yourself. Anti-activism is really the only reason to use automated drones: They can be programmed not to disobey orders, and murder friendly people. Seriously, humans are cheaper, more plentiful, and more versatile, etc. Energy resupply demands must be met any way you look at it. Unmanned drones with human operators just allow one person to do more killing -- take the lead of the pack of drones, it gets killed, they switch to the next unharmed unit. This way a majority of soldiers don't have to be convinced what they're doing is right.

Any robot that can help a wounded person could easily be re-purposed to fire weaponry instead of administer first aid -- Especially if they can do injections.

I always say, It it's created by humans then it can be cracked.

Yeah, but can it be easily cracked, or cracked within the time frame that the information is still useful? If a criminal can MITM my internet banking and get all of my savings, that is A Bad Thing. In 2006 we could crack Enigma in 4 days with then-modern home PC hardware and an optimised brute force routine. That is absolutely fine; The people who benefited from its use are mostly dead, the war is over, there's no need for the security anymore. In fact, Enigma was so good that almost all of the successful cracks were based on operator error; Enigma was unbreakable at the time when operated correctly.

Just because something can be cracked doesn't mean it's not fit for purpose.

I'll stick with the blood of the young, thank you very much.

From Cory Doctorow's article today...

...the Adobe module is not only closed source, it is also protected by controversial global laws that threaten security researchers who publish information about its security flaws.

These laws â" the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the European EUCD, Canadaâ(TM)s C-11 and so on â" prohibit revealing information that can be used to weaken DRM, and previous security researchers who disclosed information about vulnerabilities in DRM have been threatened and prosecuted.

This created a chilling effect on the publication of vulnerabilities in DRM, even where these put users at risk from hackers. For example, when word got out that Sony BMG had infected millions of computers with an illegal rootkit to stop (legal) audio CD ripping, security researchers stepped forward to disclose that theyâ(TM)d known about the rootkit but had been afraid to say anything about it.

This gap between discovery and disclosure allowed the Sony rootkit to become a global pandemic that infected hundreds of thousands of US military and government networks. Virus writers used the Sony rootkit to cloak their own software and attack vulnerable systems.

The inclusion of Adobeâ(TM)s DRM in Firefox means that Mozilla will be putting millions of its users in a position where they are running code whose bugs are illegal to report.

Under-paid?

Average teacher salaries. California had the nation's highest average salary in 2002-03, at $55,693. States joining California in the top tier were Michigan, at $54,020; Connecticut, at $53,962; New Jersey, at $53,872; and the District of Columbia, at $53,194.

Source: http://www.educationworld.net/salaries_us.html

Being one of the highest paid, it's kind of strange that Mark identified New Jersey as the school system in need of help. From all appearances the US is saddled on the high-end of average yet performance is far from. It's a real pain when there's actual metrics to by which to measure these crap arguments. Funny how the teacher unions are so against them. I'd accept your "the system" argument if and only if you included the union to which these teacher belong.

Right, because that poll simply cannot be wrong. Also, what about the protesters being Russian? They do live there, do they not? How come every medial outlet calls these guys `pro-Russian separatists' while the Maidan neo-nazis are called simply `protesters'? I do not think the facts are as straight as you might believe and Russia does have plenty of reasons to be upset (the NATO expansion in Eastern Europe is a very legitimate reason to be outraged).

They are actually special forces from Russia and not Ukrainian.

This isn't about defamatory material. This is about matters of historical/public record. This case was brought by someone who wanted records of bankruptcy proceedings against him removed. That's not libel nor slander. It's a public record. Similarly a German court blocked a guy who was trying to get records of a previous court judgement or prosecution (I don't recall which) against him removed from a newspaper website. http://www.theguardian.com/com...

One roll per "SWAT" call, results to be cumulative:

On a "1" he gets shot in the arm

On a "2" he gets shot in the leg

On a "3" he gets beat-up and tossed into a squad car for a few hours

On a "4" he gets a stripsearch, a cavity search, a delousing and a county jail "roomie" for a few nights

On a "5" he gets a round in the face

On a "6" he gets the crap scared out of him (literally... threaten him till he soils) by an over-militarized police unit

On "7" through "12" he gets his life threatened by armed men, and spends a sleepless night talking with investigators, trying to "prove" he's not guilty of something gets the contents of his home overturned and sifted through and has to explain all this to, and comfort, his terrified family members who many never again feel safe in their own home.

