As far as I know, aerial photography has been legal for a very long time. And ultimately, that's all a UAV is doing here.
Aerial photography is legal. Law enforcement is legal. Aerial photography by the military for military purposes is legal. Aerial photography by the military for law enforcement purposes is emphatically not legal, and for very good reasons. If military personnel were involved in operating these drones, and they were being operated for law enforcement purposes, they were in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
We can probably assume that usage of the drones over US soil by the military was for military purposes, not law enforcement purposes, if there really were just 20 flights in the past decade. The military is acutely aware of Posse Comitatus. Now if there were more than 20 flights, I'd start to get suspicious. It's hard to imagine the military having a military need for all that many flights. They've been fine with satellite imagery of the US for many years for their planning purposes.
either to laugh at the most awkward watch made in since the old calculator watches in the 70's/80's, or to wonder why anyone would wear such a bulky watch in the first place.
I still wear an '80s calculator watch you insensitive clod!
We're heading into the Bitcoin end game, where the goal will be for the miners to extract as much money as they can from BTC users via transaction fees until the whole thing collapses. The miners want the network to saturate, and they want people to pay ever-increasing fees to get their purchases on the blockchain.
I think the problem is a lot more fundamental than that. Some people spent millions of dollars buying mining ASICs and installing them in Hong Kong skyscrapers. Seven people, to be precise. They get $11,000 worth of bitcoins for every block they complete. But those ASICs are badly designed, and only able to operate with 1MB block sizes. Three of the five core Bitcoin developers have been coopted, either with bribes or threats, to prevent the Bitcoin network from transitioning to a larger block size and turning that expensive investment into so much scrap. Those miners bought so many chips that they now dominate the worldwide hash rate, and they're damned if they're going to allow it to bankrupt them, resorting to direct pressure on Bitcoin developers plus DDoS of anyone who tries to run software that's capable of generating larger blocks.
The cryptocurrency that eschews government has been pwned by a criminal gang. Color me shocked and amazed.
Why infiltrate the room the 3D printer is in when you can acquire much more detailed and accurate data using a credit card, a hacksaw, and a laser scanner? You buy the product. You scan the outside with the scanner. You saw whatever cross sections are interesting and scan those too, and you're done.
But hey, that chiming sound you hear is another graduate student getting his wings. Nice thesis project.
Classified materials are classified regardless of markings and are generally easily identifiable as such (by subject matter or sources)...
That's not even remotely true. It is often fantastically difficult to identify classified material unless you have been read into the program that classified said material.
I've been sitting in a briefing and watched the group's security guy walk around the table, tearing a page out of each briefing book, and telling the two people in the room who didn't have clearances, "You didn't see that." The person who prepared the briefing books and the presentation slides had been given the list on that page without any markings on it and incorporated it. I had the requisite clearance and knew a thing or two about the program, and that list seemed perfectly innocuous to me. I had no idea that it was classified until the security guy popped out of his chair. I didn't expect to see anything classified. It was an unclassified briefing. The presentation slides had boilerplate UNCLASSIFIED markings on every corner. The information had incorrect labeling at that point, but at the time the presentation books and slides had been created (two years prior), the information in that list was not classified. It was retroactively classified, and unless you knew that, it was not identifiable as classified information.
And it gets worse. I can hand you two sheets of paper with no classification markings containing a handful of words and numbers and challenge you to identify the classification level of each. Let's say I do this in a secure facility but we're not in a SCIF. From context, you might assume SECRET. But maybe you think I'm mishandling, and so you would assume TOP SECRET. If you look closely, you'll see that all the words are identical and all the digits that are on both sheets are identical. One number on one of the sheets has two more significant digits than the number on the other sheet. That sheet is TOP SECRET. The other is SECRET. (And you might have been right if you had guessed I was mishandling.) Unless you knew a large number of details you would guess wrong about one or both sheets, and you'd need to know even more details to know the TS compartments involved, so even your guess of TS could be incomplete without detailed knowledge. Knowledge you shouldn't have unless you hold that clearance. Remove a few of the words and that highly specific number and now both sheets are UNCLASSIFIED. The differences look trivial, and if you were not in possession of all three versions, and able to compare the differences, odds are you would be unable to guess correctly at all.
