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Given that they were donated at no cost, precisely zero seconds.

It's still stupid, but no, they didn't pay for them.

That said, we keep seeing the stereotype that the key ability to successful police enforcement is to be able to drive faster than the criminals. Which is nonsense. The strength of the police force versus criminals is that there's a million of them, pre-scattered across the country, and they communicate with each other in realtime. You don't have to catch up with the fleeing perp, you're already past them - or at least, another officer is. You just need to not lose them (aka, a helicopter, or better, a drone; things like StarChase help too) and keep the net around them tight enough that you can nab them if they stop (which has to happen eventually), but not so tight that they feel the need to drive like a maniac and endanger the public. Heck, you can even make them stop in a place where they're no threat to the public, such as spike strips on a closed road or the like. But you never need to have car chases through busy public areas - at least not for more than a brief initial period. It's pointless.

There's a interesting statistics on the topic here. 91% of police chases are over non-violent crime. 233 suspects and their passengers (some of them innocent) die in police chases every year in the US, as well as 87 innocent bystanders and 3 police officers - more than the number killed by floods, tornadoes, lightning and hurricanes combined. 42% of police chases were over nothing more than simple traffic infractions. 15% were for suspected drunk driving - which just adds even more danger to bystanders.

Police chases make great TV, but usually they're hardly worth the risk unless there's a serious danger of A) losing the suspect, and B) the suspect committing a violent crime after being lost.

"...the right to refrain from executing transactions to pirate sites if copyright holders (MPAA, RIAA, PSR for Music) file a complaint."

Ha ha, no way this will be abused by the "copyright holders". I can't see anything that could go wrong here, no sir.

Except these "copyright holders" have been known to file utterly bogus complaints, claiming copyright over birds singing, public domain works, anything that has a sound in the background that might (or might not) vaguely resemble some sound in something they own (or claim to own).

But don't worry, Citizen, the uber-mega-international corporations have your best interests at heart, never fear! All hail the glorious mega-corporations! Remember, "corporations are people too"!

Pao's essay is bizzare -- she complained about "trolls" while she herself used the troll tactic of claiming to be swamped with private messages of support:

As the trolls on Reddit grew louder and more harassing in recent weeks, another group of users became more vocal. First a few sent positive messages. Then a few more. Soon, I was receiving hundreds of messages a day, and at one point thousands. These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words. Many shared their own stories of harassment and thanked us for our stance.

The writers of these messages often said they could not imagine the hate I was experiencing. Most apologized for the trolls’ behavior. And some apologized for standing on the sidelines. “I didn’t do anything, and that is why I am sorry,” one user wrote. “I stayed indifferent. I didn’t attack nor defend. I am sorry for my inaction. You are a human. And no one needs to be treated like you were.” Some apologized for their own trollish behavior and promised they had reformed.

As the threats became really violent, people ended their messages with “stay safe.” Eventually, users started responding on Reddit itself, using accurate information and supportive messages to fight back against the trolls.

If Pao had really received "hundreds of messages a day" from supporters, then she should have been easily able to use crowfunding to pay her legal bills.... IMHO.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday. 'The DOD has to tap into all the streams of innovation and emerging technology and it has to do so much more quickly,'

Question 1: Do we spend more on military than the rest of the world combined?(*)

Question 2: Is our military already 1,000 times stronger than the next strongest power?

Question 3: Is there an immediate threat to the US from... anyone?

We're killing our country with all this needless spending.

Can't we just sit back and relax for a couple of years?

(*) This doesn't count militarization of the police, or internal police forces such as Homeland security, DEA, TSA, National Guard, and others.

Let me google that for you

The very first headline from your link:

A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast

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

I don't think your citation shows what you thought it was going to show.

Slavery and other issues were just the hot button topics that got the average person engaged, that isn't really what it was about.

No that is revisionist history. It was purely about slavery. The states rights argument was created after the south lost because it was embarrassing to have fought for slavery.

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

It's expensive on purpose to make sure only Big Pharma can afford the R&D to begin with.

Big Pharma has the FDA set up expensive hurdles only they can afford to jump.

Nope.
Those rules went into place to make sure as possible that we didn't have another Thalidomide fiasco.

