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And two former DIRNSAs agree.

So does ADM Rogers -- except that every interpretation of various US officials' arguments on encryption wildly conflate multiple issues (such as domestic law enforcement, which can and does sometimes have a foreign intelligence connection, and foreign signals intelligence purposes), or utterly misunderstand the purpose, function, and targets of foreign intelligence.

Yes, I know you (not OP, the "royal you") think you know it all, because you have taken things you think of as "proof" utterly out-of-context with zero understanding about things like foreign SIGINT actually works, and have seen 3-4 unrelated pieces of a 1000 piece puzzle, with some of those pieces actually parts of different puzzles, and believe you have the full picture.

People continually and willfully seem to want to forget or ignore that actual, no-shit foreign intelligence targets also -- gasp! -- use things like iPhones, Gmail, Hotmail, WhatsApp, and so on. And, when foreign intelligence targets use these modes of communication, amazingly, we actually want to target them.

If you're an American (or frankly, any innocent person) anywhere in the world who isn't an active member of a foreign terrorist organization or an agent of a foreign power, the Intelligence Community DOES NOT CARE ABOUT and actually DOES NOT WANT your data. Sounds crazy and bizarre for foreign intelligence agencies to care about things like foreign intelligence, I know, but it's true. Weird!

I guess it's easier to believe that functioning democracies* all are constantly looking for ways to illegally spy on their own citizens who have done nothing wrong, rather than to believe that intelligence work in the digital age where the only distinction is no longer the physical location or even the technology used, but simply the target -- the person at the other end, is actually extremely complicated, and not fun.

* If you don't think the Western liberal democracies of the world are worth a shit, or laugh at the term "functioning democracies" when used in reference to the US, warts and all, that simply means you have lost all perspective of reality, and are part of the problem. And it will be to our peril, because there actually are governments in the world who do spy on their own citizens, and wherein the people don't have anywhere NEAR the level of freedoms we have, no matter how terrible you think we are. And guess what? It's our national security and intelligence apparatus that we use to defend ourselves. If you're now so jaded that you don't actually believe the US and its allies, and their principles, are something worth defending and fighting for, then everything I have said here means nothing to you anyway. Just be advised that your perception of history and reality is fatally skewed.

What is Mexico's fault is restricting their citizens' ability to defend themselves from criminals while also having a corrupt and ineffective police force. Fortunately, some politicians and citizens are trying to change that. http://www.vice.com/video/the-...

Servetus was burned as a heretic by Protestants. Someone else already touched on Galileo.

Bruno was not persecuted for his scientific research either.

From http://www.theguardian.com/sci... :

The answer, it seems, is yes (a bit) and (mostly) no. In the first episode, a rather hefty portion of airtime (11 out of 43 minutes) is devoted to an animation on the life of Giordano Bruno. Burnt at the stake by the Roman Inquisition in 1600, he was there to play the role of scientific hero and martyr. It is an ill-fitting part for this idiosyncratic Dominican monk.

Laudably avoiding any temptation to snark, Meg Rosenburg took the sudden interest in this reasonably obscure figure as an opportunity to help those who might Want to Know More About Giordano Bruno. While Bruno’s cosmological poetry and mystical thought included heliocentrism, he was not, of course, a scientist, nor was he sentenced to death for “scientific” ideas or anything like “the nice-mannered, doe-eyed dissenter” that appears on the screen.

From http://motherboard.vice.com/bl... :

But the truth is that Bruno's scientific theories weren't what got him killed. Sure, his refusal to recant his belief in a plurality of worlds contributed to his sentence. But it's important to note that the Catholic Church didn't even have an official position on the heliocentric universe in 1600, and support for it was not considered heresy during Bruno's trial.

On top of that, his support for Copernican cosmology was the least heretical position he propagated. His opinions on theology were far more pyrotechnic. For example, Bruno had the balls to suggest that Satan was destined to be saved and redeemed by God. He didn't think Jesus was the son of God, but rather “an unusually skilled magician.” He even publicly disputed Mary's virginity. The Church could let astronomical theories slide, but calling the Mother of God out on her sex life? There's no doubt that these were the ideas that landed Bruno on the stake.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

I shall just leave these here, eh?

It's not that Google or Thawte have failed to correctly revoke certificates: it's that far too many people, at far too many sites and with far too many technologies, do not actually keep their signature authorities up-to-date. Because these people don't update signature authorities, they are unable to verify numerous valid certificates. These people then simply set their automated procedures, or make it their personal practice, to accept invalid certificates.

