I thought that Rohypnol had been regulated so heavily that very few people can get their hands on it, and that those who can are also capable of getting something stronger and harder to detect. To me, this sounds like giving people an easy way to test for polonium poisoning in their food - sure, it might help if you're someone who has pissed off a foreign intelligence service (or the Russian government) but it's a non-issue for the vast majority of people... that and if they really want you dead, they have other methods.
As great as that sounds, it's actually not the case here. The article states that the girl's father is an infectious disease researcher at UCLA and she was sending the samples to a lab at Duke to be DNA-sequenced. It seems like most of what she did was collect samples of the fungus for her father - an interesting summer project, but not exactly hard science.
Don't worry, I'm sure they could get a few million dollars if they built an office with a window that overlooks the NSTX machine and an oversized mahogany desk and rented it out to all of those rich Bond villains out there. I hear Dick Cheney is in the market for a new lair of evil.
I just don't get why someone would be willing to commit criminal activity like they did just to annoy some people. It's not exactly a show of skill - PSN has been a low-hanging fruit for DDoS attacks since forever - and it's clearly not making them any money. I'm sure there's also ways they could've annoyed people more without having DHS coming after them for calling in a bomb threat. If I had a DDoS-capable botnet I'd at least do something fun with it, like spam mobile email addresses with fake CNN updates purporting that Christ has risen and he's declared the Year of the Linux Desktop.
I've heard from people that work in retail that it would be better to pay off 20% of your customer base to not shop with you than it would be to take their business due to how many complaints they're going to make and how much time they're going to take up doing it.
I don't think that these bug reports that the NSA is making are actually leaks. My theory is that these exploits have already been used by the NSA, and are believed to be at the end of their useful life cycle (ie; the NSA suspects that someone else has found the bug and may report it) so they go ahead and report it - it boosts the NSA's image because they're supposedly reporting zero-days, but in reality they're just getting rid of what they don't need anymore.
As gruesome as the video is, it is now part of the historic record - whether the police in the UK like it or not. The same thing happened with the Budd Dwyer suicide video, where a bunch of studios chose not to air any footage at all from the suicide, not even the parts that did not contain gore. Fortunately, as bad as that video is, copies have survived to become part of the record, which is important in understanding things like how the media reacted to the first suicide ever recorded on television.
Years from now, when the history books are trying to teach kids everywhere how brutal groups like ISIS were, this is what they will have to show them - how the Islamic fighters were so enthralled with the idea of turning Iraq and Syria into islamic states that they were willing to forego their humanity and behead a man who had done nothing to them, simply because he wasn't of the same religion as they were.
Most of the failed gaming kickstarters never would've made it to production anyway. Retsupurae did an excellent series of these titled "Kickstarter Nonstarters", which showcased a bunch of kickstarters that failed to make funding. They included:
- A horrible 3D version of the hentai game Monster Girl Quest (the fact that the subtitle is "Lose and you get raped! should tell you everything you need to know, though it does have a pretty interesting plot).. that is also sanitized of porn. The guy who was proposing it made a video (creepily enough) with his wife and 6 year old son in it.
- A "remake" of Chrono Trigger, made by a guy claiming to be a former Square-Enix employee. Apart from the obvious problem of this guy not owning the rights to Chrono Trigger, there was also the fact that he clearly hadn't worked for Squaresoft in the 1990s because the entire thing was made in RPG Maker.
- A city-builder game made by a guy who had zero credentials and no clear programming expertise. The only thing he had to show off at the time his kickstarter went up were a couple of amateur-quality models he made in Blender.
There are hundreds of these that go up. Even if they made funding, most of them would be slapped down immediately by a C&D letter, and I wouldn't doubt if a large percentage of those failed kickstarters are ones like this.
I can't even think of how scary it must be to wind up on Bennett's couch. I can imagine a naïve traveller opening Bennett's door, finding no one there and deciding to make themselves at home.. only to hear the door slam and lock behind them. That's Bennett preparing to move in for the kill - but he won't do it yet, oh no, that would be too soon. He'll lie in wait until the traveller is at their most vulnerable, just when they've turned the lights off to sleep, wondering where the host is.. and that's when he springs out with a satanic, blood-curdling cry of "Hey, want to hear my thoughts on cellphone tethering and data plans?"