No, it's not even remotely easy to identify unmarked classified material. That's why we mark classified material.
Obvious pork is most definitely obvious. After spending $20 million, NASA gets... a pile of paper. For $20 million, not one sheet of metal will be bent, not one rivet will be hammered, not one seam will be welded. And why is NASA spending this $20 million? Because it might not work. Or maybe nobody will want one.
After 70 years of this bullshit, we're suffering far more than we realize. Because of contracts like this, big business is now convinced of its own infallibility, and Republicans are convinced of the ineptitude of government. This is not the capitalism they've been selling us all these decades. This is ridiculously socialized risk. If we were pursuing actual capitalism, Lockheed would have done a market analysis, possibly discovered that there's a profitable niche going unfilled, and attempted to fill it by designing and building an aircraft. With their own goddamn money.
Instead, Lockheed did a market analysis, possibly discovered there's a profitable niche, and hedged their bets by shoving their risk up our collective asses. So now it's all upside for Lockheed. They can't lose. If it turns out that designing planes on paper is still a stupid idea (F-35, we're looking at you), and the pile of paper NASA receives can't be used to build a plane anybody wants, it's "government" that failed. "NASA Failure!" "NASA Boondoggle!" "NASA's Plane Can't Fly!" The headlines write themselves.
And so the perception that government is incompetent is reinforced, and Lockheed Martin's stock doesn't take a hit, because hey, they delivered a pile of paper. That's what the contract specified. US businesses are never wrong, US businesses never make mistakes, especially not big expensive multi-million dollar mistakes. No, only governments do that.
It's insidious. It's wrong. Every contract like it should be opposed by every American.
What's wishful thinking got to do with it? We could actually image Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, not merely detect them. We have the equations of optics to tell us what we need to build to do it. It's difficult and expensive, but we know it's possible because we know how, in detail. We don't even have to invent any new science. It's just engineering. It's not even new engineering. It's just application of engineering we've done before. More of it than we've ever done before in that direction, but not more than we've ever exerted for a single project. We're just not that interested in the subject right now. If we as a species, or even we as a country were as interested in images of exo-planets as we are interested in football, we'd have detailed photos of tens of thousands of planets by now, including planets as small as Mercury (that aren't Mercury).
It's not that we can't do it. It's not that the planets aren't there to see. We just don't care all that much. We're generally quite self-centered, individually and as a species. After all, the entire first half of this comment section is an argument about exactly how much like us our God may or may not be, if it exists at all. Talk about self-centered...
Hey, there are only three little old ladies left who like AT&T. If they lose even one, that's a 33% drop in their remaining good will. And that's irreparable, 'cause they're not making any more of those.
The good news is that there are actual facts on the ground to break up that round-and-round. Places like Florida saw a huge drop in violent crime as soon as they allowed concealed carry.
Except when they don't. Missouri is a Shall Issue concealed carry state and St. Louis had the highest per capita murder rate among all US cities in 2014 and 2015. For all types of violent crime, St. Louis was fourth in 2014, behind Detroit, Memphis, and Oakland. Concealed carry did diddly shit to change anything. At the end of 2014, the law was changed such that all concealed carry permit holders are now able to open carry, overriding any county or city bans. Still nothing.
FP16 isn't much faster to compute than FP32, but it is a big win for memory bandwidth, which is usually the performance chokepoint for GPUs.
It used to be. This thing has stacked memory (called High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)) with an absurdly wide memory bus. With four stacks, the memory bus is 4096 bits wide, vs the typical 512 bits over 8 channels of GDDR5. HBM2, which Samsung started producing in volume a month ago, doubles the number of dies in the stacks, from 4 to 8, and doubles the throughput.
