I keep seeing the same old pointless 2nd amendment arguments debated over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Enough already, OK? I'm not a gun owner and my politics are anything but conservative, but geez, "the right to bear arms" seems pretty damn clear to me. America is a country where citizens are allowed to have guns, always has been and always will be. I just wish liberals would recognize this truth and drop the issue for good. Gun control is the single most alienating issue I know of on the Left, it does nothing but make enemies of good folk who might otherwise be natural allies. Liberals need to just walk away from the whole arms thing and pretend it never existed. For whatever reason and regardless of the justification, guns in America are here to stay. Deal with it. And yes, I will say it plainly, the sad fact is that occasionally a Columbine or a Sandy Hook is bound to happen, this is the true price we pay for being an armed society of imperfect human beings. Too bad I've never once heard a politician from either side of the aisle get up and admit that or anything remotely like it. It's the truth, though, we should accept it and move on.
For the record, I thought hard about posting this as an AC, but in the end chose not to. Truth is nothing to be ashamed of.
The US Government can simply take more money from taxpayers, then borrow 40 cents from China for every dollar, and they will make ACA succeed by brute-force.
Uh, isn't that basically just socialism, plus the fact that people want more than what they can afford? They could just spend less on healthcare and get the same result without the borrowing. However, the whole point of socialism is to take money from people who have money and to spend it on people who don't. If you don't like that then the solution is to just let people who can't afford insurance die, which most would not consider an acceptable solution.
The problem with healthcare is that everybody wants to paint it like some black-and-white simple problem with a simple solution, when in reality it is about 500 problems lumped into one big mess. There are lots of issues that drive up costs. There are lots of issues that discourage preventative care. There are lots of issues with who gets cared for. There are lots of administrative issues with paying a fair price for the work that gets done. There are lots of issues with trying to figure out what the best way to take care of a sick person actually is.
Everybody like to just pick one thing and point out a simple solution to it. Just let ERs turn away the indigent and now hospitals are solvent (just be sure to budget more money for the morgue, both for those who can't afford care and also for those who left their wallets at home when they keeled over). Just set the reimbursement rate for a particular treatment at $10 and now it doesn't cost much to pay for it (ignore the fact that nobody will provide the treatment any longer). Let the market freely set prices (and ignore the fact that consumers have little ability to shop around while unconscious). Every complicated problem has a simple solution that won't work...
OK, here's my simple solution. Expand Medicare to cover everyone. Do it in increments, slowly adding younger and younger people, reducing the eligibility age by 10 every 2 years. Eventually - probably pretty soon, actually - you start adding people who haven't payed enough into the system to pay for their care, so you need an outside revenue source. I see one obvious option that doesn't involve a major tax increase or even a spending decrease, and which has many serendipitous side benefits as well: end the drug war and legalize and tax all recreational drugs, with the tax revenue earmarked specifically and exclusively for the new medicare.
There, problem solved!
Seriously, though, my answer to those raving against government bureaucrats running and ruining our health care system is simply to point to Medicare, which has been working fairly well for a long time, and is well liked by those who rely on it. There is no reason Medicare couldn't be expanded, eventually becoming the single-payer system we so badly need.
I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado.
We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days.
Good luck to everybody there.
Very strong tropical cyclones like this one do contain very high sustained winds equivalent to what you would find in a significant (F3 or higher) tornado, which is why the NWS occasionally issues blanket tornado warnings for areas lying in the path of the most intense and dangerous part of a hurricane's eyewall, which is usually the NE quadrant. The practice is controversial, though, and has been inconsistently applied. Keep in mind that wind speed isn't everything when it comes to how much damage is done by a storm, in a tornado there are sudden shifts in pressure and wind direction that you wouldn't necessarily find in a cyclone's eyewall, while the winds from a cyclone generally last a lot longer and of course with a cyclone you also have storm surge and flooding to worry about. Both types of storm are incredibly dangerous, but a structure that might survive the one could still be totally wiped out by the other, and vice versa, even if the wind speeds involved were pretty much the same.
The question is: is doing/seeing something in virtual reality actually a crime? I'm sure Christians would say "Yes, it's a sin" but legally you haven't 'hurt' anyone. As this stuff gets more realistic, how much of the criminals currently exploiting children will simply buy/rent a render farm and become a legitimate business? To put it very crudely: the render farms do not involve the cost and risk of kidnapping, transporting, exploiting and maintaining people (whether they be adult or not) and they can give the same experience without putting anyone either physically or legally at risk.
At that point (if you're "into" that stuff), doing this becomes merely thought crime. I haven't done the research into whether this increases or reduces the risk of actually physical incidents (I hope it would reduce the drive for gratification in the illegal ways drastically) but it could be a boon for a host of people and move a lot of law enforcement activity to other exploitation of humans.
Yes, this is the critical question, isn't it? Does watching deviant sex (virtual or otherwise) in a porno increase or decrease the chances of the viewer trying out that behavior in the real world? I'm not sure, but I believe the little research that has actually been done on this subject tends to indicate either a neutral or negative influence for porn. In other words, seeing a behavior on a porno doesn't necessarily make someone want to run out and do it themselves, and may actually make them less likely to do so than if they hadn't watched porn to begin with. Of course, under current law, if the behavior being studied involves minors or child porn, you probably couldn't even do the research without risking jail time yourself. We've created a situation where even the study of this behavior becomes utterly unthinkable. We spend ridiculous amounts of time and money trying to lock up everyone involved in a certain kind of bad behavior that turns out to be pretty prevalent, but at the same time we make it impossible to study ways of actually reducing the unwanted behavior itself. As if the drug war hadn't already proven pretty conclusively the unintended negative consequences of treating a behavioral problem in strictly a legal manner, but we sure seem headed in exactly that direction with CP.
I agree, "should of" must be avoided at all cost. He coulda used "shoulda" instead of "should of", it's a much more elegant solution.
And before anyone gets started, yes, the damn punctuation should go outside the quotation marks, because that's where logic (not to mention everyone outside of America) requires it to be! Deal with it.