Here's an interesting story about Frances Oldham Kelsey who had the kind of heroic stubbornness that so seldom happens now a days. She and the people she worked with, probably saved the lives of tens of thousands of people from Thalidomide.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

And here's some about the big pharma stooges and similar assholes.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/...

WaPo article on craters in Siberia - apparently they're from methane gas evaporation, which is spectacularly bad news, because methane has more greenhouse effect than CO2. There's a lot of methane stored in frozen arctic tundra, and if warming temperatures make more of it escape, that's going to warm things up faster and make more of it escape.

Well you should have spoke up if you cared so much! Now you just want to excuse felonies with plausible similar instances. She made a few other mistakes, too. This one is another felony that government workers are explicitly told is violation of federal code: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Ahh, the famous peer reviewed articles that assert truth. Fairly sure nothing like this could ever happen.

Yes because serious consequences actually stop bad behavior

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Perhaps you believe laws stop crime

That may be a part of the advantage of going with one of these vendors. We sometimes hear about malfunctioning cameras when police are accused of abuse. Sometimes multiple cameras malfunction at the same time.

A properly designed system would make deleting evidence difficult, and even if the evidence were to be deleted, it would likely leave an audit trail showing that the video did indeed exist at one point and reveal when and how it was deleted.

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

Then you will also need to ban Cyclists [...]

Not all cyclists. Just people on fixies. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing...

As it turns out, we do. A Google Self Driving Car and a cyclist on a fixed gear bike met at a 4-way stop. The cyclist was doing a track stand (staying upright on the peddles, sometimes peddling backwards and forwards a small ammount) instead of balancing on a foot. This caused the Google car to think the cyclist was going to enter the intersection after the car had started moving, causing it to stop and "wait" for the cyclist, which by this point had "stopped", which the car took to mean that he (the cyclist) was waiting for the car to go (which was actually the case), and so the car would start moving again until the cyclist started his next forward motion to balance himself.

Actually, this would be a perfect idea. There used to be a guy in Maryland known as the "Route 29 Batman" who would dress up in a (really nice) Batman costume, and would go to hospitals to visit sick children and entertain them.

And sadly, he was killed in a car accident just a few weeks ago, so there's certainly an opening for it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

But because the North won, they got to abolish slavery and weaken states' rights at the same time.

Funny how they only abolished slavery in those pesky southern states. Maryland was allowed to keep their slaves for a year after the emancipation proclamation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

In fact, Mexican workers that are paid "under-the-table" (as in they don't have anything taxes taken out of their paycheck) are relatively rare. Meaning they financially contribute to a system under which they are considered as faceless statistics and under which they have no voice.

Relatively rare? So where do the rest of the illegal aliens send their taxes? Do they fill out a W-4 with a fake SSN? Do they use a fake Tax ID number instead? Since they can't claim any excess taxes because they don't file, do they claim 10 exemptions to minimize the withholding amount?

And what about all the petitioners that are waiting 20+ years for their chance to legally immigrate to the U.S.? Are we to tell them "Sorry, the illegal population is so large that we don't have room for you again this year."? http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

--

Excellent point. From the article http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

"Despite the rather gloomy results, the new paper pointed out that this kind of verification is precisely what scientists are supposed to do: “Any temptation to interpret these results as a defeat for psychology, or science more generally, must contend with the fact that this project demonstrates science behaving as it should.”"

This is the kind of stuff that needs to be done.

How exactly is this not a dystopian sci-fi novel come to life?

The dystopian novels may concentrate on the methods, but the real reasons for gloom are the governments behind them. A vibrant democracy arming its peace officers with effective tools to help them fight crime is starkly different from a repressive dictatorship doing the same.

And, although the US is not any longer the vibrant democracy (republic) we once were, it is not the brutal police force, that is used by our overlords today to keep opposition at bay. Not yet, anyway — for now they still use the IRS and other "civilized" tools to suppress would-be challengers. Possibly, because their support among actual police is not all that high.

The Sci-Fi writers didn't see any of that coming.

why do people think it is acceptable to ... pee all over public toilets?

Because they're (see item 10) dainty and/or fastidious.

There is plenty of evidence. While information from a foreign government may not be "born classified", other information on her server was.