The police will find the gibbering husk of what used to be a man huddled in a pile of trash in an alley a mile down the road, slowly rocking back and forth, chanting the same four words over and over: "He.. doesn't.. shut..up.."
My guess is that without advertising, content providers would have to turn to a subscription-based model. I would actually like to see this, because it means a lot of sites would finally die off. Take any website (IGN, Gamespot, Gamefaqs) that does videogame reviews and/or guides. Most of these websites are dinosaurs - they come from a time before the Wiki model and streaming video, when people had to go to them to get reviews. As such, their entire business model is heavily susceptible to corruption - such as the Gamespot reviewer that was fired for giving Kane and Lynch a negative review when the producers of the game had taken out full-page ads for the game on Gamespot.
Nowadays, if I want to find out how to do something in a game or whether a game is worth playing, I can go on Youtube and look it up - usually resulting in better quality than a published guide or review on one of those sites. As an example, last night I wanted to know how to speed-clear this one grinding map in the Vita release of Disgaea 4. There's a guide on Gamefaqs that tells you how to do it in far too many words. I can't quote it word-for-word, but I can come close.
"The best way to clear this map quickly is to use Desco's Yog Sothoth ability (learned at level 100) and fuse her with another monster in order to increase its AOE. Normally, Yog Sothoth's AOE looks like this:
XXX XXX XXX
The fused form looks like this:
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
Where X are squares that her attack hits. The enemies are arranged in a pattern that matches the AOE of Yog Sothoth when fused. Use the Training Center (with Desco as the leader) to give your other party members (particularly Valvatorez and Fenrich) some of the EXP. If you can't get Yog Sothoth to kill in one hit, try using buff spells (such as Braveheart) or the Medic's Let's Go Chachacha ability to give her another turn. Valvatorez's final ability, Tyrant Flughude, can take out one row of enemies while Fenrich's Big Bang (learned at level 500) can be transferred to any other character for 48,000 mana and hits a larger area than Yog Sothoth when used with a Magichanged giant monster. Be sure to throw the EXP +50% Geo Block onto the nearby panel to increase EXP gain."
In the time it took me to read that, I could look up a video on Youtube and see the same thing done in less than thirty seconds and without terrible ASCII art - and without ads plastered all over. The same thing goes for reviews - I can either spend ten minutes paging through ad-ridden pages to find out what some professional reviewer scored it, or I can go on Twitch or Youtube and look for gameplay footage.
Linux has so much going for it in the device market that I don't see why Linus doesn't just double down on it. The future of Linux seems to make more sense as a kernel used for other things (like Android) rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.
A lot of the bigger, more frequently-used services actually encourage this. The best example I can think of is Netflix, which allows you to have separate profiles for family members but requires that everyone use the same user/pass to log in. I don't know why they couldn't just have individual passwords for the same account - at least that way I could avoid my mom trying to get everyone in the family to watch Sherlock ("Oh, I didn't see it on your watched list! You should try it!").
Amazon's Kindle app does pretty much the same thing, though it's not directly encouraged - you can log into your Kindle account from several different devices at once, effectively allowing people to share their books with anyone they trust enough. I think this is actually worse than Netflix, because most of the time you're using the Kindle app on a mobile device that can easily be lost or stolen.
The only company I've seen do sharing well is Valve, which has Steam Family Sharing that allows you to "lend" people your account without actually needing to tell them your password.
The Speigel article states that the person responsible for making the call recordings of Clinton/Kerry and Kofi Annan was the same person the BND now believes to be a double-agent working for the US. The headline here makes it seem like the German government ordered the BND to do it, but it doesn't seem to be the case here.
This ordinance doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it struck down if it passes.
The way privacy law works now is that if you're standing in your yard and are plainly visible from a public area (the street), you can be photographed without your consent because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is an exception for things like fences and tall hedges and the like, but for the most part, if you can see it without trespassing on someone's land it's fair game.