OK, this is ridiculous. I’ve read the linked articles and many of the comments here and elsewhere, and while there is a lot to say about the Common Core in general, I will limit myself simply to question 1 of the test. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is an atrocious test question, an abomination that should never appear on any math test, let alone a 1st grader‘s! Think that’s too strong? Well tell me, then, why is the coffee cup marked with a 6 and labeled below as “whole“ even there? Can anyone at all explain to me why 5 pennies (or what appear to be 5 pennies) have anything at all to do with a friggin’ coffee cup? Is this to do with the price of a cup of coffee? Clearly not, but the thought must occur even to 5th graders, since there are coins involved... And thus confusion creeps in right from the start, merely from looking at the pictures. One immediately wonders, are we measuring price or quantity? The possibility that it might be price-related serves only to confuse, and has no business on a test of basic math skills. I should say right here that besides pennies it also occurred to me that the disks might represent volume, 3D slices of an idealized cylindrical “cup” of liquid, and it’s not impossible that a bright 1st grader with good visual thinking skills might think the same thing, only... The cup in the picture isn’t cylindrical. So then, more entirely unnecessary potential for confusion, this time seemingly aimed directly at the gifted student. I can’t tell you how many times I messed up on tests when I was a kid because I assumed extra complexity existed on what were in actuality very simple problems. The stating of what is required on a test question should be clear and unambiguous. This example here is riddled with ambiguity, and that’s just looking at the drawing!
So then, it appears there’s no real relation between the pennies and the coffee cup, they’re just arbitrarily chosen icons used to test the understanding that a numeral (the 6 on the cup) can represent quantities of an item (the coins), and that one can do subtraction by converting the 5 coins to a number 5, which subtracted from the whole of 6 is the answer 1. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but nothing is gained from using coins and a cup, in fact it seems deliberately confusing! I’ve no background in education, but I’m pretty damn sure that trick questions should not be appearing on a 1st grade test of basic math skills, except possibly as a bonus for extra credit. So why not use units and pictures that make sense? A pie and individual slices comes to mind.
Then there’s the wording. What exactly is meant by “part I know”? Talk about ambiguity! Why not say “the part you know about”, or even better, “the portion of the whole you know about”? The wording on these kinds of problems really matters, kids shouldn’t have to guess at the meaning! By keeping the caption short and vague you add unnecessary ambiguity. This does make the answer harder to arrive at, but it does so in a way that cannot possibly be beneficial to the teacher or student. Even the title reading "find the missing part" is ambiguous... The missing part of what? Surely there are better ways to specify exactly what's being asked of the test-taker in this question. Ambiguity in all its forms should always be avoided, because by its very nature it can’t be used to test for comprehension of specific concepts, and testing the understanding of very specific concepts is the stated goal of this particular test!
Look, this is ridiculous. I know nothing at all about writing tests, or about education in general, yet I can easily and quickly pick apart the many problems with this one question. You’re telling me professionals who study this stuff for a living can’t do any better than this? There is simply no excuse for questions like this appearing on an important stand
It's using Microcode in the CPU that is received over 3G cellular.
Remember SandyBridge advertised this capability for supposedly stopping theft....
But it's really just a backdoor so they always have a network connection to your box. They can run compiler trust attacks or just read arbitrary data from memory after scanning application fingerprints.
I've been saying for awhile now that this is the next attack vector but the last few times I've mentioned it, you trolls downmodded me to infinity.
So please listen again. It's not the sound card.... they use that to detect when people are close to avoid transmitting if I were to guess. His tinkering proved they should stop before being detected.
Yeah, I thought of this, too. Here's some background info on the tech involved. It seems to fit, the article doesn't specifically say only certain newer intel processors are at risk, but it doesn't give any counterexamples that would rule it out, either. This is an obscure deliberately OOB data transmission channel that seems like it could well be the hidden vector, only... Surely a security specialist would be aware of this as a possible mechanism? Also, why would disconnecting the mic/speakers stop a transmission if it's really using 3G? Could be wrong, but I've reluctantly concluded that this line of investigation is probably a red herring in regards to the case at hand, although it's certainly alarming enough in its own right.
It is a complex issue and the more closely I look at it the more complex it seems to get.
No, it's simple. The US pays massively more for healthcare than the rest of the world, but gets markedly inferior results. In a sense you can say that the free market has already decided the issue, in that countries around the world have experimented with various different ways of delivering health care to their citizens, and the results are clear: single payer systems are by far the most cost effective way to provide universal medical care. To defend the current US system you either have to give up on the idea of universal care, which many Republicans seem perfectly willing to do, or you have to rely on a fantastical doctrinal framework that asserts government run solutions are always bad because, well, they just are. I'm sorry, in the real world I'll take proven solutions over the arbitrary dictates of doctrine every time. Come on, folks, this stuff is really not all that hard to understand or even particularly complex, the rest of the world figured it out long ago. There simply is no good argument for not moving to a single payer system, and what what prevents it from happening is nothing but sheer inertia and the fact that some politically active fat cats stand to lose a big portion of their income.
You are assuming that analysts are working 24 hours per day. You are also assuming that they have nothing better to do than look at random people. They don't have time for that - they have their hands full with people who have come to their notice either through a pattern of behavior (such as attending a terrorist course in Pakistan or a similar place) or because they associate with people who have done that.
Analysts aren't looking for random law breakers, they are looking for people believed to be planning terrorist acts. If they find someone of interest, for whatever reason, they will be spending days, weeks, months on that person. They aren't looking for you, unless you fall into the category of people that they are tasked to find.
You talk a lot about who they are looking for, but that's essentially irrelevant to the current discussion, which deals with who they are looking at. The first is what happens in an ideal fantasy world, but the latter concerns what is actually occurring in the US today, and recent revelations indicate there is plenty of reason for concern. Every single US citizen has reason to worry, for why that is so see shdowhawk's reply, which sums it up better than I could ever do.
I've always liked the quantum cat box method of execution, myself. This is something I've encountered in various SF novels. The idea is a variation on Schrodinger's Cat, where the condemned criminal is placed in a sealed box in which the release of poison gas or some other lethal mechanism is to be triggered by an extremely likely to the point of near-certainty quantum event, such as the radioactive decay of an unstable atom. Theoretically, as long as no one looks in the box, the condemned person within cannot be said to be truly dead, no matter how much time has elapsed. Like the proverbial cat, the criminal is both dead and alive at once, in a superposition of states, until the box is opened, which it won't ever be. So everyone involved can pat themselves on the back and know that they haven't technically killed anyone. That's the theory, anyway. I don't know enough physics to say for sure that the concept will ever be both effective and practical, but it sure is a neat way around the problem of nobody wanting to know for sure that they're the executioner. There is no executioner, because the actual state of the body inside the box is indeterminate.
Do we not have a direct analogy between this ruling and warrantless examination of Internet usage - as does the NSA & others ?
So does this mean that the NSA needs a court order before it can collect any Internet use on anyone ? Ie the end to their current ''vacuum up everything'' way of doing things ?
The NSA has a valid court order. The problem is that the order was issued in complete secrecy, by a secret, non-adversarial court whose actions can never be challenged by the innocent but insignificant citizens whose privacy was actually violated, because, uh... Well, that's a secret.
