Can't victims of bullying just get a restraining order? We don't need new laws. We don't need spying on students. Students should be told to come forward if there is a problem instead of hiding it.
I don't know if you ever went to a school with other kids, but I don't think there's any school I ever went to where "restraining order" would have been even on the radar of anyone as a possibility to deal with bullying. Now there are more extreme forms of bullying--I suppose if someone is actually left black and blue all over and so on, for example, restraining orders and the like would be appropriate--but I think usually bullying is more about *social* violence, sometimes with a physical component, than it is about physical violence.
Students need to be taught to learn how to handle a problem if they have it--how to understand the options and their consequences. One of those can be making a formal report, but it is important also that they understand how to take control of the situation socially, because (1) they won't always be able to complain to someone else, and (2) most of our society sees "NARCs" and "Whistleblowers" and the like as bad things rather than good things, so there are *major* social penalties to complaining.
We do. We need more people in STEM generally, even if it results in too many people in STEM, because it's a lot better to have people trained to think rationally than not.
Absolutely. Still, this will teach students a valuable life lesson. Prospective employers are probably going to pull the same sort of nonsense, so they had better start learning to watch what they say in public right now.
Also... I'm obviously building the wrong type of software. I'd love to be able to charge $13K plus monthly usage fees for scanning targeted people on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other services for scary keywords and phrases.
There is nothing new under the sun. It will teach kids how to bully without being direct about it; how to talk about suicide in a way a computer won't understand; how to mock teachers relentlessly while using code names. Human beings adapt to new rules--sometimes the adaptation is expensive and the result of painful lessons (much of the history of warfare, for example); other times it is fairly painless and done to avoid a teacher calling you in after school.
The Proton rocket has gone through a number of redesigns over its long life. The latest version, the Proton-M, first flew in 2001, and they kept flying the Proton-K for many years (for reasons I actually don't know). They've only done 90 flights of the Proton-M, and half of them were in that post-2010 period of "repeated failures" (although they had about as many failures for pretty much all of the 2000s as well).
I would highly expect the faulty pump to have been redesigned with the Proton-M modifications, based simply on that analysis.
IIRC, Stage III failures are responsible for a very high percentage of launch failures.
Although IIRC, Clancy once wrote about one being faked in order to put a spy satellite into orbit without people realizing it was a spy satellite. Of course, the tech wasn't as good then...
Oracle must have contributed to the right Administration official.
No.
The United States Solicitor General's Office writes a *LOT* of these "op" briefs. Generally ten pages saying "This case isn't so magically important that SCOTUS should look at it among the thousands of cases people are asking to look at." Taking that position on a case is the default position and nothing should be read into it.
They are for the most part really top-tier professionals who are trying to make the decision based on what is best for the US Government as an institution. Not influenced very much by politics. They are widely considered the "tenth justice," and really care about (1) whether the case is important, (2) whether the case presents the issues it's about well (i.e. is it a good vehicle for the issue), (3) whether the case has facts that are favorable for getting to what the government thinks is in its interest, etc...
They do call around to get the opinions of the various affected agencies in determining whether to support an appeal. They probably talked to someone from the PTO when figuring out what the government position should be.
But at the end of the day, it's important to realize that SCOTUS can still take up the issue in another case if they want to--maybe one with better facts, etc...; and they won't be bound by the Federal Circuit's ruling here.
Yes. It's a difficult balance, and one that I think journalists should be looking at more closely. Putting a moratorium on certain types of news might help, even a brief one--you know the rush to sensationalize. Or maybe when you have an event that kills more than ten people, you require a review of coverage by a specialist on the lookout for that kind of problem. Obviously not a government person, but a psychologist who can say "we should probably play this down a little so it doesn't provoke more terrorism."
Bin Laden was intent on committing an act of terrorism. Had he not hit the WTC, he would have hit something else. The root cause here was that Bin Laden was a terrorist.
No, you're focusing on one part of a much bigger picture and saying that it was the problem. "Root cause" is a phrase that doesn't mean very much. It's pretty ambiguous when you're dealing with a lot of moving pieces.
