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So can you give me some links to the "Pentagon trolls?

Sure, here is some relevant reading:

Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda
Pentagon ramping up public relations offensive: Agency moves to bolster image in face of mounting criticism of Iraq war
U.S. Media Knew Kosovo Reports Were Propaganda
Meet The State Department Team Trying To Troll ISIS Into Oblivion
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi -- "The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers..."
Pentagon Paid for Fake âAl Qaedaâ(TM) Videos
The Government's Social Media Propaganda Machine
âoeOn the Offensiveâ: US State Dept. Gives $40M Boost to âoeTroll Farmâ Propaganda Efforts
How the American government is trying to control what you think

That should get you started.

Of course, our mass media tends not to emphasize such American skulduggery and propaganda. They'll do an initial report on the issue, but it's rarely, if ever, put into the news loop and repeated over and over and over again. Funny how that works, eh? It makes one think of Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who once bluntly said, "There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear."

If you want any more you'll have to search for it.

So can you give me some links to the "Pentagon trolls?

Sure, here is some relevant reading:

Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda
Pentagon ramping up public relations offensive: Agency moves to bolster image in face of mounting criticism of Iraq war
U.S. Media Knew Kosovo Reports Were Propaganda
Meet The State Department Team Trying To Troll ISIS Into Oblivion
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi -- "The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers..."
Pentagon Paid for Fake âAl Qaedaâ(TM) Videos
The Government's Social Media Propaganda Machine
âoeOn the Offensiveâ: US State Dept. Gives $40M Boost to âoeTroll Farmâ Propaganda Efforts
How the American government is trying to control what you think

That should get you started.

Of course, our mass media tends not to emphasize such American skulduggery and propaganda. They'll do an initial report on the issue, but it's rarely, if ever, put into the news loop and repeated over and over and over again. Funny how that works, eh? It makes one think of Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who once bluntly said, "There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear."

If you want any more you'll have to search for it.

Calories matter because every last one of us needs about 1 million of them each year. They certainly aren’t the only thing we need; we also need vitamins and minerals, fats and protein. But if we don’t have those 1 million calories, other needs fade into the background. There’s not much point in talking about phytonutrients if people are starving.

corn

Crazy but true. The blame goes, not to Amazon, nor the USPS, nor China. The United Nations UPU (United Postal Union) treats China like an undeveloped bit player

Under current rules, those charges
(called terminal dues) are set ludicrously
low for certain countries, among them
China. (Under UPU rules, for example,
China, the world’s second-largest
economy, gets the same break on
terminal dues as do Gabon and
Botswana.) This means that the USPS
actually charges China Post less to
deliver a package from China into the
U.S. than it charges a U.S. business or
customer to deliver a similar size
package within the 48 states. The post
office is losing money on every package
it delivers from China — costs it has to
pass on to its own American customers,
not to mention U.S. taxpayers.

(Arthur Herman, National Review)

Article in Forbes last fall. "As U.S. Postage Rates Continue To Rise, The USPS Gives The Chinese A 'Free Ride'" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/w...

Article in Washington Post almost four years ago, "The Postal Service is losing
millions a year to help you buy cheap stuff from China" - https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Calories matter because every last one of us needs about 1 million of them each year. They certainly aren’t the only thing we need; we also need vitamins and minerals, fats and protein. But if we don’t have those 1 million calories, other needs fade into the background. There’s not much point in talking about phytonutrients if people are starving.

In the calorie department, corn is king.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.washingtonpost.com... https://www.fiercepharma.com/s... Most of pharma's "R&D" is spent on marketing.

Yeah, no trade war except the one China thinks they are in: https://www.washingtonpost.com... .

Auditing the entire US postal service and keeping track of every demonstrably false public statement out of Trumps petulant pie hole are both daunting tasks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

The early birders get up early, show up for appointment on time and wait for the masters of the world, us, night owls, to show up late

Teh real reason for the 2016 election outcome!

https://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/07/05/5-things-a-data-analysis-of-hillary-clintons-emails-show-about-her-work-habits/

5.) Mrs. Clinton was an early riser

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/30/why-donald-trump-tweets-late-at-night-and-very-early-in-the-morning/

Trump is a Twitter addict and a night owl.

HAHA. YOU'RE JUST LIKE TRUMP!!

