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Hey, at least they're in good company with the Nation of Islam...

If that is the case, where is the crowdfunding source for all the public defenders? Not for this one high profile case.

There is an irony to your statement that I don't think you intended or are aware. The public defenders office very expensive.

https://news.vice.com/article/...

My grandfather helped fight Nazis during WWII. He was a radioman for the RAF and was involved during D-Day. He discovered the Germans were using radar which earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross. I'm sure he'd punch these people in the face if he were alive today. I have another relative who was almost captured behind enemy lines by the Nazis but by knowing German he was able to escape.

Shooting these bastards is too good for them. These people deserve something slow and painful.

Here's a good documentary on these assholes.

https://motherboard.vice.com/e... show up blank in my SeaMonkey v2.48 web browser. I had to turn off my uBlock Origin to view it. :(

He was free to express his opinion, they were free to fire him.

With regards to the latter statement, not necessarily

He said he was aware of illegal hiring practices at Google (see page 6, footnote 6), so them firing him days later could be viewed as retaliation against a whistleblower, which is an illegal reason to fire someone in California.

Also, he identified himself on page 2 as a "classical liberal" (including with that link), not a conservative.

He actually didn't use any citations of scientific publications, that may be where some quotes originated but no sources are shown.

Perhaps you read one of the early, incomplete copies of the document that circulated late last week, rather than the original, full document that he published internally (it wasn't an e-mail), which contained footnotes and citations? In just a quick skim, I found that he linked to at least five separate papers in the first six pages alone, as well as including numerous additional links to articles, Wikipedia, and other sources that he used to back up his points or clarify the way he was using various phrases.

Moreover, he recommended against Google continuing what he is saying are illegal hiring practices that, contrary to California laws against affirmative action, disproportionately favor minorities. He's calling for the same standard to be applied to all candidates, rather than for some to be measured against a more lenient standard, as he's suggesting is currently the case. That, in and of itself, is not a bigoted statement, since calling for equal treatment is not bigotry, though I'll agree with what I assume would be your viewpoint that a bigot would use those same arguments as a guise to push their agenda.

he said that women are inferior engineers

Having actually read his paper, I don't recall that part. Could you point it out to me?

He alleged that Google was engaging in illegal hiring practices that disproportionately favored minorities in ways that California law specifically disallows, and he strongly suggested that the result of those hiring practices was that some candidates who were inferior regardless of their gender were nonetheless hired because of their gender. Put differently, he's saying that Google engaged in a form of affirmative action by lowering the bar for minorities, which is illegal, and ended up hiring less qualified candidates as a result, gender be damned.

Most of his arguments regarding the biological differences between the genders were aimed at dispelling the notion that gender imbalance in an organization is always the fault of discrimination within that organization. He admits that organizational discrimination plays a role, but he was trying to make the point that there are other causes at play—of which the differences in biological predispositions towards certain traits is just one—and that Google has over-emphasized discrimination to the point that it's engaging in illegal behavior, while under-emphasizing other causes for gender imbalances in the workplace, despite having the ability to develop fixes for them.

Whistleblowing implies that he was disclosing potentially illegal activity that google was engaging in.

Which is exactly what he did. You apparently missed the footnote on page 6 where he specifically claimed to have seen Google engaging in illegal hiring practices. Here's the quote (emphasis mine):

6 Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

going so far as to assert the hypothesis that women were biologically not suited for the work crossed a line.

No, he neither asserted nor hypothesized that claim. I've seen that claim incorrectly repeated as people have tried to shove those words in his mouth, but what he actually said was that, speaking in generalities, different genders are biologically predisposed to different traits. He never said that those differences make a given gender unsuitable for a job, nor that they make any particular person unsuitable. Far from it, in fact, as he made it clear that he believes there's a great deal of overlap between the genders when it comes to those traits, and as such he called for assessing people as the individuals they are, regardless of gender.