If the Afghani royal family had been better able to steer the economy of their country in a positive direction and less interested in hollywood decades ago... if the Taliban hadn't been so anti-western... if the soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan... if the CIA hadn't armed the mujahadeen... if Osama hadn't been related to the Saudi Royals... if he hadn't developed the personal networks he developed... if only he had died in a car accident.... if, if, if... there are *a lot* of causes to complex problems.
Reporting can be one of those causal links, something that inspires some jackass like Osama to hit the twin towers or some stupid kid to shoot up his school. If I tell a large audience all the stupid things someone could do or did do, it's reasonable to think someone might actually do that. So I should be aware and careful about how I report on it.
And there we have the problem. Who gets to decide what is an important issue?
Single event vs. series of events might be a good first wave cut. Also, at least in the US and probably in many other places, journalism is one of the few professions that has ethical training and standards. What I'm suggesting is that when reporting on a single event, reporters and their publishers should be much more careful about the *consequences* of their reporting.
I'm not suggesting we have a board of censorship or anything like that.
People can't change that radically. However the tech is going to be designed differently. That argument that happened before snowden where someone would tell the security expert he was being paranoid... that will go differently.
Corporate America is also taking the security more seriously. After Target and Sony they're starting to understand that they have to take this seriously... or else.
This. Security will be taken a little more seriously, which helps a little. There will be a *little* more oversight and pushback within government, which helps a little. It's not a fix; it's patch. What we're seeing is very similar to the response that small companies tend to make to a major security breach--they plug that particular hole, they tighten security a little bit, and they respond a little bit to public concern. It's a net positive but still not enough considering the risk of abuse of mass surveillance.
We only have evidence that they're abusing it a little bit right now--like for parallel construction, which is flagrantly unconstitutional. The concern, and the time when we'll see people more thoroughly changing their habits, will be when (1) people realize their phone calls are being coded or recorded or listened to (this will freak out EVERYONE on wall street, who make phone calls when they do illegal things), and (2) the government starts publicly using some of the information it collects to charge people, discredit people, or target people for being disappeared and people realize it.
That's how it works in the tyrannical states. We're not there yet, but we've been close in the past (think McCarthy or Hoover and what they could have done with this mass surveillance apparatus). We have a lot of great guys in intelligence and I hope that continues to be the case--but without strong institutional safeguards, that's not enough to count on.
Now our government could use the information more subtly, just to influence events by digging up dirt on key players. That will be much harder to stop and is less likely to change public use of the communications infrastructure.
I mean, do you seriously believe that the NSA doesn't have dirt on every single presidential candidate? They may not be using it out of respect for the integrity of the democratic process or out of knowledge of how bad the blowback could be, but still.
40 kb? So that's like one call to printf("%s",szMars)...
News Agencies Responsible for Murder and Terrorism
on
Death In the Browser Tab
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· Score: 4, Informative
By showing their propaganda videos, it means said publisher is condoning the acts displayed,
No it doesn't. The act of making such videos accessible to others, and approving of the actions within the video, are two entirely different, wholly separate things. You can make the video available without approving of the contents.
But by making it available you take some responsibility for the consequences of the reporting.
A bunch of reporters were kidnapped in the middle east around the Iraq conflict until it stopped being news and became less common. Then soldiers were kidnapped (IIRC in the lead-up to the Israel-Lebanon war) and the Press made a big deal about it, so they started kidnapping more soldiers. The Press shares some responsibility for the increase in soldier kidnappings. Not as much as the people who kidnapped the soldiers, but still some, because *without the press they would not have been kidnapped.*
The same thing is true for school shootings after Columbine.
And the same thing is true for 9/11. Right after the 1993 WTC car bombing, the news media began explaining of course the towers didn't come down *because they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.* Osama Bin Laden followed western news about his attacks; this suggested to him the idea of flying planes into the towers. Without media coverage and publicizing the fact that the towers were designed to withstand the impact of a plane, we probably would not have had hijacked planes flown into the twin towers.
News is important; coverage of important issues matters. But coverage of *single events*, when done without regard to the consequences, can cost a lot of lives.