Trump has him beat by a long shot - with an average of 6 lies per day:

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Apparently many have missed to recent Supreme Court decision - There is no such thing as hate speech https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

Apparently many have missed to recent Supreme Court decision - There is no such thing as hate speech https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Commentary on ads for Sad Coke aside, you appear to be right about the influence of fake stories on the election. FTA:

Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, the study's authors, inserted three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn't vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).

Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):

        Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
        Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
        Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)

Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.

[...]

For those defecting from Clinton, believing fake news had a greater effect than anything except being a Republican or personally disliking Clinton. Obama voters who believed one of these fake news stories “were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who believed none of these false claims, after taking into account all of these other factors,” the researchers write.

Given that these fake stories were widely circulated on Facebook, the inference that Facebook had a non-zero effect on the election is fairly obvious.

Seriously. It's hilarious to watch the mental gymnastics of Google's CEO openly tauting that he's DIRECTLY working with a presidential candidate to "use our data" to help the candidate.

  - Facebook sold some ads. Who the fuck reads Facebook ads?
  - Google literally used their entire platform (read: tracking your information) + "muh algorithms" to assist a candidate.

And IN RETURN, the CEO got, and I quote, "a virtual open door to access the White House at will"

https://www.googletransparency...

https://theintercept.com/2016/...

https://mashable.com/2009/04/2...

https://www.wired.com/2008/11/...

https://www.politico.com/story...

https://www.theguardian.com/te...

"Eric Schmitt, 'CEO of America' "

And these are LIBERAL WEBSITES running these articles. So you can't even play the whole "alt-right / foxnews / fakenews / Russia-wrote-it" Red Herring bullshit.

Of course, I don't know why we're restricting to Obama either. Under Hillary, they did the same thing (for likely the same quid-pro-quo arrangement):

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://www.googletransparencyp...

https://qz.com/823922/eric-sch...

https://www.politico.com/magaz...

https://qz.com/520652/groundwo...

So with literally DOZENS upon dozens of professional articles dedicated to the subject from dozens of separate news organizations, anyone who ignores this well-established fact is throwing their head in the sand and humming, and not worthy of a debate response and should be downvoted accordingly for low signal-to-noise ratio.

  -> Google did everything Facebook did, and far more.

Funny, you forgot to quote[...]

It's quite astonishing what some people will do to prevent anyone hearing their story.

Dial down your off-topic antisemitic propaganda. The guy wasn't killed to prevent people from hearing a story, he was killed because he was in the middle of a violent riot.

Funny, you forgot to quote[...]

It's quite astonishing what some people will do to prevent anyone hearing their story.

Like ... by publishing their "story" in the Washington Post? Yeah, what a coverup! :)

The coverup is shooting someone who is clearly identified as a journalist. Israel does this kind of thing all the time. Hell, when an Israeli soldier was caught on video shooting a wounded and detained Palestinian in the head and was sentenced to a year in prison there were protests because the sentence was too harsh!

Funny, you forgot to quote[...]

It's quite astonishing what some people will do to prevent anyone hearing their story.

Like ... by publishing their "story" in the Washington Post? Yeah, what a coverup! :)

No, my point was that msmash was trying (knowing that few click to the articles) to omit the involvement/culpability of the agents of Religion of Pieces in this hacking that this /. story is about.

Funny, you forgot to quote[...]

It's quite astonishing what some people will do to prevent anyone hearing their story.

That is a load of shit. There are plenty functioning democracies in the world that haven't devolved into a 2 party system, both beheld by corporate interests, and both forcing through unpopular legislation by riding on critical bills of supply.

"Devolved"? The US has been a two party system almost since its inception. It's a natural outcome of first past the post voting systems and it's resulted in a stable government for 150 years and the wealthiest country in the world. It's not clear that having more than two parties results in better outcomes either. Our two party system has it's flaws to be sure but parliamentary systems with numerous parties are flawed as well. Pick the poison that works for you but understand that every system has its flaws.

You talk about those legislative tactics as if they are something new. You talk about it as if money and corporate interests were something new. EVERY non-totalitarian country has to deal with similar legislative tactics and the corrupting influence of money. That will never change.

You're right the title of democracy doesn't prevent something being bad, but the way the USA is passing bills and the way the election process works are two things that are really stretching the definition.