He did however say that those predispositions are at least in part responsible for why we see gender imbalances in various industries. He also put forward several other causes that are partially responsible for the gender imbalances within any given industry, including cultural pressure to conform to stereotypes, discrimination (which he admits is a problem), and (the topic he spent a lot of time addressing) a lowering of standards as a sort of affirmative action/reverse discrimination.

As best I can figure, the people incorrectly parroting what you said are failing to understand the distinction between:
A) Saying some people are unsuited because of their biology
B) Saying some people who were unqualified for other reasons were allowed in because of their biology

He never said (A), whether explicitly or implicitly, but he strongly implied (B) when he said that he had personally seen Google engage in illegal hiring practices by lowering the bar for people from various minorities, and he called for Google to end that practice while embracing a common bar against which to judge all job candidates.

Now, I certainly don't agree with everything he said, nor do I agree with the way he said some of the things that I happen to agree with, nor do I think he did a great job of citing all of his claims (e.g. what the hell was up with his footnote about Marxists?), but if you're going to disagree with him, don't use straw men arguments. Attack the things that he actually said, rather than whatever you read via a secondhand source, which it's quite clear is where you got your information, given that he actually did cite research to back up most of his scientific claims. The whole thing only takes a few minutes to read, even with the tables, footnotes, and citations that were left out of the incomplete copies that a lot of the early knee-jerk reactions were in response to.

Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."

https://motherboard.vice.com/e... Here's the full, original manifesto with all the embedded hyperlinks the original author included. Why did Gizmodo post a version stripped of this information?

It seems like Google has made it clear that their work environment is definitively hostile towards anyone who dares question feminist dogma

Are you really so naive to think that - are you on your Dad's account or something or did we just get you before the first coffee of the day?

It's not about any *ism. It's about being critical of the company wide employment policy and ultimately the CEO himself. Any correspondence with feminist or any other dogma is co-incidental.
Pick a very public fight with management on an emotive issue, get it into the press and shit happens. Of course he got fired. He was demonstrating a lack of loyalty in a very public way and the issue itself doesn't matter.
How relevant is feminism in the millenial "bro" locker room environment of Google anyway? It's just a bullet point in the hiring policy to stop the place looking like a juvenile sausagefest to the outside world.

Ok, let's have all employees, who attempt discussions about diversity and inclusion, be fired.

The document is an invitation for discussion regarding how "bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion."

The purported full text of the document with active links is here: Google's Ideological Echo Chamber.

Please read it.

For anyone who's looking, I found the original version: Motherboard have posted it here. It's got a whole bunch of links: some are to opinion pieces, some are to scientific studies, and some are to Wikipedia articles which in turn reference a bunch of scientific studies.

The word "neurotic" does not exist in the essay. He wrote this:

Personality differences
Women, on average, have more:

-Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing ).
  These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

-Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

-Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).
  -This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs

Taken from: https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

He was the epitome of diplomatic civility in making his point. People read nefarious intent through their own biases and paranoia.

Gold doesn't take a large amount of computation time (and energy) for a transaction to take place.

According to one estimate, Bitcoin takes an estimated 15 TWh per year to keep functioning; it takes ~41,000 MWh per day, and it works out to 178 kWh for each transaction.

At the cost of electricity from my local utility, that works out to an energy cost of $15.67 per transaction.

More conservative estimates put the cost up to 94 kWh/transaction - which is "only" $8.27 per transaction.

I realize there's nuance to the story; that "mining" is where the energy "actually" goes... but since "proof of work" for a transaction requires mining, and the difficulty of finding a nonce is increased as more miners try to strike gold... we can't really separate the cost of transactions from the cost of mining BTC.

In contrast, once gold is out of the ground & refined, transactions are relatively cheap (gold is heavy, and gold certificates greatly mitigate that problem.) The transaction cost for gold has only decreased over time. Even in the world of fiat currencies like the US Dollar, the cost per transaction is a fraction of a penny.

More traditional ways of ensuring security in financial transactions are currently thousands of times less energy intensive/expensive than BTC; as it becomes more difficult to mine coins, I don't see BTC transaction costs dropping.