Which is more likely : (1) the best-funded signals intelligence apparatus in the world is lying by choosing their words carefully and, while they likely have *some* limits on how they are allowed to search US-based data, they still keep it or arrange for someone else to in case they have to search it later, or (2) this top secret program is being transparent and 100% non-deceptive?
Remember, they have a history of lying to Congress and the public, of conducting massive surveillance that is warrantless and/or authorized by a minimal number of broad-scope warrants. And they have incentives to do so. And they operate almost entirely without real oversight--their public oversight consists of elected representatives with generally *zero* technical ability.
I believe there are a lot of great guys there, but it doesn't take many bad apples for flagrantly illegal programs to keep going, with all the weight of institutional momentum behind them. Institutional momentum is hard enough to change in *transparent* institutions.
Hey, I hope I'm wrong, and most of the people I've met who've worked for intelligence have been really great people. But then you get people who are just real assholes, or who should never be trusted with important decisions. I remember one guy saying the American people weren't *ready* for the war on terror to be over, so we should keep having it--his whole view of the thing was as an exercise in propaganda that justified all of the government overreach we've seen, and that was okay with him. He was a junior guy, and I've met much better guys who work in the community, so I'm not willing to say he's representative--but it's concerning. It's an entirely understandable perspective intellectually, just morally bankrupt and contrary to values of freedom from a policy standpoint. Get the wrong guys like that at the top, and you're fucked, and there's no outlet for good transparency.
I don't think what Snowden did was okay. But I do think he should have been able to complain at the very least to the Intelligence Committee without fear of reprisal, because otherwise the wrong guys in charge inside the intelligence community and Democracy is fucked.
there's no way they're building the data centers they are just to record metadata. It would be absurd to believe they're not recording the calls or having a third party do it. Or... does "metadata" include, for example, a series of hashes of the call content that lets you reproduce them with 98% accuracy, for example?:) It's just data about the call, after all...
When I started with computers, I had to bust my ass to get any time with any machine at all and there was nobody around with information or guidance or knowledge.
The first thing I did wasn't play video games. I learned about BBSes. I learned telephony, phreaking, networking. I learned BBS software. I learned people. I built a BBS. I built a multi-node BBS. Then I moved on to writing engines for websites to do things I needed (like financial transactions, databases, etc).
I started with computers around the age of twelve and didn't really get into video games a bit until my twenties and a lot until my thirties.
Meanwhile, I have seen kids in the last fifteen years primarily use the computer for porn, video games, and social networking... and that's all they do. Not once do they give two shits worth of thought about how things work or why they work or to start taking things apart and looking under the hood. Kids are raised as consumers of content; not creators. In fact, they are punished for being creators. Inventors. Discoverers. Hackers.
Most of today's games don't have the same design. They're not really presenting you with intellectual puzzles for the most part, so much as advancing to the next level. You aren't having to figure out how not to be eaten by a grue, and even mazes are rare in today's games--things that require real use of thought or memory or other mental ability rather than just reaching for the next reward.
And except for AM radio conservatives, nobody gives a shit about Benghazi.
You would think so, but evidently not. If nobody cared, the State Department wouldn't time the release for take-out-the-trash Friday (the day when you get the least news cycle result). Instead, the timing points to an obviously politically motivated timing utterly inappropriate to a theoretically neutral unit of government.
Running from the law is a crime. Just as resisting arrest is a crime.
Although rather absurdly you can be arrested with "resisting arrest" being your only charge, meaning that you're guilty of not wanting to be arrested for no crime whatsoever?
Because it's not legal to contest illegal or erroneous arrests by physically resisting them. It's legal to contest them by pleading not guilty or by negotiating to get the charges dropped. It's also legal to sue the ass of the cop who arrested you.
It's like having someone in charge of you that doesn't even know how to do your job (on a conceptual level or otherwise). Why are they my manager or supervisor?
Because they have other skill-sets or experience you lack, at least if they were properly promoted.
