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Don't forget that rape isn't illegal everywhere.

In some places, BEING raped is illegal. Because it's sex outside marriage.

http://trueslant.com/nealungerleider/2010/01/21/saudi-arabia-to-lash-filipino-rape-victim-100-times/

http://jonathanturley.org/2008/05/14/rape-in-saudi-arabia-reporter-has-eye-opening-conversation-with-young-saudi-males/

In order to understand our reactions to deaths attributable to machines/computers/robots, we should notice the different reactions in different cases. Several killings by industrial robots were reported in the news although they were in many ways more like accidents with chainsaws and snowblowers and other dangerous power tools than the "robot kills human" sort of headline suggests. On the other hand, the Therac 25 delivered therapeutic radiation controlled by very badly designed and constructed software, and it killed at least 6 patients in a rather gruesome way. These incidents seem much more like automated manslaughter than the accidents with industrial robots, but I never found any mention in the newspapers. The killings went on for more than a year, and early investigations focused on hardware problems, mostly ignoring the software. We need a few good dissertations and more careful studies of more incidents before drawing conclusions. But, it seems that our irrational reactions to machine/computer/robot killings are driven by something more subtle and complicated than a mere autophobia. I would hazard a guess that we prefer to get excited about relatively unimportant incidents with a nice dramatic presentation, while ignoring the rationally scarier incidents that expose real systematic safety problems.

Operating too close to limits has long been the suggestion: http://trueslant.com/milesobrien/2009/06/08/the-coffin-corner-and-a-mesoscale-maw/

If you're going to take nothing more than the fact that I use a particular communication tool as a reason to write me off as irresponsible, I feel fully justified in declaring you as a pompous, superior, neo-luddite based on nothing more than that single Slashdot post.

The difference between you and the OP is that the OP has good reason to worry. FB users post things to FB they shouldn't. I know several people who have been burned by things they posted on social media sites. My estimation of anyone who uses them is automatically adjusted lower, just like anyone who uses texting abbreviations in professional communications. It shows a level of ignorance of proper etiquette and social consequences. Does it mean that everyone who uses FB is stupid? No, but it does make for an easy metric to weed out people who are less likely to make good decisions about confidentiality when they have a personal stake in the results. How are they going to behave when it is some strangers privacy they are destroying? I should also point out that in all of the cases of people I know being burned by social media posts, not one of them learned their lessons, and they all continue posting things that can and probably will be used against them in the future. Social Media is akin to any other addiction, and I don't trust the addicts for the obvious reasons.

-=Geoskd

Ghadaffi (sp?) next door in Libya? But there goes the entertainment.

Sherrod shamed them for yucking it up, duh, that was why the NAACP asked her to speak on the matter. And of course I care that she said that it's about the haves vs the have nots, you know me, that's my line! Class warfare, baby. But that was by no means the point, the major point was that she had made a mistake, and corrected it, and she was urging NAACP members to examine their own racist attitudes. Something the Tea Party has not even come close to doing.

I notice you have not addressed the serious racists outlined in the linked story I gave you. Here, maybe you missed it, so I'll keep posting it until you do address said racists: http://trueslant.com/saralibby/2010/03/21/tea-partys-racist-antics-are-anything-but-isolated/

When did the race baiter get booed down? I simply don't believe you.

I stand by my assertion that there are a sizable number of non fringe racist elements in the Tea Party. Their words and actions are on record. In fact, I would say that most Tea Partiers are motivated far more by fear that the 'white race' is losing status, than by economic motives.

I know I'm telling the truth, and I know that you know you are lying. You see, the whole point of Sherrod's speech was to complain about racism towards whites.

It was an excellent lesson in the extreme hypocrisy of the right wing, who will manufacture lies, spout racist nonsense, complain about being called racists, and claim that anyone who calls them a racist must also be a racist. It's extremely childish.

http://trueslant.com/saralibby/2010/03/21/tea-partys-racist-antics-are-anything-but-isolated/

I can Karma-Whore and google for you, but you'll need to do the actual reading:

GP's Point 1 - http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/iran-inks-deal-to-send-enriched-uranium-to-turkey-20100517-v8uc.html
GP's Point 2 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaiMjAULWn0&feature=player_embedded#!
http://libertypundits.net/article/paid-mercenaries-on-turkish-flotilla-ship-and-more-censored-footage-of-violence/
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/turkish-paper-releases-censored-photos-of-beaten-israeli-commandos-1.294443
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O'Keefe
http://trueslant.com/charlesjohnson/2010/06/06/another-cropped-reuters-photo-deletes-another-knife-and-a-pool-of-blood/
GP's Point 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Turkey_relations
GP's Point 4 - http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/columnists-164310-turkey-hamas-relations.html
GP's Point 5 - RTFA, what we're discussing in this /. post.

If you don't see Turkish Islamist policy driving this and the bigger picture this fits into (radical Islam, oppressive regimes vs new-internet-driven-world-order, middle-east mentality and its differences from western mentality, arab nation politics, Turkey's NATO/european membership, Turkish internal right-left struggle and dirty laundry, Turkish history (murder/slaughter of 1,000,000 armenians last decade, try mentioning that on Turkish media), you're just another one of those people who just can't get geopolitics and need an oversimplified model - namely, a little demonizing circle drawn around one of the participants of an equation (typically ends being one of Iran, Al-qaeda, USA, Israel, George W, etc) with an "evil" sign pointed at it. If only the world were that simple. Fox and Al-jazeera do it equally well, depending on direction the guys with the remote wants the arrow pointed in.