This is not just some random company where the boss thinks this is a good idea.

The company, Three Square Market, is a vendor of self-service vending kiosks. They'd like this to become standard to promote their way of doing business. They're trying it out on their employees first. https://32market.com/public/

It's also worth noting, and entirely unsurprising, that this company is part of the for-profit prison industry. See http://tkc32m.businesscatalyst.com/ and find that they're also this company: http://www.turnkeycorrections.com/

Turnkey Corrections sells video-chatting for inmate visits. States are turning to stopping in-person visits in favor of for-profit video calls.

Try to hack the voting system 150000 times and it's a statistic...
Try to do it once and you're likely a Trump voter.

In the case of drivers licenses and searches for alcohol, the reason for that phase in the paperwork is, of course, specifically to waive your Fourth Amendment rights such that no lawsuits or arguments can be raised. Driving without a license is a crime that carries a higher penalty than a first time DUI, so I wouldn't recommend it.

I think the reason they don't allow "useful" identification by facial recognition (and by "useful" here I mean "useful to you, so you don't have to carry papers") is because facial matches are probabilistic and they believe that requiring a physical token reduces the chance that someone will slip through with false identification. Also, facial recognition is fairly easy to spoof if you're determined (great example: https://creators.vice.com/en_u... are SUPER realistic). Note that for domestic travel, at least, it _is_ possible to travel and get through security checkpoints without ID, it's just amazingly irksome. One of my employees traveling with me left his wallet on an airplane and had no ID when flying back the next day, so I got a good description of the process; it's basically an Experian identity check asking you for various info out of your credit report.

That was the same argument I heard over and over to get us into Iraq. The CIA/FBI/NSA are not trustworthy.

You didn't hear it from the intelligence agencies. You heard it from BushCo who were busy lying about what the intelligence agencies were telling them.

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked "specific information" on "many key aspects" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that's not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Ironically, this sort of misrepresentation of intelligence to further the president's goals is exactly what trump has been doing with russia. We are getting leaks because the agencies learned from the Iraqi invasion that when the president lies about their work, the consequences are dire as fuck. Better to leak than to let Trump pull another Bush.

Press releases are easy. The actual "rocket science" involving sending humans to the Moon, and getting them back alive, is far more difficult. Specialized electronics have to be used in space. Or, use a Minority Report style triple redundant processing system where there are three chips in case one gives an anomalous result. Honestly, though, we don't NEED to use "advanced electronics" to get to the Moon, obviously.

Footprints and flags style missions are, other than the great PR, not that useful. IMHO, what we should be aiming for is building up telescopes on the far side.

That's why you should never talk to police

"Drivers will also get a cut of Uber's "teen fare" which had previously gone exclusively to Uber. "

Wait, what? Uber has been charging a special higher fare for teens... but the driver was (up until now) getting the same amount????

How does that make any sense? If there's a surcharge because teens are in some way harder to deal with-- what, do they damage the cars, or what?-- the driver is the one dealing with it-- the driver should get the surcharge and Uber get zero part of it.

Not much info about the teen surcharge, but here are a few comments. The drivers seem annoyed:
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
https://www.reddit.com/r/uberd...
https://uberpeople.net/threads...

china is doing just that, co2 scrubbers ala dune-style water concentrators
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

Those aren't CO2 scrubbers. Those are particulate scrubbers.

china is doing just that, co2 scrubbers ala dune-style water concentrators https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

Some of the perchlorates will release oxygen dimers after simple heating. The resulting gas wont be immediately breathable though. It will likely release other, toxic gasses that will need to be captured and resequestered (like chlorine, etc.)

You need a reducing agent to turn all that iron oxide into something useful.

In terms of processing CO2 into breathable air, and using it in general...

About 9 years ago, a story ran here on slashdot.
https://science.slashdot.org/s...

One liter of this substance can store 89 liters of CO2, and it is very selective, and very durable (It can be reprocessed with heat many times). This would be much cheaper to use than pumps which have moving parts, have a propensity to get clogged with dust, etc. This you just put in a porous bag and hang up outside for a few days, then take it back in and process it.