Under this ordinance, I could photograph my neighbor mowing his lawn with a regular camera, but doing so with a drone would be in violation. I'm surprised they didn't simply say "Existing laws and regulations governing photography and the right to privacy also apply to cameras mounted on drones."
Oh, it was worse than that. If I remember the rant correctly (I did read it a few times on 4chan), she had the idea that the men are given a female "judge" (which she, creepily enough, said should be a direct blood relative if possible) who decides whether he's worth "milking" (her word) for a sperm sample before they are castrated and turned over as slaves. I think she also mentioned the idea of some males being kept as breeding cattle for several years before being sent for castration. The fun part was when she insisted that this was a good thing.. FOR THE MEN.
What's even more apeshit is the second giant rant she made, which was more recent, about the idea of committing wide-scale infanticide against male babies in order to "reduce the male population to 10% of what it currently is", because she believed that was the "ideal balance" between genders. The hilarious part was when she insisted that this didn't extend to committing genocide against men to get her desired numbers, as if this somehow made the idea more palatable. Again, I'm sure if I posted her exact words somewhere but reversed the genders, I would have feminists banging on my door complaining of misogyny.
So wait, why would the NRC even be a target then, unless the hackers were dumb enough to believe that the NRC would store sensitive information on a public-facing server?
What I want to know is exactly what they think constitutes sexism, and whether it goes both ways. Most people think of it only as misogyny, but there is plenty of hatred the other way around as well. For instance, a few weeks ago, Vice had a rather intriguing article about a person calling themselves "The Femitheist", a 22-year-old college student infamous for posting a lengthy rant in which she claimed that the world would be better off if men were treated like animals - forcibly castrated in a public "ceremony" and used as breeding and/or labor slaves, with the penalty for refusing to accept that being an immediate execution. The scary part about this is that as bugfuck insane as it is (she claimed in the Vice article that it was a "joke" after people got understandably pissed at her) there were feminists and tumblr SJW cheering her on.
Now, I'm not a feminist or a tumblrite, but I'm sure if I posted the same thing word for word (except with females as the sub-human class) I would have an army of angry feminists calling for my head - and I'm sure if I told them it was "a joke", they'd only get more riled up. I'm certainly not saying this "Femitheist" person shouldn't have the right to say what they want, but it's ridiculous that a double-standard exists.
I, for one, cannot wait for the day when I can set my car's logic system to different ethical settings, sorted by philosopher. For instance, you can set your car to "Jeremy Bentham", which will automatically choose whoever looks less useful to ram into when in a crash situation. You could also set it to "Plato", which will cause the car to ram into whoever appears less educated (just hope it doesn't happen to be you).
Just make sure you don't set the car to "Nietzsche".
I looked at the Rockwell/Bazille comparison, and they don't really seem all that similar - they have three similar elements (stove, chair, and window) but those seem coincidental more than anything. The window in Rockwell's piece, for instance, is small and rectangular while the one in Bazille's is huge and arched. The chair in the Rockwell piece is actually barely identifiable as a chair at first glance, whereas the one in the Bazille piece is immediately recognizable as a wooden chair. They're also three objects that are likely to be close to one another. For instance, my aunt heats with wood and has a stove roughly the same distance from a window as in the Rockwell and Bazille pictures, and if I remember right even has a wooden chair in the same room. I think all this proves is that people tend to put their stoves in rooms with windows and chairs.
Pay-to-post models never work because of moderator corruption. For instance, Something Awful has long charged $10 for an account there, and ever since they've been doing that there have been questions of impropriety - there were allegations for a while that the site's creator was using SA as his primary income source and was instructing his mods to ban people who were likely to buy another account so he could keep making money.