There's a second problem: How the hell does one validate a certificate? There's no out-of-band communication - there's no way to do something as simple as googling "gmail TLS fingerprint" and getting the right answer, and I'm looking at you, Google Security Blog -- why do you not publish the signatures when you rotate the keys?

Homework assignment: Try this.

msmtp --port=587 --serverinfo --host=smtp.gmail.com --tls=on --tls-certcheck=off

Should the SHA1 fingerprint end in 7e:60 as this IBM thread or this stackoverflow thread?

Or should it, as the guy in this thread observed and I was able to replicate, end with 05:4c?

Or should it still be this guy who says it ends in 69:a8, and which I observed with my own eyes about a year ago and commented out when I saw random people on the 'net confirming they'd rotated to the key ending in 7e:60?

Yes, I know web pages can be compromised by bad actors.

And I know connections to web pages can also be MITM'd by even worse actors.

Certificates are broken without out-of-band communication, and Google has, by ignoring the issue, made it effectively impossible to do out-of-band communication. What is the correct TLS fingerprint for smtp.gmail.com? Will it be the same in 5 seconds? How many "correct" fingerprints are there?

Wait for artificial wombs. The same people oppose those too.

Love of music just got a new meaning: http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

"If there is one thing society can learn from the soap opera now engulfing tech zillionaire John McAfee, it is that rectal shelving is the best way to take the psychoactive drug MDPV, marketed and known colloquially as bath salts." ref

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

And even if they could help, they could not talk about it

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

we're doomed

We've been racing towards a brave new world at full speed for quite a while now. Some say we're only 20 years away from artificial wombs. I think that's when the real fun begins.

Just how many of his businesses has he bankrupted, again?

Not that many. But could you trust him not give his own businesses advantages? Is he going to be an American Berlusconi?

jodido, I'm sure you realize this, so this is more for other people.
The NSA and its predecessors have long worked with telecommunications companies who willingly hand over data without warrants.

here is a starting point as an overview...
http://www.vice.com/read/a-bri...

There becomes a measurable, yet acceptable level of environmental consequence

That level for nuclear generated electricity would be zero, considering that we have multiple other options available. If we had to choose between whale oil and nuclear, it would be a different story, but face it, between solar, wind, and reduced consumption, we simply don't need to take the risk

Wrong...

Wind and Solar are unpredictable and cannot be stored for peak times. Geothermal and Hydro tend to provide reliable power but do not provide enough supply. Wave power may contribute to this, but they are still working on engineering materials that will last in the ocean and handle the currents. That leaves Coal and Natural Gas, both of which have their own detrimental effects on the environment and risks, some of which are as bad or worse than nuclear. http://motherboard.vice.com/bl...

Modern reactor design is as safe, or safer, than natural gas and coal. Most accidents are occurring at older plants that are near their lifetime. We are in this state because of public fear and the near impossible process of bringing a new reactor online. This has slowed the development and deployment of newer, safer designs.

One of these days, we will learn how to store solar and wind energy. At that time, the other methods would quickly become obsolete. But until then, the sources of energy that we use will carry some form of inherent risk.

In 20 years, we could have artificial wombs.

I wish they would hurry up developing the artificial wombs so we can stop having these debates.

Won't be long.
The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct

Worst Case Climate Change (2008 TED Talk)

Long story short:
350 tonnes per second of CO2 being absorbed by the ocean is acidifying it.
If we don't stop 96% of ocean life dies.
Dead life rots. Rotting life in water emits nasty toxic gases.
Also melting permafrost releases giant amounts of methane dwarfing climate warming gasses releases by humans, this causes run-away warming.
Methane clathrates under ocean also melt and release billions more tonnes of methane.
Resulting gases make air unbreathable, humans and 95% of life on earth die.

^none of this stuff is included in IPCC models YET.

Global warming is clearly happening, the permafrost is already melting, the sea is already acidifying. The human species days could well be numbered.

Acid Test: Rising CO2 Levels Killing Ocean Life | Conservation Climate

99.996% of climate scientists now say global warming is happening, not 97%.