Combine that with advances in electrochemical reformation of alcohols from compressed CO2 and water, and a catalyst, (https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/10/18/194231/co2-to-ethanol-in-one-step-with-cheap-catalyst) and you get a useful feedstock for many industrial purposes, including as a feedstock for several plastics, like polyethylene.

For breathable oxygen, it seems that blasting the CO2 with the right kind of laser light produces free O2 molecules.
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

In these reactions, the only consumables are CO2, and electrical energy.

It will be the energy costs that are the roadblock.

I think throttling this might make more of a difference...

AI gets to the point were it solves a set of previously unsolvable problems, the algorithms are then researched and better non-AI solutions are then used to solve the same problems. Then AI falls out of fashion for a while and computer power increases thanks to Moore's law. Then it all repeats.

This old story is such a crock.

I highly recommend the following to anyone who wants a different perspective on modern ML:

* Talking Machines: Remembering David MacKay with Philipp Hennig — 21 April 2016

* Probabilistic-Numerics.org

This is plain old numerical methods, optimization, and search viewed through a Bayesian inference filter. I would never have termed any of this "artificial intelligence".

It took the recent large advances in unsupervised learning, the kitty classifier (and progeny), and the LSTM machine translation models to finally justify rethinking academic labels. Programs like SHRDLU from 1968 were perhaps explorations in AI, if our baby-step microscope is especially well focused. But this was closer to natural philosophy than what later became physics. Even our shiny new LSTM language models remain weirdly proximal to Searle's Chinese room. What have we really learned from watching our machines learn? Not a whole damn lot.

I'd nominate a term such as I-cubed: inexplicable inductive inference, or perhaps MIII: massively inexplicable inductive inference.

Even so impeded with an appropriate name, MIII is pretty mind-blowing. But it still ain't AI. It might be a viable building block to proceed in that direction, sooner rather than later, as we begin to erect dynamical systems upon this foundation. To drive the point home, it remains way overblown to call it MIIR: massive inexplicable inductive reasoning.

An Alberta AlphaGo Pioneer Is in China to Watch the AI Wallop Human Opponents

"Before AlphaGo, much of the fundamental games and machine learning research was done here," Muller wrote in an email. "If you look through the references list of the AlphaGo paper in the journal Nature, over 40% of these references have a University of Alberta (co-)author. Then, DeepMind greatly surpassed all of these previous efforts with their new ideas."

I haven't waded through this yet, but I suspect even the vaunted AlphaGo has a backbone of techniques that I personally wouldn't have classed as "AI" (or even AI-ish) by my own standards.

For decades, the big idea in AI was supposed to be recursion. Perhaps human language is recursive in theory, but it's only barely recursive in practice (nest more than three levels, your accurately attentive audience grows thin). Winograd is not completely wrong about this, but my long suspicion is that recursion is not going to enter the AI building through the ground floor.

Lately, we really have hit home runs with distributed representation, and to a lesser degree with convolutional image recognition. These are actual AI-ish ideas. However, two solid take-home techniques do not a field make.

Here's another possible intermediate term: generalized gradient exploitation (GGE). Plus there's tons of great mathematics about overfitting and regularization. But should we really call all this math "AI"?

In practice what AI ends up meaning is "look ma, no code!" Hey, we just built an impressive system without hiring rooms full of code monkeys, so we must be doing something right.

AI is not the moving target of lore. It's mainly our long AI pretension that fits the bill.

How many legs d

I don't mind this maybe being an additional venue...

I do. The fact is, Facebook is incredibly dangerous to democracy for reasons entirely unrelated to politicians using it to ignore other methods of constituent feedback. Take this article on how Facebook-based data-mining is enabling micro-targeted propaganda, for instance.

The Untold History of the United States is a great documentary, although there is very little in it that is "untold". My interest tapered off considerably during the last 3-4 episodes (may reflect my age) but a worldwide perspective on WWII and the cold war was very interesting.