There have also been plenty of cases of paid user accounts on websites getting banned due to moderator corruption. For instance, last year (I think it was last year, anyway, might've been 2012) there was a mod on twitch.tv who added a global emoticon (which pops up on everyone's channel, even those who are twitch partners and thus paying revenue to twitch) of his boyfriend's fursona. Emoticons on twitch mean money - they're usually a paid perk for people who subscribe to various channels and controlled by the channel owners, who upload their own. A lot of people were (understandably) upset that this guy had bypassed the usual restrictions on adding things like global emotes and was giving preferential treatment to another user simply because they were romantically involved. There were hundreds of bans issued by the offending mod against anyone who dared speak out against him, even in the most non-offensive of terms (people posting the evidence showing that the moderator and the user were romantically involved). Twitch backed him up, but eventually relented after a bunch of their partners threatened to leave.
Paid forum accounts are a surefire way to attract corruption, and even if they don't, the spectre of it is always there - that the bans being issued may not be done for a reason, but to make money for the site's operator.
In many cases, the invasive species aren't competing to survive because they have no natural predators in the area, and the damage they do can go far beyond merely shoving out local species. Best example of this is the zebra mussel.
Zebra mussels were originally from Russia, but are now on virtually every continent (after steadily invading various locations over the past 300 years) because of their tendency to attach themselves to the sides of ships and their ability to reproduce very quickly. They're a huge problem in a lot of places because they have no natural predators in those areas, and due to the fact that their larvae are microscopic can get into water treatment plants and power plants and clog up machinery. We've got a very good reason for not wanting zebra mussels to spread any more than they already have.
Worst part is, you can't even eat them - they're too small.
Here's what I don't get: why are so many college and school police officers applying for militarized gear? I could understand the police wanting a SWAT team in case of a school shooting, but giving college campus police military-grade firearms sounds like a very good way to have a second Kent State Massacre occur. Why can't they just leave the military stuff in the hands of the SWAT teams?
The thing is, it seems from the paper like the cap-and-trade system California has works - it's just that other states don't have the same system and thus there isn't much of an impact. It would be interesting to see a group of neighboring states (perhaps New England) try this method and see how it works when they can't meet their emissions goals by offloading their emissions to states that don't have a cap-and-trade policy in place.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that Rohypnol had been regulated so heavily that very few people can get their hands on it, and that those who can are also capable of getting something stronger and harder to detect. To me, this sounds like giving people an easy way to test for polonium poisoning in their food - sure, it might help if you're someone who has pissed off a foreign intelligence service (or the Russian government) but it's a non-issue for the vast majority of people... that and if they really want you dead, they have other methods.
As great as that sounds, it's actually not the case here. The article states that the girl's father is an infectious disease researcher at UCLA and she was sending the samples to a lab at Duke to be DNA-sequenced. It seems like most of what she did was collect samples of the fungus for her father - an interesting summer project, but not exactly hard science.
Don't worry, I'm sure they could get a few million dollars if they built an office with a window that overlooks the NSTX machine and an oversized mahogany desk and rented it out to all of those rich Bond villains out there. I hear Dick Cheney is in the market for a new lair of evil.
I just don't get why someone would be willing to commit criminal activity like they did just to annoy some people. It's not exactly a show of skill - PSN has been a low-hanging fruit for DDoS attacks since forever - and it's clearly not making them any money. I'm sure there's also ways they could've annoyed people more without having DHS coming after them for calling in a bomb threat. If I had a DDoS-capable botnet I'd at least do something fun with it, like spam mobile email addresses with fake CNN updates purporting that Christ has risen and he's declared the Year of the Linux Desktop.
I've heard from people that work in retail that it would be better to pay off 20% of your customer base to not shop with you than it would be to take their business due to how many complaints they're going to make and how much time they're going to take up doing it.
I don't think that these bug reports that the NSA is making are actually leaks. My theory is that these exploits have already been used by the NSA, and are believed to be at the end of their useful life cycle (ie; the NSA suspects that someone else has found the bug and may report it) so they go ahead and report it - it boosts the NSA's image because they're supposedly reporting zero-days, but in reality they're just getting rid of what they don't need anymore.
As gruesome as the video is, it is now part of the historic record - whether the police in the UK like it or not. The same thing happened with the Budd Dwyer suicide video, where a bunch of studios chose not to air any footage at all from the suicide, not even the parts that did not contain gore. Fortunately, as bad as that video is, copies have survived to become part of the record, which is important in understanding things like how the media reacted to the first suicide ever recorded on television.