People here forget an important thing: from US government perspective, it is not only about the surveillance stuff that Snowden helped to reveal. Case for his pardon would be much stronger if they thought that he only wanted to expose the surveillance programmes for public good. But government officials claim that only tiny fraction of the files that Snowden took were related to surveillance programmes. According to recent article Snowden supposedly stole 900 000 Department of Defense files, not just NSA files.

You may, justifiably, be skeptical about these claims but nature of Snowden's deeds changes if he stole and/or compromised military secrets. Even if you don't believe it, I remind you that you must take this aspect into account.

I had to look deeper to see that you are correct. There _have_ been several NASA published designs using microwaves or other EM for ordinary thrust, I'm afraid I thought the original article concerned one of those.

On review, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'll bet that this is really a "Dean Drive". The Dean Drive never worked well outside the designer's workshop, was never tested properly with a basic "pendulum" test, and seems to have been a basic "oscillation thruster": it interacted with the floor under it to provide net thrust. That would mean the system is not really "sealed", it's interacting with its environment in some subtle way.

From the description at http://motherboard.vice.com/re..., I'd guess EM interaction with the walls of the stainless steel vacuum chamber. And one of hte people I'd want to review the experiment would be James Randi, who's been helping debunk "mysterious mental force" claims for decades, and has a professional magician's eye for misdirection and sleight of hand.

Interesting, Pro Gamers are now going to be subjected to the same scrutiny that Ice Fishers, Badmitton players, Critickers, Bowlers, Country Line Dancers and players in the NFL, MLB and NCAA are subjected to.

Obviously, players in the NFL are going to be subjected to different test panels than players in the NCAA or Olympics, but for your convenience, here is the WADA list of banned substances

You will find most of the usual things there, "street drugs", etc, and of course, gamers drug of choice, Amphetamines/Stimulants.
When I first saw the headline, I thought, like many here did, what about Adderall? Because we all know that Adderall, and other legal amphetamines like it, is the real question mark here.

Should pro gamers be worried?
Only if they need it to play a video game...

As we've seen from other sports, Adderall, aka, legal speed, use/abuse is rampant.

Vice ran an interesting article where the author ran some tests to see what the effect of pot on video gaming was. Not particularly scientific, but the anecdotal results are interesting enough.
I expect that for each for those, there's a point where the benefits of consumption are overwhelmed by the intensifying effect of the drug. AKA, a little helps, a lot hurts. The same holds true for alcohol's impact on one's ability to solve problems creatively (anecdotally, at least).

the competition for mates. How is that going to be mitigated

Sex robots and artificial wombs.

Does hacking-team have anything that works on anything other then Microsoft Windows. Microsoft, the company that made email dangerous ...

Hacking Team's Tools Aren't That Impressive

Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.

Proof of work through ASICs is a very good security mechanism as attackers must spend real money on machines and electricty to attack the network and create 2-3 double spends before being caught and shutdown, but not the only method.

Already there are inter-channel payment protocols (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf and http://impulse.is/impulse.pdf are two examples among many) and off the chain transactions (Coinbase/circle/changetip are a few examples where there is no fee and wildly used). Right now there is ~118k transactions per day - https://blockchain.info/charts... but in reality the number of bitcoin transactions per day is much much higher as those numbers represent on the chain transactions. with the lighting network Bitcoin will be able to scale to higher levels of transactions per day than VISA , and without having to similarity increase the amount of ASIC's because those payment channels use multisig and ricardian contracts to secure while being ultimately backed up by PoW on the main chain.

Additionally, be aware that wasted electricity will start to be recycled as heaters(Whether hot water or space heaters). I already have some friends doing this to save on their heating bills and make money at the same time.

Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.

Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse. http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

The cited study is flawed as it doesn't account for the massive investment in call centers, offices, employees, auditors, and regulators that are needed to sustain the VISA payment rails network and the massive energy use and environmental impact those variables demand.

Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

Amazingly:

Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were "incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia.

My comment about the BBC documentary (yes... i insist!) "Yes, (Prime) Minister" has been modded as "Funny" BUT:

I was watching an episode of it with some "lessons" about how a politician can avoid a reporter's question, and the advise was "just answer the question by saying 'that's not the question', and change the subject answering something irrelevant" - ABOUT JUST AN HOUR LATER i watched some politician in the T.V. DOING EXACTLY THAT (and the phrase he used in Greek -i am Greek- was an exact translation of "that's not the question" )!!!

Amazingly:

Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were "incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia.