And no, this is not something from a Kafka novel, it's the system we actually have here in the USA, brought to you courtesy of Osama Bin Laden and a bunch of spineless politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Aaron's and similar rental companies are built on taking advantage of lower income folks who are not good financial decision makers. While there is an element of that with many businesses, these rental companies take it to the extreme.
True, but low income doesn't necessarily mean stupid, and some of these people are smart enough to figure out how to turn the tables on exploitative rent-to-own operations. I knew a guy who would look for new rent-to-own stores, and when he found one he'd walk in and sign up for their very best home entertainment package, regardless of price, and have it shipped to his living room. He'd enjoy it for a few months, always being careful to pay in full and on time, but then, inevitably, some asshole would break into his place and steal the equipment. Hey, it's a high-crime neighborhood, what are you gonna do? These predatory rental operations make so much money they consider occasional break-ins part of the price of doing business. A police report gets filed, but the cops almost never do any real investigating with this kind of incident, after all, everything's fully insured. So my friend's drug dealer ends up with a great new home theater system, my friend's debt to the dealer is forgotten, and everybody's happy!
Maybe they can't film you in the john, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if companies started installing special toilets that automatically test employees' urine and feces for drugs, and not necessarily just the illegal ones. Sadly, today's courts would probably find this to be perfectly legal. Hell, employers can already find out every medication being taken by job applicants, and sometimes even regular employees, under the guise of urinalysis screening for banned substances. Such screening discloses to the employer everything the lab finds, including legitimate prescription medication, and the practice is perfectly legal. Drug sniffing toilets are merely the next logical step. Oh, and they'll grab your DNA profile while they're at it, why not? Technology marches onwards...
Regarding free will, I’ve often thought that a lot of times we act first and think later, and I mean this in a quite literal sense. I believe a lot of our actions, particularly physical movements that are the result of choices that have to be made quickly or near instantaneously, are not really decided by what we think of as “ourselves” at all. I suspect that if you broke everything down and looked at the sequence of neurological events at an extremely fine time scale (i.e. slowed down time), so you could resolve the exact timing, cause, and effect of every event taking place in the brain prior to an action, you would find that the action is already in progress before all the sensory data supposedly needed to make the decision to act is fully integrated and understood. In other words, we often do things before the decision to do them is made. Let me explain further...
I’m saying the action in question is really undertaken almost immediately by neurological and neuromuscular systems operating below the level of conscious thought, based on sensory data that is incomplete but past a certain genetically programmed threshold. Call it a pseudo-reflexive response, because it happens before the brain has time to fully interpret sensory data and integrate it with memory. So in certain situations we don’t really make the decision to act, what happens instead is that the conscious mind is presented with a fait accompli, the body has already acted, and what feels to the decider like the making of a decision is actually more of a process of rationalization for why one has already acted. The action has already commenced, but the mind unconsciously supplies various reasons for why the action was a good idea, and the results are presented to the top level of awareness as a conscious choice that was made, a decision to do something. In reality the action happened automatically, and what feels like the full decision-making process is more of a retroactive analysis of why the action was taken. This all happens so quickly, and below the level of full self-consciousness, that it feels like free will.
I’m not saying free will is nonexistent, or that true decision making never occurs, I’m just saying that in certain time-critical situations, when the need to act quickly is strong, much of what we think of as free will is actually just the brain playing catch-up with a complex variety of subconscious reflexive and pseudo-reflexive systems. That’s my theory, anyway. I have nothing to base it on other than my suspicion that the human brain is just too slow to accomplish some of the things that feel like they’re the result of fully conscious thought processes. I think a lot of processing actually occurs at an intermediate level, a level lying somewhere between pure muscular reflex and full-blown conscious decision making. It follows that anything undertaken at such a level cannot truly be said to be the result of an application of free will. Therefore in certain tight situations we may not be quite as free to act as we think we are.
And as for the article? Well, I at least looked at it, and gave most of it a quick read through. It doesn’t seem to me that their so-called proof is all that profound, but then, maybe I’m just not enough of a mathematician and/or philosopher to recognize the true profundity of their results.
You might not be patting yourself on the back if you'd stood in line to vote in my precinct. Obama's biggest constituencies seem to be welfare trash, non-English-speaking immigrants, drug addicts, and various other dregs of the big city. Conversely, everyone I know who owns a business AND a college degree votes Republican. The backbone of the American economy is not interested in the opinions of ivory tower liberals or Starbucks coffee-jerks.
That's some blatant prejudice on display there. I mean, jeez, do you even listen to yourself?? You're claiming you stood in line to vote, and you looked at the others around you in line, and you knew, you could just tell, that a lot of them couldn't speak English, that many were on welfare, and obviously some used drugs to the point of addition. And best of all, you knew exactly how those people were going to vote! Of course you did, because only "dregs" would vote for Obama, right? I'm sorry, but regardless of whatever else you may have to say, the quote above proves you are indeed a stereotypical Tea Party member, with precisely the prejudices one would expect.
Hey, here's a thought. You want to fix the deficit? OK, first step, repeal the Bush era tax cuts, all of them. Remember how we used to have this thing called a surplus, back before the insanity of supply side economics? You know, back in the previous Democratic administration? It pisses me off no end that the same Republicans who cry about fiscal responsibility are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place by drastically reducing revenue. Oh yeah, I remember it well, even if nobody else does. Cut taxes and revenues will actually go up, they said! The economy will soar! Well guess what, we tried it and it didn't work. So lets repeal all of that, make the rich pay their share again, as they did in the days of our greatness, and then, once we have a surplus again, then... Well, then maybe we can start thinking about creating a health care system that actually gives results worthy of an industrialized superpower rather than a third-world kleptocracy. But no, all these staunch fiscal conservatives would rather eat shit and die than do anything that even remotely hints at a tax increase, even if the so-called increase is just letting the Bush era handouts to the rich expire. I'm sorry, but it's basic economics, without a return to a more historically normal levels of taxation we will never achieve the very goals the Republicans say they are aiming for. When you take one whole side of the economic equation off the table, it should come as no surprise that you can't ever balance the books. Sorry to rant like this, but these people make me sick. Repeal the Bush tax cuts, then use the money to do something useful. End of story.
But he reserved his harshest words for the girl's parents for failing to monitor her behavior, after she had been questioned by the police, and for allowing her to keep her cellphone.
Most parents can't or don't monitor what their kids do on the internet, and most parents are under the belief their child is a little angel who would never do something like this (or consider it to be 'normal' childhood stuff).
I suspect most parents do not have the kind of control over their kids this sheriff thinks, and likely aren't that interested anyway.
From what I've seen, most parents are either clueless or turn a blind eye to the fact that their kids are rotten little bastards.