Years from now, when the history books are trying to teach kids everywhere how brutal groups like ISIS were, this is what they will have to show them - how the Islamic fighters were so enthralled with the idea of turning Iraq and Syria into islamic states that they were willing to forego their humanity and behead a man who had done nothing to them, simply because he wasn't of the same religion as they were.
Most of the failed gaming kickstarters never would've made it to production anyway. Retsupurae did an excellent series of these titled "Kickstarter Nonstarters", which showcased a bunch of kickstarters that failed to make funding. They included:
- A horrible 3D version of the hentai game Monster Girl Quest (the fact that the subtitle is "Lose and you get raped! should tell you everything you need to know, though it does have a pretty interesting plot).. that is also sanitized of porn. The guy who was proposing it made a video (creepily enough) with his wife and 6 year old son in it.
- A "remake" of Chrono Trigger, made by a guy claiming to be a former Square-Enix employee. Apart from the obvious problem of this guy not owning the rights to Chrono Trigger, there was also the fact that he clearly hadn't worked for Squaresoft in the 1990s because the entire thing was made in RPG Maker.
- A city-builder game made by a guy who had zero credentials and no clear programming expertise. The only thing he had to show off at the time his kickstarter went up were a couple of amateur-quality models he made in Blender.
There are hundreds of these that go up. Even if they made funding, most of them would be slapped down immediately by a C&D letter, and I wouldn't doubt if a large percentage of those failed kickstarters are ones like this.
I can't even think of how scary it must be to wind up on Bennett's couch. I can imagine a naïve traveller opening Bennett's door, finding no one there and deciding to make themselves at home.. only to hear the door slam and lock behind them. That's Bennett preparing to move in for the kill - but he won't do it yet, oh no, that would be too soon. He'll lie in wait until the traveller is at their most vulnerable, just when they've turned the lights off to sleep, wondering where the host is.. and that's when he springs out with a satanic, blood-curdling cry of "Hey, want to hear my thoughts on cellphone tethering and data plans?"
The police will find the gibbering husk of what used to be a man huddled in a pile of trash in an alley a mile down the road, slowly rocking back and forth, chanting the same four words over and over: "He.. doesn't.. shut..up.."
My guess is that without advertising, content providers would have to turn to a subscription-based model. I would actually like to see this, because it means a lot of sites would finally die off. Take any website (IGN, Gamespot, Gamefaqs) that does videogame reviews and/or guides. Most of these websites are dinosaurs - they come from a time before the Wiki model and streaming video, when people had to go to them to get reviews. As such, their entire business model is heavily susceptible to corruption - such as the Gamespot reviewer that was fired for giving Kane and Lynch a negative review when the producers of the game had taken out full-page ads for the game on Gamespot.
Nowadays, if I want to find out how to do something in a game or whether a game is worth playing, I can go on Youtube and look it up - usually resulting in better quality than a published guide or review on one of those sites. As an example, last night I wanted to know how to speed-clear this one grinding map in the Vita release of Disgaea 4. There's a guide on Gamefaqs that tells you how to do it in far too many words. I can't quote it word-for-word, but I can come close.
"The best way to clear this map quickly is to use Desco's Yog Sothoth ability (learned at level 100) and fuse her with another monster in order to increase its AOE. Normally, Yog Sothoth's AOE looks like this:
XXX
XXX
XXX
The fused form looks like this:
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
Where X are squares that her attack hits. The enemies are arranged in a pattern that matches the AOE of Yog Sothoth when fused. Use the Training Center (with Desco as the leader) to give your other party members (particularly Valvatorez and Fenrich) some of the EXP. If you can't get Yog Sothoth to kill in one hit, try using buff spells (such as Braveheart) or the Medic's Let's Go Chachacha ability to give her another turn. Valvatorez's final ability, Tyrant Flughude, can take out one row of enemies while Fenrich's Big Bang (learned at level 500) can be transferred to any other character for 48,000 mana and hits a larger area than Yog Sothoth when used with a Magichanged giant monster. Be sure to throw the EXP +50% Geo Block onto the nearby panel to increase EXP gain."