In 2010 Obama killed the Constellation program w/o discussing it with congress first and with NO PLAN for ANY American manned spaceflight going forward; his plan only funded the Americans using ISS for a few more years via Russian Soyuz flights before dumping ISS into the Pacific Ocean There was vague rhetoric about new tech development and a possible commercial crew taxi program, but. That was it. Congress had a freak-out because Constellation had been a hard-negotiated bi-partisan program with support and buy-in from the hard-right in congress all the way to the hard-left in congress and supported by both Bush and the Pelosi-Reid team. Constellation had even made it through the 2008 election cycle ans the change of power in congress. Congress under-funded Constellation back then, as they always do to NASA, but Bush and his team did not go around whining about it and blaming the underfunding on Democrat hatred of Bush and/or white people. Obama's supporters have used commercial crew underfunding as "proof" that his opponents are racists; they LOVE this fight.

Obama's plan got such a negative backlash even from prominent Democrats that he cobbled together a plan to come up with a plan and, after months of back-room negotiations, ended up calling for a manned version of the Bush-era commercial cargo program, combined with an extension to ISS operations (which even now not all of the ISS partners have agreed to). Congress (again BOTH parties) were so unimpressed with the plan that they insisted on the SLS rocket as part of the plan and the law that ended up getting written allowed Obama's commercial crew program but also REQUIRED the SLS rocket. Obama signed that into law, but has been playing passive-aggressive games with it ever since. Every year, he tries to shift money from SLS to commercial crew, which angers congress and they in turn refuse to increase the commercial crew funds. He then announces that SLS does not need the money any way, then in separate reports to congress announces that SLS is slipping its schedule due to lack of funds (he actually says it's slipping because of delays to the Orion's service module - but THAT is because ESA is building it because he said we could not afford to have Lockheed build it in the US (an budgetary bankshot))

Congress wants a rocket to enable the US to return to the Moon and go on to Mars.

Obama is adamant that we not return to the Moon and that we will go to Mars someday in the distant future

There's no happy compromise between such opposite views.

Obama's NASA fills its website with Mars-centric rhetoric but absolutely no plan, budget, goals, or schedule (this is called "planning to fail by failing to plan"). He attempts to square-the-circle politically by making it look like he is agreeing to a deep-space future for NASA while in actuality he keeps trying to limit NASA to renting taxis for flights to and from LEO that will be easy for a future President to kill-off (since it will lack the political constituency of a big NASA program). He could EASILY get the funding for commercial crew if he would do 2 things: [1] stop slow-walking SLS and robbing its funds, and [2] agree to let congress increase the NASA budget WITHOUT tying that to an across-the-board budget balloon (boosting NASA would require either cutting something else or violating the budget caps, and Obama insists that he be allowed to bust the caps on all social spending programs if NASA gets a boost); Obama is using NASA in a supremely partisan set of fights and it's VERY bad for NASA.

A US Appeals court has rejected a corporate's appeal against being prosecuted by the FTC for failing to ensure its security was up to what it had promised https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Or is it just that now we have more access to tools to expose their idiocy and it seems there are more of them?

With social media and sites like Slashdot we hear about every stupid move any public official makes. In times past such information would only be available to people in the local area. It is the same with stranger abductions. The rate of stranger abductions has gone down but the perception is that it has gone up due to the number of reports on the news.

The worst thing that is happening is the "the" meme. Too often I see "the government", "the police", "the school system", etc. All of these are made up by thousands of different people in different places under different circumstances. Too many identifiable groups are being treated as monolithic organizations. There is no "the government". There are thousands of separate organizations that have government responsibilities and most of them never talk to each other. For example, If we hear about one city government a month screwing up some might think that city governments are screwed up. That does not take into account that there are thousands of city governments and only a very small percentage has screwed up. Too many people generalize too much(yes, I realize the irony of that statement).

Cheating is a lot more common than many realise. Maybe it's about time to open up the conversation on why we find one physical activity with another person to be taboo, but not another (like say tennis).

In a 1991 study, sex researcher Shere Hite found that 70 percent of married women have cheated on their partners; a 1993 follow-up study found that 72 percent of married men have as well. According to a 2004 University of Chicago study, 25 percent of married men have had at least one extramarital affair.

