So? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a global security / public policy magazine aimed at a scientific readership. Presumably anyone who subscribes has been following the issues and doesn't need a science primer on climate change; they presumably do need more substantive coverage than they're going to get on cable news.
I used to work in the public health field of vector-borne disease surveillance, and there is a long-standing myth that you can tell the species of a mosquito by the frequency of its wingbeats. This is nonsense -- like claiming you can always tell the difference between a flute and a saxophone by the notes they happen to be playing: their frequency ranges largely overlap. Nonetheless the myth resurfaces on a regular basis, and every few years someone will come up with a machine for identifying mosquitoes by their wingbeat frequency.
Why do people keep coming back to this myth? Because if you could do it that would be incredibly useful. Not all mosquito species bite humans, and not all species that bite humans or animals transmit diseases. In a West Nile Virus outbreak you'd set up listening stations all around your area. You'd roll the spray trucks if your equipment told you Culex pipiens was on the wing, because Cx. pipiens vectors WNV and bites both humans and avian WNV hosts. If it were Culiseta melanura you probably wouldn't because that species almost never bites humans. But using wingbeat frequencies this way can't possibly work, and mosquito researchers get thoroughly sick of debunking these devices every few years.
Now I was at a meeting, and I ran into a guy that had an acoustic mosquito identifier that worked on a slightly different principle: it did a fast fourier transform of the acoustic signal and attempted to distinguish between species based on the pattern of frequencies. I was intrigued; if you know anything about math you know this is very different from just taking the loudest frequency of a signal. It's more like telling the difference between a flute and a saxophone playing the same note by the instruments' timbre.
Now the idea that you could actually distinguish between species this way is far-fetched, because species is largely an arbitrary human construct. But if you could distinguish between distantly related mosquito clades that would be very useful (e.g. genus Anopheles is a severe concern in a Malaria sitaution but genus Culex is not). Now I have a friend who was editor of an entomology journal at the time. I ran into him at the same conference and as I was chatting with him I asked him whether he'd heard this guy's pitch. As soon as he heard the words "identification" and "frequency" come out of my mouth he literally turned his back on me and walked away -- and he was a personal friend of mine.
Now the chances that this FFT mosquito ID device worked and was practical were pretty small. It may even have been crackpottery, but it wasn't the same old crackpottery. It just sounded enough like the old crackpottery to elicit a strong disgust reaction from an expert.
Science reporting is bad because reporters are lazy and rewrite press releases.
Science reporting is bad because major news outlets have eliminated their budget for people who can do more than this. Thirty years ago many US daily newspapers had dedicated science reporters who put out a weekly "science" section for the paper and covered big science stories as they arose. These reporters had a high degree of familiarity with science topics because this was their beat. The dedicated science journalist and the weekly science supplement are well on their way to becoming extinct.
This is part of a general shift away from expensive, financially speculative "shoe leather journalism" toward cheap, profitable "opinion journalism". This is why on breaking news stories you'll see broadcast news services filling up time with frank speculation, which is the cheapest to produce kind of "information" there is. The intersection of slashed news-gathering capability and a 7x24 news cycle leaves them in a situation like having a half pat of butter to spread on a whole loaf of bread.
I'm not saying finance isn't hard. That said, linear algebra isn't hard, either. What I'm saying is that computation theory is as hard as any subject gets before only a tiny fraction of the population can do it.
It's hyperbole to lump George H. W. Bush and George W. in together. While there's no question that George H.W. had a leg up in life because of family connections, he is a combat veteran with a long and distinguished career in business and public service. I disagree with him politically, but if I ever met him I'd be honored to offer him my hand and thank him for his service to this country.
Well, while I agree with you that finance is harder than people who are totally ignorant of it are likely to realize, it's unlikely to be 4x harder than the theory of computation or advanced algorithms courses I had to take to get my BSCS, otherwise (a) a lot fewer people would be able to do finance, or (b) a lot more people would be able to do stuff like amortized analysis of algorithm complexity. It seems more likely that the CS program you attended was weak.
I know. Plus in most cases parameterized statements are far more efficient because they only need to be parsed once.
But all it takes is a moment of laziness when you're dealing with input you assume to be safe to get into trouble. Since it's a lazy habit, there are static code analzyzers that can catch most instances of SQL Injection; I wouldn't be surprised if that's how the attackers figured this out.
-- The Elements of Programming Style by B. W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974.