The Vice Guide to North Korea is very dated now, but it intrigued me enough that I visited the country in 2014. So many things have changed since 2008 that many of the details are no longer accurate, but may be worthwhile to watch after watching a more recent DPRK documentary.

[Plug] I made a short video of my DPRK trip in 2014. There are far better ones on Youtube (Aram Pan has done several), but this one is mine.

The motherboard report: https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

(2nd last link in an article with 11 links. Really?!)

No, but expect to see far more online conversations along these lines:
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/art...

Yes, that article genuinely positions the gender disparity in higher education as unfairly impacting on women because they can't all date equally educated men.

I'd use ASCII art to show my empathy levels here but couldn't think of a good representation of 0K.

In addition to what the other AC said, you should probably be aware of Mir's many other issues. I don't know what sort of retrofit you had in mind, but it's probably uninformed nonsense.

The electorate rallies around the Conservative Party [..] but at least *some* chance at getting a non-catastrophic outcome from the upcoming Brexit negotiations.

Really? I wouldn't even credit them with that. May has said repeatedly that "no deal is better than a bad deal" and made quite clear she's prepared to walk with nothing more than WTO terms. This is presented as a negotiating tactic, but in truth it's obvious arrogance from someone who- along with her hard-Brexiteering colleagues and other Little Englanders- thinks that Britain still has the power, influence and position it had in the days of Empire; something that was already mostly in the past when it joined the EU in the early 1970s.

Someone who thinks that they *will* be able to demand what they want, and even if they don't will get away with it anyway thanks to their "special relationship" with the United States and supposed connections with the Commonwealth, i.e. the former empire. As this article says:-

A senior Indian official has been reported as saying, "We cannot separate free movement of people from the free flow of goods and services." Sound familiar? It's much the same as every European bureaucrat pointing out that Britain can't cherrypick its terms for accessing the single market. [..] The post-imperial delusion of "old friendships" is going to shatter in the coming months, revealing a relationship of coercion that no longer holds.

And the salient part:-

Britain is a bully going to a school reunion, only to find his victims now have better jobs and better lives than him.

Regarding your second option:-

Enough of the electorate decides to vote for other parties that we end up with a hung parliament and [etc] Never mind being careful what you wish for; the lesson here is that you need to be *really* careful what you vote for, because however this pans out it's going to be on the UK electorate just as much as it is on the politicians they voted for.

...you might begin to understand why (as a Scot in favour of independence) I'm not even considering entertaining the possibility of playing along with the UK electoral and political system that- from my point of view- is fundamentally broken, does not- and cannot- reflect the difference in political opinion between Scotland and England (and Wales) that has been growing since the Thatcher years but is now at breaking point.

We currently have 56 of 59(!) seats held by the SNP, yet are ultimately governed by the Conservative party that has just 1 seat in Scotland, but won due to voters in England and Wales.

We voted 62 to 38% to remain within the EU, yet are being dragged out because voters in England and Wales wanted to leave, as part of a campaign that started as a sop to the Tory party's Euro-sceptic right wing- primarily in South-East England- and consistently revolved around them, using the future of the UK as nothing more than a political football for their internal squabbles.

To add insult to injury, Scotland's position within the EU post-independence had been a central plank of the scaremongering "Better Together" campaign during the independence referendum. I'm surprised that the likes of Alistair Darling still have the cheek to show their faces when we saw how that turned out.

So- England and Wales heading in a hard right UKIP-like direction (UKIP themselves are only in decline because the Tories have mostly taken up that position for themselves and become- as you say "UKIP lite") while Scotland is completely different.

Do I want to remain tied to an elephant that clearly doesn't want to go the same way I do? No.

Oh, wait! They already do that!

What he was fined for doing was using the term "engineer" to describe himself while doing it.

No, it is much more sinister, the board wouldn't tolerate that he was using methods used by engineers.

You don't believe that, did you? I didn't.