Surge pricing achieves two things: 1] Encourages drivers to work peak times in peak areas, increasing service.

Well, in theory. Perhaps with a few caveats. Personally I could understand the time constant factor, and why others have a problem with it.

To me, it would appear that it's simply a problem of having enough information to make most people happier not being the same thing as having enough information (or a sufficiently good model) to eradicate most (or all) of the highly undesirable outliers.

Uber surge pricing is closer to gouging than anything else. If you want to truly bring in "new" drivers for a surge.... then restrict surge pricing to people who haven't driven for Uber in the past week.

I recently saw a comedian explain it - it's funnier if you 'punch up'. Even 'punching down' is usually a self-deprecating joke about the comedian ("look what an asshole I am").

White people have had an advantage for hundreds of years (or longer?), and it shows in the percentage of politicians ruling, and probably more importantly the percentage of super rich. It started with slavery, but continued with Jim Crow, and exists today as, at minimum, bias. With that history and current imbalance, it stands to reason that any comparisons showing white people favorably will be met with disdain.

I think of it like this. If we're all neighbors, then we're actually teammates to a degree. If we're the player doing poorly, we should focus on doing better, working harder. If we're the player doing well, we should focus on helping the teammates not doing well. Encouragement seems to work in all situations, and actual help and advice in some situations (like if it's requested).

Surge pricing achieves two things: 1] Encourages drivers to work peak times in peak areas, increasing service.

Well, in theory. Perhaps with a few caveats. Personally I could understand the time constant factor, and why others have a problem with it.

To me, it would appear that it's simply a problem of having enough information to make most people happier not being the same thing as having enough information (or a sufficiently good model) to eradicate most (or all) of the highly undesirable outliers.

it refers to a "well-regulated" militia

which translated to today's meaning is "well-trained"

dirty harry constitutional activism in the last century (a freak out over crime, which was actually solved by better policing and sentencing) has meant we have easy guns for every hothead douchebag who wants one. and so the usa has a sky high homicide rate compared to its social and economic peers, who have actual gun regulation

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/8...

but if we followed the actual intent of the founding father's second amendment, they were saying we need *well-trained* gun owners. the founding fathers linked proficiency with ownership. their words. the text of second amendment. not the reinterpretation of activist judges from the last century. we fucked up with prohibition, and reversed that. time to reverse the legal fuck up over firearms from the last century

all we need is testing and licensing before you get a gun. like we do with cars, an equally dangerous tool that any mouth breathing retard should not get just because he wants one

"when guns are outlawed, only outlaws..."

i'm saying you every right to a gun, you have to prove you can use it first. a statement any *responsible* gun owner agrees with. all of the problems with guns is from hotheads easily getting one. make it harder to get one, the hot heads simply don't use a gun. they use a knife, which is far less lethal, because they aren't trying hard in life: they are casual hot heads or genuinely deranged. if it is hard to get one, they don't have the ability to try that hard. the same hard concentration they lack because any sleight or flush of anger makes them start shooting. proof:

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

oh sure, criminal masterminds will get any gun they want. and use that gun carefully: they are criminal masterminds. they won't shoot up street corners or discos or movie houses, which is the fucking problem in the usa, because guns are so easy for any asshole to get

"there's too many illegal guns out there already..." yeah, it will take awhile to drain the swamp. progress will be slow and delayed for years as police mop up all the unlawful guns out there. as if just because doing the right thing is hard, that that is somehow a valid argument against doing the right thing

now the crazy part:

guaranteed i will get responses to this comment from people screaming i am stealing all guns. I AM SAYING GO AHEAD AND GET A GUN. just prove you can use one safely and proficiently first LIKE THE FUCKING FOUNDING FATHERS INTENDED. a statement any actual responsible gun owner agrees with

still, you will hear "WHY YOU WANNA GRAB MA GUN" (wheeze, gurgle), just because i am saying you need to prove you can use a gun before you get one. hardly earth shattering, completely moderate, agreed to by a majority of responsible gun owners. but the kneejerk propagandized morons will act like i'm out to steal all guns. fucking pathetic brain dead zombie retards

Would you have been happier if she had kept the job while on the campaign trail? It isn't like she would be very effective at her job while on the road.