Interestingly enough, the parents of the 14 year old are claiming that they did indeed monitor on a daily basis everything their daughter did on FB. They are claiming they never saw any bullying or even so much as swearing in any of the girl's posts. They are also claiming that because they never saw anything remotely like what the girl is accused of posting, their daughter's FB account must have been hacked. All this despite the many admissions by classmates of the victim that intense bullying had indeed occurred, and that this girl was the ringleader.
It's difficult to say for sure exactly what the truth is in all this, but it sounds like the parents are either in deep denial about what their daughter did, or they are going dangerously way out on a limb in an attempt to try and protect her from the legal consequences of her actions. One explanation is that the girl was smart enough to keep two FB accounts, one for the parents to see and one for all the other stuff. I suppose a hacked account is not entirely impossible, but it sounds pretty unlikely to me. But who knows? Stay tuned, this story may get even more complicated as more facts emerge.
In absolute terms, there isn't one.The Guardian published information, because that's what journalists do.
From the perspective of a government, though, the situations as complete opposites. In the case of phone hacking, the Guardian supported the security of the public by exposing and denouncing a crime. In the case of the Snowden documents, the Guardian is exposing and denouncing a legal operation protecting the security of the public, and in doing so it's helping criminals evade detection.
To Cameron, it looks like the Guardian is acting inconsistently, publishing whatever it wants not based on ethics, but rather based on the potential for public outrage.
Your perspective and sense of ethics may differ.
Yes, exactly, this is what journalists do, or are supposed to do, anyway. It's incredible to me that the idea of a double standard is even being brought up. I mean, jeez, haven't these people considered the possibility that a newspaper might have published the details of both operations because, well, they were both, um... News??
I guess these days it's just assumed that there has to be a political agenda of some kind behind every single story a news organization publishes. Which is just pathetic. I guess the concept of journalism for journalism's sake, and maybe the entire concept of a free press in general, is now considered passe by the politicians running our so-called democracies.
If you have no income, then...congratulations, you will qualify for medicare and get healthcare for free...you won't pay a tax. Simply enroll and enjoy.
First of all, low or no income eligibility would mean you'd receive medicaid, medicare is strictly for older people. Second, I believe there are places where even that wouldn't work. Many states have chosen not to expand medicare/medicaid under the ACA, and IIRC some of those states have laws that bar able-bodied adults from receiving medicaid, even if they have no income.
Charities and other money-collecting entities are put on the list of terrorist groups all the time. Who can tell if some charity is on that list? Who will check? How close the match has to be? What if you send money on Jan. 01, and the group is declared terrorist on Jan. 05? Or a year later?
Something like that may have actually happened in this case. The article doesn't give exact dates, just years:
...the terrorist plot for which Moalin and three other defendants were convicted in February was sending about $8,500 to al-Shabaab, known most recently for the Kenyan Westgate mall attack. The money was sent in 2007 and 2008. The United States government designated al-Shabaab—which means “The Youth"—a terrorist group in 2008...
So it would appear that at least some of the donated money that constitutes the crime in this case - and possibly all of it, without dates you can't tell - was sent before the organization in question was designated a terrorist group.
You are talking complete nonsense. Do some research, heroin is not harmful to the user even if used continuously for decades, there is no inevitable physical decline like you see in users of, say, alcohol, or tobacco. As for tolerance, it's real but not inevitable, you'd be surprised how much of the desire to increase one's dose is driven by the distorted thinking that comes from the unending and exhausting struggle to maintain a habit in the underworld environment of drug prohibition. In point of fact, studies show that given an ample legal and hassle-free supply, both humans and animals usually settle on an eventual steady daily dose and no more. The supposedly inevitable and universal need to increase the dose just isn't seen in laboratory and clinical settings, which suggests that like many other of the "problems" associated with heroin, it's an artifact of prohibition. Certainly most overdoses are exactly that, preventable deaths that simply wouldn't happen if the user had access to a pure product with a labeled dosage. Street bags can and often do contain harmful cutting agents, and the amount of actual heroin in such bags is often a dangerous guessing game. Then there's the fact that alcohol figures prominently in something like 90% of heroin deaths. In fact alcohol is manifestly a more dangerous drug by any measure of harm you want to use, and yet it's perfectly legal. What is accomplished by keeping heroin illegal? The decades of drug war madness has served only to increase both supply and demand, while purity is up, and prices have actually fallen. We've accomplished nothing but to cause more death and more ruined lives, with uncounted families destroyed and significant segments of the population chewed up by a merciless legal system, all while failing to have any positive effect at all on actual usage. So put the blame for most overdoses and virtually all drug-related crime squarely where it belongs, on the fact of prohibition. The drug itself is relatively harmless in comparison.
The real problem with Congress, particularly in the House, is the two-party system and archaic rules that allow a minority of representatives to block any action even when the other party has sufficient votes to pass a measure
If you're referring to the so-called "Hastert Rule", it's even worse than you think. There is no such rule written into law anywhere, nobody ever voted for anything like that and nobody ever signed it into law. The rule in question is merely a convention that Republicans in the House adopted back in the '90s, more of a tradition than any kind of law. The fact that the Republican leadership appear quite ready to ruin the country rather than go against this nonexistent and unwritten "rule" pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the current level of congressional dysfunction and partisan gridlock. The truth is they could end this farce any time they want to... But don't hold your breath.
This is the same problem the internet has faced right from the beginning, and is not confined to academia: who do you trust online, and how can you be sure they're on the level? Someone or something is needed to weed out the bad apples... In other words, moderation. And yes, the same basic principles apply equally to discussion forums like Slashdot as they do to online scientific research journals. Ultimately it comes down to reputation, and some form of karma system. Slashdot's system uses temporary moderators selected by an algorithm, but for scientific journals there is currently just the one site mentioned in the article, run by one guy who is single handedly attempting to keep track of who the legitimate journals are. I don't see why this function couldn't eventually become more automated, perhaps even incorporating random moderation and meta-moderation overseen by an algorithm, just like Slashdot. There's been plenty of research into reputation management systems over the years, surely there must be something that could apply to the chaotic research journal situation described in the article, perhaps even an already existing software package. The phenomenon of open online academic journals is relatively new, these things usually work themselves out over time, as with any new technology. The idea of open journals is a good one, sooner or later some system of useful self-regulation will emerge, and the useless and/or predatory journals will eventually fall by the wayside.
Anyone who thinks this offers some form of anonymity in any way hasn't been paying attention. For instance, the locations are all known, there's a website that lists them all! Anyone interested in exactly who is downloading or uploading what just has to put up a hidden camera to watch the thumb drives.