Only to those who are predisposed to believe such circular reasoning. If you want to argue that Gerrymandering is a threat or that the electoral college system doesn't represent the will of the voters I can get with you on that. But arguing that the US isn't a democracy is just plainly and clearly not true.

Asians are white.

Hence the Russians getting so annoyed when the US wants to put one of its hackers on trial.

STW Analyst: “A lot of things have surprised me about working at the CIA! The diversity of occupations employed here, the rotation opportunities, the investment in employee training.”

But not, sadly, the practice of torture.

STW Analyst: “A lot of things have surprised me about working at the CIA! The diversity of occupations employed here, the rotation opportunities, the investment in employee training.”

But not, sadly, the practice of torture.

I thought that was a liberal California thing. Y'know, the whole "not informing a sexual partner that you have HIV/AIDs" is now just a misdemeanor instead of a felony thing.

Source
Source
Source
Source
etc.

Sounds like a great place for all those bug chasers to go after they realize nobody wants to bone somebody who is such a severe biohazard.

Do we not learn from Martin Luther King despite his being dead? Many visionaries have died as martyrs and their deaths have caused the change they sought. True, some die forgotten, but not all do. Further, saying, "I will not kill," is not the same as saying, "I will not resist." Having a good defense or even a good offense is not the same as having a lethal offense. Regarding calling the police... in the wake of the New York killing, I just last night asked whether my family should think twice about calling the police if they are more likely to shoot first than to not. How far should we go in dealing with it ourselves? It is an open topic of discussion, one that has come up more often as we are more aware of needless killing of people by cops. (I say "aware" because it has probably happened a lot more in history than we know, and the modern era is bringing the problem more into the light.) I do not know all the answers. I do believe that the more I error toward "I will not kill," the better the world will be, especially if I can encourage that belief in others.

which in turn gets substituted into suicides by other methods if you reduce access to guns

That's mostly untrue. Don't buy into the gun runners' talking points. Suicide is primarily an impulsive act, committed at a moment of mental and emotional weakness - often under the influence of alcohol which is a disihibitor. 9 out of 10 people who survive a suicide attempt do not die from a repeated suicide attempt. Firearms are by far the most effective form of suicide because they are handy, require no preplanning and are the most lethal means of killing. The more time and effort required to commit suicide, the more time a person has to pull out of the funk that led them to try.

It also helps that what any sane person is trying to reduce is homicides in general.

Spare us your rationalizations for shitty statistics.

For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die

Your own quoted study says "could not determine causation". That's because most firearm-related homicides occur where the crime rate is high

Its funny you think that when the study authors could not determine causation, YOU could. Sounds like you don't understand science nor statistics. Lemee guess, you also believe that global warming is just a 'theory' and therefore carries no significant evidentiary weight. To be more specific you've misunderstood a standard term of art and tried to misuse it for your own agenda.

Facebook is now admitting that data of most of its 2 billion users has been collected and used by third parties.

Needless to say, Zuckerberg and Facebook proper sincerely apologize for this usage and take people's privacy very seriously.

Many mass shooters had received mental health treatment that usually included drugs.....but he wants you to think they're using illicit drugs to increase the moral panic.

OP never mentioned illicit drugs, he said mind-altering. You know, like anti-depressants?

For the two hundred years before that decision, it was accepted that the government had the right to regulate guns as a mechanism to regulate the militia.

Wrong. "Well regulated", means able to shoot accurately, it has nothing to do with legal regulations. The militia was all able-bodied adults.

Gun control is a damage mitigation strategy. The goal is to make it harder to commit a mass shooting, and to make you slower while you are committing your mass shooting.

Also incorrect. The ultimate objective of gun control is to take away one of our essential freedoms. If the objective were to reduce the number of casualties we'd be doing proactive things like locking doors, improving physical security and actually investigating tips about violent individuals.

Most mass shooters are expecting to die in the police response. The presence of armed civilians is not a deterrent. Especially because exactly zero mass shootings have been ended by an armed civilian.

Plenty of attacks have been stopped by armed civilians. There was a mall shooter a few years ago who was confronted by an armed civilian and killed himself. There was a recent story in a local crime blog about a conceal carry license holder stopping a 3 on 1 attack. Here's an older article about some of the attacks that were stopped by a good guy with a gun. There have been a number of attackers that have been stopped by a concealed carry license holder in Chicago since the McDonald decision.

We will never find security in giving up essential liberties.