AMD's Zen is being built with the same memory interface. One supposes that a CPU operating on much less homogeneous data won't enjoy a bump the size of the 4X gain between the Titan double precision and this thing's double precision performance, but it should be at least double. Combined with their 40% gain in instructions per clock over their previous generation, and for a couple of months at the end of 2016, AMD might actually be ahead of Intel. It might even last longer than that, if Intel is smart enough to drag their feet before introducing their own stacked memory CPU. AMD needs the life support.
You insult my intelligence man, as if I wont have even enough to calculate the trajectory of anvil accounting for relativistic effects and get out of the way.
Ah, but now that general relativity has broken down, all of physics has failed, and we are left with only cartoon physics. So you don't have to get out of the way. The anvil will smash you flat, except for your feet, which will stick out of the bottom of the flattened pancake that was you. You may then, at your option, run around a little bit before popping back into shape, or just pop back into shape in the next scene.
They don't have to. They just have to tell me what electricity is going to cost for the next 24 hours, and my smart appliances will find an optimum between price and comfort.
Piffle. If they want to get that aggressive about pricing, I'll start installing Tesla Powerwalls and level myself out, maximizing my comfort and convenience and minimizing my cost, completely negating their attempts to squeeze more money out of me.
I'm no fan of the Taliban, but calling them a "mob" or "organized crime" ignores the fact that for several years they were the de facto government of 90% of Afghanistan, and recognized as the de jure government of Afghanistan by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.
Organized crime left unchecked will eventually overthrow its host government. We call the result a failed state. If the mob that has overthrown the state then begins to perform governmental functions then yes, it is the new government. A rebel government then achieves legitimacy by hanging on long enough. The US invasion of Afghanistan did indeed overthrow a Taliban-led government.
My original post was something of a sound bite post. I make no apologies for that. It's an effective rhetorical technique. Having started the conversation, we can get into the nuances, for those people who actually have an attention span. The more nuanced, yet still absolute description is that there is no such thing as terrorists—there are only mobs/organized crime and successful armed rebellions (whose participants will exercise their age-old prerogative of redefining themselves as "freedom fighters"). Anywhere outside of the failed states, these organizations that give themselves names are still just mobs, and the local, functioning governments should treat them as such.
The distinction between mobster and terrorist should, no, must remain solely an academic distinction within the purview of a functioning government opposed to them. Legally, a criminal attempting to frighten a population is still just a criminal, regardless of tactics.
The militias in the US understand that successful armed rebels get to call themselves freedom fighters. So does the FBI. The FBI also understands that a government can not ignore rule-breaking backed by guns within its borders. The FBI could not ignore what went on in Nevada and in Oregon. To do so would be to become a failed state. Instantly.
It's long been understood that humans crave order above all else, that totalitarian jack-booted thuggery is preferable to anarchy. Democracy, direct or representative, is apparently the most preferable, but anything, absolutely anything, including despotic theocratic monarchy, is preferable to real anarchy. This is a fundamental truth of human nature. Generations of anarchists have come and gone for thousands of years without putting a dent in it. Governments have come and gone for thousands of years, and despite all of the variations, they served one shared fundamental purpose: to maintain order.
So the FBI reacted, and the militias were suppressed, and peace prevails (not without a lot of grumbling). The instigators will be tried as criminals, exactly as they should be, and not branded as terrorists. Obviously it helped that they are white Christians. Not so obviously, everybody, regardless of race or creed, who behaves as they did should be treated as they were. As criminals.
It's also paradoxical. Cold weather should speed up the metabolism, and thus, on the same diet, the organism should lose weight, not gain it. Yet the adaptation to gain fat to likely protect body temperature kicks in, generating changes in the digestive subsystem to achieve that end.
In short, evolution is a bitch. Everything alive today is the product of a long line of creatures with effective survival adaptations. It turns out that effective survival adaptations don't give a damn about arbitrary aesthetic ideals. Who'da thunk it?
You really can't fat shame skinny parents for having a fat kid, especially when a half-dozen blood tests come back negative for any medical causes.