So, interesting concept, poor execution. Now if the drives were accessible through wireless means, that would be a step towards creating a true dead-drop network. This thing as described is just a stunt. Art project? Yeah, I can believe that.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep seeing the same old pointless 2nd amendment arguments debated over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Enough already, OK? I'm not a gun owner and my politics are anything but conservative, but geez, "the right to bear arms" seems pretty damn clear to me. America is a country where citizens are allowed to have guns, always has been and always will be. I just wish liberals would recognize this truth and drop the issue for good. Gun control is the single most alienating issue I know of on the Left, it does nothing but make enemies of good folk who might otherwise be natural allies. Liberals need to just walk away from the whole arms thing and pretend it never existed. For whatever reason and regardless of the justification, guns in America are here to stay. Deal with it. And yes, I will say it plainly, the sad fact is that occasionally a Columbine or a Sandy Hook is bound to happen, this is the true price we pay for being an armed society of imperfect human beings. Too bad I've never once heard a politician from either side of the aisle get up and admit that or anything remotely like it. It's the truth, though, we should accept it and move on.
For the record, I thought hard about posting this as an AC, but in the end chose not to. Truth is nothing to be ashamed of.
The US Government can simply take more money from taxpayers, then borrow 40 cents from China for every dollar, and they will make ACA succeed by brute-force.
Uh, isn't that basically just socialism, plus the fact that people want more than what they can afford? They could just spend less on healthcare and get the same result without the borrowing. However, the whole point of socialism is to take money from people who have money and to spend it on people who don't. If you don't like that then the solution is to just let people who can't afford insurance die, which most would not consider an acceptable solution.
The problem with healthcare is that everybody wants to paint it like some black-and-white simple problem with a simple solution, when in reality it is about 500 problems lumped into one big mess. There are lots of issues that drive up costs. There are lots of issues that discourage preventative care. There are lots of issues with who gets cared for. There are lots of administrative issues with paying a fair price for the work that gets done. There are lots of issues with trying to figure out what the best way to take care of a sick person actually is.
Everybody like to just pick one thing and point out a simple solution to it. Just let ERs turn away the indigent and now hospitals are solvent (just be sure to budget more money for the morgue, both for those who can't afford care and also for those who left their wallets at home when they keeled over). Just set the reimbursement rate for a particular treatment at $10 and now it doesn't cost much to pay for it (ignore the fact that nobody will provide the treatment any longer). Let the market freely set prices (and ignore the fact that consumers have little ability to shop around while unconscious). Every complicated problem has a simple solution that won't work...
OK, here's my simple solution. Expand Medicare to cover everyone. Do it in increments, slowly adding younger and younger people, reducing the eligibility age by 10 every 2 years. Eventually - probably pretty soon, actually - you start adding people who haven't payed enough into the system to pay for their care, so you need an outside revenue source. I see one obvious option that doesn't involve a major tax increase or even a spending decrease, and which has many serendipitous side benefits as well: end the drug war and legalize and tax all recreational drugs, with the tax revenue earmarked specifically and exclusively for the new medicare.
There, problem solved!
Seriously, though, my answer to those raving against government bureaucrats running and ruining our health care system is simply to point to Medicare, which has been working fairly well for a long time, and is well liked by those who rely on it. There is no reason Medicare couldn't be expanded, eventually becoming the single-payer system we so badly need.
I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado. We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days. Good luck to everybody there.
Very strong tropical cyclones like this one do contain very high sustained winds equivalent to what you would find in a significant (F3 or higher) tornado, which is why the NWS occasionally issues blanket tornado warnings for areas lying in the path of the most intense and dangerous part of a hurricane's eyewall, which is usually the NE quadrant. The practice is controversial, though, and has been inconsistently applied. Keep in mind that wind speed isn't everything when it comes to how much damage is done by a storm, in a tornado there are sudden shifts in pressure and wind direction that you wouldn't necessarily find in a cyclone's eyewall, while the winds from a cyclone generally last a lot longer and of course with a cyclone you also have storm surge and flooding to worry about. Both types of storm are incredibly dangerous, but a structure that might survive the one could still be totally wiped out by the other, and vice versa, even if the wind speeds involved were pretty much the same.
The question is: is doing/seeing something in virtual reality actually a crime? I'm sure Christians would say "Yes, it's a sin" but legally you haven't 'hurt' anyone. As this stuff gets more realistic, how much of the criminals currently exploiting children will simply buy/rent a render farm and become a legitimate business? To put it very crudely: the render farms do not involve the cost and risk of kidnapping, transporting, exploiting and maintaining people (whether they be adult or not) and they can give the same experience without putting anyone either physically or legally at risk.
At that point (if you're "into" that stuff), doing this becomes merely thought crime. I haven't done the research into whether this increases or reduces the risk of actually physical incidents (I hope it would reduce the drive for gratification in the illegal ways drastically) but it could be a boon for a host of people and move a lot of law enforcement activity to other exploitation of humans.
Yes, this is the critical question, isn't it? Does watching deviant sex (virtual or otherwise) in a porno increase or decrease the chances of the viewer trying out that behavior in the real world? I'm not sure, but I believe the little research that has actually been done on this subject tends to indicate either a neutral or negative influence for porn. In other words, seeing a behavior on a porno doesn't necessarily make someone want to run out and do it themselves, and may actually make them less likely to do so than if they hadn't watched porn to begin with. Of course, under current law, if the behavior being studied involves minors or child porn, you probably couldn't even do the research without risking jail time yourself. We've created a situation where even the study of this behavior becomes utterly unthinkable. We spend ridiculous amounts of time and money trying to lock up everyone involved in a certain kind of bad behavior that turns out to be pretty prevalent, but at the same time we make it impossible to study ways of actually reducing the unwanted behavior itself. As if the drug war hadn't already proven pretty conclusively the unintended negative consequences of treating a behavioral problem in strictly a legal manner, but we sure seem headed in exactly that direction with CP.
I agree, "should of" must be avoided at all cost. He coulda used "shoulda" instead of "should of", it's a much more elegant solution.
And before anyone gets started, yes, the damn punctuation should go outside the quotation marks, because that's where logic (not to mention everyone outside of America) requires it to be! Deal with it.