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO USES THAT YOU LISTED IN THAT ONE QUOTE is a difference that makes no difference.

You don't think that it's significant that in one instance the user knew they were handing over their information to a political campaign and in the other the user thought they were taking an innocent personality quiz? It doesn't excuse either one, but I think it's significant.

From Facebook's blog post, "Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. "

Every Facebook user has a "public profile". And when they say "most people on Facebook", they're not just talking about the Cambridge Analytica leak. They mean most users.

Information you share that is always public: Some of the information you give us when you fill out your profile is public, such as your age range, language and country. We also use a part of your profile, called your Public Profile, to help connect you with friends and family.

Cambridge Analytica accessed more than just the public profile. From that same Post article:

The third-party firm (Global Science Research) used a clicky personality quiz to get people to interact with the app, which then used a loophole to pull all the behind-the-scenes data of that user, and also the same data relating to all their friends -- typically 200-300 other people per user.

The only reason people are getting wound up about this is because their favourite talking head on the news told them that Facebook – in a roundabout way – helped DRRUUUMMPFF win the election.

Fun bit of trivia: Facebook actually did lend a bit of assistance to the Obama campaign in 2012 , so it's not like ol' Zuck is strolling around wearing a red ball cap these days... Back when word first got out, the media were talking about how modern the Obama campaign was for using the data.

Graphic says you're wrong. Look at the maps, by county. Counties that are blue tend to be higher-crime counties. Red counties seem to have lower crime rates. Not always, but the trend is unmistakable - even if the accompanying text tries to deny it.

And if you want to use stats on gun violence...take out the damned suicide numbers. If people want to off themselves, they will.

If you remove suicides, you have gun deaths (last I looked) lower than car accidents, and you don't see people wanting to ban cars.

And, if you look closer at the statistics, most gun deaths are by handgun AND out of those, most are gang related, them killing themselves. It isn't the law abiding gun owner that is the problem, it is...criminals.

I don't think they called it the Bill of Privileges, or the "Bill of Needs"...it is the Bill of Rights in the US constitution.

Frankly, I don't give a fuck about the rest of the world. If I wanted to live under those type of rules, I'd move there.

Also, if I buy a car and don't drive it on public roads, but only on private property, etc...I don't have to register it.

With my guns, I do not shoot them in public places, only on private property like a gun range, or I have friends with lots of land where we can go shoot all we want.

So, as long as I legally own and use my weapons, no...the government has no need to know about them any more than it needs to know my ownership of knives, hammers or crossbows, etc...which also can be missed and kill people.

Can you show any correlation between gun laws and violent crime? I actually did a study on that for a statistics project at university, I found no correlation between gun laws and violent crime.

I'd like to see this correlation you claim.

Don't take my word for it though. I did do a statistical analysis but so did a lot of other people with much more experience in this than I have.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

That link is just one example I could find with a short Google search.

I'll hear people make claims about "gun deaths" correlating to gun ownership. I don't care if the person got murdered with a gun, a knife, or by being tossed out a window. If we want to see murder go down then it can't be done with gun laws. We might see "gun deaths" go down but that's like saying "pool drownings" go down by banning pools while total drownings stay the same because now people go swim in a lake instead.

One of the most informative infographics about mass shootings in America. But as this story unfolds, it's clear that those speaking about arming teachers is just a band-aid. We want children to be safe in schools, but workplaces are okay? By numbers, workplaces are a more dangerous place than schools both in the number of shootings and the number of people killed. Should we make illegal rules and contracts that stipulate against guns on private property? Do we pretend any of that makes sense as people with an intent to kill rarely obey the laws or rules to carry a gun and more guns almost always leads to more gun accidents and death without at least a minimal higher standard on gun ownership and possession?

I definitely wouldn't pretend I have the exact answers. To some extent, I think we over-sensationalize gun violence because as horrible as it is, we're not approaching it from the mindset of it being an aberration from an otherwise utopia. While there's certain statistics that can be argued about other countries to justify strict gun laws, it would seem like a large part of the problem is the culture that thinks guns are a solution to a lot of problems they simply aren't.