But there was a thread about this on a Danish engineering forum some time ago, and someone dug up this:

"By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations for his modified version of the ITE formula to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon 's and worldwide traffic signals, which signals are public equipment, processes and works, Jarlstrom applied special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such creative work as investigation, evaluation, and design in connection with public equipment, processes, and works. Jarlstrom thereby engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS 672.005(1)(b).

By doing so through the use of algorithms for the operation of traffic control systems, and through the use of the science of analysis, review, and application of traffic data systems to advise members of the public on the treatment of the functional characteristics of traffic signal timing, Jarlstrom engaged, specifically, in traffic engineering under OAR 820-040-0030(1)(b) and (2)(a).

By engaging the practice of engineering (specifically, traffic engineering) without registration, Jarlstrom violated ORS 672.020(1), 672.045(1) and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c)"

From the correspondance: https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

Before it was Keep Portland Weird. Now it's Keep Oregon Weird?

Is it possible for any government in the U.S. to make any law, no matter how confusing, and not care about whether someone may make a mistake, or whether they may not know the law?

To me, anyone who has a Tektronix oscilloscope on a shelf above his desk is likely to call himself an "engineer".

The bot-driven fake submissions are in support of ENDING Net Neutrality. This was not a false-flag operation. These posts likely came from the DCI Group ( https://www.dcigroup.com/ ) which was hired by the National Cable and Telecom Association via Broadband for America see: http://www.zdnet.com/article/a... and https://news.vice.com/article/... .

Gosh, I hope nothing unpredictable and horrible comes out of the ice with all these changes... like smallpox and anthrax that is coming out of the arctic.
https://news.vice.com/article/...

That's why, for example, judges and jurors are sought to be impartial.

There you are! Justifying Trump's dismissing a judge as "biased" because he was of Mexican descent...Racist, racist, racist!

Of course, attacking a judge because of his ancestry is indeed, racist, and Trump's admissionsa actually showed his own realization of the bias and animus he had been demonstrating.

That is what Trump chose to do. He picked a deliberate course of racial antagonism to attack a judge in a lawsuit where it was immaterial. In the media. Nothing more. Remember, Trump University? It didn't get filed as a request for recusal in court, it was merely engaging in political aggrandizement. You don't get a judge to act in a case just because you go on CNN and pout like a crybaby.

You do know this, right? Trump was whining about a judge. He chose to do it with an included racist spin, so it only reflects on Trump. Not the judge. In the realm of public opinion. At least, until it becomes relevant to a legal matter. Now personally, I blame Trump's political advisers, who should have at least made Trump temper his remarks, but he still has a problem with running his mouth. Or twitter fingers, as the case may be. But he's not the only one with a problem with that in his administration. That sort of thing can reflect on you.

Which was why when somebody takes your statements, applies them to you, in a legal case, and submits them to court, well, then you have a judge rule on it.

Now if you want to see a judge who got in trouble because of their own actions, let's try one. That's one where a

90% of the post were plainly about the article submitted and how Trump shouldn't do this, but how can slashdotters forget that this is the same guy that hates encryption and wanted Apple to break their own iPhone? He did everything to encourage that golden backdoor and weaken security with publicity and law enforcement.

It should be clear that this guy is very outdated for today's world function. Although the means to remove him might not be great, there seems to be no alternative to remove someone that high without doing so. We do need a replace and hopefully not another one of those rotting potatoes.

Name one American the Russians drone murdered.

I hope, you don't insist on it being done by drones, which Russia does not really have — and what it does have, it uses for intelligence-gathering and artillery-coordination only. But, here, I'll list a few:

• Joseph Stone, an American paramedic who was killed in eastern Ukraine on April 23
• Mark Gregory Paslawsky, the sole American fighting on the Ukrainian side of the war in the east of the country, died from injuries sustained in battle in the town of Ilovaysk on Tuesday.

You can also safely chalk up a sizeable fraction of American deaths in the Middle East to Russians — but we may not know the exact details of their coordinating ISIS and other terrorists against the US for decades...