See? Smart programmers knew bad or malicious input forty years ago. Trust me, even back in the days of FORTRAN card decks people tried to figure out ways to make the computer do things that would annoy or inconvenience the sysadmins.
In this case the exploit was actually quite tricksy. Normally you don't think of the user agent as user input; it's supposed to come from the browser. But ultimately it's still input coming the outside, and if you do anything with it you have to distrust it. This is how exploits work; they utilize assumptions that seem safe to a programmer, but that can be violated. I'll bet there's a lot of systems that are vulnerable to SQL injection this way that thoroughly sanitize input that's supposed to be from users.
Oh, for Pete's sake; being an automotive engineer doesn't automatically mean you're an idiot. You make the various parts of the car as strong as they need to be, but you make them lighter. Or if the car is somehow too light to be safe (e.g. in a car vs. car head-on), then you spend the weight you saved on something else that makes a difference.
If you look at Wolfram's career it's clear he didn't get where he is because the fix was in; but that career also suggests why physics isn't dominated by these single-minded prodigies. What obsesses you at 15 probably won't hold the same fascination when you're 21, over a third of your life later. But you can use your Phd-stamped prodigy card to make a lateral career move.
There are a few landmark physicists who got their PhDs fairly young-ish, say 22-24; but when you're 20, 2-4 years more is still a long time. Most of these guys showed early interest things besides physics. Max Planck was a music prodigy. Heisenberg joined a paramilitary group to overthrow the government of Bavaria. Paul Dirac earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. The teenaged Stephen Hawking tinkered with homemade fireworks and model airplanes.
Er... copying the aesthetics is more likely to yield a beautiful result than copying the mechanics of the user interface -- not that they went very far on this other than the dock. I've been messing around with elementaryOS on parallels on my MacBook Pro and in fact I think the basic shell looks nicer than the Mac.
As far as the office suite, well, it's an Ubuntu derived Linux; it has all the usual Linux office suite offerings: LibreOffice, Gnumeric, Abiword, Calligra, etc., plus the usual geeky oddballs like Lyx and Retext. You must "sudo apt-get install libreoffice", or if you prefer search in the software center. It doesn't include an office suite in the default installation, but from my point of view that's the way it should be done.
I don't find it very mac-like either, but that's not necessarily a flaw. There's a lot of things I don't like about the Mac OSX GUI, starting with the stupid dock, which violates all the pre-MacOS X apple design guidelines; it's just shiny crap as far as I'm concerned; sure it works but it functions less well than the things it replaced.
The essential, most important element of the Mac interface, pretty much since the original Mac 128K, is the way menus are handled, and ElementaryOS does not copy that. Sticking menus to the top of the screen make them much easier to hit, because you don't have to finely target the cursor in the Y axis to hit them; also unlike the dock they have horizontal positional stability.
I wish they'd copied the OSX menus and and the Mac OS9 task/window menu and left the dock out.
Well, I played around with it a bit and it's, in a word "nice". It's really nice. It's Oh-my-God-this-thing-is-nice nice. It's probably the distro now I'd demo to someone who was curious about Linux.
Linux enthusiasts are all about power. To us power equals simplicity; it really is so much easier to open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install blech" than it is to slash our way through some kind of stupid app-store GUI. So we tolerate a lot of crap in GUIs; ugly, bad layout, lousy typography, idiotically convoluted design, because we implicitly expect GUIs to be badly designed crap. Nice isn't even on our punch list, but don't knock it until you've tried it.
Things like blind spot monitoring and automatic braking are crutches for bad drivers, as the OP said.
I dunno; I think I can do better than automatic braking on a good day, probably even a typical day, but when it comes to safety I should consider the kind of driver I am at my worst; when I'm angry, tired, and distracted for example.
When we think of ourselves as drivers we imagine ourselves at our best, which is why everyone thinks he's a better than average driver. Most people probably are better than average half of the time. But people aren't consistent like machines; we aren't always at our best. Even good drivers are bad drivers occasionally. If you're honest with yourself you'd probably admit to yourself that from time to time you make a stupid mistake that you normally wouldn't.
The whole point of these things is that they're cheap and tiny, which means building them into things easy and practical. That in turn creates a community which swaps ideas and designs for them. If you want to talk pathetic computing power, there's the Arduino; but computational power isn't the point of the thing.
Some things have "existence" value. For example it bothers me that climbers have turned Everest into a garbage dump, but at my age I have no intention of taking mountaineering. Or take the reaction people here had to the (incorrect) reports that a prototype NASA moon rover had been scrapped for metal. Did people have a "use" for that rover?