There's mounting evidence, from this study and a few others, that no amount of blood testing will ever find anything, yet there is still a medical reason. It looks like they should have been testing your gut flora, not your blood. Of course, even after this is accepted science, and effective treatments are developed, people like that principal will still insist that it's all somebody's fault.
Was this guy really a terrorist? or just a asshat nutcase?
All terrorists are just asshat nutcases. They are only criminals with guns and bombs and slightly weirder motivations than most other criminals with guns and bombs.
There is no such thing as a terrorist, as a legal distinction. There are military combatants and there are civilians. If a civilian plants a bomb, he's still a civilian. He's just a criminal civilian. If a civilian shoots a bunch of people with an automatic weapon, he's still a civilian. He's just a criminal civilian. If a civilian gets together with a bunch of his buddies and plants bombs and shoots a bunch of people with automatic weapons, he's still just a civilian.
We even have a name for that. We call them mobsters.
Attempting to create terrorism as a legal distinction is stupid twice. Once because you're playing in to their narrative, giving them far more credence than they deserve, and twice because it's being used to foment fear and trample rights here at home. One is cowardly, the other treasonous.
Taliban, Al Queda, blah blah, these are just mobs. Organized crime. Treat them as such.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, aerial photography has been legal for a very long time. And ultimately, that's all a UAV is doing here.
Aerial photography is legal. Law enforcement is legal. Aerial photography by the military for military purposes is legal. Aerial photography by the military for law enforcement purposes is emphatically not legal, and for very good reasons. If military personnel were involved in operating these drones, and they were being operated for law enforcement purposes, they were in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
We can probably assume that usage of the drones over US soil by the military was for military purposes, not law enforcement purposes, if there really were just 20 flights in the past decade. The military is acutely aware of Posse Comitatus. Now if there were more than 20 flights, I'd start to get suspicious. It's hard to imagine the military having a military need for all that many flights. They've been fine with satellite imagery of the US for many years for their planning purposes.
either to laugh at the most awkward watch made in since the old calculator watches in the 70's/80's, or to wonder why anyone would wear such a bulky watch in the first place.
I still wear an '80s calculator watch you insensitive clod!
He would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids!
We're heading into the Bitcoin end game, where the goal will be for the miners to extract as much money as they can from BTC users via transaction fees until the whole thing collapses. The miners want the network to saturate, and they want people to pay ever-increasing fees to get their purchases on the blockchain.
I think the problem is a lot more fundamental than that. Some people spent millions of dollars buying mining ASICs and installing them in Hong Kong skyscrapers. Seven people, to be precise. They get $11,000 worth of bitcoins for every block they complete. But those ASICs are badly designed, and only able to operate with 1MB block sizes. Three of the five core Bitcoin developers have been coopted, either with bribes or threats, to prevent the Bitcoin network from transitioning to a larger block size and turning that expensive investment into so much scrap. Those miners bought so many chips that they now dominate the worldwide hash rate, and they're damned if they're going to allow it to bankrupt them, resorting to direct pressure on Bitcoin developers plus DDoS of anyone who tries to run software that's capable of generating larger blocks.
The cryptocurrency that eschews government has been pwned by a criminal gang. Color me shocked and amazed.
Stick a fork in it, Bitcoin is done.
Why infiltrate the room the 3D printer is in when you can acquire much more detailed and accurate data using a credit card, a hacksaw, and a laser scanner? You buy the product. You scan the outside with the scanner. You saw whatever cross sections are interesting and scan those too, and you're done.
But hey, that chiming sound you hear is another graduate student getting his wings. Nice thesis project.
I've got high hopes for Zen when it comes out personally.
I have a thin thread of hope for Zen this year. Having any more than that seems excessive.
Classified materials are classified regardless of markings and are generally easily identifiable as such (by subject matter or sources)...
That's not even remotely true. It is often fantastically difficult to identify classified material unless you have been read into the program that classified said material.