OK, this is ridiculous. I’ve read the linked articles and many of the comments here and elsewhere, and while there is a lot to say about the Common Core in general, I will limit myself simply to question 1 of the test. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is an atrocious test question, an abomination that should never appear on any math test, let alone a 1st grader‘s! Think that’s too strong? Well tell me, then, why is the coffee cup marked with a 6 and labeled below as “whole“ even there? Can anyone at all explain to me why 5 pennies (or what appear to be 5 pennies) have anything at all to do with a friggin’ coffee cup? Is this to do with the price of a cup of coffee? Clearly not, but the thought must occur even to 5th graders, since there are coins involved... And thus confusion creeps in right from the start, merely from looking at the pictures. One immediately wonders, are we measuring price or quantity? The possibility that it might be price-related serves only to confuse, and has no business on a test of basic math skills. I should say right here that besides pennies it also occurred to me that the disks might represent volume, 3D slices of an idealized cylindrical “cup” of liquid, and it’s not impossible that a bright 1st grader with good visual thinking skills might think the same thing, only... The cup in the picture isn’t cylindrical. So then, more entirely unnecessary potential for confusion, this time seemingly aimed directly at the gifted student. I can’t tell you how many times I messed up on tests when I was a kid because I assumed extra complexity existed on what were in actuality very simple problems. The stating of what is required on a test question should be clear and unambiguous. This example here is riddled with ambiguity, and that’s just looking at the drawing!
So then, it appears there’s no real relation between the pennies and the coffee cup, they’re just arbitrarily chosen icons used to test the understanding that a numeral (the 6 on the cup) can represent quantities of an item (the coins), and that one can do subtraction by converting the 5 coins to a number 5, which subtracted from the whole of 6 is the answer 1. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but nothing is gained from using coins and a cup, in fact it seems deliberately confusing! I’ve no background in education, but I’m pretty damn sure that trick questions should not be appearing on a 1st grade test of basic math skills, except possibly as a bonus for extra credit. So why not use units and pictures that make sense? A pie and individual slices comes to mind.
Then there’s the wording. What exactly is meant by “part I know”? Talk about ambiguity! Why not say “the part you know about”, or even better, “the portion of the whole you know about”? The wording on these kinds of problems really matters, kids shouldn’t have to guess at the meaning! By keeping the caption short and vague you add unnecessary ambiguity. This does make the answer harder to arrive at, but it does so in a way that cannot possibly be beneficial to the teacher or student. Even the title reading "find the missing part" is ambiguous... The missing part of what? Surely there are better ways to specify exactly what's being asked of the test-taker in this question. Ambiguity in all its forms should always be avoided, because by its very nature it can’t be used to test for comprehension of specific concepts, and testing the understanding of very specific concepts is the stated goal of this particular test!
Look, this is ridiculous. I know nothing at all about writing tests, or about education in general, yet I can easily and quickly pick apart the many problems with this one question. You’re telling me professionals who study this stuff for a living can’t do any better than this? There is simply no excuse for questions like this appearing on an important stand
It's using Microcode in the CPU that is received over 3G cellular.
Remember SandyBridge advertised this capability for supposedly stopping theft....
But it's really just a backdoor so they always have a network connection to your box. They can run compiler trust attacks or just read arbitrary data from memory after scanning application fingerprints.
I've been saying for awhile now that this is the next attack vector but the last few times I've mentioned it, you trolls downmodded me to infinity.
So please listen again. It's not the sound card.... they use that to detect when people are close to avoid transmitting if I were to guess. His tinkering proved they should stop before being detected.
Yeah, I thought of this, too. Here's some background info on the tech involved. It seems to fit, the article doesn't specifically say only certain newer intel processors are at risk, but it doesn't give any counterexamples that would rule it out, either. This is an obscure deliberately OOB data transmission channel that seems like it could well be the hidden vector, only... Surely a security specialist would be aware of this as a possible mechanism? Also, why would disconnecting the mic/speakers stop a transmission if it's really using 3G? Could be wrong, but I've reluctantly concluded that this line of investigation is probably a red herring in regards to the case at hand, although it's certainly alarming enough in its own right.
It is a complex issue and the more closely I look at it the more complex it seems to get.
No, it's simple. The US pays massively more for healthcare than the rest of the world, but gets markedly inferior results. In a sense you can say that the free market has already decided the issue, in that countries around the world have experimented with various different ways of delivering health care to their citizens, and the results are clear: single payer systems are by far the most cost effective way to provide universal medical care. To defend the current US system you either have to give up on the idea of universal care, which many Republicans seem perfectly willing to do, or you have to rely on a fantastical doctrinal framework that asserts government run solutions are always bad because, well, they just are. I'm sorry, in the real world I'll take proven solutions over the arbitrary dictates of doctrine every time. Come on, folks, this stuff is really not all that hard to understand or even particularly complex, the rest of the world figured it out long ago. There simply is no good argument for not moving to a single payer system, and what what prevents it from happening is nothing but sheer inertia and the fact that some politically active fat cats stand to lose a big portion of their income.
You are assuming that analysts are working 24 hours per day. You are also assuming that they have nothing better to do than look at random people. They don't have time for that - they have their hands full with people who have come to their notice either through a pattern of behavior (such as attending a terrorist course in Pakistan or a similar place) or because they associate with people who have done that.
Analysts aren't looking for random law breakers, they are looking for people believed to be planning terrorist acts. If they find someone of interest, for whatever reason, they will be spending days, weeks, months on that person. They aren't looking for you, unless you fall into the category of people that they are tasked to find.
You talk a lot about who they are looking for, but that's essentially irrelevant to the current discussion, which deals with who they are looking at. The first is what happens in an ideal fantasy world, but the latter concerns what is actually occurring in the US today, and recent revelations indicate there is plenty of reason for concern. Every single US citizen has reason to worry, for why that is so see shdowhawk's reply, which sums it up better than I could ever do.
Done: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/25/armed-agents-seize-records-reporter-washington-tim/
I've always liked the quantum cat box method of execution, myself. This is something I've encountered in various SF novels. The idea is a variation on Schrodinger's Cat, where the condemned criminal is placed in a sealed box in which the release of poison gas or some other lethal mechanism is to be triggered by an extremely likely to the point of near-certainty quantum event, such as the radioactive decay of an unstable atom. Theoretically, as long as no one looks in the box, the condemned person within cannot be said to be truly dead, no matter how much time has elapsed. Like the proverbial cat, the criminal is both dead and alive at once, in a superposition of states, until the box is opened, which it won't ever be. So everyone involved can pat themselves on the back and know that they haven't technically killed anyone. That's the theory, anyway. I don't know enough physics to say for sure that the concept will ever be both effective and practical, but it sure is a neat way around the problem of nobody wanting to know for sure that they're the executioner. There is no executioner, because the actual state of the body inside the box is indeterminate.
Do we not have a direct analogy between this ruling and warrantless examination of Internet usage - as does the NSA & others ?
So does this mean that the NSA needs a court order before it can collect any Internet use on anyone ? Ie the end to their current ''vacuum up everything'' way of doing things ?