Umm, while your defense of Palin is noteworthy, It might be handy to note that the 2008 Presidential election took place on November 4, 2008, and the governor's resignation took place on July 26, 2009. Roughly 9 months later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

sarah palin is the world's foremost expert on raising celibate children

I don't know what this has to do with anything. You teach your children how they should behave, it doesn't mean that they do everything they are taught. I am guessing you don't have any children.

Actually, Ms Palin's children appear to be raised with the same values as her, So I suspect Mama Bear figures she did a great job. Notable is that Bristol, the unwed mother, who makes a fair amount of money by preaching abstinance to trotskyite's children She erned $262,500 at least one year doing just that..

She's pregnant again - out of wedlock - again.

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

It seems to be a recurring theme among those who would pronounce themselves as somehow better than others. The Palin family has that quality in good supply.

It seems we get family value Senators woh look to engage in oral sex in airport bathrooms, Preachers who rail against Gays, yet have ongoing affiars with other men, Governors who run off to foreign countries with some floozy they are fucking, while they are still married, and get re-elected to another position. a surprisinly log list of pol who like to have sex with underage males.

You may want to defend these people. I consider them and anyone regardless of political stripe as slezeballs who should be arrested if applicable, or at least stop trying to act like they are superior and moral and honest beings. Allow me to put this in bold:

There is not one goddamned thing wrong with being conservative.

But!

These are people held in high regard who are incredibly hypocritical. Unwed mother who does one thing, yet tells everyone else they need to behave another way. That's just a sample as noted above. Her mother quitting halfwy through a elected office, yet defenders will twist themselves into knots trying to spin a story that she didnt quit.. And on and on and on.

But has the propaganda been so effective that people will defend grifters ike those who will let you give them as much money as you are willing to give, demanding you live in a way they never would, while delivering nothing else but vague hatred to breed more hatred and money for them - well, this isn't even remotely conservatism. It's Trotskyism.

https://normsaysno.wordpress.c... https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Today I heard yet another bonehead talking about the alleged "Rape Culture" at college which uses a 40 year old bullshit study for it's statistics. Not because we can't do better studies, but because the numbers in that particular study favor the bullshit they want you to believe.

There is a possibility that people who want to do those studies actually CAN'T do better studies.

CDC did a phone survey study on rape. Spent tens of thousands of work hours and several million dollars on it.
http://www.cdc.gov/violencepre...
And got "rates of sexual violence in the United States...comparable to those in the war-stricken Congo".
Their methodology was tainted at several steps, from framing the questions, through all survey takers being female (which totally can't alter their approach to asking questions after first couple of cases of women reporting rape), to paying for answers (paying more for taking part in the rape-related part of the "health" survey).

So, they did another one.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss...
This one not only had numbers once again shooting through the roof, this time you didn't even have to look up methodology to see glaring errors.

Results: In the United States, an estimated 19.3% of women and 1.7% of men have been raped during their lifetimes; an estimated 1.6% of women reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey.
The case count for men reporting rape in the preceding 12 months was too small to produce a statistically reliable prevalence estimate.
An estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences.

If dad forces mom to have sex - that's rape.
If dad forces dad to have sex - that's also rape.
If mom forces dad to have sex... that's not rape. That's "other forms of sexual violence".

It's the old "It's only the guy who's GIVING the blowjob that's gay" logic.
Along with the "men can only be raped by other men" logic - i.e. "women can't rape".
I.e. All rapists are men.

Could it be that people doing these studies simply can't give up their confirmation biases, and that they are taking existence of "rape culture" as a foregone conclusion?

When about 1 in 5 (or more) of population reports being raped... which is about 63 million people in USA...
That either means that there are tens of millions of rapists out there, working overtime to meet their rape quotas while everyone, INCLUDING VICTIMS, is just going with it and shrugging their shoulders without a care for themselves or others - or that the people doing the studies have serious issues with the methodology of their studies.

I don't know about Finland, but in the US the government is spending an amount that equates to $60k per household in poverty (though that figure is somewhat misleading). Some sort of minimum income could let us shrink 90+ government programs into just a few and cut the agencies that hand out the money.