I've been sitting in a briefing and watched the group's security guy walk around the table, tearing a page out of each briefing book, and telling the two people in the room who didn't have clearances, "You didn't see that." The person who prepared the briefing books and the presentation slides had been given the list on that page without any markings on it and incorporated it. I had the requisite clearance and knew a thing or two about the program, and that list seemed perfectly innocuous to me. I had no idea that it was classified until the security guy popped out of his chair. I didn't expect to see anything classified. It was an unclassified briefing. The presentation slides had boilerplate UNCLASSIFIED markings on every corner. The information had incorrect labeling at that point, but at the time the presentation books and slides had been created (two years prior), the information in that list was not classified. It was retroactively classified, and unless you knew that, it was not identifiable as classified information.
And it gets worse. I can hand you two sheets of paper with no classification markings containing a handful of words and numbers and challenge you to identify the classification level of each. Let's say I do this in a secure facility but we're not in a SCIF. From context, you might assume SECRET. But maybe you think I'm mishandling, and so you would assume TOP SECRET. If you look closely, you'll see that all the words are identical and all the digits that are on both sheets are identical. One number on one of the sheets has two more significant digits than the number on the other sheet. That sheet is TOP SECRET. The other is SECRET. (And you might have been right if you had guessed I was mishandling.) Unless you knew a large number of details you would guess wrong about one or both sheets, and you'd need to know even more details to know the TS compartments involved, so even your guess of TS could be incomplete without detailed knowledge. Knowledge you shouldn't have unless you hold that clearance. Remove a few of the words and that highly specific number and now both sheets are UNCLASSIFIED. The differences look trivial, and if you were not in possession of all three versions, and able to compare the differences, odds are you would be unable to guess correctly at all.
No, it's not even remotely easy to identify unmarked classified material. That's why we mark classified material.
I firmly believe there is no such thing as blind spots, not when the seat and mirrors are properly set up.
Say rather there are no rear blind spots. Oddly enough, there are still two blind spots left. Your roof posts on either side of your front windshield.
More pork for Lockheed Martin.
Obvious pork is most definitely obvious. After spending $20 million, NASA gets... a pile of paper. For $20 million, not one sheet of metal will be bent, not one rivet will be hammered, not one seam will be welded. And why is NASA spending this $20 million? Because it might not work. Or maybe nobody will want one.
After 70 years of this bullshit, we're suffering far more than we realize. Because of contracts like this, big business is now convinced of its own infallibility, and Republicans are convinced of the ineptitude of government. This is not the capitalism they've been selling us all these decades. This is ridiculously socialized risk. If we were pursuing actual capitalism, Lockheed would have done a market analysis, possibly discovered that there's a profitable niche going unfilled, and attempted to fill it by designing and building an aircraft. With their own goddamn money.
Instead, Lockheed did a market analysis, possibly discovered there's a profitable niche, and hedged their bets by shoving their risk up our collective asses. So now it's all upside for Lockheed. They can't lose. If it turns out that designing planes on paper is still a stupid idea (F-35, we're looking at you), and the pile of paper NASA receives can't be used to build a plane anybody wants, it's "government" that failed. "NASA Failure!" "NASA Boondoggle!" "NASA's Plane Can't Fly!" The headlines write themselves.
And so the perception that government is incompetent is reinforced, and Lockheed Martin's stock doesn't take a hit, because hey, they delivered a pile of paper. That's what the contract specified. US businesses are never wrong, US businesses never make mistakes, especially not big expensive multi-million dollar mistakes. No, only governments do that.
It's insidious. It's wrong. Every contract like it should be opposed by every American.
Wishful thinking is a smart assumption?
What's wishful thinking got to do with it? We could actually image Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, not merely detect them. We have the equations of optics to tell us what we need to build to do it. It's difficult and expensive, but we know it's possible because we know how, in detail. We don't even have to invent any new science. It's just engineering. It's not even new engineering. It's just application of engineering we've done before. More of it than we've ever done before in that direction, but not more than we've ever exerted for a single project. We're just not that interested in the subject right now. If we as a species, or even we as a country were as interested in images of exo-planets as we are interested in football, we'd have detailed photos of tens of thousands of planets by now, including planets as small as Mercury (that aren't Mercury).