A boss who doesn't know how to do your job but who trusts you when you say what you can or can't do or has an understanding of what you can or can't do can still be your boss in a useful way. If you're running a sports stadium, you don't have to know how to drive the Zamboni or run the concession stand, you have to know how to interface with the people responsible for them, as well as with the owners, etc...
While I applaud Paul, Wyden, and the other Senators who have pledged to do everything in their power to block the spying-allowed version of this renewal; Sen. Paul's "filibuster" was pure PR stunt for his presidential campaign. It was during the discussion of a completely unrelated bill, and wasn't even an official filibuster.
Populism works by incentivizing politicians to do PR stunts drawing attention to issues people care about. This PR Stunt is much more important than 90% of Senate Business anyway.
they couldn't possibly hope to recover the $100k+ in legal fees.
$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."
There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.
Were they felonies where you confessed guilt or that were fairly routine? 100K might be a bit inflated, but not necessarily if you were to go all the way to trial... you have civil discovery costs on both sides and over 4000 photos, plus electronics experts on posting, plus the cost of motion practice, plus trial time, plus appeals. It really depends who you get to do the case, but it could certainly go to $30K pretty easily, and $100K under certain circumstances.
That being said, it's likely 5K before settlement.
As a former troublemaker, I never understood how suspension is a punishment. I considered a three day vacation from school to be supreme good fortune.
It's not punishment for the kid. At the most it's punishment for the parent that makes a good parent make the kid see sense.
I got detention once in high school and it was just ridiculous. They didn't make you *do* anything, you just hung out in the Cafeteria for a few minutes and could read or do your work or whatever you wanted. They should have been at least making us mop up or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't victims of bullying just get a restraining order? We don't need new laws. We don't need spying on students. Students should be told to come forward if there is a problem instead of hiding it.
I don't know if you ever went to a school with other kids, but I don't think there's any school I ever went to where "restraining order" would have been even on the radar of anyone as a possibility to deal with bullying. Now there are more extreme forms of bullying--I suppose if someone is actually left black and blue all over and so on, for example, restraining orders and the like would be appropriate--but I think usually bullying is more about *social* violence, sometimes with a physical component, than it is about physical violence.
Students need to be taught to learn how to handle a problem if they have it--how to understand the options and their consequences. One of those can be making a formal report, but it is important also that they understand how to take control of the situation socially, because (1) they won't always be able to complain to someone else, and (2) most of our society sees "NARCs" and "Whistleblowers" and the like as bad things rather than good things, so there are *major* social penalties to complaining.
And they say we need more women in STEM!!!!
We do. We need more people in STEM generally, even if it results in too many people in STEM, because it's a lot better to have people trained to think rationally than not.
Absolutely. Still, this will teach students a valuable life lesson. Prospective employers are probably going to pull the same sort of nonsense, so they had better start learning to watch what they say in public right now.
Also... I'm obviously building the wrong type of software. I'd love to be able to charge $13K plus monthly usage fees for scanning targeted people on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other services for scary keywords and phrases.
There is nothing new under the sun. It will teach kids how to bully without being direct about it; how to talk about suicide in a way a computer won't understand; how to mock teachers relentlessly while using code names. Human beings adapt to new rules--sometimes the adaptation is expensive and the result of painful lessons (much of the history of warfare, for example); other times it is fairly painless and done to avoid a teacher calling you in after school.
People like you are the problem. FB profiles are hardly appropriate for professionals.
Party invites, for normal people, are frequently on facebook these days.
The Proton rocket has gone through a number of redesigns over its long life. The latest version, the Proton-M, first flew in 2001, and they kept flying the Proton-K for many years (for reasons I actually don't know). They've only done 90 flights of the Proton-M, and half of them were in that post-2010 period of "repeated failures" (although they had about as many failures for pretty much all of the 2000s as well).
I would highly expect the faulty pump to have been redesigned with the Proton-M modifications, based simply on that analysis.
IIRC, Stage III failures are responsible for a very high percentage of launch failures.
Although IIRC, Clancy once wrote about one being faked in order to put a spy satellite into orbit without people realizing it was a spy satellite. Of course, the tech wasn't as good then...