My comment about the BBC documentary (yes... i insist!) "Yes, (Prime) Minister" has been modded as "Funny" BUT:

I was watching an episode of it with some "lessons" about how a politician can avoid a reporter's question, and the advise was "just answer the question by saying 'that's not the question', and change the subject answering something irrelevant" - ABOUT JUST AN HOUR LATER i watched some politician in the T.V. DOING EXACTLY THAT (and the phrase he used in Greek -i am Greek- was an exact translation of "that's not the question" )!!!

Amazingly:

Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were "incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia.

Amazingly:

Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were "incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia.

1. All the diagrams give the impression that it will be like people flying through tubes as in Futurama. Instead you will be sealed inside a metallic "bullet", that runs in a metallic tube - no windows for you (sort of like James Bond in The Living Daylights). It's a pity if you have any sort of claustrophobia.

If you dislike the idea of long-range transportation without windows, I have bad news for you...
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

2. While the device doesn't run in a complete vacuum, it runs in an atmosphere that is low to the point of being unbreathable. But the device doesn't contain any onboard air supply - instead it relies on the driving compressor/fan assembly to compress the air to a human sustainable amount. So if the device loses power for any reason (electrical, mechanical, computational) then you better be able to hold your breath for a long long time.

Really? Are you seriously so close-minded to think of this as a problem? I guess you got this idea by taking airliner as reference which is simply dumb. The reason why airliner need onboard air supply is because there's not air available in case the cabin pressurisation fail. But in Hyperloop case, engineering emergency exit system seem far more logical than oxygen mask.

3. There was no indication that the loop itself was anything more than a single tube. Thus there is no capability to bypass any section. So if a device fails, all devices that are already in transit and behind it are screwed (see 2 above).

Yeah...if they ever present a working prototype, I'm sure they'll simply "forgot" to address safety issue like "what will happens if the Hyperloop fail (or hit an iceberg) in the middle of the desert?"

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/do...

The police of England, at least those in Leicestershire, scanned faces of every person who attended the Download Festival http://downloadfestival.co.uk/

Another source -- http://www.itv.com/news/2015-0...

it will probably survive global warming

Probably, but not definitely. We do not know how life on this planet will end, or what man-made or natural extinction events are to come. For all we know Venus might have had life once.

The worst case scenario for too much CO2 release is ocean acidification kills most ocean life, which then rots - it's then eaten by organisms which emit hydrogen sulfide, which then kills us humans because it screws up the air we breath and breathing is kind of essential to living.

It's happened before.... Maybe.

Maybe we should try not to f**k with the planet since we clearly don't know what the outcome will be.

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct | Motherboard

Permian-Triassic extinction event

Worst Case Climate Change (2008 TED Talk) - YouTube

He’d grown up Catholic, but later embraced atheism. "I thought the brain was a computer," Davis says, "And so I had no need for a soul." He saw himself as a scientific materialist; he believes that metaphor—the brain as a computer—has done more to increase the number of atheists than anything by Darwin. He still considers himself scientifically minded. "Today I find the people most similar to me are atheist-scientist people," he says. "The difference is God has talked to me, so I'm basically like an atheist who God has talked to."

So they are going to collect even more data, making them an even bigger target for "data liberation" hacks. Hhhm.

Stolen Uber Customer Accounts Are for Sale on the Dark Web for $1

Did Ulbricht Pay a Hitman to Kill A Silkroad Employee?

A 'murder for hire' indictment was brought against Ulbricht but the prosecution declined to bring charges.

Indictments that aren't brought as charges infer nothing more than prosecutorial strategy, and it doesn't indicate the existence or not of a criminal action. Prosecutors typically have many more indictments than charges, and as the case proceeds they trade off indictments for the good of their case (e.g. plea bargains, shedding weaker parts, or simply the prosecutor merging indictments to bolster charges, as seems to be the case here).