It's not that we can't do it. It's not that the planets aren't there to see. We just don't care all that much. We're generally quite self-centered, individually and as a species. After all, the entire first half of this comment section is an argument about exactly how much like us our God may or may not be, if it exists at all. Talk about self-centered...
Sorry you got modded down.
The grandparent post wasn't modded down. Anonymous Cowards start at 0.
... and will suffer a loss of customer goodwill.
Hey, there are only three little old ladies left who like AT&T. If they lose even one, that's a 33% drop in their remaining good will. And that's irreparable, 'cause they're not making any more of those.
500+ posts about ad-blocking software and policies and not one APK post.
Aaah, the blessed quiet. Thank you whiplash.
I figure they reached 1000 grandmothers who think a company should do what a court ordered.
Who else will answer a call from a number they don't recognize, or that has a blocked caller ID?
Pew Research has no idea how to reach anybody under the age of 45.
The good news is that there are actual facts on the ground to break up that round-and-round. Places like Florida saw a huge drop in violent crime as soon as they allowed concealed carry.
Except when they don't. Missouri is a Shall Issue concealed carry state and St. Louis had the highest per capita murder rate among all US cities in 2014 and 2015. For all types of violent crime, St. Louis was fourth in 2014, behind Detroit, Memphis, and Oakland. Concealed carry did diddly shit to change anything. At the end of 2014, the law was changed such that all concealed carry permit holders are now able to open carry, overriding any county or city bans. Still nothing.
FP16 isn't much faster to compute than FP32, but it is a big win for memory bandwidth, which is usually the performance chokepoint for GPUs.
It used to be. This thing has stacked memory (called High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)) with an absurdly wide memory bus. With four stacks, the memory bus is 4096 bits wide, vs the typical 512 bits over 8 channels of GDDR5. HBM2, which Samsung started producing in volume a month ago, doubles the number of dies in the stacks, from 4 to 8, and doubles the throughput.
AMD's Zen is being built with the same memory interface. One supposes that a CPU operating on much less homogeneous data won't enjoy a bump the size of the 4X gain between the Titan double precision and this thing's double precision performance, but it should be at least double. Combined with their 40% gain in instructions per clock over their previous generation, and for a couple of months at the end of 2016, AMD might actually be ahead of Intel. It might even last longer than that, if Intel is smart enough to drag their feet before introducing their own stacked memory CPU. AMD needs the life support.
You insult my intelligence man, as if I wont have even enough to calculate the trajectory of anvil accounting for relativistic effects and get out of the way.
Ah, but now that general relativity has broken down, all of physics has failed, and we are left with only cartoon physics. So you don't have to get out of the way. The anvil will smash you flat, except for your feet, which will stick out of the bottom of the flattened pancake that was you. You may then, at your option, run around a little bit before popping back into shape, or just pop back into shape in the next scene.
They don't have to. They just have to tell me what electricity is going to cost for the next 24 hours, and my smart appliances will find an optimum between price and comfort.
Piffle. If they want to get that aggressive about pricing, I'll start installing Tesla Powerwalls and level myself out, maximizing my comfort and convenience and minimizing my cost, completely negating their attempts to squeeze more money out of me.
I'm no fan of the Taliban, but calling them a "mob" or "organized crime" ignores the fact that for several years they were the de facto government of 90% of Afghanistan, and recognized as the de jure government of Afghanistan by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.
Organized crime left unchecked will eventually overthrow its host government. We call the result a failed state. If the mob that has overthrown the state then begins to perform governmental functions then yes, it is the new government. A rebel government then achieves legitimacy by hanging on long enough. The US invasion of Afghanistan did indeed overthrow a Taliban-led government.
My original post was something of a sound bite post. I make no apologies for that. It's an effective rhetorical technique. Having started the conversation, we can get into the nuances, for those people who actually have an attention span. The more nuanced, yet still absolute description is that there is no such thing as terrorists—there are only mobs/organized crime and successful armed rebellions (whose participants will exercise their age-old prerogative of redefining themselves as "freedom fighters"). Anywhere outside of the failed states, these organizations that give themselves names are still just mobs, and the local, functioning governments should treat them as such.