Oracle must have contributed to the right Administration official.
No.
The United States Solicitor General's Office writes a *LOT* of these "op" briefs. Generally ten pages saying "This case isn't so magically important that SCOTUS should look at it among the thousands of cases people are asking to look at." Taking that position on a case is the default position and nothing should be read into it.
They are for the most part really top-tier professionals who are trying to make the decision based on what is best for the US Government as an institution. Not influenced very much by politics. They are widely considered the "tenth justice," and really care about (1) whether the case is important, (2) whether the case presents the issues it's about well (i.e. is it a good vehicle for the issue), (3) whether the case has facts that are favorable for getting to what the government thinks is in its interest, etc...
They do call around to get the opinions of the various affected agencies in determining whether to support an appeal. They probably talked to someone from the PTO when figuring out what the government position should be.
But at the end of the day, it's important to realize that SCOTUS can still take up the issue in another case if they want to--maybe one with better facts, etc...; and they won't be bound by the Federal Circuit's ruling here.
Gonna go with a big fat bullshit.
The evildoers are the ones responsible, not those who report on it.
Negligence can cause death as easily as deliberate murder.
Yes. It's a difficult balance, and one that I think journalists should be looking at more closely. Putting a moratorium on certain types of news might help, even a brief one--you know the rush to sensationalize. Or maybe when you have an event that kills more than ten people, you require a review of coverage by a specialist on the lookout for that kind of problem. Obviously not a government person, but a psychologist who can say "we should probably play this down a little so it doesn't provoke more terrorism."
Bin Laden was intent on committing an act of terrorism. Had he not hit the WTC, he would have hit something else. The root cause here was that Bin Laden was a terrorist.
No, you're focusing on one part of a much bigger picture and saying that it was the problem. "Root cause" is a phrase that doesn't mean very much. It's pretty ambiguous when you're dealing with a lot of moving pieces.
If the Afghani royal family had been better able to steer the economy of their country in a positive direction and less interested in hollywood decades ago... if the Taliban hadn't been so anti-western... if the soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan... if the CIA hadn't armed the mujahadeen... if Osama hadn't been related to the Saudi Royals... if he hadn't developed the personal networks he developed... if only he had died in a car accident.... if, if, if... there are *a lot* of causes to complex problems.
Reporting can be one of those causal links, something that inspires some jackass like Osama to hit the twin towers or some stupid kid to shoot up his school. If I tell a large audience all the stupid things someone could do or did do, it's reasonable to think someone might actually do that. So I should be aware and careful about how I report on it.
And there we have the problem. Who gets to decide what is an important issue?
Single event vs. series of events might be a good first wave cut. Also, at least in the US and probably in many other places, journalism is one of the few professions that has ethical training and standards. What I'm suggesting is that when reporting on a single event, reporters and their publishers should be much more careful about the *consequences* of their reporting.
I'm not suggesting we have a board of censorship or anything like that.
Yes, much closer to a Montessori school than a country schoolhouse, although perhaps a bit more focused than I remember Kindergarten...
People can't change that radically. However the tech is going to be designed differently. That argument that happened before snowden where someone would tell the security expert he was being paranoid... that will go differently.
Corporate America is also taking the security more seriously. After Target and Sony they're starting to understand that they have to take this seriously... or else.
This. Security will be taken a little more seriously, which helps a little. There will be a *little* more oversight and pushback within government, which helps a little. It's not a fix; it's patch. What we're seeing is very similar to the response that small companies tend to make to a major security breach--they plug that particular hole, they tighten security a little bit, and they respond a little bit to public concern. It's a net positive but still not enough considering the risk of abuse of mass surveillance.
We only have evidence that they're abusing it a little bit right now--like for parallel construction, which is flagrantly unconstitutional. The concern, and the time when we'll see people more thoroughly changing their habits, will be when (1) people realize their phone calls are being coded or recorded or listened to (this will freak out EVERYONE on wall street, who make phone calls when they do illegal things), and (2) the government starts publicly using some of the information it collects to charge people, discredit people, or target people for being disappeared and people realize it.