The government say,

1. Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) was the operator of Silkroad, an illegal drug-related website.
2. DPR was Ulbricht which now no one disputes (even Ulbricht now admits it, now that he's lost the case),
3. The Silkroad DPR account wanted the murder of a Silkroad employee for $80k which no one disputes,
4. A DEA agent posed as a hitman
4. Someone paid $40k to the hitman before it was done,
5. A DEA agent posed as a hitman and received $40k.
6. The DEA Agent sent the DPR account doctored photos of a dead body. DPR was told the person was tortured to death, and responded "I'm pissed I had to kill him ... but what's done is done,I just can't believe he was so stupid. I just wish more people had some integrity",
7. Another $40k was paid immediately afterwards,
8. No one was actually murdered.
9. Ulbrichts recovered laptop had his journal with an April 6 entry that says "gave [Hells Angels] go ahead to find tony76," and "sent payment to angels for hit on tony76 and his 3 associates.", and finally
10. When Ulbricht was caught in the library his computer was logged into the adminstration page of Silkroad under the DPR account.
(source: 1, 2)

Then at trial the `murder for hire` wasn't brought as a charge, but it was allowed to be used to describe the character of Ulbricht.

Character witnesses, and character evidence is allowed in trials.

As Judge Forrest said "the prejudicial effect is reduced by the Government’s stipulation that no actual murders were carried out". Apparently the judge considered that prosecutors might be worried a jury in this landmark case might be convinced that Ulbricht was non-violent, detached from reality behind a computer, and that his operation was quite different to a conventional drug ring. The murder for hire charge was unnecessary, and it might be a better prosecutorial strategy to use the murder for hire to attack Ulbricht's character as a backdrop for all other charges, to brand him as a violent drug dealer.

Of course there's no visibility to the prosecutorial strategy process but that strategy seems possible, and so I don't think much of the fact that the murder for hire charges were dropped and instead used elsewhere.

The shuttle disasters Richard Feynman, the late Nobel laureate and CalTech physicist, saw that "bulletized" thinking contributed to the Challenger disaster, where 7 crew members died and a multi-billion dollar craft destroyed due to an O-ring failure. The big problem was that NASA management wasn't really listening to the engineers - and breaking issues up into bullets helped them do that.

The engineers who worked on the Challenger O-rings knew they weren't qualified for cold weather. But management didn't want to hear it and OK'd the launch despite the engineer's opposition.

As sometimes happens, disaster ensued.

In the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, Prof. Tufte dissects the PowerPoint slides that buried important information - such as volume, mass and velocity - about the large piece of foam insulation that penetrated the Columbia's heat shield. Creating useful engineering reports in PowerPoint is difficult if not impossible.

And of course, powerpoint makes you stupid

Never mind that mining is illegal under existing space treaty.

The Outer Space Treaty bans claims of sovereignty, but does not ban individual property rights. You cannot own the moon, but if you dig up and process lunar regolith, the resulting product should be yours.

Except for the United States. We're too busy planning to hump an asteroid in lunar orbit to explore future mining opportunities. Never mind that mining is illegal under existing space treaty.

Magnasanti 6 million residents, life span is only 50 years. A harsh existence:

Quote:
"The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time."

Interview with the creator of the perfect simcity Magnasanti.

http://www.vice.com/read/the-t...

Video of Magnasanti:

https://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU

Why is a solution needed?

Acid Test: Rising CO2 Levels Killing Ocean Life | Conservation Climate

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct | Motherboard

WHO | 7 million premature deaths annually linked to air pollution

Air pollution costs Europe $1.6tn a year in early deaths and disease, say WHO | Environment | The Guardian

Abrupt Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future - YouTube

Worst Case Climate Change (2008 TED Talk) - YouTube

Here is how it is done in Netherlands!

tl;dr - goverment gives drugs for free, crime drops down

Meh, how about Temple OS? http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

all legal like

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

Yeah, I watch Vice too. They have some interesting stories, but then, that's the goal of the hipster-cum-SMEs. Not everything on their show should be taken as a full picture of reality, let alone retold as gospel without citation in a Slashdot post.

In some amazing leaps of logic, the [NSFW] "documentary" cites low birth rates and then, taking this to be self-evidently a problem, finds a couple of people who say they're basically afraid of women, and then goes on to paint an entire culture in broad strokes. But here's the thing: Industrialized nations have the lowest birth rates in the world, so one might as well conclude else that Japan is the most advanced nation on earth, which is a distinct possibility. Indeed, overpopulation is perhaps best viewed as a problem, not a goal.

I'm hardly a Japanese fanboi. I lived there for six months, for work, and I wouldn't go back if I had the choice. There's some stuff there that certainly seems weird by western standards, but I didn't see any indication that it's a culture in decline. Their GDP growth rate might not be off the charts, but that's hardly the most important indicator. India, for example, has both an amazing GDP growth rate AND population growth rate. If you want to know what it's like to live there, well, there's another Vice story about that.