Now, why is it indicative of anything? Why don't you list the Americans killed by American government — and we'll compare that to the Russians killed by Russia... Ah, you are an American — protected by these people you despise — and not worrying about what Russians do to others? Ok, do you suppose, all an enemy can do is kill? How about spying — on your country? How about lying online with millions of "voices" through hijacked accounts?

GTMO like prisons

Darling, GITMO is a tropical paradise compared to the installations run by the enterprise formerly known as GULAG.

Tell me about the Russian detention without charges + torture program.

What exactly would you like to know?

Now explain why would you rather have the CIA on your stuff?

Because whatever abuse you may accuse CIA of was aimed at the sworn enemies of the US and our allies, not US citizens, however politically active and oppositiony...

How quick people are to forget and forgive these days... remember this?
https://news.vice.com/article/...
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Yeah. Not a single review or article about this new Blackberry phone ever mentioned the case. This is why we privacy keeps eroding and why security practices went down the gutter. Stop promoting the company.

I do see the violence on the right but I do make a distinction between actions v words and lone wolfs v groups.

Actually, what you do is try to embrace a false sanctimony as you fail to admit to the violent organizations on the right, from the Bundy Ranch militias, the Respect the Flag group, the Huttaree, and even the various Tea Party groups and others on the right-wing clamoring for a revolution. Which included Donald Trump, in 2012, with his infamous Tweetstorm.

If you want to admit to them, then fair enough, go ahead and condemn them. Say they're deplorable. Say they're repugnant. Say they're dangerous.

I don't blame the Chicago kidnapping on the left anymore than I blame the Charleston shooting on the right.

Yes, yes, you already made it clear that you want to ignore how Dylan Roof is merely one among many on the right espousing such views, but that won't make it not a fact that "they do exist in abundance.

Sorry, but Dylan Roof wasn't merely some lone isolated nut following the beat of a drum only he could hear, there's a whole marching band.

By their fruits we know them.

As for the rest of your diarrhea... try harder.

I will, you're not worth giving up on. You deserve to be informed. You deserve to have the strength of character you need to admit the truth. You can have the fortitude to boldly proclaim that the shit stinks all around. It's a dysentery that

That allows the attacker to direct a target's text messages to another device, and, in the case of the bank accounts, steal any codes needed to login or greenlight money transfers (after the hackers obtained victim passwords).
... "Everyone's accounts protected by text-based two-factor authentication, such as bank accounts, are potentially at risk until the FCC and telecom industry fix the devastating SS7 security flaw," Lieu said in a statement published Wednesday...
In the meantime, and maybe irrespective of whether SS7 problems are ever fixed, social media companies, banks, and other online services need to stop using SMS-based two-factor authentication. Last year the National Institute of Standards and Technology said it was no longer recommending solutions that used SMS.

They actually require that all their hardware be shredded, no extraction of parts. https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

Watching a violent video online can lead to PTSD, inducing nightmares, anxiety and panic attacks. One study study found that people who watched traumatic events on video were more traumatized than those who watched it in real life.

So, yes, watching a traumatic video is definitely unsafe. And I sincerely help that Facebook provides psychological help to their workers who will be screening for these disturbing videos.

They can't - there's a housing shortage. Giving one group of workers prices the others out of being able to afford a home. Housing quality in many areas is rather grim. There''s not enough space in front of each house for more than one car, roads aren't wide enough for cars to park on either side and have more than a single truck or ambulance get through. Driveways are "shared" between homes so that different garages actually open onto the same driveway. Some homes are only sold as leaseholds (you own the house but lease the land for 99 years, and pay rent each year) rather than freeholds (own both house and land).

In the USA or Canada, the federal government owns all non-developed land, and so they can sell it off as and when needed. In the UK, all the undeveloped land is either owned by private estates or farmers. We have to take land used for food production out of operation in order to build more homes. UK already imports 45% of food. Married couples are being forced to house share with a room each because of the shortage in the South East. There's now the problem of beds-in-sheds-to-rent in back gardens and communal rooms in London.