That's how it works in the tyrannical states. We're not there yet, but we've been close in the past (think McCarthy or Hoover and what they could have done with this mass surveillance apparatus). We have a lot of great guys in intelligence and I hope that continues to be the case--but without strong institutional safeguards, that's not enough to count on.
Now our government could use the information more subtly, just to influence events by digging up dirt on key players. That will be much harder to stop and is less likely to change public use of the communications infrastructure.
I mean, do you seriously believe that the NSA doesn't have dirt on every single presidential candidate? They may not be using it out of respect for the integrity of the democratic process or out of knowledge of how bad the blowback could be, but still.
40 kb? So that's like one call to printf("%s",szMars) ...
By showing their propaganda videos, it means said publisher is condoning the acts displayed,
No it doesn't. The act of making such videos accessible to others, and approving of the actions within the video, are two entirely different, wholly separate things. You can make the video available without approving of the contents.
But by making it available you take some responsibility for the consequences of the reporting.
A bunch of reporters were kidnapped in the middle east around the Iraq conflict until it stopped being news and became less common. Then soldiers were kidnapped (IIRC in the lead-up to the Israel-Lebanon war) and the Press made a big deal about it, so they started kidnapping more soldiers. The Press shares some responsibility for the increase in soldier kidnappings. Not as much as the people who kidnapped the soldiers, but still some, because *without the press they would not have been kidnapped.*
The same thing is true for school shootings after Columbine.
And the same thing is true for 9/11. Right after the 1993 WTC car bombing, the news media began explaining of course the towers didn't come down *because they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.* Osama Bin Laden followed western news about his attacks; this suggested to him the idea of flying planes into the towers. Without media coverage and publicizing the fact that the towers were designed to withstand the impact of a plane, we probably would not have had hijacked planes flown into the twin towers.
News is important; coverage of important issues matters. But coverage of *single events*, when done without regard to the consequences, can cost a lot of lives.
"It would be absurd to believe they're not recording the calls": Is your tin hat crooked today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Which is more likely : (1) the best-funded signals intelligence apparatus in the world is lying by choosing their words carefully and, while they likely have *some* limits on how they are allowed to search US-based data, they still keep it or arrange for someone else to in case they have to search it later, or (2) this top secret program is being transparent and 100% non-deceptive?
Remember, they have a history of lying to Congress and the public, of conducting massive surveillance that is warrantless and/or authorized by a minimal number of broad-scope warrants. And they have incentives to do so. And they operate almost entirely without real oversight--their public oversight consists of elected representatives with generally *zero* technical ability.
I believe there are a lot of great guys there, but it doesn't take many bad apples for flagrantly illegal programs to keep going, with all the weight of institutional momentum behind them. Institutional momentum is hard enough to change in *transparent* institutions.
Hey, I hope I'm wrong, and most of the people I've met who've worked for intelligence have been really great people. But then you get people who are just real assholes, or who should never be trusted with important decisions. I remember one guy saying the American people weren't *ready* for the war on terror to be over, so we should keep having it--his whole view of the thing was as an exercise in propaganda that justified all of the government overreach we've seen, and that was okay with him. He was a junior guy, and I've met much better guys who work in the community, so I'm not willing to say he's representative--but it's concerning. It's an entirely understandable perspective intellectually, just morally bankrupt and contrary to values of freedom from a policy standpoint. Get the wrong guys like that at the top, and you're fucked, and there's no outlet for good transparency.
I don't think what Snowden did was okay. But I do think he should have been able to complain at the very least to the Intelligence Committee without fear of reprisal, because otherwise the wrong guys in charge inside the intelligence community and Democracy is fucked.
there's no way they're building the data centers they are just to record metadata. It would be absurd to believe they're not recording the calls or having a third party do it. Or... does "metadata" include, for example, a series of hashes of the call content that lets you reproduce them with 98% accuracy, for example? :) It's just data about the call, after all...
When I started with computers, I had to bust my ass to get any time with any machine at all and there was nobody around with information or guidance or knowledge.