Minimum income programs could also help us address the benefit cliff, which can cause low income workers who get a pay raise to end up much worse off financially.

I don't think anything like this (or anything different at all really) can happen in the US unless there's a major, extremely disruptive change in government. The "insiders serving insiders" government culture will stop any substantial changes.

Around here, there is a guy that runs for sheriff (never really cared if he won) named Moran, it is entirely possible that the poster is a joke.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

All his signs say "Moran for sheriff", I always read it as Moron for sheriff and wondered why anyone would vote for a moron for sheriff.

europe has better training. being a police officer in europe is a much more highly professional attitude with much more rigorous training

http://www.quora.com/How-do-UK...

Tim Dees, Retired cop and criminal justice professor, Reno Police Department, Reno Muni...

Upvoted by Quora User, I live in the UK. Graeme Shimmin, I am British. Marc Bodnick, 15 years transactions experience

Tim has 12 endorsements in Police and Law Enforcement.

Speaking from the perspective of a U.S. cop, there are several areas with significant differences. I should point out that I've never been to the UK, but have read a lot about this issue and discussed it with cops and non-cops in the UK.

I believe the most critical difference is the amount of training required of UK police. New hires attend a "police college" course of several months before going into the field to work for another few months under close supervision (sorry, I don't have the precise durations here, but it's considerably more training than most U.S. police receive). They then return to the police college for several more weeks until they are assigned to their duty stations. From here, on-the-job training is similar to that in the U.S., where the new constable works with a senior partner for several months before he is given a solo assignment. He is still closely supervised and his performance reviewed frequently for his first year to two years of service.

also, like europe, and i'll try not to completely derail the conversation, but no one should get a gun in the usa without rigorous training first, including testing and ongoing inspections. exactly like we do with getting a drivers license and a car. same level of responsibility, same standards, right?

without so many easy guns in he hands of idiots, cops are less jumpy

"if guns are outlawed, only outlaws..." actually, when guns are harder to get, the kind of casual hothead that causes all the mayhem with guns simply doesn't get a gun and reaches for a knife instead. *casual* hotheads are not trying hard in life, they will not try hard to get a gun, ti takes too much effort in a serious society. and a knife is far less lethal, so homicide rates drop

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

so the "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws..." is a propaganda lie

besides, we're not even talking about "outlawing" guns. we're talking about rigorous training which every responsible gun owner already agrees with and complies with. so what is the problem exactly? why is this country held hostage by a paranoid schizophrenic fringe on the issue of guns? most gun *owners* agree with what i am saying

yes, the criminal masterminds will still get illegal guns. and use them wisely and surgically: criminal *masterminds*. so again, no ridiculous mayhem. we're talking about the casual hothead that is thwe problem here. he should not get a gun easily, like he currently does in the usa

a responsible gun owner knows the seriousness of a gun and really has no problem insisting everyone get good training

anyway, with less easy guns getting easily in the hands of hot heads cops have less reason to be so jumpy with their own guns. the change won't be immediate, it will take awhile to drain the swamp of easy guns

as if that is somehow an argument not to drain the swamp, because the right thing is hard to do and will take time is never an argument against doing the right thing

The fact of the matter is that even if she didn't send those emails, she should still be in trouble for improperly storing classified information, some of which was actually classified at the time.

Someone(s) else at State should also be in deep trouble for this, but Clinton isn't innocent either. She stored classified information on an unauthorized server at an unsecured (from the point of classified information) location.

True... kind of... but only because he would have entered the public domain if Disney didn't keep lobbying Congress for more copyright extension laws. And they will do it again. And again. And again. The mouse is pure gold. If all it takes are some phone calls to sympathetic congressmen why wouldn't they? http://www.washingtonpost.com/... http://artlawjournal.com/micke... but hypocritical because Disney swooped on Kipling's Jungle Book as soon as that fell into public domain https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

... "crowd funding" in politics is ancient. And I'd point out that most crowdfunding systems have no problem with rich donors. Go to kickstarter... scroll down... they've got prizes for people that give 10k. Generally involves people going to some stupid party with the developer or them inserting you into their work or something.

Give 500K and get an ambassadorship?

You mean like the Virginia Tech Math Emporium?