Once again it boils down to how much money they're giving the natives. Not historical propriety, not ethics, nope. Just how much money the natives are getting.
Or it could be the common human impulse people who've been screwed have to stick it to anyone they can. Money comes into it because it's the only thing anyone might be willing to offer them. Nobody can go back in time and stop the planter takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii; nor is anyone in any position to offer the Hawaiians sovereignty. Activists are against the telescope because it's something they can stop.
And the backlash here shows the equally understandable impulse to impute nefarious motive to people who are frustrating you. But really, there's over 400,000 native Hawaiians; how much money do you think they could "extort" from the thirty meter project, and what would that be divided by 400,000? At some point an offer would have to be on the table and then their (hypothetically) smarmy pecuniary motives would be laid bare. Would it be politically conceivable in that case to do the payout?
No, I think the activists are sincere in their dudgeon. Whether it's justifiable to focus that outrage on the telescope is almost a hypothetical question at this point. When people are that pissed they don't parse their anger out carefully, they throw it around. There may well be an ulterior motive for the sovereignty activists, who probably see this a PR victory that could give their movement more credibility. But I also expect those activists also believe they're entirely justified in stopping the next telescope.
Now it might well be that if the Hawaiian Kingdom had never been overthrown that none of these people would object to the telescopes. That wouldn't mean that they're insincere about objecting to the telescopes; this is an emotional reaction. What has happened in the past is always relevant to emotion, whether or not those feelings are justified in some kind of objective sense.
So it's all too bad. I hope the telescope will be built, but sometimes politics means you can't do things you want to do. And it's not always because the people standing in your way pollitically are corrupt or evil; sometimes they just see things differently than you do.
It's delusional to think laws will make you safer, if you don't like guns don't buy one, feel free to be a helpless victim.
Rank the following recommendations in terms of their value in prolonging the average American's life: (a) Get more exercise. (b) Eat fewer calories and less junk food. (c) Stop smoking. (d) Practice defensive driving. (e) Get a gun to defend yourself from bad guys.
If you ranked (e) as anything other than dead last, you're living in a (possibly dystopic) fantasy world.
Now I don't own a gun, but I have nothing against them. The vast, vast majority of gun owners enjoy their guns without creating any kind of problem for anyone else, and that's good enough for me. They don't have to some how need them to keep themselves safe in order to justify having them.
I do think background checks are a good thing. I also think that people who cause negligent discharges should be made to keep their guns at a firing range for a period of time, after which they should complete a firearms safety course.
This year, about 700,000 hunters went out with loaded guns, many of them drank heavily at night, many of them were annoyed with each other, and yet no one was shot.
Not because hunters are somehow immunized from being mass shooters; it's because (a) mass shooters are exceedingly rare in just about any identifiable population and (b) if you are a mass shooter you're not going to out into the woods; you're going to go to a school, shopping center, or other place where people congregate.
Go a little further south to Illinois/Chicago and you'll hear an even worse story: I think more than ten people a week are dying down in Obama's old stomping grounds from thug-initiated violence.
OK. (a) The per 100,000 resident homicide rate is 15.1, which puts in 19th on the list of American cities ranked by murder rate, right below Indianapolis and above Milwaukee. That's not a very high rate for a large American city (e.g., St. Louis at 49.4/100000), but it works out to big numbers when you multiply it by Chicago's huge population: 2.7 million. (b) Obama is has nothing to do with the murder rate in Chicago as opposed to anywhere else.
... if you don't mind mis-identifying non-terrorists as terrorists.
It should be so obvious that it goes without saying, but the people who cobbled together things like the anti-terrorist watch lists after 9/11 didn't seem to grasp this: the wider you catch your net, the smaller proportion of what you haul out of the ocean is comprised of fish.
On one hand the idea that something that belongs to you handing you over to the authorities is distasteful. On the other hand hit-and-run drivers really suck; one of my college buddies was killed hit by one of them and left to die in ditch. He was just 29.
Driving is one of those things where your actions can affect others so severely that you have to accept that they're regulated; but this shouldn't be something that just happens because law enforcement suddenly discovers it can. We should, as a society, decide that this is something we are willing to accept and mandatory.
Slashdot Mirror
'Cause they don't have teachers' unions in Sweden.
The Bulletin is a policy journal, not a technical journal. Always has been.
So? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a global security / public policy magazine aimed at a scientific readership. Presumably anyone who subscribes has been following the issues and doesn't need a science primer on climate change; they presumably do need more substantive coverage than they're going to get on cable news.
I used to work in the public health field of vector-borne disease surveillance, and there is a long-standing myth that you can tell the species of a mosquito by the frequency of its wingbeats. This is nonsense -- like claiming you can always tell the difference between a flute and a saxophone by the notes they happen to be playing: their frequency ranges largely overlap. Nonetheless the myth resurfaces on a regular basis, and every few years someone will come up with a machine for identifying mosquitoes by their wingbeat frequency.
Why do people keep coming back to this myth? Because if you could do it that would be incredibly useful. Not all mosquito species bite humans, and not all species that bite humans or animals transmit diseases. In a West Nile Virus outbreak you'd set up listening stations all around your area. You'd roll the spray trucks if your equipment told you Culex pipiens was on the wing, because Cx. pipiens vectors WNV and bites both humans and avian WNV hosts. If it were Culiseta melanura you probably wouldn't because that species almost never bites humans. But using wingbeat frequencies this way can't possibly work, and mosquito researchers get thoroughly sick of debunking these devices every few years.
Now I was at a meeting, and I ran into a guy that had an acoustic mosquito identifier that worked on a slightly different principle: it did a fast fourier transform of the acoustic signal and attempted to distinguish between species based on the pattern of frequencies. I was intrigued; if you know anything about math you know this is very different from just taking the loudest frequency of a signal. It's more like telling the difference between a flute and a saxophone playing the same note by the instruments' timbre.
Now the idea that you could actually distinguish between species this way is far-fetched, because species is largely an arbitrary human construct. But if you could distinguish between distantly related mosquito clades that would be very useful (e.g. genus Anopheles is a severe concern in a Malaria sitaution but genus Culex is not). Now I have a friend who was editor of an entomology journal at the time. I ran into him at the same conference and as I was chatting with him I asked him whether he'd heard this guy's pitch. As soon as he heard the words "identification" and "frequency" come out of my mouth he literally turned his back on me and walked away -- and he was a personal friend of mine.
Now the chances that this FFT mosquito ID device worked and was practical were pretty small. It may even have been crackpottery, but it wasn't the same old crackpottery. It just sounded enough like the old crackpottery to elicit a strong disgust reaction from an expert.
Science reporting is bad because reporters are lazy and rewrite press releases.
Science reporting is bad because major news outlets have eliminated their budget for people who can do more than this. Thirty years ago many US daily newspapers had dedicated science reporters who put out a weekly "science" section for the paper and covered big science stories as they arose. These reporters had a high degree of familiarity with science topics because this was their beat. The dedicated science journalist and the weekly science supplement are well on their way to becoming extinct.
This is part of a general shift away from expensive, financially speculative "shoe leather journalism" toward cheap, profitable "opinion journalism". This is why on breaking news stories you'll see broadcast news services filling up time with frank speculation, which is the cheapest to produce kind of "information" there is. The intersection of slashed news-gathering capability and a 7x24 news cycle leaves them in a situation like having a half pat of butter to spread on a whole loaf of bread.
I'm not saying finance isn't hard. That said, linear algebra isn't hard, either. What I'm saying is that computation theory is as hard as any subject gets before only a tiny fraction of the population can do it.
It's hyperbole to lump George H. W. Bush and George W. in together. While there's no question that George H.W. had a leg up in life because of family connections, he is a combat veteran with a long and distinguished career in business and public service. I disagree with him politically, but if I ever met him I'd be honored to offer him my hand and thank him for his service to this country.
Well, while I agree with you that finance is harder than people who are totally ignorant of it are likely to realize, it's unlikely to be 4x harder than the theory of computation or advanced algorithms courses I had to take to get my BSCS, otherwise (a) a lot fewer people would be able to do finance, or (b) a lot more people would be able to do stuff like amortized analysis of algorithm complexity. It seems more likely that the CS program you attended was weak.
I know. Plus in most cases parameterized statements are far more efficient because they only need to be parsed once.
But all it takes is a moment of laziness when you're dealing with input you assume to be safe to get into trouble. Since it's a lazy habit, there are static code analzyzers that can catch most instances of SQL Injection; I wouldn't be surprised if that's how the attackers figured this out.
-- The Elements of Programming Style by B. W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974.