Perhaps that's the real point of the sensationalism? Except we don't have that discussion. We don't go to movies, watch a "hero" shooting (and presumably killing) hundreds of people and then at the end have a queasy feeling in our stomach because as much as it's a fantasy, we enjoy too much that fantasy. As a gamer who realizes that games aren't real life, I have that feeling when I start seeing gorier games. It's part of the reason why I simply won't play a large number of more horror-focused games. You see, the point isn't really that you can't enjoy playing them or tell the difference between them and life. It's that at some level, realizing what you are playing so invoke you a certain feeling of disgust about it. I simply don't see that in the eyes of a lot of people who are pro guns.

Perhaps it's fear that clouds their judgement. Maybe I'm just not seeing that revulsion because I haven't looked hard enough for it. What I do know is that we need more the discussion about why we celebrate guns so much while ignoring the real harm they can and do cause.

Ok..so, lets get rid of all semi-automatic weapons (after all that is ALL the AR-15 is, it is nothing more).

Even though millions of people own them and responsibly own them, just because a few idiots go off, we have to take away everyones ability to own them?

This is more a people problem than gun problem.

It wasn't that long ago (think 60's-70's) when you could easily buy a gun (pistol or rifle or shotgun) with no background check, at the local hardware store, or even mail order, no problem.

Hell, in High School in the late 70's early 80's, I remember tons of folks parking in the student parking lot with gun racks in their truck, with loaded rifles in them....no problem.

So, with easier access, we had no real problem with mass shootings, and I never heard of one in schools then.

And if you want to go extreme...machine guns.

You know you CAN today own one legally, right?

All you have to do is fill out some ATF forms, pay your $200 tax stamp and you can own and shoot your own machine gun.

The only thing today is, as a civilian, you can only buy ones made before 1986. IN 1986, they snuck in a law (see the Hughes amendment) that said civilians couldn't own full auto weapons (which an AR-15 is not) made before 1986.

Prior to the Hughes amendment in 1986, you could freely buy a brand new machine gun easily. Just pay a tax stamp and fill out a form.

But tell me....can you list a bunch of machine gun crimes during that time period of the 50's and 60's?

Ok, I'll give you the roaring 20's with Al Capone, but there were also there circumstances going on then too.

So, it wasn't that long ago, that we have MUCH easier access to fire arms, even fully automatic ones, yet, we didn't have the problems with mass shootings we have now, in schools, etc.

And even with these.... gun violence overall in the US has been declining over the past years..

So, over all, things have gotten better, and yet...we're wanting to have law abiding Americans, the VAST majority of gun owners in the US, millions of them...give up their rights, to cater to the lowest denominator of a few whack-o's...right?

And we're wanting to do this and make things harder on the vast majority legal law abiding citizens, even though so many of the laws already on the books are NOT being enforced...?

Hmm....I just don't buy that argument. We do not need to start treating the law abiding more and criminals and deprive them of their rights and property, and the privilege of protecting themselves and their homes.

I won't even get into reasons pertaining to the founding fathers wanting us armed, against tyranny of government that could happen.

The Vox isn't a credible source. Come back when you have a reliable source.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://qz.com/1031027/the-us-...

http://www.foxnews.com/politic...

http://thehill.com/homenews/ad...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics...

http://www.newsweek.com/americ...

Well first:
"The illusion that you need to be in one of the high cost urban centers is untrue."
I fixed that for you....but really - stop telling people.

I have an office 5 mi from my house, which is a 2400 sq ft 5 bedroom American Foursquare built in 1909 which we bought for $100k. With some minor work (done 90% by my wife's dad, actually) we now have something north of 3500 square feet.
I go to the office when I want a quite, undistracted place to work.
I'm within 30min (ok, maybe 40) of a major metro downtown, and a Delta hub airport. But the first 15 min of that drive is through rolling hills and cornfields.
I have 100meg+ internet at both my home and work. I make a low-6-figure income.

I look at my peers who brag about incomes 2x-4x what I make and I laugh at them. I live practically in Mayberry and love my life.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

The PowerPoint "thingy" was in the CitizenFour package... Don't be a lazy fanboi, Do the "Think" not just the "Different". Gellman and Poitras 2013, June 7. U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

On #1: The POTUS administration yes. But civility says that POTUS shouldn't personally target and attack individual entities. Its one thing if Amazon was in the regulatory cross hairs or had been found guilt of something. But its plain stupid to attack prior to actual legal charges; because it weakens your regulatory bodies' arguments in courts. Additionally, if you don't push legal fronts or they fail, you open up the administration for counter suits. Almost every politician and aid at the hill know this basic stuff... except for one...