The NSA has a valid court order. The problem is that the order was issued in complete secrecy, by a secret, non-adversarial court whose actions can never be challenged by the innocent but insignificant citizens whose privacy was actually violated, because, uh... Well, that's a secret.
And no, this is not something from a Kafka novel, it's the system we actually have here in the USA, brought to you courtesy of Osama Bin Laden and a bunch of spineless politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Aaron's and similar rental companies are built on taking advantage of lower income folks who are not good financial decision makers. While there is an element of that with many businesses, these rental companies take it to the extreme.
True, but low income doesn't necessarily mean stupid, and some of these people are smart enough to figure out how to turn the tables on exploitative rent-to-own operations. I knew a guy who would look for new rent-to-own stores, and when he found one he'd walk in and sign up for their very best home entertainment package, regardless of price, and have it shipped to his living room. He'd enjoy it for a few months, always being careful to pay in full and on time, but then, inevitably, some asshole would break into his place and steal the equipment. Hey, it's a high-crime neighborhood, what are you gonna do? These predatory rental operations make so much money they consider occasional break-ins part of the price of doing business. A police report gets filed, but the cops almost never do any real investigating with this kind of incident, after all, everything's fully insured. So my friend's drug dealer ends up with a great new home theater system, my friend's debt to the dealer is forgotten, and everybody's happy!
Maybe they can't film you in the john, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if companies started installing special toilets that automatically test employees' urine and feces for drugs, and not necessarily just the illegal ones. Sadly, today's courts would probably find this to be perfectly legal. Hell, employers can already find out every medication being taken by job applicants, and sometimes even regular employees, under the guise of urinalysis screening for banned substances. Such screening discloses to the employer everything the lab finds, including legitimate prescription medication, and the practice is perfectly legal. Drug sniffing toilets are merely the next logical step. Oh, and they'll grab your DNA profile while they're at it, why not? Technology marches onwards...
Regarding free will, I’ve often thought that a lot of times we act first and think later, and I mean this in a quite literal sense. I believe a lot of our actions, particularly physical movements that are the result of choices that have to be made quickly or near instantaneously, are not really decided by what we think of as “ourselves” at all. I suspect that if you broke everything down and looked at the sequence of neurological events at an extremely fine time scale (i.e. slowed down time), so you could resolve the exact timing, cause, and effect of every event taking place in the brain prior to an action, you would find that the action is already in progress before all the sensory data supposedly needed to make the decision to act is fully integrated and understood. In other words, we often do things before the decision to do them is made. Let me explain further...
I’m saying the action in question is really undertaken almost immediately by neurological and neuromuscular systems operating below the level of conscious thought, based on sensory data that is incomplete but past a certain genetically programmed threshold. Call it a pseudo-reflexive response, because it happens before the brain has time to fully interpret sensory data and integrate it with memory. So in certain situations we don’t really make the decision to act, what happens instead is that the conscious mind is presented with a fait accompli, the body has already acted, and what feels to the decider like the making of a decision is actually more of a process of rationalization for why one has already acted. The action has already commenced, but the mind unconsciously supplies various reasons for why the action was a good idea, and the results are presented to the top level of awareness as a conscious choice that was made, a decision to do something. In reality the action happened automatically, and what feels like the full decision-making process is more of a retroactive analysis of why the action was taken. This all happens so quickly, and below the level of full self-consciousness, that it feels like free will.
I’m not saying free will is nonexistent, or that true decision making never occurs, I’m just saying that in certain time-critical situations, when the need to act quickly is strong, much of what we think of as free will is actually just the brain playing catch-up with a complex variety of subconscious reflexive and pseudo-reflexive systems. That’s my theory, anyway. I have nothing to base it on other than my suspicion that the human brain is just too slow to accomplish some of the things that feel like they’re the result of fully conscious thought processes. I think a lot of processing actually occurs at an intermediate level, a level lying somewhere between pure muscular reflex and full-blown conscious decision making. It follows that anything undertaken at such a level cannot truly be said to be the result of an application of free will. Therefore in certain tight situations we may not be quite as free to act as we think we are.
And as for the article? Well, I at least looked at it, and gave most of it a quick read through. It doesn’t seem to me that their so-called proof is all that profound, but then, maybe I’m just not enough of a mathematician and/or philosopher to recognize the true profundity of their results.
You might not be patting yourself on the back if you'd stood in line to vote in my precinct. Obama's biggest constituencies seem to be welfare trash, non-English-speaking immigrants, drug addicts, and various other dregs of the big city. Conversely, everyone I know who owns a business AND a college degree votes Republican. The backbone of the American economy is not interested in the opinions of ivory tower liberals or Starbucks coffee-jerks.
That's some blatant prejudice on display there. I mean, jeez, do you even listen to yourself?? You're claiming you stood in line to vote, and you looked at the others around you in line, and you knew, you could just tell, that a lot of them couldn't speak English, that many were on welfare, and obviously some used drugs to the point of addition. And best of all, you knew exactly how those people were going to vote! Of course you did, because only "dregs" would vote for Obama, right? I'm sorry, but regardless of whatever else you may have to say, the quote above proves you are indeed a stereotypical Tea Party member, with precisely the prejudices one would expect.
Hey, here's a thought. You want to fix the deficit? OK, first step, repeal the Bush era tax cuts, all of them. Remember how we used to have this thing called a surplus, back before the insanity of supply side economics? You know, back in the previous Democratic administration? It pisses me off no end that the same Republicans who cry about fiscal responsibility are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place by drastically reducing revenue. Oh yeah, I remember it well, even if nobody else does. Cut taxes and revenues will actually go up, they said! The economy will soar! Well guess what, we tried it and it didn't work. So lets repeal all of that, make the rich pay their share again, as they did in the days of our greatness, and then, once we have a surplus again, then... Well, then maybe we can start thinking about creating a health care system that actually gives results worthy of an industrialized superpower rather than a third-world kleptocracy. But no, all these staunch fiscal conservatives would rather eat shit and die than do anything that even remotely hints at a tax increase, even if the so-called increase is just letting the Bush era handouts to the rich expire. I'm sorry, but it's basic economics, without a return to a more historically normal levels of taxation we will never achieve the very goals the Republicans say they are aiming for. When you take one whole side of the economic equation off the table, it should come as no surprise that you can't ever balance the books. Sorry to rant like this, but these people make me sick. Repeal the Bush tax cuts, then use the money to do something useful. End of story.
Most parents can't or don't monitor what their kids do on the internet, and most parents are under the belief their child is a little angel who would never do something like this (or consider it to be 'normal' childhood stuff).
I suspect most parents do not have the kind of control over their kids this sheriff thinks, and likely aren't that interested anyway.