I have a demonizing-circle detector. Every time I get someone draw me one (whether Erdogan from Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, Ismail Hanniyeh from Hammas, Al Jazeera or Fox, I immediately know I'm being told a half-truth. Big problems don't fit in little circles, and the root causes are way more complex and way more distributed.
If complexity can be equated to pain with people who can't grasp it, I'll invoke the following:
"Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."

http://trueslant.com/barrettbrown/2010/03/24/cia-state-department-apparently-acting-on-plan-to-destroy-wikileaks/

of everything is bullshit.
"I'd rather be hit with a tazer then a 40cal any day."
What's that, a 9mm? Of course you'd rather be hit by a tazer than a 40cal! Bullets: 25% chance/death, 30%/chance perm.damage (Red Cross figures)
Tazer: "Although the company spins it otherwise, Taser-associated deaths are definitely on the rise. In 2001, Amnesty International documented three Taser-associated deaths. The number has steadily increased each year, peaking at 61 in 2005. So far almost 50 deaths have occurred in 2006, for an approximate total of 200 deaths in the last five years." Not very save at all, it would seem, but better odds than any bullet.
"Nothing is 100% safe," agreed
"and besides 99.999% of the time you did something to warrant getting hit, so its your own damned fault if you die."
That's just utter bollocks. "friendly fire","mistaken identity","weapon system error","overzealous operator", i could go on, i seriously think a more realistic figure would be 25% of the time you did something to warrant getting hit.
(and yes i've been in the army and handled many different weapons).
Some food for thought on how these systems are going to be used (on us ;():

http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/03/07/normalizing-the-police-state-and-how-it-ends-with-taser-firing-drones/

Russians say: "nuke it!"

Child Protective Services report reproduced here

I already provided a citation for you: http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/03/30/tx-county-teaching-kids-government-is-out-to-harm-them-makes-parents-unsuitable/

It has all the names, the location, even a copy of the police report.

Well if ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, et cetera are censoring the news by ignoring these stories, then you have to turn to alternate sources. For example, notice how they described the "hate speech" coming from Tea Party protestors, but completely ignored the anti-war riots happening in Berkeley just one week earlier. Or how they reported on the "Obama is a Nazi" posters, but completely ignored the "Bush is a Nazi" or "Bush is a chimp" posters in 2008.

Or the black man that Obama supporters beat to a pulp last month. These TV news organizations have sold-out to Democrats and only present the news that favors Democrats, while ignoring news that does not. And why not? Democrats have pledged to work with RIAA and MPAA to protect the TV/movie industry's productions.

Hence the nickname - DNC-NBC. Links to child custody case:
(read the CPS report at the bottom of the page)
http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/03/30/tx-county-teaching-kids-government-is-out-to-harm-them-makes-parents-unsuitable/
(google) http://www.google.com/search?q=seize+Child+distrusting+Government

"Since then, four perfectly good studies comparing large populations of kids have showed that thimerosal did not cause the increased reporting of autism. The best evidence comes from Denmark, which stopped putting thimerosal in vaccines in 1992; the rate of autism in kids born afterward continued to increase. "

...suffice to say, by the end of that article, I'd lost interest in the subject. About the only question of interest here, is "what took the Lancet so long?" Physician and SF writer F.Paul Wilson runs a blog at TrueSlant.com: http://trueslant.com/fpaulwilson/ ...where his most recent post riffs off the BBC story about the Lancet article author actually being cited for "acting unethically". Wilson puts it:

The MMR is the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The UK's General Medical Council also ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield ...acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in doing his research... Get this: the guy is a gastroenterologist and he was doing spinal taps on kids. He paid kids and his son's birthday party £5 each for blood. His so-called research was published in 1998 in the respected journal The Lancet, but he neglected to mention that he was being paid to advise the lawyers for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR. The board said he had acted with "callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer".

Click on Dr. Wilson's link to see his copy of a graph showing the slight drop in MMR vaccinations resulting in a sharp increase in measles cases. Fortunately, a mere thousand or so more per year will only mean a couple of deaths, blindings, sterilizations, and so forth. Words fail me.

http://trueslant.com/laurieessig/2009/11/22/lessons-from-the-uc-student-protests/

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that PETA kills animals. Not a handful of animals. Thousands.

Perhaps it also has to do with calling feeding kids meat child abuse.

Maybe it could be with this not so tactful ad.

Or maybe he's offended by PETA's ads that make mothers out to be murderers.

Then PETA goes on to say that dad's a psychopathic killer.

It will be a total sham and a waste of time.

Votes are being sold for $10 a pop, nobody expects the elections to be fair so whoever wins election results will be contested, election ink safeguard is washable (then again, that may save some people's fingers), 13-year-olds vote, there are reports of people being hanged for voting and somehow Britney Spears is registered to vote.

But yeah. Sure...
A map and a bunch of anonymous SMS messages will SURELY fix all that.

Here's Matt Taibbi on your claim that "Fannie Mae regulation REQUIRED banks to loan . . .":

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/18/the-greatest-non-apology-of-all-time/#comment-881
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/18/the-greatest-non-apology-of-all-time/#comment-883

Here's Matt Taibbi on your claim that "Fannie Mae regulation REQUIRED banks to loan . . .":

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/18/the-greatest-non-apology-of-all-time/#comment-881
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/18/the-greatest-non-apology-of-all-time/#comment-883