Not only that, but when they do get caught, they get a free pass from their fellow pigsxxxx cops who refuse to arrest them, from the district attorneys who refuse to prosecute them, from judges who pretend to believe blatant lies, and from the juries who talk themselves into believing blatant lies.
http://www.vice.com/read/testi...
Testilying: Cops Are Liars Who Get Away with Perjury
February 3, 2013
By Nick Malinowski

Yes, fighting them in court is a fruitless venture and will come back at you, or maybe mafia put them up to it to begin with. They can get away with a lot in a place like NYC, but every place has a weakness, could be someone watching say 20+ years of cover-ups and/or a small town with a very fragile economy or maybe the town was built over or next to something of value. Shame that one knows not to expect to find justice in a court room anymore.

Another good story in Vice. Just remember, perjury is a felony, these cops are committing crimes on the witness stand, and the district attorneys and judges let them get away with it and encourage it.

http://www.vice.com/read/testi...
Testilying: Cops Are Liars Who Get Away with Perjury
February 3, 2013
By Nick Malinowski

(Former NYPD Detective Carlton Berkley says that police routinely lie in order to justify arrests, and district attorneys and judges knowingly accept those lies.)

On November 17, 2012, a 40-year-old father from Harlem, Greg Allen, defending himself pro se (Latin, he says, for when you fire your attorney), won acquittal in a case brought against him by the Brooklyn District Attorney and the New York City Police Department. The Judge determined that the witnesses, two officers from Brooklyn’s notorious 73rd precinct, had lied.
The police officers, William Gardner and John Blanco, had accused him of disorderly conduct and obstructing government administration (crimes he did not commit), and the cop’s own video evidence showed his innocence. The police and the district attorney prosecuted the case anyway even though their own videotapes exposed the police testimony as a fabrication. They refused to back down from their original story. The judge didn’t buy it.
"It's like you're sitting there in the courtroom watching a video with the judge and the cops, and the cops are just saying something totally different than what the video shows," Allen says.
So used to this absurd process was the young prosecutor, Seth Zuckerman, that he never flinched as the cops went through the charade. Perhaps more tellingly, the district attorney’s office, Zuckerman’s bosses, didn’t drop the case even after learning that their only physical evidence contradicted the officer’s story of the arrest.
A few weeks later, US District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin upheld claims of NYPD misconduct in another case, finding the testimony made by police officers Miguel Santiago and Kieron Ramdeen not credible. Scheindlin sort of piled it on. The officers’ account “makes nosense,” it was “implausible,” she said. She noted that Santiago had previously lied in the scope of his police work, issuing summonses to an innocent person to help a friend of his in a bizarre revenge scheme.
Scheindlin’s ruling hinged on the fact that officers in the Bronx, Santiago and Ramdeen among them, routinely invented justifications for stopping people outside certain buildings in the borough and at times made arrests without cause. People doing nothing wrong were stopped, harassed, illegally searched, and arrested at the whim of the officers who then created legal justifications for their actions after the fact.
First- and second-degree perjury is a felony, and yet none of these cops will face any charges for straight up lying in a courtroom under oath. The rules are different for cops. As infuriating as that might seem, this pattern of behavior has been known fact for decades.

There are any number of abuses that can go on behind the shield, cops can be among the best criminals because they know the job and know how not to get caught, they know forensics etc etc etc. There are dirty cops out there and unfortunately in this day and age the good ones are the minority. I don't think cops in Seattle with dysfunction and abuse is a localized problem to either the department or the region, it is a national problem.

Not only that, but when they do get caught, they get a free pass from their fellow pigsxxxx cops who refuse to arrest them, from the district attorneys who refuse to prosecute them, from judges who pretend to believe blatant lies, and from the juries who talk themselves into believing blatant lies.
http://www.vice.com/read/testi...
Testilying: Cops Are Liars Who Get Away with Perjury
February 3, 2013
By Nick Malinowski

It's also time to hit the fools with some hard facts:

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct | Motherboard

Acid Test: Rising CO2 Levels Killing Ocean Life | Conservation Climate

Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Deaths in China - NYTimes.com

Full Cost of Coal $500 Billion/Year in U.S., Harvard Study Finds | CleanTechnica

Coal's hidden costs top $345 billion in U.S.-study | Reuters

I don't care if people believe in global warming or climate change, fossil fuels are still killing us and this planet regardless.