That's the sort of risk he subjected every family member to in every home he pulled this "prank" on. At 16, you are plenty old enough to know better. Kids at age 16 used to be able to hold jobs, and in some places even marry. 16 year olds fought in both the American Revolution and in the American Civil War and have fought in many other wars in human history. This kid is a dirtbag playing with the lives of innocent people and he would likely have continued to do it up until people died (and almost certainly even beyond that point) and if somebody does not put him down soon he probably WILL become a rapist, a murderer or a child abuser (SOME form of bastard that gets his kicks destroying people's lives).

As for the authorities... that's a whole other (and serious) problem. We've had a rash of recent episodes where the police who are supposed to "protect and serve" and who gun control activists tell us are the only ones who should be "trusted with guns" have gone NUTSO and blasted away like Yosemite Sam. The recent episode in Florida where 23 officers unloaded 350+ rounds into two unarmed men, the Los Angeles pickup truck barrage, The infamous NYC "shootout" with an unarmed man, The Arizona vet shooting, etc are all examples of this poor training, poor discipline, and just appallingly bad judgement. There is simply NO excuse for authorities to bash their way into a home in response to such a 911 call... SOME effort out to be made with things like cameras and pocket periscopes to see what's happening inside before lives are put very much at risk.

It would be risky to do, considering what it would do to the market for Chinese hardware once it was found out.

Apparently, the NSA is either stupid enough to think that nobody could ever figure them out, or just as stupidly shortsighted as other branches of the US government.

Yeah, that article contains good arguments in the sense that they're worth talking about, unlike the stupid denial of basic physics you have been professing. The scientists recognize the greenhouse effect and recognize the basic validity of climate models. They are trying to find an explanation for an observed inaccuracy in past predictions (the famous temporary slowdown in warming - please do note that the trend is still warming). Their explanation consists of slight inaccuracies in the data that have been fed to the model. Other explanations have subsequently been proposed , and while the topic is still subject to debate, heat getting trapped in the depths of the pacific ocean currently seems to be gaining traction as the most prevalent hypothesis, which is worrisome because once this finite heat reservoir is saturated, the heating will pick up with a vengeance (see links at the end of this post for mainstream media reports that quote the authors on making this same point).

To corroborate what I said, the article you're linking to was published in the "opinion & comment section". "Commentary articles are opinionated pieces that focus on a topical issue in climate research that is relevant to policy, the economy or society". In other words, this part of the journal is to stir up discussions. And discussions there are. Here are two articles in the same journal that cite yours:
This one says that even though the heating is slower, it's still getting hotter (yeah, it's also a commentary).
This is the famous paper that proposes a mechanism behind the observation that heat is being stored in the Pacific at an increasing rate (full peer-reviewed article).

And to close, for those who don't like to dig through highly technical papers or simply don't have access, here are three mainstream media reports on that last article. This is science at work, people. It advances through hypothesis and counter-hypothesis, and you cannot just go cherry-picking one report that seems to confirm your political bias without following the further developments of the story...

... the fact that you can do this with a telephone is pretty scary.

Militarization of the police fits your "government's" anti-activism agenda that has been carried out for over a century.

SWATting won't end on its own, they want the practice to become more acceptable. This is just practice for ensuring no one ever tries to defeat "national security" which means maintaining the social, economic and political status quo even against the will of the people. What's scariest is how easy "citizens" allow themselves to be fooled into paying for oppressive police states they actually do not want. It's like they've not learned a thing from their Declaration of Independence or founding fathers teachings about the folly of trading rights for security.

It seems history has at least one more cycle left to repeat. This isn't analogous to an allergic reaction reaction at all. This is consciously planned out social engineering, and if you think otherwise, you're just ignorant of the facts about your country that have been common knowledge for decades. The 70's did happen, you know. Pentagon Papers ring a bell? Read any FOIA docs recently?

What do you do if a child keeps acting up? You take away it's damn toys. Point the finger all you want, but this is your kid that's running amok, again.

I think you should also read this article on the cost of global warming. It's costing us now, and will only cost us more as it warms.