In the time it took me to read that, I could look up a video on Youtube and see the same thing done in less than thirty seconds and without terrible ASCII art - and without ads plastered all over. The same thing goes for reviews - I can either spend ten minutes paging through ad-ridden pages to find out what some professional reviewer scored it, or I can go on Twitch or Youtube and look for gameplay footage.
Linux has so much going for it in the device market that I don't see why Linus doesn't just double down on it. The future of Linux seems to make more sense as a kernel used for other things (like Android) rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.
A lot of the bigger, more frequently-used services actually encourage this. The best example I can think of is Netflix, which allows you to have separate profiles for family members but requires that everyone use the same user/pass to log in. I don't know why they couldn't just have individual passwords for the same account - at least that way I could avoid my mom trying to get everyone in the family to watch Sherlock ("Oh, I didn't see it on your watched list! You should try it!").
Amazon's Kindle app does pretty much the same thing, though it's not directly encouraged - you can log into your Kindle account from several different devices at once, effectively allowing people to share their books with anyone they trust enough. I think this is actually worse than Netflix, because most of the time you're using the Kindle app on a mobile device that can easily be lost or stolen.
The only company I've seen do sharing well is Valve, which has Steam Family Sharing that allows you to "lend" people your account without actually needing to tell them your password.
Sorry to be completely off-topic, but The Nuclear Shill sounds like the name of a really bad comic book villain.
The Speigel article states that the person responsible for making the call recordings of Clinton/Kerry and Kofi Annan was the same person the BND now believes to be a double-agent working for the US. The headline here makes it seem like the German government ordered the BND to do it, but it doesn't seem to be the case here.
This ordinance doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it struck down if it passes.
The way privacy law works now is that if you're standing in your yard and are plainly visible from a public area (the street), you can be photographed without your consent because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is an exception for things like fences and tall hedges and the like, but for the most part, if you can see it without trespassing on someone's land it's fair game.
Under this ordinance, I could photograph my neighbor mowing his lawn with a regular camera, but doing so with a drone would be in violation. I'm surprised they didn't simply say "Existing laws and regulations governing photography and the right to privacy also apply to cameras mounted on drones."
Sounds good. I'll call up Xenu, you get the DC-8 spaceplanes.
Oh, it was worse than that. If I remember the rant correctly (I did read it a few times on 4chan), she had the idea that the men are given a female "judge" (which she, creepily enough, said should be a direct blood relative if possible) who decides whether he's worth "milking" (her word) for a sperm sample before they are castrated and turned over as slaves. I think she also mentioned the idea of some males being kept as breeding cattle for several years before being sent for castration. The fun part was when she insisted that this was a good thing.. FOR THE MEN.
What's even more apeshit is the second giant rant she made, which was more recent, about the idea of committing wide-scale infanticide against male babies in order to "reduce the male population to 10% of what it currently is", because she believed that was the "ideal balance" between genders. The hilarious part was when she insisted that this didn't extend to committing genocide against men to get her desired numbers, as if this somehow made the idea more palatable. Again, I'm sure if I posted her exact words somewhere but reversed the genders, I would have feminists banging on my door complaining of misogyny.
So wait, why would the NRC even be a target then, unless the hackers were dumb enough to believe that the NRC would store sensitive information on a public-facing server?
What I want to know is exactly what they think constitutes sexism, and whether it goes both ways. Most people think of it only as misogyny, but there is plenty of hatred the other way around as well. For instance, a few weeks ago, Vice had a rather intriguing article about a person calling themselves "The Femitheist", a 22-year-old college student infamous for posting a lengthy rant in which she claimed that the world would be better off if men were treated like animals - forcibly castrated in a public "ceremony" and used as breeding and/or labor slaves, with the penalty for refusing to accept that being an immediate execution. The scary part about this is that as bugfuck insane as it is (she claimed in the Vice article that it was a "joke" after people got understandably pissed at her) there were feminists and tumblr SJW cheering her on.