On #2: What city doesn't complain that a major business doesn't pay enough taxes?

On #3: I don't think the GP was talking about stock price specifically. Just that Trump's continued assault as POTUS on Amazon will be damaging and this will have an impact on hiring and retention.

On #4: https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Funny to link to the Washington Post. Summary: Trump is highest at 37% change over compared to the last 5 presidents. Reagan was next at 17%. And he lost 6 out of 12 of his top level positions; compared to Obama 1 and Bush 0.

He doesn't have a "little" turn over just like everyone else, he DOUBLED the 2nd up! I doubt we will see this level of incompetence in our lifetime again.

Few things where Trump has actually hurt the economy: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+Trump...

There was a backup. The phone belonged to the terrorist's public employer who were cooperating to provide access. The FBI requested that San Bernardino reset the phone password which then caused the phone to stop syncing data which had not yet been backed up (correct and expected behavior).

...by resetting the password, the county, which owned Farook’s phone, and the FBI eliminated the possibility of seeing whether additional data beyond Oct. 19 might be recovered from the phone through the auto-backup feature, experts said. [ FBI asked San Bernardino to reset the password for shooter’s phone backup ]

So, it was the FBI's error that caused the phone data to be potentially important in the first place. Of course, the FBI did not actually know (and could not know) whether there was additional data on the phone or not, so the importance of the phone itself was highly speculative.

FFS... we need a special court for tech cases.

It seems that way, but I'm not sure why it should be. ... I think I could make that pretty obvious to most people, even a judge.

Unfortunately it often isn't. The initial judge learned to program so he could understand the case. He admitted his learning was rudimentary, but enough to understand what was going on. The appeals judges did not and that has been a point of contention. The only one in the legal system who learned to program was the trial court judge, and he threw out most of the arguments as a result. The appeals courts and the solicitor general have made their decisions without that, and Google's appeals say the knowledge is imperative.

Consider back in 2011, Justices Elena Kagen (age 51 at the time) and Stephen Breyer (age 73 at the time) had game consoles brought in and they learned to play multiple violent games so they could fully understand the case. They followed instructions on how to play their way through to the scenes that the plaintiffs found most objectionable, the ones where they say people were lighting children on fire and smashing their heads to get points.

If judges don't know enough to make a properly informed decision and they cannot gain that knowledge from case law and subject experts, it is their duty to gain that knowledge. There have been judges who took up hiking in dangerous situations, visited a wide range of locations from pig farms to remote deadly roadways, and studied arcane subjects in order to make a fair judgement.

Note that the first time around the question was split into three parts: copyright, patent, and damages. The judge learned how to program. In trials there are question of law and questions of fact; the judge decides questions of law and the jury decides questions of fact. The judge ruled from his experience learning to code that many of Oracle's claims were invalid on their face, and didn't allow them to go to the jury trial. The declaration was that "it does not matter that the declaration or or method header lines are identical," even though Oracle decided they were. The non-programmer appeals court judges reversed the decision. The Solicitor General (who also doesn't know how to program) recommended against a SCOTUS ruling at the time, letting it go back to the lower courts for further defense.

It headed back to the lower court for this second round. The judge and the jury decided there should be no damages because of the fair use exception in copyright law. The jury included people who knew how to program, and they decided it was perfectly legal due to fair use. Now the appeals judges (who still don't know anything about programming) is countermanding the jury's findings, which rarely happens.

Google should absolutely appeal. The next level is the full en banc review. They asked earlier for members of the three judge panel to learn to code, but they apparently did not convince them. Their lawyers should (and I'm sure they are) using that fact in their appeals. While the judges are comfortable enough with books and movies to apply copyright law in those cases, they can argue that unlike the trial court judge who learned to program to answer the questions, the appeals judges did not have a sufficient understanding to make these determinations, thus even though they understood the wording of law they still committed an error of judgement by failing to fully understand the content of the case.

Let's not pretend they are even close to as safe as human driven vehicles. If you look at the real metrics, cars killed 1.18 people per 100 million miles. Autonomous vehicles are on track to do much worse, but we don't have clear statistics yet.

I'm also not confident that software engineers will have the same level of respect for life that other engineers have shown.

Shaming pedestrians for crossing safe roads (I assume they are not suicidal) while the president makes himself an all-powerful dictator makes a fine country indeed. I'd rather have a country where corruption is automatically shamed.