The distinction between mobster and terrorist should, no, must remain solely an academic distinction within the purview of a functioning government opposed to them. Legally, a criminal attempting to frighten a population is still just a criminal, regardless of tactics.
The militias in the US understand that successful armed rebels get to call themselves freedom fighters. So does the FBI. The FBI also understands that a government can not ignore rule-breaking backed by guns within its borders. The FBI could not ignore what went on in Nevada and in Oregon. To do so would be to become a failed state. Instantly.
It's long been understood that humans crave order above all else, that totalitarian jack-booted thuggery is preferable to anarchy. Democracy, direct or representative, is apparently the most preferable, but anything, absolutely anything, including despotic theocratic monarchy, is preferable to real anarchy. This is a fundamental truth of human nature. Generations of anarchists have come and gone for thousands of years without putting a dent in it. Governments have come and gone for thousands of years, and despite all of the variations, they served one shared fundamental purpose: to maintain order.
So the FBI reacted, and the militias were suppressed, and peace prevails (not without a lot of grumbling). The instigators will be tried as criminals, exactly as they should be, and not branded as terrorists. Obviously it helped that they are white Christians. Not so obviously, everybody, regardless of race or creed, who behaves as they did should be treated as they were. As criminals.
There is no such thing as a terrorist.
It's also paradoxical. Cold weather should speed up the metabolism, and thus, on the same diet, the organism should lose weight, not gain it. Yet the adaptation to gain fat to likely protect body temperature kicks in, generating changes in the digestive subsystem to achieve that end.
In short, evolution is a bitch. Everything alive today is the product of a long line of creatures with effective survival adaptations. It turns out that effective survival adaptations don't give a damn about arbitrary aesthetic ideals. Who'da thunk it?
You really can't fat shame skinny parents for having a fat kid, especially when a half-dozen blood tests come back negative for any medical causes.
There's mounting evidence, from this study and a few others, that no amount of blood testing will ever find anything, yet there is still a medical reason. It looks like they should have been testing your gut flora, not your blood. Of course, even after this is accepted science, and effective treatments are developed, people like that principal will still insist that it's all somebody's fault.
Was this guy really a terrorist? or just a asshat nutcase?
All terrorists are just asshat nutcases. They are only criminals with guns and bombs and slightly weirder motivations than most other criminals with guns and bombs.
There is no such thing as a terrorist, as a legal distinction. There are military combatants and there are civilians. If a civilian plants a bomb, he's still a civilian. He's just a criminal civilian. If a civilian shoots a bunch of people with an automatic weapon, he's still a civilian. He's just a criminal civilian. If a civilian gets together with a bunch of his buddies and plants bombs and shoots a bunch of people with automatic weapons, he's still just a civilian.
We even have a name for that. We call them mobsters.
Attempting to create terrorism as a legal distinction is stupid twice. Once because you're playing in to their narrative, giving them far more credence than they deserve, and twice because it's being used to foment fear and trample rights here at home. One is cowardly, the other treasonous.
Taliban, Al Queda, blah blah, these are just mobs. Organized crime. Treat them as such.
Flash that buttery gold, jittery zeitgeist ...
Wither by the watering hole, water patrol
What are we, a heart huckabee, art fuckery suddenly?
Ah, now I see the relevance to Slashdot. This is output from a Markov chain phrase generator, yes?
I notice that both this transcription and the response that 'corrected' it from an official source still didn't get the third to last sentence right.
Where the cash cows actually beef
should be
Where the cash cow's actually beef
It's a contraction of "cow is".
In other words, all you network engineers and people running the backbones need to step up and protest.
I thought you said backhoes...
Yes. I have backups. You have backups. You're modded down to 0 for a perfectly reasonable question.
Anonymous Cowards start at 0. There are no negative mods whatsoever on the grandparent post.