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/art...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

If the government did it, they would be putting the finishing touches on their plan to roll ISDN

Like they did in Chattanooga, TN, Longmont, CO, and tens of other cities across the US? Oh wait, you said ISDN, not Gigabit fibre.

I'm not a big government fan, but when it comes to services that have reached utility level (aka everyone needs them to function in society, like water, electricity, and now internet access) the profit driven "free market" approach only seems to create monopolies that drive up prices and lower the quality of service.

Sigh. Again, this isn't a free market. Remember "billions in subsidies"?

The other issue is that this isn't like water and electricity. The same standards of delivery for those services was the same 100 years ago. Broadband has changed dramatically in the last 5 years. There is simply no comparison.

I have no problem at all with municipal broadband competing in a market on a level playing field (meaning they also have to provide service to places that might not be lucrative), which is mostly what you see in Chattanooga. But it can't be an either/or.

If the government did it, they would be putting the finishing touches on their plan to roll ISDN

Like they did in Chattanooga, TN, Longmont, CO, and tens of other cities across the US? Oh wait, you said ISDN, not Gigabit fibre.

I'm not a big government fan, but when it comes to services that have reached utility level (aka everyone needs them to function in society, like water, electricity, and now internet access) the profit driven "free market" approach only seems to create monopolies that drive up prices and lower the quality of service.

As a technology director for a public K-12 school, I'm very concerned about what I'm reading in the headline. But the "article" is an extremely biased report, citing just as equally biased an article, and neither article really gives me a clue as to what's going on here.

So, let's start at the source: Here is the actual FCC draft order specific to this change. Now, in the course of working on and completing E-Rate filings with the USAC to receive reimbursement for internet and network services for our school district, I've read a few 60-70 page FCC reports before. They're not fun, but they're necessary. That being said, I'm about 20 pages in, and already I'm disturbed. Here's why:

FCC reports that I've read in the past are boring, dry reads, but at least they're factual and unbiased. Not so with this one. Three sentences in, and we get this: "The FCC has historically subjected the provision of business data services by incumbent local exchange carriers (LECs) to price regulations." And the spin continues..."eases the regulatory burdens"; "spur entry, innovation and competition in the vibrant business data services market"; "competition is robust and vigorous in the markets." And this is still just the first page. The draft order is littered with biased political spin, something that has not been present in my reading of previous FCC draft orders. Because of this, I can't even depend on a government document to give me an unbiased report of the rationale behind the decision, nor can I depend on it to help me determine what the consequences of the decision will be. So, I'll have to create my own... here goes.

Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) price regulations have been there historically specifically to protect subscribers from LECs that had monopoly or near-monopoly controls over their service regions. Most regions throughout the United States historically were not served by competitive broadband providers. Recently, this has begun to change, where some communities now have competitive service providers come in, giving subscribers a choice. The FCC began to look into this issue back in 2012, before Trump. According to the report, "In December 2012, the Commission released the Data Collection Order FNPRM, to collect data, analyze how competition, “whether actual or potential, affects prices, controlling for all other factors that affect prices,” and “determine what barriers inhibit investment and delay competition, including regulatory barriers." By not controlling pricing, the FCC claims in its report that LECs will no longer be limited entry into a potential market, where capped rates would not allow for a sufficient recovery of the investment necessary to build into a new market area.

But, here's the flaw in their reasoning: trenching fiber costs a lot of money. A lot. If service provider A already has fiber, service provider B is not going to install fiber if it does not believe that it can earn back their investment in a reasonable amount of time. Even if prices are artificially inflated by provider A, just because they can, if provider B tries to compete and trenches their own fiber network, both A and B know that A can lower its rates to a competitive level to drive out provider B. So, B has no incentive to trench, leaving A with the monopoly.

The easiest solution: make internet a utility. It's silly to think that it's a smart idea to run multiple fiber lines to a building. (I should know; our school has two of them, and both are dark.) It would be just as silly to have multiple electric taps, or multiple water pipes. But, that's not happening anytime