From what I've seen, most parents are either clueless or turn a blind eye to the fact that their kids are rotten little bastards.
Interestingly enough, the parents of the 14 year old are claiming that they did indeed monitor on a daily basis everything their daughter did on FB. They are claiming they never saw any bullying or even so much as swearing in any of the girl's posts. They are also claiming that because they never saw anything remotely like what the girl is accused of posting, their daughter's FB account must have been hacked. All this despite the many admissions by classmates of the victim that intense bullying had indeed occurred, and that this girl was the ringleader.
It's difficult to say for sure exactly what the truth is in all this, but it sounds like the parents are either in deep denial about what their daughter did, or they are going dangerously way out on a limb in an attempt to try and protect her from the legal consequences of her actions. One explanation is that the girl was smart enough to keep two FB accounts, one for the parents to see and one for all the other stuff. I suppose a hacked account is not entirely impossible, but it sounds pretty unlikely to me. But who knows? Stay tuned, this story may get even more complicated as more facts emerge.
In absolute terms, there isn't one.The Guardian published information, because that's what journalists do.
From the perspective of a government, though, the situations as complete opposites. In the case of phone hacking, the Guardian supported the security of the public by exposing and denouncing a crime. In the case of the Snowden documents, the Guardian is exposing and denouncing a legal operation protecting the security of the public, and in doing so it's helping criminals evade detection.
To Cameron, it looks like the Guardian is acting inconsistently, publishing whatever it wants not based on ethics, but rather based on the potential for public outrage.
Your perspective and sense of ethics may differ.
Yes, exactly, this is what journalists do, or are supposed to do, anyway. It's incredible to me that the idea of a double standard is even being brought up. I mean, jeez, haven't these people considered the possibility that a newspaper might have published the details of both operations because, well, they were both, um... News??
I guess these days it's just assumed that there has to be a political agenda of some kind behind every single story a news organization publishes. Which is just pathetic. I guess the concept of journalism for journalism's sake, and maybe the entire concept of a free press in general, is now considered passe by the politicians running our so-called democracies.
If you have no income, then...congratulations, you will qualify for medicare and get healthcare for free...you won't pay a tax. Simply enroll and enjoy.
First of all, low or no income eligibility would mean you'd receive medicaid, medicare is strictly for older people. Second, I believe there are places where even that wouldn't work. Many states have chosen not to expand medicare/medicaid under the ACA, and IIRC some of those states have laws that bar able-bodied adults from receiving medicaid, even if they have no income.
Charities and other money-collecting entities are put on the list of terrorist groups all the time. Who can tell if some charity is on that list? Who will check? How close the match has to be? What if you send money on Jan. 01, and the group is declared terrorist on Jan. 05? Or a year later?
Something like that may have actually happened in this case. The article doesn't give exact dates, just years:
So it would appear that at least some of the donated money that constitutes the crime in this case - and possibly all of it, without dates you can't tell - was sent before the organization in question was designated a terrorist group.
You are talking complete nonsense. Do some research, heroin is not harmful to the user even if used continuously for decades, there is no inevitable physical decline like you see in users of, say, alcohol, or tobacco. As for tolerance, it's real but not inevitable, you'd be surprised how much of the desire to increase one's dose is driven by the distorted thinking that comes from the unending and exhausting struggle to maintain a habit in the underworld environment of drug prohibition. In point of fact, studies show that given an ample legal and hassle-free supply, both humans and animals usually settle on an eventual steady daily dose and no more. The supposedly inevitable and universal need to increase the dose just isn't seen in laboratory and clinical settings, which suggests that like many other of the "problems" associated with heroin, it's an artifact of prohibition. Certainly most overdoses are exactly that, preventable deaths that simply wouldn't happen if the user had access to a pure product with a labeled dosage. Street bags can and often do contain harmful cutting agents, and the amount of actual heroin in such bags is often a dangerous guessing game. Then there's the fact that alcohol figures prominently in something like 90% of heroin deaths. In fact alcohol is manifestly a more dangerous drug by any measure of harm you want to use, and yet it's perfectly legal. What is accomplished by keeping heroin illegal? The decades of drug war madness has served only to increase both supply and demand, while purity is up, and prices have actually fallen. We've accomplished nothing but to cause more death and more ruined lives, with uncounted families destroyed and significant segments of the population chewed up by a merciless legal system, all while failing to have any positive effect at all on actual usage. So put the blame for most overdoses and virtually all drug-related crime squarely where it belongs, on the fact of prohibition. The drug itself is relatively harmless in comparison.
The real problem with Congress, particularly in the House, is the two-party system and archaic rules that allow a minority of representatives to block any action even when the other party has sufficient votes to pass a measure
If you're referring to the so-called "Hastert Rule", it's even worse than you think. There is no such rule written into law anywhere, nobody ever voted for anything like that and nobody ever signed it into law. The rule in question is merely a convention that Republicans in the House adopted back in the '90s, more of a tradition than any kind of law. The fact that the Republican leadership appear quite ready to ruin the country rather than go against this nonexistent and unwritten "rule" pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the current level of congressional dysfunction and partisan gridlock. The truth is they could end this farce any time they want to... But don't hold your breath.
This is the same problem the internet has faced right from the beginning, and is not confined to academia: who do you trust online, and how can you be sure they're on the level? Someone or something is needed to weed out the bad apples... In other words, moderation. And yes, the same basic principles apply equally to discussion forums like Slashdot as they do to online scientific research journals. Ultimately it comes down to reputation, and some form of karma system. Slashdot's system uses temporary moderators selected by an algorithm, but for scientific journals there is currently just the one site mentioned in the article, run by one guy who is single handedly attempting to keep track of who the legitimate journals are. I don't see why this function couldn't eventually become more automated, perhaps even incorporating random moderation and meta-moderation overseen by an algorithm, just like Slashdot. There's been plenty of research into reputation management systems over the years, surely there must be something that could apply to the chaotic research journal situation described in the article, perhaps even an already existing software package. The phenomenon of open online academic journals is relatively new, these things usually work themselves out over time, as with any new technology. The idea of open journals is a good one, sooner or later some system of useful self-regulation will emerge, and the useless and/or predatory journals will eventually fall by the wayside.
Anyone who thinks this offers some form of anonymity in any way hasn't been paying attention. For instance, the locations are all known, there's a website that lists them all! Anyone interested in exactly who is downloading or uploading what just has to put up a hidden camera to watch the thumb drives.
So, interesting concept, poor execution. Now if the drives were accessible through wireless means, that would be a step towards creating a true dead-drop network. This thing as described is just a stunt. Art project? Yeah, I can believe that.