Now, I'm not a feminist or a tumblrite, but I'm sure if I posted the same thing word for word (except with females as the sub-human class) I would have an army of angry feminists calling for my head - and I'm sure if I told them it was "a joke", they'd only get more riled up. I'm certainly not saying this "Femitheist" person shouldn't have the right to say what they want, but it's ridiculous that a double-standard exists.
I, for one, cannot wait for the day when I can set my car's logic system to different ethical settings, sorted by philosopher. For instance, you can set your car to "Jeremy Bentham", which will automatically choose whoever looks less useful to ram into when in a crash situation. You could also set it to "Plato", which will cause the car to ram into whoever appears less educated (just hope it doesn't happen to be you).
Just make sure you don't set the car to "Nietzsche".
I looked at the Rockwell/Bazille comparison, and they don't really seem all that similar - they have three similar elements (stove, chair, and window) but those seem coincidental more than anything. The window in Rockwell's piece, for instance, is small and rectangular while the one in Bazille's is huge and arched. The chair in the Rockwell piece is actually barely identifiable as a chair at first glance, whereas the one in the Bazille piece is immediately recognizable as a wooden chair. They're also three objects that are likely to be close to one another. For instance, my aunt heats with wood and has a stove roughly the same distance from a window as in the Rockwell and Bazille pictures, and if I remember right even has a wooden chair in the same room. I think all this proves is that people tend to put their stoves in rooms with windows and chairs.
Pay-to-post models never work because of moderator corruption. For instance, Something Awful has long charged $10 for an account there, and ever since they've been doing that there have been questions of impropriety - there were allegations for a while that the site's creator was using SA as his primary income source and was instructing his mods to ban people who were likely to buy another account so he could keep making money.
There have also been plenty of cases of paid user accounts on websites getting banned due to moderator corruption. For instance, last year (I think it was last year, anyway, might've been 2012) there was a mod on twitch.tv who added a global emoticon (which pops up on everyone's channel, even those who are twitch partners and thus paying revenue to twitch) of his boyfriend's fursona. Emoticons on twitch mean money - they're usually a paid perk for people who subscribe to various channels and controlled by the channel owners, who upload their own. A lot of people were (understandably) upset that this guy had bypassed the usual restrictions on adding things like global emotes and was giving preferential treatment to another user simply because they were romantically involved. There were hundreds of bans issued by the offending mod against anyone who dared speak out against him, even in the most non-offensive of terms (people posting the evidence showing that the moderator and the user were romantically involved). Twitch backed him up, but eventually relented after a bunch of their partners threatened to leave.
Paid forum accounts are a surefire way to attract corruption, and even if they don't, the spectre of it is always there - that the bans being issued may not be done for a reason, but to make money for the site's operator.
In many cases, the invasive species aren't competing to survive because they have no natural predators in the area, and the damage they do can go far beyond merely shoving out local species. Best example of this is the zebra mussel.
Zebra mussels were originally from Russia, but are now on virtually every continent (after steadily invading various locations over the past 300 years) because of their tendency to attach themselves to the sides of ships and their ability to reproduce very quickly. They're a huge problem in a lot of places because they have no natural predators in those areas, and due to the fact that their larvae are microscopic can get into water treatment plants and power plants and clog up machinery. We've got a very good reason for not wanting zebra mussels to spread any more than they already have.
Worst part is, you can't even eat them - they're too small.
Here's what I don't get: why are so many college and school police officers applying for militarized gear? I could understand the police wanting a SWAT team in case of a school shooting, but giving college campus police military-grade firearms sounds like a very good way to have a second Kent State Massacre occur. Why can't they just leave the military stuff in the hands of the SWAT teams?
The thing is, it seems from the paper like the cap-and-trade system California has works - it's just that other states don't have the same system and thus there isn't much of an impact. It would be interesting to see a group of neighboring states (perhaps New England) try this method and see how it works when they can't meet their emissions goals by offloading their emissions to states that don't have a cap-and-trade policy in place.