See? Smart programmers knew bad or malicious input forty years ago. Trust me, even back in the days of FORTRAN card decks people tried to figure out ways to make the computer do things that would annoy or inconvenience the sysadmins.
In this case the exploit was actually quite tricksy. Normally you don't think of the user agent as user input; it's supposed to come from the browser. But ultimately it's still input coming the outside, and if you do anything with it you have to distrust it. This is how exploits work; they utilize assumptions that seem safe to a programmer, but that can be violated. I'll bet there's a lot of systems that are vulnerable to SQL injection this way that thoroughly sanitize input that's supposed to be from users.
Oh, for Pete's sake; being an automotive engineer doesn't automatically mean you're an idiot. You make the various parts of the car as strong as they need to be, but you make them lighter. Or if the car is somehow too light to be safe (e.g. in a car vs. car head-on), then you spend the weight you saved on something else that makes a difference.
Pretty much. There's enough stupid in the world worth attacking without having to make more up.
If you look at Wolfram's career it's clear he didn't get where he is because the fix was in; but that career also suggests why physics isn't dominated by these single-minded prodigies. What obsesses you at 15 probably won't hold the same fascination when you're 21, over a third of your life later. But you can use your Phd-stamped prodigy card to make a lateral career move.
There are a few landmark physicists who got their PhDs fairly young-ish, say 22-24; but when you're 20, 2-4 years more is still a long time. Most of these guys showed early interest things besides physics. Max Planck was a music prodigy. Heisenberg joined a paramilitary group to overthrow the government of Bavaria. Paul Dirac earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. The teenaged Stephen Hawking tinkered with homemade fireworks and model airplanes.
Er... copying the aesthetics is more likely to yield a beautiful result than copying the mechanics of the user interface -- not that they went very far on this other than the dock. I've been messing around with elementaryOS on parallels on my MacBook Pro and in fact I think the basic shell looks nicer than the Mac.
As far as the office suite, well, it's an Ubuntu derived Linux; it has all the usual Linux office suite offerings: LibreOffice, Gnumeric, Abiword, Calligra, etc., plus the usual geeky oddballs like Lyx and Retext. You must "sudo apt-get install libreoffice", or if you prefer search in the software center. It doesn't include an office suite in the default installation, but from my point of view that's the way it should be done.
I don't find it very mac-like either, but that's not necessarily a flaw. There's a lot of things I don't like about the Mac OSX GUI, starting with the stupid dock, which violates all the pre-MacOS X apple design guidelines; it's just shiny crap as far as I'm concerned; sure it works but it functions less well than the things it replaced.
The essential, most important element of the Mac interface, pretty much since the original Mac 128K, is the way menus are handled, and ElementaryOS does not copy that. Sticking menus to the top of the screen make them much easier to hit, because you don't have to finely target the cursor in the Y axis to hit them; also unlike the dock they have horizontal positional stability.
I wish they'd copied the OSX menus and and the Mac OS9 task/window menu and left the dock out.
Well, I played around with it a bit and it's, in a word "nice". It's really nice. It's Oh-my-God-this-thing-is-nice nice. It's probably the distro now I'd demo to someone who was curious about Linux.
Linux enthusiasts are all about power. To us power equals simplicity; it really is so much easier to open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install blech" than it is to slash our way through some kind of stupid app-store GUI. So we tolerate a lot of crap in GUIs; ugly, bad layout, lousy typography, idiotically convoluted design, because we implicitly expect GUIs to be badly designed crap. Nice isn't even on our punch list, but don't knock it until you've tried it.
Things like blind spot monitoring and automatic braking are crutches for bad drivers, as the OP said.
I dunno; I think I can do better than automatic braking on a good day, probably even a typical day, but when it comes to safety I should consider the kind of driver I am at my worst; when I'm angry, tired, and distracted for example.
When we think of ourselves as drivers we imagine ourselves at our best, which is why everyone thinks he's a better than average driver. Most people probably are better than average half of the time. But people aren't consistent like machines; we aren't always at our best. Even good drivers are bad drivers occasionally. If you're honest with yourself you'd probably admit to yourself that from time to time you make a stupid mistake that you normally wouldn't.
The whole point of these things is that they're cheap and tiny, which means building them into things easy and practical. That in turn creates a community which swaps ideas and designs for them. If you want to talk pathetic computing power, there's the Arduino; but computational power isn't the point of the thing.