You know, almost all of that can be applied to the US these days ... Trump doesn't know or care what the law says, seems to want a personal oath of loyalty (to him, not the Constitution), has mingled his family business with the presidency (by letting his children be his advisers as well as running his business), and generally acts like he expects his every whim to be treated as if it is law.

Heh.

One wonders if you sang the same tune when Obama whipped out his "pen and phone" and repeatedly got slapped down 9-0 by the Supreme Court.

A humiliating Supreme Court loss for Obama

Yeah right, this is totally not a bipartisan thing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Well, maybe we should ask our cops in America to just look the other way and pretend crimes aren't happening, like your UK cops do.

How about instead we ask them to stop committing crimes, especially while on duty. They should especially stop raping so many women, and killing us at unprecedented rates even though it's the safest time in history to be a cop in America.

Well, maybe we should ask our cops in America to just look the other way and pretend crimes aren't happening, like your UK cops do.

How about instead we ask them to stop committing crimes, especially while on duty. They should especially stop raping so many women, and killing us at unprecedented rates even though it's the safest time in history to be a cop in America.

What people need to understand is that the Internet brought with it the capability of committing a crime in one legal jurisdiction, while sitting in another legal jurisdiction. In this case, committing a crime in one country while sitting in another. One of the basic assumptions in nearly all our laws is that the crime and the perpetrator are/were in the same legal jurisdiction at the time the crime was committed. So they're not set up to handle these new Internet crimes.

Extradition treaties were created more for the case of a perpetrator of a crime in one country fleeing to another country. In those cases, it's clear the suspect committed a crime at the time, but up to the country he fled to to decide if it's something he should be extradited for. In Internet crimes, the person in one country may have been acting completely legally where he was residing, while his actions in a remote location were a crime at that location. The closest non-Internet analogy would be if someone in one country shot and killed someone in another country, when the shooting would've been justifiable in country but not the other.

When there's a mismatch between the two country's laws on whether the act was a crime, neither extreme solution works. If you do take one extreme and decide that the laws of the country of residence should always apply, then every country will simply make it not a crime to hack computers in other countries. And the Internet will break as everyone sets up filters to block all IP addresses outside their country except for certain whitelisted IPs. If you take the other extreme that the laws of the country where it was a crime should apply, then you enable a mechanism whereby countries with extremely restrictive laws (e.g. China) can reach out into other countries and imprison people who are acting legally there.

It'll take years, if not decades for our laws to grapple with and come up with some reasonable-sounding solution. I've been thinking of it on and off for years, and still haven't come up with anything which seems reasonable.

No, it's quite common for US cops (generally hired from the dregs of society) to do things like that and worse. Start reading about civil forfeiture abuse, where travelers and business owners are relieved of valuables and cash under "suspicion" without trial. Obama and Holder tried to curtail this, Trump and Sessions fully support it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

You see, normal people with 1/2 a brain are capable of evaluating facts without constantly saying "what about ...". It's a skill but I think you could learn it too.

Sorry to hear you were dropped on the head as a child - early and often. Trump has faced a ten month long investigation from Mueller on a theory, for something that Hillary did in fact. The only response available is "sure, keep investigating Trump but Hillary should have been indicted last year".

Otherwise, not only are you a political hack, you're doing what the United States routinely accuses countries like Venezuela or Russia of doing: using the criminal justice system to go after people you don't like for purely political purposes.

I know comrade. Your handlers told you to just keep repeating lies over and over and eventually you'll sway the dumb people. It doesn't even matter if you don't supply any facts!

Not just early and often, but from a great height as well. I have the facts, you have the dumbest conspiracy theory of all time.

Carol Davidsen, Director of the 2012 Obama campaign's Media Analytics group, got data on almost all American voters. In a telling quote, she said:

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

They got the data from an estimated 190 MILLION people in the United States. There's no way 190 million people gave permission to the Obama campaign. Instead, they used the 1 million Obama app downloaders to scrape all of their Friend's personal information - which is exactly what CA's professor did.

Here's an article from 2013 that has Obama campaign analysts reporting that Facebook knew the campaign was breaking the rules, but allowed it "as long as you stop on Nov. 7th".

There is no doubt that the Obama campaign did at least everything Cambridge Analytica did, and more.