The first thing I did wasn't play video games. I learned about BBSes. I learned telephony, phreaking, networking. I learned BBS software. I learned people. I built a BBS. I built a multi-node BBS. Then I moved on to writing engines for websites to do things I needed (like financial transactions, databases, etc).
I started with computers around the age of twelve and didn't really get into video games a bit until my twenties and a lot until my thirties.
Meanwhile, I have seen kids in the last fifteen years primarily use the computer for porn, video games, and social networking... and that's all they do. Not once do they give two shits worth of thought about how things work or why they work or to start taking things apart and looking under the hood. Kids are raised as consumers of content; not creators. In fact, they are punished for being creators. Inventors. Discoverers. Hackers.
Most of today's games don't have the same design. They're not really presenting you with intellectual puzzles for the most part, so much as advancing to the next level. You aren't having to figure out how not to be eaten by a grue, and even mazes are rare in today's games--things that require real use of thought or memory or other mental ability rather than just reaching for the next reward.
And except for AM radio conservatives, nobody gives a shit about Benghazi.
You would think so, but evidently not. If nobody cared, the State Department wouldn't time the release for take-out-the-trash Friday (the day when you get the least news cycle result). Instead, the timing points to an obviously politically motivated timing utterly inappropriate to a theoretically neutral unit of government.
Running from the law is a crime. Just as resisting arrest is a crime.
Although rather absurdly you can be arrested with "resisting arrest" being your only charge, meaning that you're guilty of not wanting to be arrested for no crime whatsoever?
Because it's not legal to contest illegal or erroneous arrests by physically resisting them. It's legal to contest them by pleading not guilty or by negotiating to get the charges dropped. It's also legal to sue the ass of the cop who arrested you.
A small percentage of African slaves were brought to the USA.
From fewer than 400,000 slaves came over 37 Million.
The USA's reward for being a minor player in the trade and allowing its slaves to greatly increase in number is everlasting pay-back.
Are these crazy comments a product of naive machine learning algorithms?
Or code used for illicit communications?
Any ideas?
Crappy used laptops are cheap. You don't need 16. You need 4. The first one will be about done by the time you get the 4th one started.
The Dell Latitude E4300 I am typing this on concurs. And cost around $80 on ebay a year ago.
It's like having someone in charge of you that doesn't even know how to do your job (on a conceptual level or otherwise). Why are they my manager or supervisor?
Because they have other skill-sets or experience you lack, at least if they were properly promoted.
A boss who doesn't know how to do your job but who trusts you when you say what you can or can't do or has an understanding of what you can or can't do can still be your boss in a useful way. If you're running a sports stadium, you don't have to know how to drive the Zamboni or run the concession stand, you have to know how to interface with the people responsible for them, as well as with the owners, etc...
While I applaud Paul, Wyden, and the other Senators who have pledged to do everything in their power to block the spying-allowed version of this renewal; Sen. Paul's "filibuster" was pure PR stunt for his presidential campaign. It was during the discussion of a completely unrelated bill, and wasn't even an official filibuster.
Populism works by incentivizing politicians to do PR stunts drawing attention to issues people care about. This PR Stunt is much more important than 90% of Senate Business anyway.
they couldn't possibly hope to recover the $100k+ in legal fees.
$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."
There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.
Were they felonies where you confessed guilt or that were fairly routine? 100K might be a bit inflated, but not necessarily if you were to go all the way to trial... you have civil discovery costs on both sides and over 4000 photos, plus electronics experts on posting, plus the cost of motion practice, plus trial time, plus appeals. It really depends who you get to do the case, but it could certainly go to $30K pretty easily, and $100K under certain circumstances.
That being said, it's likely 5K before settlement.
As a former troublemaker, I never understood how suspension is a punishment. I considered a three day vacation from school to be supreme good fortune.
It's not punishment for the kid. At the most it's punishment for the parent that makes a good parent make the kid see sense.
I got detention once in high school and it was just ridiculous. They didn't make you *do* anything, you just hung out in the Cafeteria for a few minutes and could read or do your work or whatever you wanted. They should have been at least making us mop up or something.