Some things have "existence" value. For example it bothers me that climbers have turned Everest into a garbage dump, but at my age I have no intention of taking mountaineering. Or take the reaction people here had to the (incorrect) reports that a prototype NASA moon rover had been scrapped for metal. Did people have a "use" for that rover?
Once again it boils down to how much money they're giving the natives. Not historical propriety, not ethics, nope. Just how much money the natives are getting.
Or it could be the common human impulse people who've been screwed have to stick it to anyone they can. Money comes into it because it's the only thing anyone might be willing to offer them. Nobody can go back in time and stop the planter takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii; nor is anyone in any position to offer the Hawaiians sovereignty. Activists are against the telescope because it's something they can stop.
And the backlash here shows the equally understandable impulse to impute nefarious motive to people who are frustrating you. But really, there's over 400,000 native Hawaiians; how much money do you think they could "extort" from the thirty meter project, and what would that be divided by 400,000? At some point an offer would have to be on the table and then their (hypothetically) smarmy pecuniary motives would be laid bare. Would it be politically conceivable in that case to do the payout?
No, I think the activists are sincere in their dudgeon. Whether it's justifiable to focus that outrage on the telescope is almost a hypothetical question at this point. When people are that pissed they don't parse their anger out carefully, they throw it around. There may well be an ulterior motive for the sovereignty activists, who probably see this a PR victory that could give their movement more credibility. But I also expect those activists also believe they're entirely justified in stopping the next telescope.
Now it might well be that if the Hawaiian Kingdom had never been overthrown that none of these people would object to the telescopes. That wouldn't mean that they're insincere about objecting to the telescopes; this is an emotional reaction. What has happened in the past is always relevant to emotion, whether or not those feelings are justified in some kind of objective sense.
So it's all too bad. I hope the telescope will be built, but sometimes politics means you can't do things you want to do. And it's not always because the people standing in your way pollitically are corrupt or evil; sometimes they just see things differently than you do.
FFS. Give me a break. Sorry, I have no white guilt.
And strangely enough, this is not about you.
It's delusional to think laws will make you safer, if you don't like guns don't buy one, feel free to be a helpless victim.
Rank the following recommendations in terms of their value in prolonging the average American's life:
(a) Get more exercise.
(b) Eat fewer calories and less junk food.
(c) Stop smoking.
(d) Practice defensive driving.
(e) Get a gun to defend yourself from bad guys.
If you ranked (e) as anything other than dead last, you're living in a (possibly dystopic) fantasy world.
Now I don't own a gun, but I have nothing against them. The vast, vast majority of gun owners enjoy their guns without creating any kind of problem for anyone else, and that's good enough for me. They don't have to some how need them to keep themselves safe in order to justify having them.
I do think background checks are a good thing. I also think that people who cause negligent discharges should be made to keep their guns at a firing range for a period of time, after which they should complete a firearms safety course.
This year, about 700,000 hunters went out with loaded guns, many of them drank heavily at night, many of them were annoyed with each other, and yet no one was shot.
Not because hunters are somehow immunized from being mass shooters; it's because (a) mass shooters are exceedingly rare in just about any identifiable population and (b) if you are a mass shooter you're not going to out into the woods; you're going to go to a school, shopping center, or other place where people congregate.
Go a little further south to Illinois/Chicago and you'll hear an even worse story: I think more than ten people a week are dying down in Obama's old stomping grounds from thug-initiated violence.
OK. (a) The per 100,000 resident homicide rate is 15.1, which puts in 19th on the list of American cities ranked by murder rate, right below Indianapolis and above Milwaukee. That's not a very high rate for a large American city (e.g., St. Louis at 49.4/100000), but it works out to big numbers when you multiply it by Chicago's huge population: 2.7 million. (b) Obama is has nothing to do with the murder rate in Chicago as opposed to anywhere else.
... if you don't mind mis-identifying non-terrorists as terrorists.
It should be so obvious that it goes without saying, but the people who cobbled together things like the anti-terrorist watch lists after 9/11 didn't seem to grasp this: the wider you catch your net, the smaller proportion of what you haul out of the ocean is comprised of fish.
On one hand the idea that something that belongs to you handing you over to the authorities is distasteful. On the other hand hit-and-run drivers really suck; one of my college buddies was killed hit by one of them and left to die in ditch. He was just 29.
Driving is one of those things where your actions can affect others so severely that you have to accept that they're regulated; but this shouldn't be something that just happens because law enforcement suddenly discovers it can. We should, as a society, decide that this is something we are willing to accept and mandatory.