Math Emporium website if you want to contact them. I am sure the process could be adapted for K-12 without much difficulty.

The biggest destinations in California are the Bay Area and LA, and people migrate there not for the quality of life (which sucks) or for gardening, but because a bunch of important companies have their headquarters there.

Furthermore, demographically, California isn't doing so well either:

http://knowmore.washingtonpost...

Why is it that so many people seem to think that it's no big deal to open a connection to a random host on the internet? That puts you in yet another situation where you have to enumerate badness.

In this case, what you just described allows someone to probabilistically verify that someone saw a page (regardless of how they got the HTML - email/spam, HTTP, or a README.html found in a warez .zip). Marking links as prefetchable is something the malicious party can do on their own, so it offers zero protection, and a single packet all that is needed to track you.. Of course, we're not talking about a single packet, as this stupid "feature" does the entire transport layer including the SSL connection, not just the TCP 3-way-handshake.

I suggest thinking long and hard about what any of this data can be correlated with (temporally or as a matching surrogate key), remember that it doesn't have to work all the time. Single data points are usually safe on their own, but the pattern that emerges when you join someone's data trail together can be very detailed.

We need a reduction of data that browsers transmit, in this post-Snowden world.

If people had access to valid information about how to use cannabis safely, and had the ability to obtain it in a legal manner, that would be very unlikely.

Since Colorado legalized cannabis in 2012, traffic fatalities have declined each year.

It is muckraking.

The information was not deemed classified until long after the emails were sent.

That doesn't appear to be true. At least one email was classified at the time it was sent, and several others were considered automatically classified under the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's guidelines. Furthermore, "what server it was stored on" is not irrelevant; if you have classified information and store it in unapproved locations, you would ordinarily get in a lot of trouble.

"Corporations are people, my friend," Romney said.

Some people in the front of the audience shouted, "No, theyâ(TM)re not!"

"Of course they are," Romney said. "Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?"

He was making the obvious point that corporations are constituted of people and work for the benefit of people.

Your logical fallacy is strawman.

No one ever said anything about tracking you at home, or while away from the office. Meanwhile, study after study after study continually show that sitting all day, per the office drone norms, is terrible for you.

Wearing a little watch-sized gizmo that tells you to get up and stretch your legs every few hours is hardly the most Orwellian oversight I can imagine. And really, the company has entirely pragmatic reasons for the idea, beyond BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. Simply put: healthier employees are cost effective. You'll take less surprise sick days; even if your total days off work remain constant, you'll have more vacation time which is planned in advance. You'll also be in a generally better mood, less bitching about how much your back is killing you

Oh, and we already do have a shady organization tracking the air you breathe. It's called the fucking EPA.

Your information is out of date. The article you linked is three weeks old. See, for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com..., which states:

A State Department spokesman late Tuesday described the top-secret designation as a recommendation and said they had not been marked classified at the time, but said staffers "circulated these e-mails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton."

You guys don't have elections? Seems like if it was one party's fault, that could easily be rectified.

Not when the party in power actively works to suppress the other side from being able to vote.

North Carolina has the worst record on voting rights. If you're black, you can expect to wait in line 24 times longer to vote than white people. If you need a state ID, and you're black, you're going to have to drive three times farther to get a new ID, and if you're black, you can expect to have your congressional district gerrymandered into the neighboring four Republican districts, thus diminishing your vote. Black people in North Carolina have traditionally been the population most likely to use early voting. So of course, the Republican legislature in North Carolina decides to cut way back on early voting.

North Carolina is some beautiful country, but the state is run by a bunch of ignorant racist peckerheads. Best to stay away unless for some reason you're looking for a state where the age of consent is 16.

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

RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time.

I'm not sure that marketing was really considered credible. Here is a Washington Post artcle from 1978 that has a very skeptical tone regarding Soviet "safety".

Well first they tried to hack into Google's data centers without a warrant. https://www.washingtonpost.com... When that didn't work they tried to hack into the app stores, again without a warrant. https://firstlook.org/theinter... After that, Google et al cranked up the encryption. This is entirely a reaction to the US government trying to get data without a warrant. People didn't feel comfortable with that and wanted the device makers to protect data better. The manufacturers have responded to market demands.